When and how to invest in new acquisition channels | Adam Grenier (Uber, MasterClass)

**Adam Grenier** (0:00)
One of the biggest pieces of advice I'm giving to people that are like, how should we adjust our marketing with the economic changes and things like that, is like, start by assuming you no longer have product market fit.
Because you had product market fit in a different market. It's a different market now, so you have to start over, and hopefully you do, or it's pretty close to, and you just have to adjust a couple of things, and you can be right back on track. But if you just assume you need to launch a new channel to fix this problem, you're gonna be wrong, because your entire customer base changed, not just the next 10% of customers that you're looking for.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:34)
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 experiences building and scaling today's most successful companies. Today, my guest is Adam Grenier. Adam was head of growth marketing and innovation at Uber, where he basically built their growth marketing infrastructure and the team from the ground up. Then he went on to VP of product and marketing at LambdaSchool, and most recently, he was VP of marketing at Masterclass. These days, Adam advises companies large and small on growth and marketing strategy. In our conversation, we cover how to decide when to try new and emerging acquisition channels like TikTok, VR, newsletter ads, and how to go about testing them out.
We get into the growth CMO role, which is an emerging role that Adam has helped pioneer. And we get into some real talk about burnout and depression and mental health issues that often come with working in tech. This was a really powerful and insightful conversation and I learned a lot from Adam, both as an operator and as a human. I can't wait for you to hear this episode. And so with that, I bring you Adam Grenier.
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Adam, welcome to the podcast.

**Adam Grenier** (4:04)
Thank you, thanks for having me.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:06)
It's my pleasure, I'm really excited to chat. So I'm gonna give a very brief overview of your very impressive career. And just let me know if I missed anything. Sound good? Okay, so you're most recently VP of marketing at Masterclass, which I'm actually a happy subscriber of and have watched many, many a video.
Before that, you're VP of product and marketing at LambdaSchool. I don't know if that's right before, but that was something you did. Also you're head of growth and marketing and marketing and innovation at Uber, which is a really cool title. And I think you spent four years there and you basically built their growth, marketing infrastructure and the team.