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This week’s Ivey Entrepreneur podcast features Emily Lonetto, HBA’16, founder of GrowthTO, the largest community of growth and product practitioners in Canada.
Emily’s career ambitions have ranged from Rockstar (she literally sang in an alternative rock band in Toronto), to promoter, to entrepreneur and growth marketer. Her experiences on the growth team at Tilt (acquired at AirBnB) kick-started her career in growth, and she has since held positions at numerous high profile start-ups and scale-ups such as PartnerStack, Clio, and Voiceflow.
In this episode, Emily helps us understand what growth really is, how to spot talent for your growth team, and uncovers the tactics behind several well-executed growth initiatives that she has participated in.
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The Ivey Entrepreneur Podcast is sponsored by Connie Clerici, QS ’08, and Closing the Gap Healthcare Group, Inc.
Transcript
You're listening to the Ivey entrepreneur podcast from the Pierre L. Morrissette Institute for Entrepreneurship at the Ivey Business School. In this series Ivey entrepreneur, and Ivey faculty member Eric Janssen will anchor the session.
Eric Janssen
Here with Emily Lonetto from GrowthTO Emily, good to have you on the podcast
Emily Lonetto
Thanks for having me.
Eric Janssen
No problem. It's always nice to have known not as a recent alumni, but I always like to talk about degrees of separation. And I feel like your degrees of separation from the current group of students here at Ivey is so small that you're very relatable. So thanks for coming back.
Emily Lonetto
No problem. It's always so weird, and also great to come back and kind of see how things have changed. So thanks for having me.
Eric Janssen
Have they changed?
Emily Lonetto
I would say Yeah, a little bit, slightly different facilities. You know, the microwave wasn't where I thought it was gonna be. But it's interesting to see like the new faces the new realm of Ivey sweaters from in the hallway.
Eric Janssen
Of course, the swag has changed the building chain.
Emily Lonetto
Yeah, the swagger haha.
Emily Lonetto
Yeah, good. So you're spending a lot of time on growth to and in the growth space? I don't, I don't want to beat a dead horse. So we don't need to define like, what is growth, but maybe just describe a little bit the projects that you're working on related to growth to right now? What does that organization all about?
Emily Lonetto
Yeah, so growth yo actually was an organization that I started, I would say, out of my second job, out of school, when I was coming in as the first growth person, first marketer, first female, as well as someone outside of the core group at a startup, and was trying to come in and figure out how can I work with a team that's never worked with a growth team before? After coming out of a job where I was previously on a growth team that was pretty established at a company called Tilt. And establishing growth to really came from kind of conversations like this, were connecting with people. I just wanted to figure out what did people know that I just didn't, because you can't grow even as like a person if you're not exploring outside of that. And what started off as a ridiculous shortlist of like 50 growth leaders in Toronto and in North America quickly turned into basically like a mutual event session amongst growth leaders, trying to figure out how can you not only grow the startups that you're in, but also your connections, your own learnings, and connect with people that were going through the same things. So it started off informally with coffees turned into about 200 members across Toronto, and now in last year, we've scaled it from merging as well as growing our own community to now 2500 members across North America.
Emily Lonetto
That is fantastic. So often, a lot of younger, mostly younger, but 20 somethings students that I'm interacting with. They don't know or not familiar with the language of startups. So you know, STR, AE, customer success, growth, they don't really know what it is. So let's not go textbook definition. But like, what, what would someone who's graduating from Ivey do in a growth role? What is the actual work of a growth person?
Emily Lonetto
What's kind of funny to me is that like growth, and a lot of ways, it's actually so similar to a lot of the stuff that we do and Ivey, at least like from a perspective and foundational standpoint, like what growth really is, is you are sitting at the intersect of different departments, you're looking holistically at a company and trying to figure out what are the areas that you can make a big impact on the company. So often growth will sit in between marketing, product and sales. Sometimes we'll sit under one of those departments. But for the most part, why I say it's actually kind of similar to some of the stuff that we apply here is really what students can expect going into a role is you're going in, you're analyzing, you're analyzing the components that are in front of you, what are the resources that you have? What are the goals of that company, or where you'd like to go? you're establishing constraints you're putting in what measures for success you're going for, and you're coming up with a plan. I often actually think about it a lot like how I used to approach Ivey exams, where you can put in, like 75 kids in a single section, and you're gonna get 75 different answers. And in a growth role, you're pushing your answer forward, rather than just giving that and hoping that someone chooses it.
