Eyal (00:00)

You go to Yelp and you actually see an onboarding flow that gets you directly to a home services look and feel, not a generic uh one-size-fits-all approach And that was kind of eye-opening. The results were really eye-opening. When we ran this experiment, we saw significant lifts both in in the the right usage for home owners versus um versus restaurant-goers and also uh to some degree like the LTV and revenue that Yelp was seeing went up as a result personalizing that experience.

Dennis (00:00)
Hi everyone, my name is Dennis Mink. I'm with.

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Dennis (00:03)
Biddy's and I am today's host of Just One Thing, a podcast where we sit down with great growth marketers who have been doing very interesting things in the world of mobile growth marketing and growth in general and where we focus on having a conversation around just one thing. So today I have with me, y'all, Runstein. Y'all, thanks for

joining me.

Eyal Grundstein (00:31)
Hi, Dennis. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

Dennis (00:34)
Yeah, my pleasure, man. It's been a while.

Eyal Grundstein (00:35)
and it's just been

a lot, a lot, a lot.

Dennis (00:37)
Yeah, you have a very interesting

professional work history. You've had roles at, I mean, some of like the most well-known companies in the world from Yelp and GSN, the game show network that I worked with years ago in like the 2000s, back when I had my digital marketing agency in Los Angeles, like really back when it was actually like a game show network. Like, and that's what it was, right?

Eyal Grundstein (00:46)
Yeah.

yeah. ⁓

Dennis (01:01)
why don't you kind of like tell us a little bit about you. You're you know super interested in understanding kind of what you're doing currently and then let's get into the topic of the day.

Eyal Grundstein (01:09)
Thanks for having me on, Dennis. Yeah, I'm Eyal Brunstein, really passionate about growth marketing and helping companies scale and helping customers scale. Note that the views on this podcast and the opinions I share here are entirely my own and not representing kind of past, previous or current employers or clients. But I'm really happy to share my experiences and go deeper into

of stories from the trenches.

Dennis (01:40)
Great, yeah, sounds good. Sounds good. cool, well, is there anything, I know that you've been working

at Meta for quite some time, head of growth marketing, looks like you've been more e-comm retail, CPG focused, is that still, how's that going for you?

Eyal Grundstein (01:57)
Yeah, you know, little bit of history, right? I've been in the growth marketing space for about 15 years, seeing it really evolve from kind of the wild west into the data driven discipline that it is, right? You know, starting on mobile gaming and then consumer apps, companies like Yelp. The last six years been in big tech ads on the ad side, you know, having been a client of advertising throughout my career, interesting to see kind of the other side.

and really helping advertisers scale on the platform. So five plus years has been at Metta focused on helping small and medium advertisers scale on the platform through growth marketing. So it's really like doing growth marketing to advertisers and to growth marketers. It's really fascinating both working at the scale of the business, right? In terms of millions of advertisers, hundreds of millions of businesses, but also

working on nuance problems and challenges and opportunities that these advertisers have. So definitely learned a lot, very excited to the evolution and also how advertising is constantly evolving.

Dennis (03:06)
And probably my most important question of the day, what kind of employee discount will you get on the new ⁓ META Ray-Ban displays? The glasses.

Eyal Grundstein (03:14)
Ha ha ha!

Yeah, we're still waiting, but that'll be exciting.

Dennis (03:21)
20%, 30%, 50%, maybe three.

Those are pretty cool with the onscreen or on lens display. They look cool. Cool. Well, why don't we, get into it. So I know that we've had some conversations and I know you had, you wanna talk about specifically something that you've been passionate about throughout your career and has been sort of a...

constant for you and that was the whole topic of personalization.

Eyal Grundstein (03:47)
Yeah, it's really interesting topic, right, that I've seen kind of develop and evolve. think my first story into deeper personalization was when I joined Yelp, right? I was brought on to help scale their paid performance marketing. Yelp was a well-known brand. had a lot of growth through word of mouth, organic channels, SEO, and they really wanted to scale performance marketing.

Here's just something that's really fascinating about Yelp, right? It's this one app that serves completely different needs. You know, you've got someone looking for the best pizza parlor in their area. You have someone looking for a good yoga studio, and then you have a homeowner that has a leak on the roof and needs desperately to get a quote, right? Or a young professional that's making a move and needs movers ASAP.

So, you what I realized in kind of scaling performance marketing is that testing different channels is these aren't just different searches within the app, right? These are different people with different mindsets and different intent. And, you know, we think of how we should apply that not only to the product itself, but within marketing. So, you know, as we're testing new channel, me and my team really found that we had like core hero ads that were working.

pizza, a burger, these things that really attract eyeballs. But what if we went deeper, right? What if we actually had an ad that's targeted to a homeowner that actually has the copy about that paint point? And then even in the product itself, tailor an onboarding experience to that homeowner's needs. So instead of showing the same generic ad and funneling all the users to the same

onboarding flow, what if we kind segmented our approach and had a more personalized experience? So we ran an experiment where we really had a few different pain points that we saw a lot of search and frequency for, as, you know, getting a quote for a home problem issue, such as getting a quote for movers, such as, you know, different home services needs, and really applied the onboarding flow.

to mirror that paint point. So you see an ad for a leaky roof, right? And then you click on that ad, you go to Yelp and you actually see an onboarding flow that gets you directly to a home services look and feel, not a generic one size fits all approach. And that was kind of eye-opening. The results were really eye-opening.

