In a world driven by data, how can marketers leverage AI to transform their campaigns?

Get ready to level up, Conquerors! This week, we’re thrilled to welcome Lomit Patel, the visionary Chief Marketing & Growth Officer at Tynker, as our guest on the Conquer Local Podcast.

With over two decades of scaling high-growth startups like Roku, TrustedID, and IMVU, Lomit excels in turning big ideas into massive successes. As an award-winning author and speaker, he’s also written the influential book, “Lean AI.”

Don’t miss this opportunity to gain insights from Lomit’s expertise!

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The NEW WAY to Optimize Marketing Campaigns with AI 

Introduction

I’m Jeff Tomlin and on this episode, we’re pleased to welcome Lomit Patel. 

Lomit is Tynker’s Chief Growth Officer. He has over 20 years of experience scaling venture-backed startups from Series B and beyond, including Roku (IPO), TrustedID (acquired by Equifax), Texture (acquired by Apple), and IMVU, which was a top-grossing gaming app). 

He’s an award-winning public speaker, author, and advisor, and his book, “Lean AI,” is part of Eric Ries’ “The Lean Startup” series.

Get ready Conquerors for Lomit Patel coming up next on this week’s episode of the Conquer Local Podcast.

Lomit Discusses his Career Path and Growth Strategies.

Jeff Tomlin: Lomit Patel, hey. It is a great pleasure to have you on the Conquer Local podcast. First off, hey, thanks for taking time out of your busy day and schedule to join us, and have a quick chat. How are you doing, man?

Lomit Patel: I’m doing great. How are you doing Jeff?

Jeff Tomlin: Doing well. I’m doing well. Hey, it is a treat for me to have a marketing practitioner and growth-minded guy on a show like this. You’ve got a heck of a resume throughout your career. Boy, I want to start there, names like Roku, TrustedID, which was acquired by Equifax, Texture, I think that was acquired by Apple if I’m right, and you’re now running Growth. You’re the chief marketing officer, and chief growth officer at Tynker. Walk us a little bit through the career progression, and how you got from each step, and landed to what you’re doing now with those things behind you, and author now. It’s an impressive resume.

Lomit Patel: Thank you. What I will say is, growing up, I’ve always been fascinated with tech startups. I grew up in England, and one of the things that I knew growing up was if I wanted to work in a startup, I had to figure out a way to get to San Francisco. That’s where a lot of the action was happening at the time. And first best career move I made was to go to grad school in the United States. That got me over to San Francisco. And by design, what I’ll say is there’s just a lot of opportunities here for the most part, because there’s so many venture-backed startups that keep getting funded, and I got lucky to be able to join some of these startups that you mentioned really early. I would say the key to what my role has been in these startups that you mentioned really early, because I joined them generally right around when they have product market fit, it’s really to really figure out once you have the product, how are you going to grow, and scale that. And being venture-backed, the goal is always to get to hundreds and millions of users, or hundreds of millions in revenue as quickly as possible. And at the core of achieving that, it’s really understanding the entire customer funnel, from how you acquire customers, how you engage, retain and monetize users, and just being very data-driven, and creative at the same time, and just running a lot of experiments, trying to validate different hypotheses, to really figure out what’s the best channels to acquire customers, what’s the best creative messages that resonate, what’s the changes do within the product, to really enhance the user experience, that continues to get us customers, and keeps those customers. And then ultimately, once we generate this massive user base, and millions of customers, how are we going to best monetize, and figure out the business models, which generally revolves either around purchases, subscriptions, or advertising.

Lomit Shares Growth Tactics and Roku Success Stories.

Jeff Tomlin: Whenever we’ve got marketing, sales, and growth practitioners on the show, people do make comments, and they want to hear tactical strategies. You’ve had a lot of success with the brands that you’ve worked with, and grown over the years that have eventually successfully exited. Roku, you had a great success growing that. I believe you leveraged PR, and influencers, and had a ton there. Maybe talk about maybe a couple of your secret tactics that you’ve used, that have created a lot of growth and success, and maybe some of the others.

