Early days at Smartly
Could you tell us about your past life before Smartly and how you arrived where you are?
I have always been interested in the technical side of things and learned coding as a kid on my own even before learning it in school. I was considering a business degree but still ended up doing a computer science degree and went on to build a startup, where I acted as CTO but could contribute a lot on both sides. After my startup I had a stint in a consultancy in Finland doing product work and that’s when I got deeper into the design side and acquired the skills to be a good Product Manager. Only after this did I take my first pure product management role.
How did you find your first customers for Smartly?
I joined when the business had already launched — we had low six figure monthly revenue at that point. Originally, Smartly.io’s co-founders Kristo and Tuomo were building a different startup and working with gaming companies. But they started hearing about the problems with Facebook and user acquisition. It repeated so much that they thought there was something there and they pivoted to solve this problem. They were already exposed to the customers they solved a problem for and worked with them directly.
What brings companies like Uber and eBay to stop managing their campaigns directly from Meta (Facebook), Google, and Pinterest and look for a marketing business partner?
So if you look at our core customers, they have a few things in common. One thing is usually scale. From the early days we built with large customers who are very active on Meta and other platforms. All of them are very outcome driven, whether they focus on brand recognition or performance.
If you combine these two requirements — scale and being outcome driven — it generally means you as an advertiser have a complex setup. You need to do a lot to drive performance across markets globally. When you are spending a lot of money you also need to do a lot of things to stay on top of the performance and measure everything. This is our target market.
If you build only for that segment instead of all the marketers out there, you end up with a very different product. Our value and vision is to optimise and automate a lot of processes, all the use cases that come with a complex setup.
Usually when customers come to you with a very complex use case of having many markets, do you see they already have in house tooling or they come to FBPs first?
Well it depends. We started with digital natives, customers who are very tech driven and can build things in house. But we are also moving to more traditional customers using lots of agencies. It might be that they are not building at all but trying to find something which solves all their use cases right off the bat. In many cases we have conversations about what we can do and what can the advertiser build on top so we make sure we are building for several customers and they can build their custom cases on top of our APIs.
Smartly.io is one of the leading Meta Business Partners, with several billions of ad spend going through your platform every year. How did you build such an iconic product, and in your opinion, what were the most critical decisions you took?
So I would once again say that being close to the customers was the key. People say you should be at your customer’s offices building your product in the beginning and that’s literally what we did. A few people were in Helsinki in the office and the rest were sitting next to the marketing managers at the client’s office, writing code and solving problems directly there. This was the key to building something valuable.
We also got a bit lucky with having Rocket Internet as an early client, which allowed us to scale globally from the very beginning and expand in the Berlin ecosystem. We started serving APAC customers from Helsinki thanks to that partnership.
Another key for us is trying to understand the priorities of the platforms we work with — Meta and others: what are they trying to accomplish? We need to make sure we are aligned and we do not push something contrary to their best practices. We have seen a few years back how there were many dropshipping customers using hacks for their campaigns which Meta was recommending against. We decided not to build for these use cases because it wasn’t going to last and we want to focus on the long term.
The ROI of using Smartly.io
Smartly.io takes a percentage of the performance marketing budget as a product fee. How do you make sure companies get a good ROI on this investment? Do you have a specific north star metric?
The North Star metric is a difficult question because this is not something you could trivially measure automatically across all advertisers. Our customers are constantly running tests and measuring the performance of their advertising and the different approaches we take with them. They are very performance driven and they wouldn’t spend that much money without getting good results. It’s a mix between qualitative and quantitative tests which make sure we are constantly creating value.
Our customer success teams are also always helping and trying to make sure everyone is satisfied with our service. One of our core values is radical candor so we want to know as early as possible if something is not working out so we can talk about it and fix it. There’s rarely a huge surprise coming up that we wouldn’t know about.
On the quantitative side we also monitor feature adoption of different functionalities and try to follow the development and trends across our customer base. And of course we use surveys, NPS and direct calls to surface all the product information and see if there is anything we can do better.
As the competition rises, what helps you stay on top? We have seen you acquired a company, but is there a secret sauce to your success?
I still think the biggest competitor we have is ourselves. We have to make sure we don’t get stuck on our internal processes. There are always so many problems in the world you can solve but as long as we solve the proper one and follow the pace at which the industry is moving we might be able to maintain our advantage.
Being an MBP means having a privileged relationship with Meta. How would you describe this relationship?
