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KEY HIGHLIGHTS

🍾 The experience with Blue Bottle Coffee

🚣🏼‍♂️ What is it like to hire an external unbiased coach?

🤾🏿‍♀️ The beginnings of a social network exclusively for college students

📝 The learnings from running a social gaming distribution company

🗂 Competing with established book publishers by building a product for students

 🖥 How the habit of writing helped create a popular blog

📈 How content marketing helped HubSpot grow tremendously

⏳ What is a self-reinforcing growth loop

▶️ The beginnings of Reforge as Silicon Valley Business Review

👣 Building Reforge out of SVBR

🥾 What are the challenges in scaling an education business

🔖The criteria for having an application get through at Reforge

🛴 Self-reinforcing growth loops at Reforge

KEY QUOTES

Growth challenges at Blue Bottle Coffee

The model of growth itself, for the digital side of that company, was very different in terms of the levers that we pulled and the interesting problem or integration about how to leverage this amazing physical in-store experience to also drive the digital side of the business and vice versa. That was also a very specific challenge, not just from a growth perspective, but from a technology perspective, as well as how you integrate those two worlds.

What is an unbiased coach?

The reason why I use the words external unbiased coach is that I think we just have a tendency to tell ourselves stories in our heads, either negative or positive, stories that aren’t necessarily true, based on the way that we’re interpreting the world. Those stories don’t necessarily serve us. They stray from the actual truth. I think that’s actually the most important part of getting to the truth. 

So one of the most valuable things that this person has provided me is bringing me back down to earth, bringing me back to the truth. When you’re telling myself a really negative story about something, as a founder, you’ll go through so many times where you think the company’s just gonna fall through the earth and it’s all doom and gloom and stuff. He’ll put me back to, “hey, well, there are all of these other positive things going on. This problem, we need to tackle head-on”.

Lessons from founding a social network company

 I think the big lesson was, it was just a lot around execution. We did not execute well. We didn’t have the right co-founder mix that was representative of all of the essential skills that we needed to make that successful. We didn’t necessarily have a technical co-founder, I became that person, over time, by just teaching myself how to code. We didn’t necessarily bring on the right mentors either at the time, who really understood the tech in the software space, we didn’t move into the right environments, to surround ourselves with supporting resources. 

The importance of building and maintaining momentum for startups

One of the things that I tell my team at Reforge all the time, and I tell other entrepreneurs in my portfolio is that in startups the most important thing to think about is how do you build and maintain momentum because once you lose momentum, it’s 10x harder to regain it back. 

What sets Reforge Apart?

Reforge is very much in the professional education space now, and it’s a different approach, but has some similarities in the sense that a lot of the budgets and a lot of the decision-making historically have been locked up in the hands of like HR execs and people at the management level. As a result, professional education companies end up building educational products that are very much about checking the boxes for the end consumer. 

Why i started writing

Over time for me, writing is thinking in the sense that it is how I work through meaningful problems and then find a way to communicate those problems in a well-structured way and so I think one of the things that is sorely lacking in a lot of professionals today is just this ability to trust in your own problem-solving skills and work through meaningful problems on your own. 

Problem solving through writing

We’re just running from meeting to meeting, just constantly reacting. So then when we have three to four-hour chunks of time, people come with the feeling of a loss like, I don’t even know what to do with this time, what things I should be working on, etc. And so I think for me, it’s just like writing is one of those things where I work through meaningful problems. 

Writing as a means of showcasing what you can do

This is becoming incredibly important for all roles in all products – to find ways to show off a meaningful body of work that you have produced in your prior roles, and that’s what writing has done for me.

Content as a driver for company growth

There’s what content does for your company from a softer side of things, like things you can’t measure. Then there’s just more of the underlying mechanics of it. 

I think the first is kind of what most people are used to in the sense that what great content does as you educate your audience and your user base is that it helps you build this brand and this reputation that is much larger than you actually are, like yourself as a product and a company. What that’s doing is, it’s providing the space for your product and your software to grow into so there are many, many people that would read HubSpot content. They had no idea HubSpot sold software, but when they were in the buying cycle for buying marketing automation software, one of the first places that they would go is Hubspot content. Then they would find out that HubSpot also provided the software. 

Hubspot’s growth through content marketing

 its audience would then write additional content linked back to HubSpot, which would improve SEO. The next cycle of this loop that I’m describing, got better and better with every single cycle. HubSpot has the domain authority of like 98 – 99% and they can publish any piece of content, it’ll immediately rank in the first couple of spots. 

It just builds this massive compounding, like a machine over time that generated upwards of  100,000 leads per month. It provided this distribution machine which is just crazy. As a result over time, that’s what got to the IPO. 

