20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik

**Raman Malik** (0:00)
You need someone to hear about your product three to seven times before they're going to give it an honest trial. If I can get a user on Perplexity specifically to three queries in that first session, now I know I'm really on to something. There's no middle ground if you're not first. It literally just means your only other option is to just be a lot better than everyone.

**Harry Stebbings** (0:18)
This is 20 Growth with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, 20 Growth is a show where we sit down with the best growth leaders in the world to discuss their tips, tactics and strategies when it comes both to growth and to scaling growth teams. And today, we sit down with the head of growth for one of the fastest growing consumer companies in history. They are the Google killer and they are crushing it. I'm so excited to welcome Raman Malik, head of growth at Perplexity, where he's responsible for growth marketing, onboarding, activation, retention and monetization. And prior to Perplexity, Raman was an early member of the growth team at Lyft and joined Perplexity earlier this year, having founded his own startup previously. But before we dive into the show today, when I spoke to Canva co-founder Cliff O'Bracht on the podcast last year, he touched on how visual content is fast becoming the fuel that's driving the modern workplace. And your team needs to create an engaging visual pitch deck to sell an idea. A product launch needs an inspiring video to excite investors and customers. It's a game changer for visual communication at work. Canva turns your team into master visual communicators so they can get their point across with visual impact inside and outside your business with no design experience needed. With Canva, any team member and any company, whether you're a startup or a global organization, can design compelling on-brand visual content quickly and easily. And that's why 90% of the Fortune 500, 90% use Canva. Start designing today at canva.com. Designed for work. And talking about growth, let's dive in to how Voyantis is transforming customer acquisition. As this is my growth podcast, I'm so excited to share with you the amazing story of the fastest growing company in my portfolio, voyantis.ai, who isn't being asked by their board to improve unit economics. The Voyantis is the first and only company I've seen that has found the way for you to crack this nut by not only leveraging your first-party data to predict customers' lifetime value, but truly coupling these predictions with a prescriptive layer, integrating with and influencing each and every step of your customer's growth journey. Voyantis helps you acquire the right customers in Google and in Meta, allocate incentives to the right customers via your Salesforce embrace, and trigger the right upsell option at the right time for each of your customers. Oh, and check this out, the best part, Voyantis are not only increasing ROI by 20 to 40%, but they're also improving the quality of your customers. Their solution has already improved Unity Economics for leading companies like Miro, Rappi, Moneyline and many, many more. So if you want to improve your LTV to CAC ratio before your next board meeting, which I recommend, start by heading over to voyantis.ai/20vc.
That's v-o-y-a-n-t-i-s dot a-i slash 20VC to get a free value assessment. You have now arrived at your destination. Raman, it is so lovely to finally do this. Thank you so much for joining me today.

**Raman Malik** (3:16)
Thank you for having me. This will be so much fun.

**Harry Stebbings** (3:18)
Dude, I want to start with, you mentioned before you were brought up in Alabama. How the fuck does a kid from Alabama get to being head of growth at Perplexity?

**Raman Malik** (3:28)
I have no clue. I have no clue. I had a great family that really pushed all of us to get out of Alabama to go do cool stuff and, you know, here I am in San Francisco working at a really, really fun company.

**Harry Stebbings** (3:39)
But you were at an MBA program. A lot of people at MBA programs who want to move into startups, you founded a startup. What happened there? What's your advice to others in MBA programs wanting to get into startups?

**Raman Malik** (3:51)
Yeah, MBAs have such an interesting reputation in tech. Most people just absolutely hate them. I personally, even though I left a year early in the MBA, I had a great experience. I got there. I came to Tinker with ideas. I never took an interview, started playing around with all my different ideas. You can get funding from the school. So it's essentially like a pre-precede, and you're just tinkering full time. And investors start conversations start flowing, and it became very clear, like, I'm going to learn a lot more. I'm going to have such a better experience if I just go full steam ahead on this idea. And that was it. I mean, it was amazing.