It was a blur!
It's already been six months since I moved to Indent Corporation (the Korean startup behind the review marketing SaaS VREVIEW).
I spent Q1 focused on outbound and Q2 on inbound, trying all kinds of things.
Along the way I met a lot of people and absorbed a lot of knowledge, and I could feel myself growing another notch.
Marketing at Indent and VREVIEW has in fact become far more sophisticated than before and has started running toward higher targets.
Personally, though, it was a shame that I let go of the blogging and retrospectives I'd kept up well back in my useB days.
Maybe it was a sense of entitlement to rest on weekends after working hard all week, but even the writing I used to do religiously came to a halt.
For Q3, I decided to get my rhythm back so that the company's growth and my own growth can move together again. 😁
Feeling the importance of a growth team
The thing I was most looking forward to when moving to Indent was that there was an organization called the 'growth team.'
In Korean startups, it still seems common for marketing and sales to run as separate teams, despite the serious problems the information gap between them causes.
Fortunately, Indent is structured so that the marketing, sales, and CSM teams each operate under a parent organization, the growth team.
Of course, day to day, most of the communication happens within the marketing team, but I could feel many things improve just from having a culture where all information is shared transparently and the umbrella of the growth team.
I also felt that the growth team structure is effective not only for information sharing but for making you constantly think about 'the whole company's growth.'
Rather than simply increasing the number of inbound inquiries, it pushes you to think and try more things in order to hit the quarterly and annual revenue targets. Thanks to that, in Q1 I got to experience a range of campaigns I'd never tried before.
Webinars, outbound, offline events, and more. I plan to write them up in separate posts when I get the chance.
Sync-ups, wrap-ups, and all-hands
I'm someone who really hates unnecessary meetings.
Rather than "Shall we all put our heads together and think about it?"
I prefer "Let's each share what we've thought and give feedback."
When I joined, Indent had three main recurring meetings.
The sync-up, where everyone shares the status of what they're working on
The wrap-up, where we share the results produced each week
And the occasional all-hands, where the company's overall direction is shared
Beyond those, a few other meetings have come and gone, and new ones have been created, and it feels like we're gradually finding the approach that fits us.
As the company grows, these changes will only become more important, and with global expansion and other issues they can change any number of times, and probably should.
What I felt in Q1 and Q2: we need more trial and error
Having worked on all sorts of things together, webinars, offline events, email campaigns, search ads, the website redesign, and planning even more going forward, what I've come to feel is that the core of it all is defining 'the approach that fits us.'
There's plenty of good information in theory and in books, but in the end, which channels and which messages our customers respond to is something you can only learn by living through it.
If Q1 and Q2 were about experiencing levels 1 through 3 of nearly every area of B2B marketing, in Q3 and Q4 I want to grow to level 5 and beyond and contribute to real growth through more trial and error and hypothesis testing.
The good news is that, for all the effort, I am growing one way or another.
*That said, going forward I need to make sure I take breaks along the way so I can keep going without burning out. I think I hit a bit of burnout in June.