The inspiration behind Reforge

The team would ask me about professional development like what they could be doing and then I would spend hours researching what to recommend to them and I just kept coming up empty-handed. Everything was intro and entry-level, designed to help people get jobs, which is great, but just wasn’t what my team was looking for. 

There are certain things out there, from traditional MBA schools, but they tend to be so high-level and so disconnected, that it’s really hard for somebody to apply. That’s because their customers could come from finance to tech to management consulting. So like they’re trying to serve all of those audiences. As a result, it wasn’t very credible.  So I decided I was going to create this course on the side and write down everything that I felt like I had learned over the past 10 years.

The most underutilized tool for growth

I think the most underutilized tool in the world right now is the scientific method. There’s a reason that it was defined and has been used for so long. That’s because it’s an incredibly valuable tool when you’re going into the unknown and trying to improve different problems

Playing the long game in professional education

we are very much playing the long game to go in the sense that I think there are professional education companies out there that went for scale incredibly quickly. As a result, it’s coming to bite them back in the ass in the sense that they created this “credential” and then just tried to sell as many of those credentials as possible to as many people as possible. 

The problem and the challenge with that are that if the thing that you are selling is a credential, then that credential’s inherent value is based overtime on the quality of people that have that credential, more like HBS, which is you just do all the filtering at the top of the funnel and to build that value in. 

As a result, those credentials start to hurt the business.

Importance of best fit for Reforge

I think what people are used to is the old world where you’re accepted into these things based on some level of prestige or something like that. That is not what we do at all. What we really think about it, is what we call fit, meaning is this person applying, going to be able to get an immense amount of value out of this program for them based on their role, their stage in their career, the type of company and product that they’re working on, problems that they’re facing, and some other factors. 

The target audience for Reforge

we have to constrain it to really think about how we built this product specifically for a certain type of person. What we’re doing is we’re trying to match that with the people applying. I think a lot of products actually don’t do this well enough like they build a product specifically for a certain target audience. Then they launch it to the masses. That really creates a lot of issues in the sense that it’s really hard to understand what’s working and what’s not working, and it creates this really bad negative word-of-mouth cycle because all of a sudden, you have all these people coming into the product that you didn’t build it for, who see this product and they’re like, “What the hell is this thing? This thing sucks.” They don’t really understand that, they might have been the exact target audience. 

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Shamanth 

Brian, welcome to the show. 

Brian 

Thanks for having me. 

Shamanth 

Absolutely.  You’ve worked with an enormous number of companies and advised them on growth. You’ve had so many companies grow. 

I would like to start by asking you about a company that I wasn’t expecting to see in your engagements because it’s so unlike most of the other tech companies that you’ve worked with, and this is Blue Bottle Coffee. 

What was the kind of work that you did with Blue Bottle? And how did your work in tech inform your work with a company that was so different from everything else you’ve done?

Brian 

You’re right, it was a little bit different than some of the other companies that I had been involved with. That’s actually why I took the gig. I originally met the Blue Bottle team through Andy Johns, and I started talking with them. I just really liked the team. They had two sides of the business: their coffee shops and they also had their digital business, where they had both an e-commerce store as well as a subscription product. They felt like there was this huge growing segment of the market around the craft of higher-end coffee and trying to figure out how to expand that footprint not just physically but digitally as well. 

I’ve worked on the digital side on their subscription product. Their e-commerce product was bought by Nestle for somewhere close to 800 million. It was definitely a different experience and a different set of challenges in the sense that software was enabling the digital side of the business while still applying a lot of the same growth frameworks and stuff. 

But the model of growth itself, for the digital side of that company, was very different in terms of the levers that we pulled and the interesting problem or integration about how to leverage this amazing physical in-store experience to also drive the digital side of the business and vice versa. That was also a very specific challenge, not just from a growth perspective, but from a technology perspective, as well as how you integrate those two worlds. 

That’s how we came across it. It was a great experience.

Shamanth 

You take on very many challenges that look nothing like the earlier things that you have done, and I’m excited to dive into so many of your experiences. 

To turn the clock back quite a bit from your work with Blue Bottle. You’ve said that the number one most valuable thing you’ve done in your career is to get an external unbiased coach. And you’ve also said that this is someone you worked for straight out of college. Can you speak to how this coach impacted you? You also said you’re still working with this exact same coach. What had to happen to keep that relationship evolving over many years?

Brian 

This person was actually my first manager straight out of college at ZoomInfo, where I was a product manager and started my career. I think we just formed a  good relationship. As I started my first venture-backed company, I kept in touch. He’s an entrepreneur himself. 