Emily Lonetto
Cool. So say, I'm a one man show or me and a partner starting a business. And I think I want to we've got some sort of minimum viable product that we put out there interesting traction, maybe some people are interested. I've got some a couple users. How do I make the decision between investing in marketing roles or sales roles or growth roles, like who should I be hiring at what stage?
Emily Lonetto
So there's a lot to unpack there. But I think a good way of always looking at it is, especially early on, you're looking for people who are multifaceted, who are able to really take a look at of the problems and of the product that you currently have, like, what is the biggest area of impact that you'd have? Do you need more customers? So in this case, of the customers that you have early traction with, how many of them are staying, how many of them love the product? How many of them have even spoken to? So before you even think about hiring new people, it's how many of your existing customers have you engaged with how many of them are from your, let's say, pre existing relationships versus ones that have organically or let's say outside of your network have joined? Oftentimes, I think the mistake that early stage startups will do is they'll hire someone specifically to fill x role, right at the beginning, assuming that the product is at a certain point where you have product market fit, which is a little bit beyond having a minimum viable product. And what that means is instead of having something that just functions, so like a minimum viable product, will basically be something that at least serves a purpose. And you can do some basic testing on versus product market fit. So does that product actually fit with the audience that you're going after? When you find a base level of that, that's when I would always recommend starting to look for someone who really focused on growth. Before that, you want to look for someone who is probably growth minded, but is able to do maybe some of those other siloed works?
Eric Janssen
So you're saying beyond MVP, you found some initial product market fit? So you said earlier, you're selling to people beyond your immediate network or referral there are people organically starting to find your product? Yes, is there and this is so hard to to over generalize, but if you had to over engineer it, can you give an idea of that? What like revenue stages that is this? Do you see pre like seed stage companies hiring growth roles, or is it typically after someone's done a raise where they're like, Wow, now their expectations to grow at a certain rate, we need that mean, to now hire a growth person,
Emily Lonetto
I would say that you definitely have growth minded leaders that come in at seed, those people are setting the foundation for that. So like, growth is really data heavy, it's really centric on understanding the product or seeing the consumer being able to have access to that information. Often at seed stage, you want someone who's going to go in and actually set up all the infrastructure for that, they'll probably be the person who understands how to use it. But that's a slightly different skill set than going out. And let's say hiring a growth coordinator, growth manager, who may be becoming into optimize a channel that's pre existing. And I think that those types of hires tend to typically come in series A, or maybe C round.
Eric Janssen
So the the more specific growth hires happen at a later stage, but the more broad hire could happen relatively early.
Emily Lonetto
Oh, absolutely. And I think there's never too early of a stage to have somebody who is growth minded coming in and setting that challenge setting that foundation. Because if you get someone that's like that, at the beginning, it's contagious. And you want every department to be thinking about that at all times.
Eric Janssen
So you, you've talked about the role of a Swiss Army knife, so I'm not going to I'm not going to debate it, but let's have a discussion around it. Because there are, there's always a role for a Swiss Army knife in the beginning, there's this period of thrashing, you've got to get a bunch of things set up, you've got your learning. So someone that could do a bunch of different things is good. I've found that over time, the need for a multipurpose person wanes, and then you need to get specific people in those roles. I haven't yet effectively transitioned a Swiss Army knife into a more senior role that may be totally my own fault. So do you always need a Swiss Army knife for their stages where Swiss Army Knife is more valuable than other stages?
Emily Lonetto
See, I think that it's really dependent like I think there are some people who are really damn good at scaling a company from like, series A to Series B, or from B to C. And then there are people who come in later stage and they really own in the development of a department or a silo. And I think that, I would say, as someone who identifies probably as like a Swiss Army knife and has had success and trying to build out like teams and also train other people to develop other types of tools outside of what would be their knife, so their core skill set, I would say maybe at the beginning, there's a little bit more freedom and like you are looking for people who maybe like to navigate the chaos and they use the fact that their Swiss Army knife to do that. Those people will probably outgrow or be outgrown by the company at a certain point. The people that are able to, like pull out those tools when needed, but still understand what their core purpose are. I think those ones become extremely strong leaders because They are able to deeply empathize with things outside of their scope, which sometimes might be necessary as the company really does go into the next phase of growth.
