Lessons Learned: Startup Growth with Karim Gargum

Spyros Tsoukalas: Welcome to the Growth Mentor Podcast, the first episode of 2023. And today we have with us, Karim Gargum, who is a growth and product leader with a proven track record of developing and launching new products for innovative startups such as Thriva, Bayer, Novartis, and the NHS. Karim, welcome. I’m excited to talk to you. And we talk about growth strategies. So, let’s cut to the chase, would you share with us something that you don’t know about startup growth and growth strategies?

Karim Gargum: Thank you so much for inviting me. And yeah, look, I don’t know if it’s something that people do know or don’t know. But I think it’s something to be very, very well aware of in that with growth. A lot of times, we’re kind of coming into the picture after the product market fit is there. And I think you really have to start with a strong foundation and make sure that the initial customers you’re working with, are viable. And as this sort of goes through its different sort of stages, you might start with friends and family, colleagues, co-workers, and they might say, Hey, that’s a great idea, we’d love to use it. But are they really a viable sort of market for your product, you have to kind of keep looking at that equation as you grow as your business grows. So I think always having the humility and the sort of approach of looking at that initial sort of foundation is really, really critical from what I’ve experienced.

Spyros Tsoukalas: Thanks for sharing. It sounded like a big takeaway from your career. So if we could generalize a little bit, what mistakes do you see startups doing when dealing with growth and growth strategies and the domain you have been dealing with?

Karim Gargum: I think there’s kind of one thing that I, I’ve been really thinking about a lot lately. And it’s where do you sort of clever tactics, or let’s say, hacks, work in relation to kind of authentic connection with the challenges and problems you’re trying to solve for your customer, your customer group, or your audience. So I think, ultimately, you can win if you are genuinely solving that pain point, generally solving that problem. And it’s always great to know some hacks and some tricks and use the cool latest tools, etc. But it’s not going to get you there alone if you don’t have that very authentic foundation below that you can refer back to. So I think that’s really something that I find people like saying, Oh, what’s the trick? What’s the hack? How can we do this? You know, what are the keywords that we can find? But what but they haven’t really thought clearly about? Does their product really meet the needs of their customers? And again, that sort of ties into the first question quite a bit as well.

Spyros Tsoukalas: So given that, what is your approach? How do you build a startup growth strategy?

Karim Gargum: I think it’s difficult, right? Because if you look at a startup and the different stages of its life, let’s say, I still find friends and colleagues or ex-colleagues from the startup community in particular, who are like, Hey, I’m thinking about something this area, or I want to launch a product in this area. And I always have to wonder, how much validation have they done around that idea? Is that something that they’re very convinced of themselves? And so you almost have to start at the very beginning, by being humble and really trying to test the idea. You know, we’ve seen people speak about launching kind of fake doors, testing your product, your service, getting ads through to see if people will kind of sign up to register for a notification or purchase, even if you don’t have anything ready yet. But I think you really do have to be quite disciplined about testing the real appeal of your product, firstly, before you kind of get into those next stages. And then once you have that, it’s like a virtuous cycle, you see that you’ve met the product need, and then you can start to improve on how you grow that product. And that is more about messaging, but the channels about the channel or product and market fit. So I think that’s the kind of approach we should all be looking at, as we try to grow our businesses.

Spyros Tsoukalas: As far as I understand, you have worked both with product and growth. So how can you align these two domains?

Karim Gargum: I think it’s so critical. I’m a little bit older. So when I started working in digital marketing, about 20 years ago now, it was very different, very separated, you would kind of be brought a product or service and say, hey, look what we sell, go and market it right. And the world has changed. The world has evolved a lot since then. And nowadays, for us to really build in those kinds of virtuous growth cycles. We need to understand, what is a product doing, and what’s the onboarding experience. What’s the sort of utilization? How frequently are people engaging with the product, and all of those? Create opportunities and also risks for us to both gain and lose momentum on the growth side, we can lose retention, or we can maybe, gain additional value from a customer over the lifetime where we can generate referrals or other kinds of positive elements for us. So it’s really just critical looking at sort of how the product enables those growth cycles and supports it and it means a really close relationship between those two areas of the business in particular.