I think a couple of years after I left ZoomInfo, I wanted to formalize it and structure it a little bit. That’s how it all started and kept going and he’s still a very meaningful adviser to my current company, Reforge.

The reason why I use the words external unbiased coach is that I think we just have a tendency to tell ourselves stories in our heads, either negative or positive, stories that aren’t necessarily true, based on the way that we’re interpreting the world. Those stories don’t necessarily serve us. They stray from the actual truth. I think that’s actually the most important part of getting to the truth. 

So one of the most valuable things that this person has provided me is bringing me back down to earth, bringing me back to the truth. When you’re telling yourself a really negative story about something, as a founder, you’ll go through so many times where you think the company’s just gonna fall through the earth and it’s all doom and gloom and stuff. He’ll put me back to, “hey, well, there are all of these other positive things going on. This problem, we need to tackle head-on”. 

I think once again, just grounding back in that truth really requires an external unbiased opinion, meaning somebody who’s going to look at it for what it is, and not be afraid to tell you what they are seeing in terms of the actual truth. 

I think this is really hard to get from other places in the sense that if you have co-founders, your team, if you have a boss, your wife or your friends or your significant other, they have their own sets of biases and they’re all pulling in the other direction. Giving somebody the role specifically to help me really be grounded in the truth is just the most valuable thing that that person has provided. I think it’s really hard to find, but if you can find that it’s worth it and hold on to it.

Interesting, and you not only found this particular relationship, but you sustained that for very many years, even as you’re in very different kinds of roles. I find it impressive that you sought this sort of feedback. 

Before your work at Reforge, you actually founded a social network as a 19-year-old, way before Facebook and MySpace. What were some of the things you learned starting your first business? And did you also envision at the time that social networking could become as ubiquitous as it is today?

Brian 

This specific idea was to create a college-specific social network. The hypothesis driven around that was that people that are within the college environment are more tightly connected and have more motivations around that. At the time, the only things that were out there were  Friendster and MySpace. We were one of them. There were a couple of different stories. There were actually quite a few of these that had the same insight at the same time.

I think the big lesson was, it was just a lot around execution. We did not execute well. We didn’t have the right co-founder mix that was representative of all of the essential skills that we needed to make that successful. We didn’t necessarily have a technical co-founder, I became that person, over time, by just teaching myself how to code. We didn’t necessarily bring on the right mentors either at the time, who really understood the tech in the software space, we didn’t move into the right environments, to surround ourselves with supporting resources. 

To be honest, looking back, these are all things that people would label as 101 mistakes. But you have to remember this was 14-15 years ago now. The wealth of knowledge and resources that are now available for entrepreneurs and founders, wasn’t even close to what it was now. 

There’s a fun story I like to tell. I was at the University of Michigan and at the time, it was not the most entrepreneurial place for technology and software. I went to the dean of the entrepreneurship school, we told them about this business plan that we had, that we handed him. This person handed back a book on the differences between brick-and-mortar and software businesses. This book said, brick and mortar businesses have physical locations where software businesses don’t. That was the type of help that was available at the time. 

Obviously Zuckerberg’s team was an incredibly smart team, out-executed everybody, understood network effects way earlier than anybody else etc.

One of the things that I tell my team at Reforge all the time, and I tell other entrepreneurs in my portfolio is that, in startups the most important thing to think about is how do you build and maintain momentum, because once you lose momentum, it’s 10x harder to regain it back. 

Momentum is the thing that attracts and retains the top talent. And that was the thing that Facebook did so well, they sequenced the momentum perfectly. As a result, it’s this snowball that just accrues and grows. That’s the high level of how I think about that. 

Shamanth 

That is also impressive, because you were 19 at the time and like you said you had no resources at all. In very many ways. It sounds like those are exactly the kinds of resources that you’re building for entrepreneurs these days at Reforge so people have that kind of access, thanks to a lot of work you’re doing now.

Subsequently, you were at the forefront of another industry, this time with social gaming. And you found a social gaming distribution company. For those of our listeners who haven’t been in social gaming, can you tell us what a social gaming distribution company is? And what exactly does the product look like?

Brian 

We started a company named Viximo. At the time, social gaming didn’t even exist yet. We started the company about a year before that really took off. The insight was that there’s this thing called virtual goods happening. It was all mostly happening over in Asia, Korea and China being the two big places. I don’t even remember how I originally learned about virtual goods and I was surprised that people are paying for these things. 

I dug into it and tried to understand it and through that path and process, I thought this virtual goods thing is going to be big in some way, shape or form, we just don’t know where and how it’s going to manifest. So we took this bet and we created this company that was going to be this virtual goods platform. 

