 Welcome, Maziar. That's great. OK, thank you so much. Maziar has a multi-phase educational background. He studies graphic design, performing art, theater, and he has a PhD in communication and media. He works in Artbeads where he plays a hybrid role from marketing to product design. And I don't know again if he's leapt. Welcome. Thank you so much. And I want to thank the audience who came here. At this time of the day, I know you have had enough talks and you have got enough information today. I will try to keep this short and informative and, let's say, entertaining as much as I can. So, all right. By the way, I have 30 minutes or I have 30 minutes. Thank you. So my name is Maziar Fieruzband. I am a co-founder and CMO in my company Artbeads. We do team, we create premium WordPress themes. I'm going to talk about marketing. But I try to explore a different site, a different approach to marketing than the regular or classic or commonly known marketing. I'm going to study or look at marketing from the perspective of lean methodology. And I'm going to start with the description of marketing. Well, it doesn't require description. Everyone knows what marketing is. But maybe Sergio Zeman puts together like very short but efficient description of marketing by saying marketing is more stuff to more people for more money, more often, more efficiently. This is very general, but I'm sure holistic. The thing is that the way you do this, I mean, this can be the goal. This can be the destination. But how you want to achieve this? And there are millions of different ways to do this. And I want to look at one specific perspective that is less covered and is like the, let's say, most modern way of marketing. Before starting to talk about marketing, I want to say I want to talk about what is not marketing. Marketing is not only about selling a product. The process of marketing a product does not end when a product is sold. It actually begins there. This is how we oppose to the classic way of marketing when the goal was actually just selling. When you want to sell Coca-Cola, some water and sugar, like Steve Jobs says, your mission is accomplished when you just sell a can of Coca-Cola. But the way we want to explore marketing is actually the other way around. It actually starts when you sell the product. So what is this lean marketing? We don't want to repeat this jargon word over and over. Let's dig in. So lean marketing is derived and kind of inspired from a methodology called lean a startup. Lean a startup can be defined as a way of building a product around, I mean, driven by learning. So you can just replace the word building by selling or marketing. The learning that is the very important aspect in this methodology is actually a three-fold model, a three-fold process of building, measuring, and learning. So you measure what you built and how it performs and learn from the results and then reflect the results in your plans for the next stage. And this process keeps happening. It doesn't start in a stop somewhere. It keeps happening. So there is also a word for lean marketing or lean methodology. There's also a second name that is quite popular. Maybe you have heard this more often. It's growth hacking. But these actually are the same thing, talking about the same thing. Lean marketing, like I said, follows the very same concept of building around learning or, like I said, marketing around learning. And this process has eight steps. However, I have tweaked this a little bit. And it starts with finding empathy. And then we define a hypothesis. And then we build a small product based on this hypothesis. And then we measure what we built, make decision, and then pivot or persevere. And then we try to reach stickiness. We try to reach virality. And then we start to earn money and spend it and enjoy it. So I'm going to give a little description or explanation of each of these steps, starting with finding empathy. So what is this all about? Before you start a product, before you ideate a product, you need to go inside your target market's head. You should try to solve a problem that people care about and people would like to pay for. And that is how you are finding an empathy. Once you've found that, you need to define a hypothesis, something you assume is going to work. So your product is driven by an intention, like we discussed, or something that makes you think this product is relevant and has a right to exist. So you have a hypothesis. What you're going to do is going to build a very small version of what you think is going to work and what you think that your target market is going to enjoy. And it solves the problem for them. This small thing that we just talked about is your minimum viable product that is also called the shortened version is MVP, which is going to prove or disprove your hypothesis. You should think about very essential elements without which your product will not work. So everything else that is not essential should be just cut off and thrown away. And then you have this small product that you will put into test and see how it performs. Now it's time to measure. Measuring is having different forms and different ways to measure. But we're going to focus on the three major ways, which is analysis, interview, and experiment. So let's first focus on analysis. So normally, we do analysis. This is not a new thing to talk about. But think is the way you do analysis might suffer, some problems might lack, some wrong perspectives. Firstly, the metrics that you are focusing and trying to measure should be comparative, not absolute. For example, if you're focusing on conversion rate as a KPI to measure the performance, you should not say, OK, I sold 3,000 copies today or last month. You should say