Meta is also a very customer driven organisation. In that sense we are very much aligned. So long as we are solving their customers’ problems they are very happy. We have seen cases where they changed their product based on the needs we have been raising through our customers. They are also very partnership centric, and after Google, Meta was the other big company which built an ecosystem which really kicked off. Now everyone is following that path in the online marketing space. We see Snap and Pinterest and TikTok mirroring that strategy and successfully building large ecosystems of partners and we are excited to be a part of that.
Meta is a large organisation growing very rapidly so it is a lot of work for us to have the relationships with all the correct people at Meta and making sure everyone knows what we are doing and we are fully aligned. We discuss our roadmaps and have direct and open conversation with different levels of their organisation so they know they can rely on us.
As Meta and Google constantly improve their adtech toolset, what is your product defensibility strategy? Since they are building automation features as well, how do you keep a strong enough USP?
The core of that is the fact that we have a more narrow audience. The native tools of the platforms cater to all of their millions of customers, with a massive long tail. It makes sense for them to focus on that long tail and build tools everyone can easily onboard. If I was running their business I would make sure we are getting all the new businesses on board.
What we do is focus on the very large customers — there are a lot of things we are doing on the scale side which we know is not on the roadmap of Meta or others. So that’s the USP. When we started Meta still had separate tooling for the advanced advertisers and the long tail which they combined. I definitely understand the reasoning behind combining the tools but this also opened up a position for us to build for the advanced advertisers. It could be that in the future they go the Google path and build separate UIs but previously they went the other way around.
One additional thing is that Google started closing their own ecosystem but saw all the value Meta was getting from it and they changed tune a bit to cater to partners — so there is a lot to do in this space in general since the platforms embrace our existence.
Finally, we have a lot of creative tooling which is platform agnostic so we now see other channels asking us when we will integrate them which is a good position to be in.
In general, when looking at MBPs, we can see a high level of specialization, be it in creative automation or audience management. How did you achieve being a generalist, and how do you keep ahead of these specialized players?
When we started, everything was less specialised as it is now. The early use cases were much simpler as what they are today. Starting now it would probably be insane to try and do everything because of how complex it got but our history allowed us to expand in all these directions.
Our goal is still to improve the performance of our clients via brand or direct response advertising. A few years back we figured the importance of creatives to drive that outcome. So we started building tooling on the creative side and now we even made an acquisition to keep developing our services further (Viralspace). What we are trying to achieve is combining the actual ad buying with the creatives. Let’s say you are using the templating tool to create hundreds of variations of your creatives with different localisation — we want to move these templates directly to the proper campaign with the proper targeting, which other players cannot do if they specialise in a smaller part of the stack.
These synergies make our offering somewhat unique in the advertising space and hopefully this is what our customers appreciate.
Being Chief Product Officer
How do you see your role as a Chief Product Officer? How would you describe a classic day?
Well you can’t really have even a typical week or a typical month or a typical year because when the company is scaling as it is it’s constantly changing. There are a few things that I am focusing on: one is that I am constantly in contact with the customer. It doesn’t matter what level of product you are doing, you need to understand the customers. In many cases I might be talking to a team lead or a VP or marketing at the customer’s organisation, understanding the wider context of what they are trying to accomplish, so not just the users of our tool but their managers or their managers’ managers, trying to understand what is the biggest problem they are solving and is it something outside of the scope of what we are doing. Are there some new tools they are taking into use? Is there possibly something we should be solving, should we be integrating into something and understanding the wider context with the customers.
Then the ecosystem itself is moving super fast. The marketing ecosystem is known for rapid changes and that’s what people enjoy about it. I’m constantly keeping myself up to date on what’s happening in the ecosystem, currently the biggest topic is the privacy and measurement space and how the changes are affecting the end users and our customers.
Then of course I need to stay up to date on what the marketing platforms are doing. So if you look at Meta, Google, Pinterest, Snapchat, or TikTok, what is on their mind, what’s on their roadmaps, what are they doing in the future. When we have all these data points, making sure that we have the right investment areas, that we are solving the right problems, we have the right teams in place, is there a new topic we should be solving in the future. That’s the context I am working with.
On a weekly basis at least, one thing that is happening is that I am working on that scope to some degree, and then working with the teams directly to make sure I can help wherever I can and remove the blockers so we are making progress.
You mentioned how fast the ecosystem is changing — how long ahead do you plan your product cycles? Do you have a vision for several years for instance?
Yes we have a larger vision which we are building towards. It’s obviously not planned in detail but just an overarching goal state. We then have Strategic Initiatives we use to explain the road towards the vision and are working on few initiatives at a time. And these strategic initiatives are updated and changed when the data and the ecosystem around us change.