We were going to be some type of platform and sell tools to help enable this virtual goods model. 

After about a year or so, the Facebook platform was launched, and then the very early social games started to emerge. It was very clear that social gaming was going to be the epicenter of this business model. So we pivoted the company into being a social gaming platform. At the time, for those who weren’t around, the whole ecosystem developed crazy fast. There were apps that went from doing nothing to a million dollars per day in revenue overnight, it was just absolute insanity. But all these social game developers were hyper-concentrated on the Facebook platform in terms of their revenue, and they knew that was going to be a risk. At the same time, there were actually all of these other social sites around the world that had pretty meaningful audiences. But nothing was close to Facebook. 

We built this platform that aggregated all of those different sites, and allowed social game developers to integrate and get access to all of the distribution on those sites, rather than implementing, integrating to each one of them individually where things like ROI and the cost was just incredibly difficult. 

We built a pretty decent business fast once we pivoted to that, but then the mobile shift came along and turned everything upside down. We started going through that transition, and about a year and a half into that it got acquired. But it was a crazy roller coaster, very volatile, like the highs and the lows were very extreme during that time, probably the most extreme I’ve experienced in my career but learned a ton too. 

When it came to focused customer acquisition, the knowledge around viral loops was in product-driven growth. That’s really where all this growth thing really started. As you see, all of the leading growth people in the world right now stem from the social gaming world and this is one of those reasons.

Shamanth 

Certainly, and we have had quite a few of those on the podcast. They’ve spoken quite a bit about those early days of social gaming. You’ve certainly been at the forefront of the social gaming space from its very early days. You transitioned from that to something that is different, which again, is one of the things I find so impressive about you is that you seem to have taken on challenges that look very little like the earlier ones. 

You’ve written about your next venture in that you decided to circumvent the textbooks and go straight to the end customer. That is how big disruption happens. They built a product for the students and marketed directly to the students in an industry where everything went through the professors, universities are very corrupt. 

So again, not only were you in a different space, but you also took a very unconventional approach to reach the target market at the time. So what inspired you to basically seek a completely different space but also a completely different approach from what would have been conventional?

Brian 

My second venture-backed company was Boundless Learning. The thing that really attracted me was initially the people. I went and did a three-month trip in Thailand and when I came back, two of my closest friends who are also entrepreneurs had started peeling back the onion in terms of the education space, specifically one of the most corrupt pieces of it, the textbook piece of it and had built this hypothesis that we could build this thing that would take the cost of producing textbooks, down like 100x. 

A textbook publisher usually takes about two years to produce a textbook, which is absolute insanity. We got that down to about less than a month, somewhere between 10 and 20 grand in capital, depending on the topic using things called open educational resources that the government had spent hundreds of millions of dollars funding over the years, but were buried in these  terrible databases of education institutions. 

As a result, they were not being used in everything. We took a bet that we could build a process around that, and then also market directly to the student. I think those bets actually played off, we were able to do that, and Boundless Learning ended up growing. We had millions of students visiting the product a month, the challenge ended up being where we got our hypothesis wrong, it was a little bit more around the business model. We couldn’t necessarily figure out that piece. 

Unfortunately, at that time, three of the largest textbook publishers banded together and sued us because they saw the threat to their model. While the lawsuit was baseless, the goal of it was draining money out of the company. It was really unfortunate because I think we had this amazing asset. That was incredibly valuable, we just needed a little bit more time to iterate on the business model. But that’s how these things go. 

You take these big bets, big hypotheses, and work to try to prove it out as quickly as possible. Sometimes the bets are wrong, and sometimes the clock runs out on you. That’s kind of what happened in that case.

Reforge is very much in the professional education space now, and it’s a different approach, but has some similarities in the sense that a lot of the budgets and a lot of the decision-making historically have been locked up in the hands of like HR execs and people at the management level. As a result, the professional education companies end up building educational products that are very much about checking the boxes for the end consumer. 

In a very similar way, at Reforge we are trying to build programs, products and material that is very much built for that individual end consumer first, and then work our way up the stack. But there are a lot of things going on in professional education. The budgets are being pushed into the hands of individuals, which I think is a great thing for managers who are much more closely connected with the problem. And that’s gonna usher in a whole wave of new professional education products as purchasing power shifts. 

Shamanth 

I can see what connects those dots. It’s a very different paradigm that you guys are defining at Reforge just compared to the traditional model of executive education on one hand, or $20 ebooks on the other. I think Reforge has a very distinct niche.