how big or how more was my sell or conversion rate comparing to the previous month or this quarter comparing to the previous quarter. So you should be comparative, not absolute. Your metrics should be actionable, not of vanity. Actionable means it should give you some insight by which you can make decision. Like saying I have 5 million visitors in a month is not a good KPI, because it doesn't give you any insight that can drive action. It should be something insightful, or we say actionable. And also it should be leading, not lagging. It should be more forward-looking than backward-looking. Exploring the past and making decisions based on the metrics that are solely looking at the past is not good, is not useful. You should focus on metrics that are leading and forward looking. So with these factors in mind about the metrics that you should measure, I'm going to show you some examples of the good KPIs or good metrics to focus when you're measuring your performance. It's, for example, uptime and reliability. Revenue per customer, churn rate, upselling, stickiness, enrollment, conversion rate, lifetime value, morality, and, very importantly, customer acquisition cost. So these were some examples. They're for sure more. And then we have a second way of measuring the performance, which is interview. This is very commonly being forgotten in the marketing sphere. You should remember that you should talk to your users and their experiences with your product. Well, many of us can confirm. And you should ask them what they do like and what they don't like about your product and what improvements they want. So that about the second form. The third way is doing experiment. And maybe it's the most important, even more important than analysis. So experimenting is like this. If you want to put it very simple in a simple way, you believe feature X will improve the metric Y by a specific percentage. And this is an assumption. So you have to experiment. This is a very simple formula for experimenting. And this statement actually is like the hypothesis we just talked, but it's a very shorter version of that. So experimentation is the only way to prove or disprove it. The other form, one major form of testing is split testing. Many of you might have heard already. And it's when you define cohorts of users and then experiment new features and marketing campaigns to those different cohorts. We also have AB testing, which is actually when we are comparing one attribute, such as link collar and anything else. And assuming everything else is equal, we are doing AB testing. So just one element is put in the testing. However, we have more complicated way of AB testing, which is multivariate testing. But maybe this is the easiest and simplest thing to begin when you're trying to assess your product performance. So after doing these measurements, these three forms of measurement that we just discussed, we need to make decision. That's a very historical moment we have to deal with. And that's when you pivot or persevere. So for those of you who don't know the meaning of these two words, pivot is like staying in the path, sorry, persevere means staying in the path that you are in. And it actually shows that you're in the right direction. And pivot is the opposite, which means you have to change your direction. So if the measurement results was aligned with your goal, it means that your hypothesis is proven and you may persevere in the path you are in. But if the result of the measurement is negative and not as expected, then it's time to pivot towards another direction and restart from step one. So those of us who hit this scenario, we have to go back to step one of this formula. And those of us who don't and we prove our hypothesis, we can continue. And that's where we should start working on this kind of things, reaching a stickiness. Well, as you can guess from the meaning, stickiness is like making your users, making your audience or target market stick to your product or service more and more. You see, there is nothing about making money at the moment. So if your MVP is vindicated, it's time to focus on increasing your user's engagement with your product. Like I said, so for example, two metrics or average stats that you can consider as the right and standard way to show that your product having the right stickiness is the turn rate. If your turn rate is less than 5% and also the time spent in your product, depending on what kind of product you're selling, it's a web application, it's a mobile application, this might change, of course. But 17 minutes a day is like an average amount you can consider. Like I said, this is very relative. Changes from sector to sector and product to product. But these can be like the ballpark figures. So after the stickiness, we need to think about how to increase virality. There are different ways or different forms of virality. Inherent virality, artificial virality, word of mouth virality. Inherent virality happens naturally within the product. And a good example is Envision. Those of you who have worked, UX designers and designers might know the service. So you prototype of products to your client or your colleagues and you invite them to Envision. And they automatically see the service. The third party service that is actually making this prototype happen. So that's inherently viral. This has this virality mechanism built right inside the product. But we also have artificial virality, which is incentivized and less genuine. And best example is Dropbox. Dropbox was about to collapse. And the only way they could survive and actually became this big was their referral mechanism that I remember they used to give you like a couple months of free usage or iron a couple gigabytes of