Lomit Patel: Yeah. So I think in terms of tactics, ultimately it really comes down to really understanding who the customers are you’re trying to get. Who are going to be the best early adopters for those different products and services? As an example, at Roku, it was really going to be a lot of people that were primarily tech adopters, that we’re going to try to pivot into trying a new technology product, that would help them stream content. The second part of that equation was to really figure out, what’s the right content that we were offering on Roku, that really attracted, or would be attractive to users? And ultimately, the first content partner we had was Netflix who was trying to validate their whole business around streaming. So it was serendipitous around perfect timing, but ultimately, what’s the best place to get Netflix customers? If you can, work out some partnership where they’ll be able to give you great placements within their website. That was one place that we were able to negotiate and get some really good visibility on their website, where they were educating their customers around streaming, and Roku was the top position, and the top choice on how people could stream that content. So that was a really good channel. We did a lot of the other things that most people do, like paid search, search engine optimization, content marketing. But the other thing that we looked into was, “Where else can we get to these users?” And the thing that came to mind was at the time, I don’t know if people remember or not, but Netflix started off as a DVD by mail business. So they used to ship out millions of DVDs every week. And within that DVD, for the most part, when you open that flap, there was nothing in there. So we were able to negotiate getting a cheap ad placement within the DVD mailer, and that really ended up becoming a great growth hack for us early on, to be able to get visibility and awareness right in front of the users about what Roku could potentially do, to help them stream content. And what I would say is it really came down to knowing who our initial customers were going to be, that would find the product valuable, but also having the foresight to work with those potential partners, to really figure out what’s the best way to reach those users as well.

Leveraging Influencers and Pricing Strategy.

Jeff Tomlin: It always fascinates me that there’s a lot of different technology models, and a lot of them use the same channels, similar channels, and tactics, but it’s amazing how different some of the strategies can be, depending on where the best place to find the users is. I think that’s a pretty cool growth hack, and very different from online optimization, but you found the right delivery method to get in front of the people that mattered. Right?

Lomit Patel: Right. And then I think Jeff, you could probably relate to this being a marketer, the other thing that we looked into was, now people call them influencers, but it wasn’t really known as influencers. It was really just a bunch of bloggers that wrote about tech. And the question was, “How could we reach out to them, and get them to review our product?” And we gave them access to try out the product. It was nothing paid or anything. It was just really just, “Hey. We have this cool product. Would you want to try it out?” Invite them over to our offices to check out the product. And that really led to a lot of exposure, because we were able to get a whole slew of really prominent tech bloggers, as well as the long tail of bloggers to start writing about us. And then the other thing for anyone who works in consumer electronics, one of the biggest seasons for selling products is always the holidays. That’s when people are looking for new gift ideas.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah.

Lomit Patel: So the other growth hack is really reaching out to a lot of the gift guides that were going to come out. And we did that every season, and tried to get placements within that for Roku, like a PR placement. It wasn’t paid, but we always got good visibility, because it was a novel product. The other thing that I will add that was really important to Roku for growth was price point. Because ultimately, a lot of products that come out, you have to try and find the optimal price point where you can get mass adoption. And for us, the secret was to try and keep that psychological price point under $99. And we did that. And what I’ll say is we didn’t lose any money on that sale, because what we got really smart at was doing a lot of cross and upsells within the purchase flow, to be able to make up the margins. As an example, we sold cables, which cost us, I’m not going to go into too much details, but we made great margins on that, as well as once we knew somebody was using Roku, we were able to get them to buy two, three or four different devices for different rooms. So they became a great lifetime value customer for us.

Product-Market Fit is Crucial for Marketing Success.

Jeff Tomlin: And of course, a great piece of the recipe that helps with the efforts, you get people coming into your office, and trying out the product, and then you have the tech bloggers writing about you. A key piece is having a great product. When you really have fit, and you have a great product, it feels like you’re running downhill with the wind behind you.

Lomit Patel: I would say that has definitely been the common denominator across all the different companies that have worked, which have been successful. It really comes down to the product, because I feel like people like us that work in marketing can be really dangerous. With the right product, we can have a lot of that momentum behind us, but if we have a bad product, especially in this day and age with social media, the negative reviews can kill you. So yeah. It’s a double-edged sword.

