Extra Crunch Tuesday: Three growth marketing experts share their best tools and strategies for 2020

Welcome to Extra Crunch Tuesday

Getting skilled growth professionals to talk about their work is easy: all you have to do is pay them for their time.

But if you can’t afford to put one on retainer, the next best course of action is to sit down and have a conversation, which is what we did at TechCrunch Early Stage, our virtual event for founders.

Lucas Matney recapped discussions with three top channel marketers:

• Ethan Smith, founder and CEO, Graphite
• Susan Su, startup growth advisor, executive-in-residence, Sound Ventures
• Asher King-Abramson, founder, Got Users

Many forms of marketing are just pro forma displays of corporate behavior, but growth marketing is falsifiable.

Which means you can test the advice they’ve offered here about how to build a high-performance SEO engine, design a minimum viable email channel and create great growth assets for paid channels.

Have a great week — thanks for reading,

Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist

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Join Extra Crunch Live today for a fintech extravaganza with Wealthfront’s Andy Rachleff at 1pm EDT/10am PDT

You’ll receive this email just after 1 p.m. EDT/10 a.m. PDT/5 p.m. GMT, which means you’ll be just in time to join the conversation on today’s episode of Extra Crunch Live with Wealthfront founder and CEO Andy Rachleff.

Before founding the algorithmic wealth management app, Rachleff was a general partner at Benchmark, an early-stage venture firm.

Managing Editor Danny Crichton will ask Rachleff about where neobanking is headed and what it takes to get started today in fintech.

He’ll also take questions from Extra Crunch members, so sign up now to participate in the chat.

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Extra Crunch Partner Perk: members save 20% on Canva Pro

Sponsored by TechCrunch

Annual and two-year members of Extra Crunch can receive 20% off an annual plan for Canva Pro

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Y Combinator President Geoff Ralston shares actionable advice for startup founders

Geoff Ralston is president of Y Combinator, but he doesn’t have all the answers.

“We try to not be too smart, because great founders often see things beyond what you’re seeing,” he said in a recent episode of Extra Crunch Live.

In conversation with Greg Kumparak, Ralston offered extensive advice to entrepreneurs who are hoping to land a spot inside his accelerator, including some comfort for procrastinators:

“Don’t tell anyone on the admissions team that I said this, but it’s a little bit of a soft deadline. We would never turn down the next epic company because you missed the deadline.”

Read highlights from their conversation, or watch/listen to the entire hour.

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Seed funding tips and tricks from Uncork Capital founder Jeff Clavier

Jeff Clavier has 16 years of experience as a seed investor and “has made nearly 230 investments and counting,” reports Ingrid Lunden, who interviewed him at TechCrunch Early Stage.

Their conversation covered much of the basic advice Clavier offers entrepreneurs who are seeking their first check, but the questions from our virtual audience also uncovered a ton of useful information.

What is the best way to get an introduction to an investor? What is the likelihood of getting pre-seed funding without a technical co-founder, but a very well-thought through idea? What kind of diligence questions do startups need to be prepared to answer?

Click through for the answers, along with a pitch deck overview Clavier prepared for the occasion.

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How to pick the right Series A investors

Founders in fundraising mode will meet with a flurry of investors in a short while, and when they’re ready to make a decision, they’re under a tremendous amount of pressure.

This is a less than optimal way to enter a partnership, says Jake Saper, a partner at Emergence Capital. “Neither party really gets to know the other well enough to know if this is a relationship they want to enter into.”

Saper says founders should identify experts they want to work with as soon as they close their seed rounds. “You want to work with people who give you energy.”

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Conversational analytics are about to change customer experiences forever

Relying on data points like page views, session times and click-through rates will only get you so far in this day and age.

There’s a firehose of data available on the average consumer, and more companies are leveraging conversational analytics to anticipate their next move.

The conversational AI market is predicted to reach $15.7 billion in 2024 by offering consumers curated buying experiences for everything from selecting a home refi to a new pair of shoes. How will you use this tech to transform CX inside your company?

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IoT and data science will boost foodtech in the post-pandemic era

Grocery stores will have to do more than simply limit the number of shoppers and mandate mask-wearing to come up with sustainable strategies for operating in the COVID-19 era.

In a guest post that looks into the near future of grocery services, early-stage investor Sunny Dhillon offers three suggestions for food stores: “rely on the data, rely on the biology and rely on the hardware.”

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R&D Roundup: Supercomputer COVID-19 insights, ionic spiderwebs, the whiteness of AI

In his latest recap of bleeding-edge technology, Devin Coldewey looked at several breakthroughs that could have implications for today’s startups:

Wireless cameras attached to beetles may help advance visual processing technology, researchers identified “the most worrying potential crimes made possible by AI tools,” and an artificial spider web may offer lessons for manipulating objects and controlling robots.

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