As a company we have yearly goals defined and are then doing more detailed plans one quarter at a time where we align the different teams. Even the quarterly plans can change of course if something big is happening. When we are building on top of third parties these things happen every now and then.
Usually the next quarter is quite detailed on what we are doing, then the next twelve months are understandable on what parts are we trying to solve and what we want to build but the details come later when we are closer by.
How do you manage all the dependencies when building a roadmap, knowing you are reliant on all the innovations of marketing platforms while you are building your own innovations?
Well that’s the most difficult part — we get a lot of benefits from building on top of these platforms. We have platform dependent teams, building directly on top of the APIs, and they are different from the teams building Smartly.io functionalities untied to any of the APIs. For example, our creative tooling is built by separate teams who can plan specifically for a longer time if they want. That’s helping on the planning side.
But we find most ideas for what we want to build by deeply understanding our customers’ problems — we are a very customer centric company and we constantly dig deeper into their day to day problems as well as larger goals. When we see something that the marketing platforms are not solving, that’s where we build. To me it seems quite simple since we always listen to our customers and try to understand how big of a problem they have and how valuable it would be if someone solved it.
A more tricky question to ask a product manager — is there an example of a feature you tried to build in Smartly which failed?
Well there’s lots of small things. We try to prototype fast and throw ideas in the trash rapidly if they don’t work. One bigger thing could be the Google Search side which we looked into at one point. We tried to get into it, found the correct people to talk to, and found an actual problem which we could be solving but it ended up not fitting our product vision. It was the last mile of optimization, which unfortunately didn’t benefit from the rest of our offering, and it would have been too complex to sell correctly with our organization. It could be a great idea for a smaller startup but it’s maybe one of the bigger things we discontinued. We celebrated the failure and moved on to building more valuable things.
How do you reconcile the visions from executives at your client’s orgs, who have very long term needs, and the marketing people requirements, who are more operational?
We tried to build the organisation so that we listen to the real customer needs. We give business outcomes to the teams as goals, and they work closer with the operational levels of our clients’ organisations to make it happen. So for example, we had a goal to get the designers to use Smartly directly to build creatives. Several product teams looked at what we would need to build so that the designers would actually come to Smartly with the paid social managers to create ads on our platform.
I am meeting with customers every week to talk about broader topics as well, and we organise customer summits where we talk about higher level goals and try to understand the different focus areas for our customers. It’s kind of this crash course into one customer in trying to understand their needs.
We also have a practice that everyone in the Product team does customer support, including me. In support you have to work with customers to solve very detailed problems with the tool. So that’s how we are structured to listen to our customers at every level.
Looking beyond Meta
Lately, Smartly is diversifying and moving away from being a pure Meta partner. What do you see as the biggest challenges in building your product offering on different Social Media platforms with different audiences and ad formats?
The biggest problem is the balance between platform dependent and platform agnostic functionalities. On the team level we have tried to make sure we have specific teams working on top of the APIs and making sure they have all the required functionalities for the platform. We also have separate teams which are building the specific Smartly.io value adds which we enable for all the platforms we integrate.
Do you test the features of new Social Media platforms with specific accounts?
We leverage our Managed Services team for that part as much as possible. They can of course move a lot faster and start offering services on a new platform within days. For instance we have been running TikTok ads through Managed Services for a while now and we leverage their learnings for product discovery. We use their experience to test out new platforms and see what works or what would be relevant for our tools.
In an agency model, customers can get lazy and rely on you. How do you manage to keep them engaged with your product?
We have a model for this: managed onboarding is a service helping advertisers structure their automation and set up their creative templates so after three to six months they get their campaigns running and all the setup they need to succeed. We hand over the accounts and train the team in this model.
Value of customer support
We know everybody at Smartly regularly does customer support. Could you explain the value it has in your eyes?
About support specifically — I recruited many product managers and it is something that many people mentioned in the process, how they wanted to talk to the customers directly but never had the opportunity to do it. A lot of product managers see it as “this is how it should be”. It originally came from Kristo and Tuomo who pushed it from the early days for all functions.
Let’s end with a note on iOS 14.5 — how did you help customers prepare for this change?
We did multiple things here. First we obviously needed to understand everything which was happening and how the platforms were reacting. We communicated with Meta which was releasing a lot of material on how the change was going to affect them and we built our own content on top to support customers.
Since we work with many advanced advertisers which are deep into measurement, we surveyed how everyone was approaching the change and seeing the different solutions people were going for. We organised round tables with our customers so they could share information.
It looks like we are going ten years back in the measurement space so there are going to be a lot of approaches in the beginning. Some things will work better than others and we will steer towards them.