Spyros Tsoukalas: And do you bring content marketing into this mix? Because I noticed that this was quite a note in your profile. So how does content marketing come into this mix?

Karim Gargum: I think content marketing is a great tool to focus the mind around how your product or services solve the underlying problems, again, you know, you’re noticing a bit of a feeling and what I’m saying, because I do truly believe in kind of an authentic approach to marketing and growth rather than sort of a gimmicky or sort of, you know, a false approach now, like, getting that content marketing, right means really understanding the stories and the problems of your customers, and speaking to them in an informative and honest and useful way. So I think you can use that as a tool to get different parts of the business aligned, like, we’re creating this piece of content, does it align with our beliefs as a business, you can kind of look at it across product and growth, but also across the other parts of the business sales, the general leadership, the founders, the co-founders, the CEO, etc. So I think content marketing really works as a strong tool, from that perspective, almost as a kind of brand building, as well as helping customers through the purchasing cycle as well. So it’s a strong tool for authenticity within a brand and within a business and your startup.

Spyros Tsoukalas: So Karim, going back to your approach, could we wrap up all the things you mentioned and elaborate more on how you do all this?

Karim Gargum: I think, in terms of the approach that I’d use and that’s been effective, and that I’ve seen other people use, I think it is, especially at those early stages of a new business, getting really close alignment between what’s the mission of the business. What’s the value proposition of the product or service you have? And then how do you layer the growth strategy on top of that, so that for effective growth, especially for like, let’s say, the acquisition side, or the kind of outbound side of the growth, as opposed to, let’s say, kind of developing the customer after they’ve come in through the door and been on-boarded and become a client, you really need to have that fuel. And that framework of like who are we as a business? What are we solving, who are our customers, having that agreement and clarity? I’ve seen some people get frustrated when they’re trying to develop growth strategies, and maybe have an idea and the rest of the people in the business are like, well, I don’t know if that approach would really work for me or not. Having an agreement on the type of customer profile means that you can say, well, it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t work for you, we all agreed that this was our type of customer. And we need to see if it works for them. And those are the kinds of interesting tools that you start to be able to use. And it’s a lot of this stuff that product teams have been using over a longer period of time, user research, understanding the kind of pain points of the user, but leveraging that for growth as well to build a really strong foundation. So I think that’s the thing that I’ve really spent a lot of time trying to understand. In the past, I’ve been lucky enough to work across product and growth teams. And that’s always been the common denominator working really closely with potential customers, and users, understanding their pain points very clearly. And using that as a kind of resource across the business, because it tends to be very interesting to both people on the growth and marketing side, as well as people on the product, engineering, side sales, the general kind of management of the business, to all sort of understand the real voice and the pain points of the customer. So I think having that as a key piece is something that I’ve experienced to be very successful. I think it still needs to be done properly and needs to be taken very seriously if you want to develop a successful strategy.

Spyros Tsoukalas: Thanks for getting into so many details. Last question for today, are there any tools you recommend for any specific activities out of those?

Karim Gargum: Yeah, it’s a good question. I don’t know if my answer is going to be very useful here. But I’ve found over a longer period of time, where I’ve been looking at marketing growth that the tools tend to change, tend to fall out of fashion, new tools come old tools fade away. But a lot of times where I found the most value is kind of understanding, what do you want from the tools? How do you make the tools work for you, sometimes, you know, it’s very effective to just take some numbers, put them in an Excel spreadsheet, and really get into the sort of nitty-gritty of those numbers and understand them, as it might be to use a really fancy new tool that can kind of extrapolate data for you and draw different automatic conclusions? So I think, for me, I’ve always been somebody who’s more about the kind of approach to the tools rather than the tools themselves, because I’ve seen them change and adapt over time. And I think there are always new cool tools out there. We’re going to be seeing more and more coming in the future with this sort of rise of AI. But having the ability to understand what you want from the tool, and also be able to do some of your own number crunchings in the background with a simple tool like Excel. So you feel that you have real confidence and fluency in those numbers is really, really important.

Spyros Tsoukalas: Karim, thank you very much for taking the time to share all these insights with us. And I hope that you enjoyed the episode and that our listeners should learn as many things as I did.

Karim Gargum: Absolutely, been a real pleasure.

Spyros Tsoukalas: Thank you.