We will certainly dive into Reforge and the work you’ve done there but I would imagine the work at Reforge was in your writing because that’s how very many people came to know about you and your work. I certainly did, right? So many other people that took up programs really knew about you and Andrew through your writings. You’ve also said that something that’s been impactful for your career has been investing in your writing. 

What inspired you to start writing and what has been the impact of writing on your career?

Brian 

The very first thing that inspired me to write was, out of college, I wasn’t a good writer at all. I think it forced me to try to become a better writer.

Over time for me, writing is thinking in the sense that it is how I work through meaningful problems and then find a way to communicate those problems in a well-structured way and so I think one of the things that is sorely lacking in a lot of professionals today is just this ability to trust in your own problem-solving skills and work through meaningful problems on your own. 

Part of it is, you know, Google. It’s too easy to punch something into Google. Or

we’re just running from meeting to meeting, just constantly reacting. So then when we have three to four-hour chunks of time, people come with the feeling of a loss like, I don’t even know what to do with this time, what things I should be working on, etc.. And so I think for me, it’s just like writing is one of those things where I work through meaningful problems. 

For every blog post that I published, there are probably about 10 to 20 that I’ve written but never published. That’s just me working through some thoughts of something I’ve observed, or a problem I’m facing, or a problem that one of my companies in our portfolio is facing or something to that nature. I just find that’s how I think and that’s how I ended up learning. But the benefit of doing some publishing is that it has certainly benefited me many times over my career. That’s because writing is also a way to show off your work and your knowledge. That’s also becoming incredibly important because you look at somebody’s LinkedIn profile, and it really doesn’t tell you much about the person or what the person is really capable of. 

Yes, there are signals around what contacts and companies they’ve worked for and all that kind of stuff. But at the end of the day, all of my hiring at HubSpot and all my hiring at Reforge is 100% based on showing an understanding of the person’s work. If they don’t have a pre-existing portfolio, then we put them through exercises to see their work. 

This is becoming incredibly important for all roles in all products – to find ways to show off a meaningful body of work that you have produced in your prior roles, and that’s what writing has done for me.

Shamanth 

There’s nothing that lets you get to know somebody you’re hiring better. Indeed, there’s so much I learned about you while researching for this interview by reading so much of your writing. So I can certainly see why that is the case. 

Speaking of writing, a lot of your work really became known very well while you were at HubSpot where you were the VP of growth. Something I find very fascinating about HubSpot as a model that I hope you can speak to is, Hubspot’s writing and content seem very ubiquitous. You said for Hubspot, content deserves most of the credit for getting the IPO.

I find that very unusual and rare, especially when tech is often credited with growth and innovation, not so much writing and articulation and content.

Can you speak to why and how HubSpot’s approach to content and writing was unique and effective? 

Brian 

There are obviously a lot of things that include the IPO, but this was one of the major ones. And while I wish I could take credit for it, it was really Mike Volpe who was the early CMO and had some of the early players like Megan Anderson and the staff that were the geniuses behind establishing this model. I think there are two perspectives on it.

There’s what content does for your company from a softer side of things, like things you can’t measure. Then there’s just more of the underlying mechanics of it. 

I think the first is kind of what most people are used to in the sense that what great content does as you educate your audience and your user base is that it helps you build this brand and this reputation that is much larger than you actually are, like yourself as a product and a company. What that’s doing is, it’s providing the space for your product and your software to grow into so there are many, many people that would read HubSpot content. They had no idea HubSpot sold software, but when they were in the buying cycle for buying marketing automation software, one of the first places that they would go is Hubspot content. Then they would find out that HubSpot also provided the software. 

In the B2B software world, the buying cycles can be infrequent. The question really is, how do you stay top of mind in between those infrequent buying cycles so that when they do come around, you’re one of the first choices? 

Now the flip side of that, if you really understand the concept of self-reinforcing growth loops, what it did is that it was this massive self-reinforcing growth loop to the point that it’s compounded so much that it’s almost impossible for others to really compete and catch up with so it’s become this massive defensible barrier in the sense that as the company generated content and then published it out there, their audience would distribute it. 

What it also did is,

its audience would then write additional content linked back to HubSpot, which would improve SEO. The next cycle of this loop that I’m describing, got better and better with every single cycle. HubSpot has the domain authority of like 98 – 99% and they can publish any piece of content, it’ll immediately rank in the first couple of spots. 

It just builds this massive compounding, like a machine over time that generated upwards of  100,000 leads per month. It provided this distribution machine that is just crazy. As a result over time, that’s what got to the IPO. 

Now post IPO, the whole playbook that HubSpot has been running. I kind of went there to help them establish processes. I was developing new product lines to continue to amplify this compounding like a constant loop that already existed or monetize it at higher levels. It was an amazing playbook. 