free storage. So that's Dropbox. That's incentivized referral program. We also have word of mouth referral system or virality mechanism, which has a lot of examples to give. I don't need to mention. You see all of the viral stories and campaigns that is just viral without any specific element or a good example of this. It's just people talk about it. And I can say it's the most effective and trustworthy kind of referring a product to a person. So after we reach this stickiness and virality, it's time for making money and scale. So if you start monetizing your product after you have made your user stick to you and you have made a viral product, then it's time to charge them. And if your customer acquisition cost, which is CAC, is less than a third of your customer lifetime value, it means that you're doing a good job. And the monetization or the step of making revenue is actually happening in the right way. However, this is a very general example. This might change. Like I said, this can be a good figure to consider for the beginning. So all right. Now after this, I have been talking about more theoretical facts than practical by telling you what is lean methodology and these different steps, the eight steps. And I want to show you the actual examples or the practical way we can make use of this idea and this methodology into marketing. And specifically when working in WordPress and just producing any WordPress product or service. So we talked about analysis. Whatever product or service you're building and you're trying to market, you make sure you prepare a report with Google Data Studio and collect the metrics that you think that matters to you and watch them on daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly basis. That's what I do as well. Always increase your theme speed and performance. So many people do not consider this as a marketing thing and more of a development thing, but I think it's more of a marketing thing because if your demo pages, for example, load for a first time visitor in less than five seconds and it lasts more than 10 seconds, you are in a bad situation and you don't want that. Experiment everything like we discussed. You can experiment templates if you're a team producer like us. All the features, regardless of the kind of product that you're building, the pricing, all the campaigns, marketing campaigns, like promotions, discounts, and offers, everything can be put into testing. There should be no, you should not be certain about anything about your marketing. Everything can be surprised, you can surprise you when you put them into testing. This has happened to me a lot throughout my career. So how do you actually conduct the testing? You first, like we said, define a hypothesis and a cohort for it, release an MVP with the hypothetical feature for that cohort, or the other ways of testing. AB test, two features for one cohort, and of course, expand if successful, pivot if not successful. This very important thing, which is more about maybe PR, but no, I think it's directly related to marketing, is how you should stay connected to your customer and your community. You should interact with customers via support or sales channels every day yourself. And that's how you know them and let them know you. You should not delegate your market research to third parties or middleman companies, like many big companies do, and that's a bad practice. You should interview them yourself, and preferably with FaceTime, not even with email. You can actually incentivize this thing with them. I don't give them an Amazon gift card or iTunes gift card, like many companies do now. Affiliate program, this is directly a growth hacking method. Affiliate program or customer loyalty programs. Why? Because if every single user successfully invites more than one other paying user, your growth is almost assured. One performance. This is, I guess, there's also a name for this, wireality coefficient figure, which is an example of a good business doing the referral program or loyalty program the right way. For example, you can define the scantires based on the number of users that one user refers. This is also what Dropbox did, like we discussed. Promotional campaigns. Promotional campaigns are what everyone does. So if you don't, you will fail. According to our experience, you can run one promotional campaign per quarter, maybe 40% to 60% discount, or subscription based on the business model that you have in Black Friday, which is upcoming. And one interesting thing is that you can consider never charging your customers for hosting. How? If you are an independent seller, don't charge your users for hosting. You can add it to your theme prize or service price and then advertise as free hosting. This is a scientific practice. And I can mention, of course, after this interview, it was like an experiment. And it actually worked like this. People were more interested in the false advertisement, we should say. So this is one growth hacking practice. Good to provide as example. And blogging, we don't need to talk about this. This is like Ivana was saying content is a king. So yes, content is a steel king. You need to blog. You need to do the content marketing. But let me give you some shortcuts about blogging. Use AdWords Keyword Planner or BuzzSumo to find the trends in your industry, our industry, in WordPress industry, and blog about them. That will cut down a lot of legwork and inefficient blogging. So how long do I have? OK, not much. This is very interesting. I actually did this experiment. It was really, really efficient and surprisingly good. Run competitor Google Ad campaigns. What does it mean? You should find your competitors' weaknesses and show how you address them with your product