When we ran this experiment, saw significant lift both in the right usage for homeowners versus restaurant goers and also to some degree like the LTV and revenue that Yelp was seeing went up as a result of personalizing that experience. So that was, you know, revelation. And we took that and then used that to segment and personalize our marketing based on like the different use cases that people would use the Yelp for.

And that insight really of personalization works. And if you have a full funnel approach to personalization, actually it has material impact on your numbers. That insight actually stuck with me throughout my career and moving forward. And Meta, right? Like we talked to hundreds of millions of businesses and 10 million plus like paying advertisers.

All these advertisers have different needs, right? E-commerce, professional services, different big brands and so forth. So we actually took that approach of personalization one level deeper at Meta as well. And it's really like guiding my team to vertical specific personalization, depersonalization. So I really learned a lot about the value of personalization of the key leverage.

Dennis (07:34)
Mm-hmm. I think that I am sort of curious. know that, so personalization is like one of these, from my experience in marketing, it's like one of these facets of marketing that if you can do it and you can do it well and you can do it at scale, it absolutely will help KPIs all throughout the funnel. we're talking like,

Eyal Grundstein (07:49)
and we'll see time.

Dennis (07:56)
D to C, B to B, mobile, web, you name it. search ads, it's very well known. The challenge always is how do you go about doing it at scale? Realistically, if you don't have deep, deep resources, be it people or dollars to invest in it, like...

Eyal Grundstein (07:57)
you

Dennis (08:13)
Like, to what extent does that really become a showstopper for really integrating personalization, personalized flows into your marketing?

Eyal Grundstein (08:24)
Yeah, that's a good question Dennis. So, you know, when you think of personalization, there's various dimensions to it. There's like hyper, hyper personalization at the account level, at the user level. Those historically have been tricky to implement due to costs of creative, cost of serving. Right. But if you think of personalization as a form of sub-segmentation,

really you're looking at one core segment, but then you're slicing that segment up to different pain points, different use cases, then it actually becomes manageable and a prioritization exercise. For example, you could have high potential customers as one ⁓ segment and within that segment go deeper on high potential customers within one vertical and within another vertical. And then you're really identifying

you know, on a revenue or potential basis, kind of what segments to go after and how deep the slice. I think a follow-up to your point is, know, in the age of AI, that's I'm personally excited about, personalization just becomes that much more manageable to implement. Cost of creative development goes down as AI accelerates. Signals and inferences from data

first party data becomes easier to analyze and ingest. And AI effectively becomes an accelerator to your personalization strategy. I think historically, while it's been challenging, I think we'll see more and more personalized content and more personalization levers as AI matures and becomes table stakes

Dennis (10:03)
Yeah, no doubt. was actually gonna bring that up. mean, of course, because AI really does, you know, we are, I mean, there's, it's the promise of leveraging AI to be able to grab data and signals.

and then from there to be able to personalize communications, personalize ads and so on. mean, the promises there, think that it's like, for example, listen, I'm on the B2B side of things. I spent about an hour yesterday, I'm investing time into really learning how to use and leverage.

Eyal Grundstein (10:22)
you

Dennis (10:34)
Clay, right, which has become like a very, very popular, know, sort of this, it's like a go-to-market platform that you use to, you know, build lists of companies and contacts and you know, and you can pull in all sorts of data and, and, and there, and what they offer, you know, is very much like gets you to the point of, now we can provide you with like very hyper-personalized copy and content and communications that you can then export and then import into your

Eyal Grundstein (10:52)
and that is very nice. ⁓

Dennis (11:02)
or whatever your email marketing tool or platform is, right? And they just actually yesterday announced they're rolling out.

user conference yesterday. They're now rolling out, they've now rolled out their own email. Basically it's like their outbound email marketing platform. So it's like they have the promise of being able to build those hyper-personalized lists, hyper-personalized messaging, and then use their platform to send out those hyper-personalized communications. I haven't played with it yet. I'm very, very curious to kind of assess how well that works. But this has been, from what I've seen, a big part of the challenge is even if you have like, a personalized content,

Eyal Grundstein (11:22)
and music.

Dennis (11:38)
messaging and so on. Sorry, I'm getting some weird feedback. There's still this aspect of how you operationalize it.

And so I think about all the friends that I have within the growth industry, the mobile growth industry, and you start to run into resource constraints and technological constraints. So I think maybe as a follow-up question, it's more a matter of from your experience, if you were to sit down with a growth marketer, let's say a team of five, a couple apps, say, and they said, listen, we really want to start experimenting with

with

a deeper level, like recently personalizing ads, personalizing flows and so on, what kind of advice would you suggest to them for how to start or how to pilot or how to test, knowing that maybe they don't have all the resources, they're unsure of what they're gonna get from this, what benefit they may see in terms of their various KPIs. What kind of advice would you offer them?