Now the game is very different. The space is extremely crowded, everybody’s doing content. Like I said HubSpot was so far ahead and built that compounding machine that it’s just so hard to compete with.

Shamanth 

I like the phrasing “self-reinforcing growth loop”. Was that premeditated and intended at the time? Or did it just happen?

Brian 

I don’t really know the beginnings of that word. Once I got there and started by codifying some of this stuff, a lot of this language took hold and people started viewing it in that perspective and doubling down on it. In terms of inventing it, I actually have no idea. The whole point of it was if you do understand how the mechanics are, you are able to really break down what’s working and why it’s working and understand the engine, then you can tune the engine. 

It’s just like a mechanic. I know nothing about cars and so I have no way of anticipating when my car’s gonna break down, and if it breaks down, how to fix it, but to a mechanic, they are able to anticipate those things. When things do happen, they know how to fix it, because they understand that engine at a super deep level. 

Shamanth

I think that analogy makes complete sense. When you really speak of codifying that knowledge, that understanding of the mechanics, one of the first times you formally codified it was on your blog. Apart from that, one of the first times you codified a lot of that was in 2015, when you started what was then known as the Silicon Valley Business Review, which was described as an eight-week lecture series on growth. What inspired this initiative at the time?

Brian

While I was at HubSpot, our team grew incredibly fast and I just ended up sitting in 1:1s on a weekly basis.

The team would ask me about professional development like what they could be doing and then I would spend hours researching what to recommend to them and I just kept coming up empty-handed. Everything was intro and entry-level, designed to help people get jobs, which is great, but just wasn’t what my team was looking for. 

There are certain things out there, from traditional MBA schools, but they tend to be so high-level and so disconnected, that it’s really hard for somebody to apply. That’s because their customers could come from finance to tech to management consulting. So like they’re trying to serve all of those audiences. As a result, it wasn’t very credible. 

So I decided I was going to create this course on the side and write down everything that I felt like I had learned over the past 10 years.

Andrew Chen, who at the time was working on growth at Uber was thinking about the same thing. I had actually run a very small test earlier. So we decided to combine forces: two times the knowledge, half the effort, half the work. 

Then we decided – fall of 2018 was when we did the full SVBR. Everybody talks about how you should always be launching with an embarrassing prototype, this was an embarrassing prototype, like every time I meet somebody that was in that first cohort, I apologize. We had about 1000 applications. So it was clear that there was a demand and a hunger for it. Despite its minimum viable business, people still had really good feedback to say about it. 

At the time, it was a really hard decision to leave HubSpot, we had done some amazing things, and some amazing things were still going on. But I decided to leave and see what it was, we renamed it to Reforge. I think what we really hit on is just that ultimately at the end of the day we’re building this engine to unlock the knowledge of the world’s top practitioners. So while the quantity of information and knowledge has certainly increased out there, because of Google and content marketing, the amount of knowledge that is accruing to a small group of people around these frontier topics, these new topics that are emerging, that are high in demand, but low in supply, that stuff is continually just being trapped in the minds of these small group of people. 

We’re building an engine around them, those that are really pushing the frontier of their practice, and unlocking the strategies and the systems that they use so that others have access to it. You don’t have to be one of the lucky few that work directly for them to actually have access to this stuff. 

So, we’ve built some amazing programs around people like Casey Winters, who’s now the Chief Product Officer at Eventbrite and Sean Klaus just joined Mulesoft and is the SVP of product there. We’re working with Elena Verna to build the Survey Monkey Team from scratch, a new program, and just an amazing group of people. We’re going to continue to expand that.

Shamanth 

First of all, if you had 1000 applicants, many of whom gave great feedback, that’s probably not an embarrassing prototype. But I can imagine it is still a small one compared to what it is today. I can certainly see what you mean about unlocking the expertise that is in the heads of some of the leading practitioners. 

Elena was on this podcast and she basically said that was one of her motivations these days. That’s essentially why she engages so I can actually see the mission that was driving you at the time and that impels you to start the program. 

There were 1000 applicants. Did you envision at the time when you had the v1 that this could be the full-fledged business that it is today with 10s of employees and thousands of alumni?

Brian 

Yes and no. We had a hypothesis and I wrote all of these hypotheses down. I still have the 2015 Evernote file with all our hypotheses about the audience in differentiation in the product market and all of these separate things that you think, if true, will make a really big business. 

Did we have extremely high competence that all those things were true? No. That’s not how things begin. So the job is you have all of these hypotheses, and then you go out and do things to either prove the hypothesis correct or wrong. If they’re wrong, then you kind of adjust and adapt. 