AI Enhances Marketing Efficiency and Optimizes Campaigns.

Jeff Tomlin: And you got to work for every bit of ground that you want to gain. Yeah. It’s tough. Hey, I wanted to jump in, and talk to you a little bit about AI. So you’ve got a book out, Lean AI, and you write a little bit about how startups can leverage it, because you can achieve a lot of efficiencies with it, and nothing is more important than a startup de-risking themselves as they’re trying to experiment, and find market fit. So talk a little bit about your book, and some of the approaches, and key tips that you’ve got for people to leverage AI to scale.

Lomit Patel: Yeah. What I will say about AI is that ultimately it’s a tool to try and help any company, business function to figure out ways to be more efficient. And efficiency comes in a number of different ways. So my book Lean AI was really based on the use cases around marketing, but it can be applied to all other types of use cases. But going back to the customer funnel, the biggest use case that we found challenging at the time, what I wrote the book about was I was working for this gaming company called IMVU, and gaming is a really competitive space, and we were just going into launching up a gaming app on mobile. And mobile is really competitive. Mobile gaming is really competitive. People don’t give you a lot of time. So you have to really get crystal clear about who your customers are, and to really get great around using data to personalize the way you’re going to target them across different channels, and how you’re going to get them to register, and onboard, and try your product out. And that first time user experience is really, really important. And in the book, what we ended up doing, the other thing, and I’m talking about this was the era between 2017 to 2022 when it was really hard to hire a lot of people in Silicon Valley, because the job market is really hard. So the question is, the more you can leverage AI and automation to do a lot of the rudimentary tasks and processes around campaign management, around optimizing your budgets, around a creative development, the better it enables you to be able to be more competitive at execution, and running a slew of different experiments. So that’s what we focused on. We ended up creating templates across different social media channels. And we were able to really test tens and thousands of different headlines, caller actions, creative messages, images, as well as different videos to really figure out what messages and what creatives resonated well for us to acquire our customers through Facebook, through Google, through Snapchat, TikTok, as well as 10 to 15 other really core channels that we were going after. And the machine was literally managing all of this for us. Because my team was really small, I had a team of probably around 10, 12 people, considering we’re managing hundreds and millions of dollars in budget, the machine was enabling us to really have that leverage and the confidence to be able to make all of those key decisions that we didn’t really have to make in terms of how much to bid, who to target across all of these places, and how to personalize all of those onboarding experiences really based on the outcomes. Because ultimately, what we trained the algorithms on was core metrics that the business was being evaluated for our investors, which is cost to acquire a customer, what is a lifetime value, and a return on investment. So those were the three metrics, and as long as the machine was able to hit those metrics, we had the luxury at that time to have an open budget. So we were able to scale our budget from spending hundreds and thousands to several to millions a month cost effectively.

Cross-Functional Collaboration is Key for AI Success.

Jeff Tomlin: That’s incredible. Tell me though. There’s different levels of sophistications that a lot of marketing teams have, and it’s interesting. The AIs, they can get to a level of sophistication in doing things for you fairly easily. But did you guys work very, very closely with your engineering team to do more sophisticated things with your technological approach, that let you get to that level of scale?

Lomit Patel: Yeah. So what I will add is I think the modern marketing team doesn’t sit alone anymore.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah.

Lomit Patel: It’s really a cross-functional team.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah.

Lomit Patel: And that’s literally the success really comes from working closely with product, because it’s all about providing the feedback in terms of how to improve the product to the product team. It’s all about working with the engineering team to create the best customer data platform, where you get all your data integrated into one place. Because once you have your data from all different sources integrated into one place, then the AI can be able to work more intelligently, versus having this disbarred data coming from different places. And then the third part is really figuring out how do you clean that data up. Right? So you’re putting good data signals going into the machine, or else you’ll be getting garbage coming out. And I think the fourth part is really working closely with the finance, the CFOs, and the VP of finance to be able to validate a lot of the financial models that were being built. Because ultimately, in terms of when you’re trying to predict out lifetime value, and you spending that scale, any mistakes could create a deep hole in the company pretty quickly in terms of burn rate. And the trick there was to create this feedback loop, that you were validating those models on a weekly basis versus monthly or quarterly. So you are able to instill that confidence to the rest of the business in terms of trusting the machine. And if it’s okay, I’ll give you one quick example.