in a landing page. So you build this landing page. And then you should run AdWords campaigns with your competitor's keyword and link them to that landing page. This is pretty evil, but it's very efficient. I know Intercom or many of the companies doing this. Actually, how I got inspired from them. So implement added value or fake it to be more transparent. If working on a marketplace, you can add Amazon gift card, incentivize your customer in different ways that you can, like I said. Amazon gift card or you can. If you're an independent seller working not on the marketplace like we do, you can provide included hosting the way we discussed. You should just advertise it as a free and added value. And then when you do it, test it with one cohort and expand it successful. You don't want to regret risking, I don't know, something like this, spending a lot of money on this, incentives, and then you regret it. You can just, like I said, do the MVP, define hypothesis, make MVP, release it, look at the product and look at the result and how it performs, and then decide if you want to expand it or not. Go GPL. Well, maybe you don't know. I mean, maybe it's surprising, but going GPL is actually a growth hacking method. Why? You should give your users the freedom to use your product however they like. And GPL helps you build trust, stickiness, and virality all at once. So maybe this is the only marketing practice or very few among the very few that has all of these engines of growth at the same time, stickiness and virality as well as trustworthiness. OK. So our product, JupiterX, is a freemium GPL WordPress team with 130,000 plus user customers. So it means GPL is not the suicide. And we have done this. We have risked this, and we don't regret it. This is very important, which is building an investing time to build your public image. You don't want to be a developer working in a cave all the time and just release a product and then charge people for that. Build yourself a public image, which is very important nowadays. Whether you're an independent seller, a SaaS provider, or a marketplace seller, you should get out of your cave and go to work camps as simple as that. You can sponsor your cities or one of the continental work camps. You should talk and share your experience with the community. These are all marketing practices. And that's it. Holy Bibles of Lean Methodology are these three books. And I definitely recommend Lean Analytics by Eric Fries, the same author for Lean Startup and the Growth Hacker Marketing. And that's it. Thanks for your time. Some questions? Just one. What a surprise. First of all, I would like to tell you a great talk. Very interesting. And what I would like to tell you is that in the last weeks, I've searched for AdWords keyword. And as different agents, different Google agents told me, they have closed that. First is what? Second question is, no, sorry, not the second question. I didn't get your first question, I think. Yeah, no, it's not the first question. I want to just say it's an information, not the question. So my question instead is, do you think that this, I think that it's great what you said, but what about if, for example, we don't have an idea, or if we are not using a system? For example, I'm selling a t-shirt now, and I have a problem because actually no one, well, not great, so small part of my people buy it. So I'm just understanding, how can I do for improve that? But what I found is that my question was just this. So do you think that if I don't have enough data, how can I do the work you have just covered? If you don't have enough data, then you should do a lot of guesswork, or they say gutwork. You have to just make assumptions based on no facts and no figures, and then put them into testing. Sometimes they work because there are some people who says guesswork works better in marketing. But if you want to take the less risky way and a more reliable way, you should find metrics. You should define metrics. You should look at those numbers. If you don't have those numbers, it's very risky to make decisions without very essential metrics, such as conversion rate or engagement rate and such. You will have a very, very dark path ahead of you. So it's very important to define those metrics and find the value before you make decisions for the future of your product or service. Great presentation. Really appreciate it. Never heard about lean methodology. Learned a lot today. How is it easy is it to implement it when you have a marketing team that has different backgrounds and different things? Because I get in your company, it's kind of easy because you're the guy and you're defining the road. But like in a marketing company for some of the clients that I deal with, I can probably think that somebody's read the book and like, OK, going home, we're going in with this, and everybody else is kind of like, OK, well. So I would just want to understand that. Yeah, the short answer is it's very difficult. It's very difficult and it takes a lot of work. Maybe it won't be as productive and rewarding in the beginning as you expect. If you read these books, there is a lot of stories, the similar people who have been part of a big company, I don't know, like Coca-Cola and such. They had a hard time making the buses understand the value of this methodology. So for sure, there is some resistance against it in the beginning, but it will be very rewarding at the end. And also, it doesn't need to be applied, like you say, immediately and all at once. Like we go home and tomorrow we do lean. It can be a very, very gradual and transitional process. You can start applying these practices one by one over time. So a culture is cultivated or unfostered during the process. But if you