I think for the first two and a half, three years, we were really working through these hypotheses about whether or not we had really strong competence in them and we addressed them. We didn’t address them all at once. 

First thing was, can we take this MVP if we put a little bit more time into it? A little bit more to get NPS scores up? We did that. I think NPS scores from the MVP went from 20 to 72, on the next version. We thought can we run this thing again? Or was this just a one-time thing that only a certain number of people are interested in? 

That worked. 

Then we asked if we could create a second one, and would that have as much demand for it? We did that and it worked. We then thought what if we do the third one, but take a totally different approach to it? Then that thing worked. So along the way, we’re just proving all sorts of different hypotheses. 

Late last year, we came around and we looked at this, and we knew we’re building something really big here, we felt really confident from all the information that we’ve gathered. Earlier this year, we started to step on the gas a little bit to really build the team expanding the programs that we’re building, expanding the software, product, and all sorts of things. So that’s how we systematically approached it.

Shamanth 

Yeah, much like you approach growth for all the products you worked on, even though everything else was consumer tech products, and grabbed the same rigor to see analysis to have you moving forward.

Brian 

I think the most underutilized tool in the world right now is the scientific method. There’s a reason that it was defined and has been used for so long. That’s because it’s an incredibly valuable tool when you’re going into the unknown and trying to improve different problems/

Shamanth 

You saw Reforge could become something very big, something very substantial. Yet, I would say there are elements of Reforge’s model and how you guys work that could be considered antithetical to scale. For instance, live meetups are an important part of the. There are hours of preparation and recording that go into what looks very much like a service business, not like an educational business. 

So how do you think about a lot of these texts that some might consider contact critical to scale and how do you think about those in the scheme of things of Reforge and the size of the impact it is going to have?

Brian 

It’s an education company, not a consulting company. So we very much talk about how we give and teach the tools for others to solve their own problems, we are not solving the problems for them. It’s a very clear difference. We very much view ourselves as a product company, not a service company in the sense that we view every program, it’s a product in itself, including not just the material that we teach, but the formatting that we wrap around it. 

So how we think about scale, I can’t necessarily talk about it in a ton of detail, because it’s part of the grand master plan that we’re still working on releasing. But our current format is basically one product format. There are a bunch of different ways that you can package this and what we’re doing, that serve different use cases for different audiences and different levels of scale and fit together in a certain set of pieces. 

So we are very much playing the long game to go in the sense that I think there are professional education companies out there that went for scale incredibly quickly. As a result, it’s coming to bite them back in the ass in the sense that they created this “credential” and then just tried to sell as many of those credentials as possible to as many people as possible. 

The problem and the challenge with that is that if the thing that you are selling is a credential, then that credential’s inherent value is based overtime on the quality of people that have that credential, more like HBS, which is you just do all the filtering at the top of the funnel and to build that value in. 

As a result, those credentials start to hurt the business.

We are not trying to build a company where we’re trying to build a credential there, we can have a whole other hour podcast on everything that is wrong with credentials and why they are meaningless in today’s world. But no, I think to build a really meaningful company in education is that you have to play a slightly longer game, it might be slightly slower growth than we’re used to like these B2C social networks and stuff. 

I doubt that space is monstrous when you consider one school, one MBA school HBS brings in about 700 million in revenue per year, not including donations. That’s one school. It is absolute insanity, how big the space is. So the way we think about scale over time is not just through more programs and in a broader audience, but we will certainly have new formats, new program formats that serve different use cases for different audiences at different levels of scale.

Shamanth 

I’ve certainly seen you guys go from one program to four if I remember correctly at this point. Certainly, there are ways that you guys have expanded just in the last couple of years. I’m excited to see what comes next time. 

Something that I found interesting, and I know you briefly alluded to this was that you said the value of a lot of credentials really goes down because they want to market to everybody. I know people who applied to Reforge and didn’t get in. 

So why not be revenue maximizing?

Brian

I think a lot of people actually don’t understand how we accept and select people.

I think what people are used to is the old world where you’re accepted into these things based on some level of prestige or something like that. That is not what we do at all. What we really think about it, is what we call fit, meaning is this person applying, going to be able to get an immense amount of value out of this program for them based on their role, their stage in their career, the type of company and product that they’re working on, problems that they’re facing, and some other factors. 

We match that based on our in-depth knowledge about what we are teaching and who we designed the program for. At a top level, we were trying to match those two elements. On a second level, because our current program format does have a live format, and there is peer-to-peer interaction, you have to think about your product experience, that’s part of the product experience. A key part of making that part of the experience compelling is that people are meeting others that are facing similar problems and similar challenges and similar types of roles to them. So part of the issue is if you get an early stage founder, in the same group as a Senior Product Manager at Facebook, those two people are facing very different problems and very different challenges and all that kind of stuff. 