Jeff Tomlin: 100%.

Lomit Patel: When the pandemic started, that’s when a lot of companies panicked. Right? I’m thinking it was March or April 2020. And a lot of advertisers pulled out, and that was the normal thing to do, for most companies did that. Algorithm was telling us to spend more, and the reason why it was telling us to spend more was because all the CPMs were coming down, because there was less competition in the marketplace.

Jeff Tomlin: Right.

Lomit Patel: And I remember having this conversation with the executive team, because it was counterintuitive to what everybody else was doing, but at the end, I felt like it was a gutsy call, but it really came down to the confidence that they had built in trust in that machine, that we ended up doing something that was counterintuitive to what a lot of other gaming apps were doing. And that enabled us to get tens and millions of users within those couple of months, when everybody else was out of the market. And then as you know, once you get those users, you’ve got users that it’s compound interest. Right?

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah.

Lomit Patel: It’s like, yeah. And that really helped fund a lot of our growth post-pandemic that the company was able to see. Yeah.

Rapid Iteration and Growth Mindset Drive Organizational Success.

Jeff Tomlin: That’s an amazing story. So you guys are making decisions on a weekly basis, not on monthly basis. And you’re rapidly iterating. You’re working really close with your engineering team, with your finance team.

Lomit Patel: Yeah.

Jeff Tomlin: You talk a lot about how important it is for marketing teams to have a growth mindset, but it really sounds like the organizations that you’ve been working in, you have that growth mindset throughout the entire organization really?

Lomit Patel: Yeah. I would say most of the companies that I’ve worked at here in Silicon Valley, just by design, there’s a lot of emphasis on the whole growth mindset, where you are really encouraged to test, learn, and iterate, and to validate using data rotted in, just intuition. And the question is, “What’s the fastest and cheapest way to validate any hypothesis?” And that’s what it comes down to. It’s not whatever you’re saying is a silly idea, but it’s, “What’s the fastest and cheapest way for us to really figure it out if that’s the right way to go, or not?” And that’s where going into AI has really empowered a lot of marketing teams that I worked at where previously we applied some forms of AI, but it was more rules-based, but now, it’s completely automated to where the machine is making decisions automatically based on insights, and you just have to validate, and make sure that those decisions are the right decisions for the business.

Customer Satisfaction is Crucial for Long-Term Business Success.

Jeff Tomlin: That’s amazing. So as you’re scaling a business, clearly customer acquisition, revenue, two of the most important things that you can think about. You also talk about a third key factor that shouldn’t be overlooked. Talk about that for a second.

Lomit Patel: Well, I would say beyond revenue, and financial health of the business, it’s really important to make sure that you’re keeping your customers happy, because ultimately, they’re the ones who are voting either through their time or money to figure out if your business is going to survive. And I think it’s really important to constantly keep talking to your customers. It doesn’t matter what stage of the business you are at. That’s something that’s been installed into a lot of the DNA into the companies that I’ve worked at, but I’ve found it at least talking to a lot of friends that I know that work at other companies, that maybe bigger, or more traditional, where there tend to be a lot of silos. So a lot of information does not get shared internally. And secondly, there tends to be a phobia to really talk to your customers frequently.

Build Relationships and Trust for Successful Fundraising.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah. You’ve been working with a lot of incredible brands that have had success from raising money, growing, all the way through scale, and then through acquisition. You have any advice to founders who are at either end of that spectrum right now? They’re out. They’re just starting to find fit, and they’re looking to raise money, or they’re looking to, “How do we get to the next level, and how do we start thinking about acquisition processes?” Do you have any advice for founders out there?