just give this, I don't know, the board of directors this as a package, for sure there will be problem, there will be resisting. First of all, I really appreciate your speech and I read the book and it's incredible. I have never read something like that and growth, marketing, growth, hacking is something that I think that we have to focus on. And so my question is, can I see another one time the part of a Google ad technique? Yes. I don't remember. Do you want to review it? Yeah, yeah, just from, yeah, first of this. Yes, yes. This technique. Starts from here, right? Yes, just because you talk about the affiliate program to run an affiliate program. And for example, we have seen Dropbox. When you say affiliate program, I think about Dropbox or also today TikTok, social network that create awareness and expand the market share just for that. I have never seen, it's my first time that I've seen this technique. Do you have an example, a practical example like Dropbox or something like that? Yeah, I have a very good example, which is Intercom. A notion and many new startups and companies are doing this. So there are like many old and classic products to solve a problem. And there is this young startup who is doing it the same thing, but in a very efficient and less custody way. And they do this thing. They just target them with their own keyword and then put together a good landing page, which actually shows to those who consider the old product why they are better than them. And Intercom was actually the one who inspired me for this and that was how I got to know Intercom. I actually made the research and I said, I'm looking for product X, why Intercom comes up. And then when I enter the landing page, it's not the usual landing page, it's not their normal homepage. It's exactly the points they are different or better than the product X. It means that they have tailored this landing page for those who find this from searching for the keyword related to that product. The product X. And I found this is a very efficient way and that's why I listed it. Yeah, you're welcome. Yeah, hi, very interesting talk. And so you address this as about making themes or stuff for internally for WordPress, right? Yes, yes, that's right. But it's actually also applicable to websites. Absolutely. Any additional or different thing you would say about that? Or the whole structure of the eight points is fully logic. Absolutely, you're right, yeah. I just wanted to, since the community and the audience here is more focused towards WordPress, I wanted to say it specifically can be applied to WordPress as a software and product. But yes, any product actually, product. In fact, in general, it's generally applicable. Absolutely, yes. This methodology in philosophy and culture can be applied to any product or service, not just WordPress related ones. Thanks. You're welcome, thank you too. So hi, Masia, thank you for your talk. It's a pleasure always to hear you. I have a question, it's quite complicated. In fact, I do not expect a complete answer. In the talk, you applied the lean method basically to WordPress themes. And I think it can be applied also to WordPress plugins. Now my question is, if you could choose one of the steps of the lean methodology for applying to the WordPress core. Because yesterday you were the lead of the marketing team. And I think that the marketing team at WordPress is not applying lean methodology. What do you think the marketing team and we as a community can take from the lean methodology and apply to market WordPress as a whole? Very good question, thank you for that. I think I will go with experimentation. I think that's one missing factor or not enough considered and used in WordPress environment and ecosystem, not much of experimentation is happening on the releases, I guess. The best example was, I guess Gutenberg. Even though I support that decision and I like that editor and it was already late for it, anything, I support it. But I think releases or the features that are being released and provided to the community are not put into testing. This AB testing, different features for different communities based on each's preferences and the factors that separate them from each other. I think that could be, that is actually missing and could be very rewarding if we had it in WordPress ecosystem, especially in the WordPress core. Very good question, thank you too. Thank you for your talk. I have a question about one of the steps that mentioned to conduct interviews. So is that asking the users about what they think of the MVP and what maybe feature requests they should add? Okay. What is the interview step? So if you are getting a feature request more frequently, so let's say you have a feature request page or form and you receive 20 features and five of them are the same. So you know that you have two candidates. That one with five frequency and one with three frequency so you can define hypothesis around this and put them into testing. And then you can measure with one of those three ways, like interviewing to those who ask for it as well as maybe other users and then looking at the metrics, which is analysis step and also the experiment that we talked about. So that is how you can prove or disprove the actual good that it feature does to your product if I have addressed your question. Absolutely, absolutely. The thing is that you should not say, okay, this product is selling and these metrics like CAC should be one third of the CLV and stuff. So I'm good to go forever. No, that's not the case. It's a very competitive market. Every day there are new solutions. So this process of building around learning should infinitely continue. Thank you too. The last one. It's fine. Thank you so much.