So

we have to constrain it to really think about how we built this product specifically for a certain type of person. What we’re doing is we’re trying to match that with the people applying. I think a lot of products actually don’t do this well enough like they build a product specifically for a certain target audience. Then they launch it to the masses. That really creates a lot of issues in the sense that it’s really hard to understand what’s working and what’s not working, and it creates this really bad negative word-of-mouth cycle because all of a sudden, you have all these people coming into the product that you didn’t build it for, who see this product and they’re like, “What the hell is this thing? This thing sucks.” They don’t really understand that, they might have been the exact target audience. 

I wrote a whole blog post about product launches and feature launches but that’s how we think about it in the sense that we’re really not only trying to optimize for how helpful and how impactful this thing is going to be for people but we’re trying to optimize the experience, build this community at the same time and continue to expand. This goes back to our point earlier of: we could maybe this year generate 3x the amount of revenue that we’re generating, and that might hurt optimizing for short-term revenue. That is definitely probably the right thing to do. But we’re trying to very much think about this on the mid to long-term basis and how we maximize that.

Shamanth 

Certainly does take courage to say no to short-term revenue. Brian, I know you spoke about self-reinforcing growth loops and that’s certainly a concept that Reforge has popularized, especially in the growth community. 

I’m curious how you think about that concept, as applicable to Reforge as a business.

Brian

There are all sorts of different types of businesses. The types of businesses that we specifically think about in Reforge are the ones that are in or trying to be in the top 1% of businesses of all time, like the Facebooks, the Spotifys, the LinkedIns and the HubSpots. 

The dynamics to grow those types of businesses are different than if you live in a different category. That’s not necessarily a good or a bad thing. It’s just the thing that we specifically address at the moment. One of the things that separate this category of companies from everyone else is that they are built on a system of compounding loops. We talked about this and how it applies to both our growth series program as well as our strategy program, in-depth. 

There are about 20 different types of groups that we go through. Each of them has different kinds of execution factors, pros, and cons and they fit together in different ways. 

For Reforge itself, if you look at the early versions of the business, it started off with a content loop like my blog, and Andrews’s blog. That’s really kind of what drove applications. Over time, while we’re in the midst of this shift, a set of viral loops in the sense that we have all of these programs and this content machine going that brings people in and re-engages them. 

But we very much build our content for how we make this as actionable as possible. Part of it being actionable is going back and implementing it in your company. 

Of course, one of the things that you need to do when you go back and implement it in your company is that you have to align the team. So we’ve started to enable these students that are participating, they can bring their colleagues into that experience and align around a concept or learning or our particular strategy. 

We’re in the midst of this shift. There’s a set of smaller loops that we use in terms of application, you can invite calls. It’s a viral amplification of it. We also use a manager loop, a viral loop in th

sense that you can get somebody to vouch for you in the application process which also ends up being a viral loop. But the core of it is really centered around the content and the program experience. If we make this thing super actionable, you are going to want to pull other people into this experience to accomplish something within your company and your product. 

There’s a set of features that are enabling a bunch of these viral loops over time, and so this strategy was very specifically chosen, tying it back to our earlier conversation about how content marketing is so crowded. We weighed that and thought what if we should just play the content marketing game? 

There were a number of reasons I concluded that I was like, I don’t think this is the right long-term strategy to invest in but one of those reasons was just, we could produce something and the number of other players out there that have an immense amount of domain authority than us is just going to go out, they’re going to copy it, they’re going to rank higher, they’re going to push us out so we just started to move in a different direction on that.

Shamanth 

That’s fascinating. Hearing you talk about that it’s almost like listening to you break down a social game, about the different mechanics that you’ve just described. 

We could just keep going on and there are so many more topics that I would love to ask you. But I do want to be respectful of your time. 

This has been incredibly fascinating, exploring many facets of your work and also understanding to some extent what the grand plan for Reforge could look like. Really appreciate the kind of impact Reforge has been having. I’m an alumnus of Reforge and it’s something that has very deeply impacted me. I’m very, very thankful to you for it. As we start to wrap up, can you tell our listeners how they can find out more about you and about Reforge?

Brian 

Yeah, definitely. You can go to reforge.com. All of our programs are listed there. We have an email list there to be notified when a new cohort comes around. You can also find me on my personal website, brianbalfourcom. And my Twitter handle is @bbalfour. 

Shamanth 

Fabulous, we’ll link to all those places in the show notes. Thank you so much, Brian, for appearing on how things go.

Brian 

Thanks for having me.

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