Eyal Grundstein (12:35)
Yes. I would think of first like what are the dimension of personalization that the team kind of wants to focus on. What comes to mind is creative, right? As a core lever. Another would be segmentation and figuring out the right segments. And then ideally tying that back to the conversion events or overall the outcomes that one is trying to get. So.

If take kind of the gaming example, if you have like five different gaming apps in a gaming company, one could be casual, a lot of users, high frequency, lower ARPU, but overall like drives a lot of the usage. Another could be hyper targeted like social casino or a male RPG style games and so forth.

The strategy is different, right? But if you're trying to have, for example, like a cross-formation strategy where you're capturing users in one app and then trying to funnel them to different apps, you really want to figure out, number one, what signals do you already have in place in terms of like data inference and in terms of figuring out who the segments are and their intent.

Number two, what are the creative ⁓ dimensions that you can use on personalization based on those signals plus based on industry benchmarks and figuring out what converts for the different audiences? number three, would say like what tools do you have in your disposal to really accelerate that personalization strategy? To me, the creative one seems to be the more obvious choice because they're

lot of creative tools out there, cost is relatively low, cost of experimentation is low. But then the second would be like the right workflows and the right tooling. Yeah, you mentioned Clay, which I've heard a lot about. If you think, if you abstract that, like how do you have a workflow within your, your various like AI and the labs that plug into the various agents that can actually like accelerate your personalization and get you data.

without having to kind of mine for that. So you can make it as automated as possible. So to me, that would be how I would approach the teams. And then I would try to really have them focus on one or two high potential use cases to kind of prove out the model and then go deeper on personalization as they get more signals of what's working, what data actually can be inferred and how ⁓ they can best automate their work.

Dennis (15:07)
Okay, let me ask you another question or two. Let's just see what you got. ⁓ You talk about tooling. What tools have you used or are there any tools that you have a strong affinity for or possibly would even recommend?

Eyal Grundstein (15:11)
you

Yeah, the evolution of tools is moving really quickly. ⁓ Meta uses Salesforce and also in-house tools. For me, what I'm excited about is actually the real power of MCPs and so forth, like plugging into the clouds of the world, right, and actually having agents that really move quickly. I think what I'm personally excited about in kind of the tool front is

It's actually this whole concept of like AI for SEO and call it AEO, GEO, et cetera. Profound is a well-known ⁓ product out there that helps companies track their brand share of voice, right? But there's others and they're all coming. I think that strategy hasn't been really explored or hasn't been really figured out as well yet. And that's like a...

huge arbitrage opportunity for growth marketers at all points of the spectrum to go deep. you know, if I had to think of like tools I would add to a stack, it would be, you know, the marketing automation tools, but also the AEO and GEO tracking tools and ideally like optimization tools that can get you discovered in LLMs for organic discovery.

Dennis (16:33)
Yeah, yeah. I agree. will tell you, it's like a funny question to throw out because I talk to a lot of people and I've been like, I think we talked about this, I'm getting very, very deep into AI these days. It started in June when I kind of made the switch from being a heavy, heavy chat GPT user. ⁓

Eyal Grundstein (16:52)
using it.

Dennis (16:54)
using

for all sorts of things and helping me with my work. But then I flipped over by getting deep into building.

websites and platforms and so on off of lovable and now I'm just like Now that I'm on that side I'm very much and I like to talk to people in my world around like hey What kind of AI tools are you using in your in your work? What do you find is working? Well, what do you know? Like how far along are you in integrating AI for? in any aspect of marketing, know,

Eyal Grundstein (17:08)
you

Dennis (17:22)
segmenting, targeting, creative, optimizing, using agents, using a lot of the different tools that are out there. And I do find that it's just, it's in the world of like growth marketing. It's really still in the becoming. It really, really is.

Eyal Grundstein (17:38)
Yes, I think to some degree, you have to be tool agnostic and like tactic focused right now, right? Because these tools, change monthly, right? You know, your creative accelerating product actually like their new one could come out next month and so forth. So you really have to think of like what

tactics do I want to explore and which tools can I use right now ⁓ but not tie yourself down to a particular tool for the longer term because things are like changing on a rapid basis.

Dennis (18:10)
Yeah, right, exactly. Well, cool, listen, thank you all for joining me. So personalization, yes, I would love to find ways of going deeper. Maybe even we'll consider putting together, doing some research and sharing some recommendations on tools and services that are out there that can really help growth marketers.

Eyal Grundstein (18:21)
Thank you.

Dennis (18:29)
pilot programs or tests ⁓ by leveraging personalization abilities in the communications. I think something like that would definitely be in order. But yeah, again, thank you for joining and have a good afternoon.

Eyal Grundstein (18:42)
Thanks Dennis, great to be here.

Dennis (18:44)
Bye.

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