Lomit Patel: Yeah. What I’ll say is, raising money is harder nowadays, but the reality is, at least with a lot of the companies that I’ve been involved in, those are things that you want to start even before you need the money, so to speak. So it’s all about relationship building. It’s all around socializing ideas around what you’re building, trying to reach out to potential VCs, and investors, or advisors, and just to ask them for potential advice, and getting feedback on what you’re building, and potentially getting them involved early in the process, to become a champion for you, because then when you do really need the money, or you need to have those discussions, I find people are more open to making those warm introductions, that makes the fundraising process a little less painful. But the other part of it is it’s just having good governance from the start in terms of how you’re running your business, that when people do their due diligence, it doesn’t raise a lot of red flags around what you’re saying, and is backed up by what they see when they look at the numbers. So if I was to put it down to one word, it’s building trust. And the way you build trust is to under promise and over deliver on whatever you say to people.

Leverage AI Platforms for Business Growth through Partnerships.

Jeff Tomlin: There’s some advice that comes from doing this once or twice, doesn’t it? If you had one takeaway for the audience, what would you want to leave in their mind?

Lomit Patel: What I would say is, at least now the AI genie is out of the bag. The reality is companies don’t need to build a lot of AI functionality themselves. There’s a lot of AI that’s being built into a lot of platforms and tools out there, to support businesses for different use cases, whether it’s how you want to acquire customers, how you want to engage, retain customers, how you want to get more efficient with customer support. So I would encourage companies, because there’s no better time to really be building and growing businesses now, because you don’t have to build a lot of this stuff. It’s really about going out there, and figuring out which is the right potential companies that have AI capabilities built in that you would want to partner with. And the best way to do that is just once you’ve identified the use cases, ask for extended free trials. So you can validate these platforms. Most people give you maybe 7 days, or 30 days, but the way I found getting 2 to 3 months of trying a product out is just offering up to do a case study, basically. So if the product’s going to be successful for you, you’ll be happy to be a customer reference, and do a case study with that partner. And by doing that, you both have a vested interest to make sure it is going to be successful. So at least in my career, I’ve found that that’s when you generally get the A team working on your account versus the B team.

Getting in Touch with Lomit Patel

Jeff Tomlin: What a great tip. Lomit, it’s been an absolute pleasure having you on the show. If people wanted to continue the conversation with you, how do they reach out to you?

Lomit Patel: Yeah. The best way to reach out to me is on LinkedIn. I’m very active. I’m always posting a lot of great content there. I also have a blog, which is lomitpatel.com, and I’m always posting a lot of great content on the blog as well. I love writing about all different facets of growing a business, scaling a business, all the way to raising money. So feel free to reach out to me. I’m happy to respond back, and help whoever reaches out.

Jeff Tomlin: A person can gain a wealth of wisdom by going through, and having a number of these successes in their back pocket. You’ve got a pile of them, and you’re a wealth of knowledge. It’s been a pleasure having you on the show. I hope that you can come back, and share some more of your wisdom with us in the future, if you’ll do that. And I wish you a fantastic, fantastic week ahead of you.

Lomit Patel: Thanks, Jeff. It was a pleasure being on the show, and I love to be back in future.

Conclusion

Jeff Tomlin: Lomit is an incredible wealth of knowledge and 30 minutes does not do it justice! 

Here’s a few takeaways from my chat with Lomit. 

Firstly, Embrace AI-powered marketing. Lomit highlights the power of AI-powered marketing tools for campaign management, budget optimization, and personalization. This is sophisticated stuff. Leveraging AI can help businesses test creative messages, personalize user experiences, and ultimately improve customer acquisition and retention.

When it comes to decision-making. Data is king according to Lomit. Businesses need to focus on collecting clean customer data, integrating it into a central platform, and using it to inform marketing decisions. This data-driven approach allows for faster and more cost-effective hypothesis testing and validation. When you have data centralized, it opens it up for all sorts of uses across your marketing stack and interesting new uses with AI.

If you’ve enjoyed Lomit’s episode discussing data-driven marketing with AI assistance, keep the conversation going and revisit some of our older episodes from the archives: Check out Episode 714: 10x Your Growth: The Marketing Framework to Attract & Convert More Customers with Solomon Thimothy or Episode 706: Transforming Your Business in the Hyper-Digital Era with John Rossman.

Until next time, I’m Jeff Tomlin. Get out there and be awesome!