How to build a powerful marketing machine | Emily Kramer (Asana, Carta, MKT1)

**Emily Kramer** (0:00)
Forget the product marketing, content marketing, partner, demand gen, growth, forget all of it. And just think of marketing as you need a fuel and you need an engine.
And goal is all the things that you're creating. I mean, this should be obvious, but if the content, it's the word, it's the design in some regard. All the things you're making, all the things that are going to add value.
An engine is how you get it out to the right people. And all of the tracking of that is the ops work I put under engine. You need fuel and you need an engine. And the question is, where do you have the biggest challenge right now? Or where do you think if you did more, you would grow faster? Is it on fuel side or is it on the engine side?

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:37)
Welcome to Lenny's Podcast. I'm Lenny and my goal here is to help you get better at the craft of building and growing products. I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experience building and scaling today's most successful products. Today, my guest is Emily Kramer. Emily led and built the marketing teams at Asana, Carta, Ticketfly, and Astro, which was a startup acquired by Slack. She was one of the first marketers to be hired at all four companies and has been instrumental in helping these companies build their marketing function, grow their products, and build their brands. She also writes my favorite newsletter on marketing, MKT1, and the best compliment that I can give her is that she's a marketer that thinks like a product manager. In our chat, Emily shares a ton of concrete advice on what to look for in your first marketing hire, what the different archetypes of marketers are, and who you should look for based on your business model, how to work with marketing effectively as a product team, and also what red flags to look for that tell you that your marketing team is not doing a great job. Emily is super specific and incredibly concrete with her advice, including sharing a ton of templates that you can immediately use that we link to in the show notes. I always learn a ton talking to Emily, and I can't wait for you to hear this episode.
And so with that, I bring you Emily Kramer.
I'm excited to chat with my friend John Cutler from podcast sponsor Amplitude. Hey, John.

**John Cutler** (2:01)
Hey Lenny, excited to be here.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:03)
John, give us a behind the scenes at Amplitude. When most people think of Amplitude, they think of product analytics.
But now you're getting into experimentation and even just launched a CDP. What's the thought process there?

**John Cutler** (2:14)
Well, we've always thought of Amplitude as being about supporting the full product loop. Think collect data, inform bets, ship experiments and learn.
That's the heart of growth to us. So the big aha was seeing how many customers were using Amplitude to analyze experiments, use segments for outreach and send data to other destinations. Experiment and CDP came out of listening to and observing our customers.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:35)
And supporting growth and learning has always been Amplitude's core focus, right?

**John Cutler** (2:39)
Yeah. So Amplitude tries to meet customers where they are. We just launched starter templates and have a great scholarship program for startups. There's never been a more important time for growth.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:48)
Absolutely agree. Thanks for joining us, John, and head to amplitude.com to get started.
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Emily, welcome to this podcast. I'm really excited to be chatting with you.

**Emily Kramer** (3:50)
Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to chatting with you in depth here.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:53)
So if I remember correctly, we first met in the first round AngelTrack program maybe two years ago. And then since then, we've invested in a bunch of different companies together. I'm also just a big fan of your newsletter that we're going to chat about.