Eric Janssen
So how would you identify given that some people may not even know that their growth potential growth person? How would you, as a company identify someone who might have that talent, they may not have labeled themselves as a growth person. But you might see you're looking to hire, how could you identify someone that has early signals that they would be successful at a growth role, or their traits?
Emily Lonetto
I think that they're definitely like, there's some easier to spot traits versus questions that I like to ask to kind of get down to it, the easier to spot ones are often entrepreneurial type people tend to be really good at growth. I love talking to failed entrepreneurs, to be honest, when it comes to trying to figure out who would be good in that mindset, because they were able to make something from nothing. And even if it didn't succeed, that part so hard, and requires so much mental capacity and emotional strain, that a lot of people that come in and have tools set up for them aren't used to. And it's deeply like, it's so important to be able to not only empathize with that, but kind of get into the mindset of that because often with growth, you're not just optimizing channels, or campaigns or tools that are there, but you're also building and you're challenging the status quo, which is actually very similar to early stage entrepreneurship. Other things that I think are really good signs when you're talking to someone is, I'll often give them like a pretty simple question. Like, let's say, this is like a silly example, because I rarely am trying to solve this problem. But let's say you start a blog, and we decide that we want to get, let's say, 100 subscribers in the next like 30 days, which is like, maybe aggressive for some types of companies, I would ask how to do that. And most people would be able to give me some pretty basic answers at the top, but you keep drilling in. So let's say after they say the basic things being like, I'm gonna write a few posts, and I'm gonna promote them through paid or the kind of typical song and dance there, you would come back and be like, Okay, well, you got 15. Now what, and you keep doing that, and you keep squeezing to see what happens when they're in a crunch. And they have a deadline, and they don't know how they're going to hit it. And see if they ask questions, see how crafty they get. And giving them those tasks? Or even sometimes asking, okay, like, what company do you love? And why do you love it? Why is it growing to you? Cool, like, what would you change about it? How can you make it better? And keep digging in on that? Because often, it's not the first question that you asked that identifies whether or not someone is able to be scrappy. And think through those problems is often like the fifth or sixth. And I also love when people just say they don't know, and start to ask questions, because that's a huge component of the job as well.
Eric Janssen
When you're hiring someone in that role, is it Do you ever assign them tasks like takeaway tasks, here's an all interviews in the room.
Emily Lonetto
I've never personally assigned something like crazy, like, for the most part, I'll be like, come in prepared to like talk about x. Because I like to think through like, if I was genuinely in a room with this person, and we're trying to solve a problem, how are they going to do that? I love seeing people whiteboard out problems. Because I genuinely just want to know, how does your mind work? Like, how are you going to contribute to an active conversation when a lot of us are probably going to be aligned on problems, but will vary based on our perspectives and vary based on what are the components that each one of us are going to carry out in order to make that happen. I have however, like gone through interview processes, where I myself has put have put together presentations or have done tasks. And one of the things that I would recommend if there is somebody who is interested in growth is like, you're typically looking for somebody who will challenge the status quo, or who is thinking slightly differently based on the information that's at hand. And often when I've seen a takeaway kind of projects or exams is they'll give you the same information they give a lot of people in a department, and it's kind of your job to sit there and be like, let's say if they're like, what channel would you double down on next quarter? Like, I dare you to say that you would try something new. And explain why you would try that instead of doubling down or situations like that I've personally done in the past.
Eric Janssen
Cool. Can you think through just to read this in something practical or tangible? So I think people have a decent idea of what growth is and the types of people that are successful at in those roles. Can you talk through some examples of some really good growth related examples that either you've been a part of or seen and they can be super famous and popular or maybe some under the radar things that people may not have heard of before?
Emily Lonetto
I'll start with like probably the most like famous examples of it just to kind of like route it. But Dropbox and Airbnb are probably like on the top of the list in terms of amazing growth campaigns, the first one being dropboxes referral program, arguably one of the first SAS products to absolutely nail referral programs and the poor people that have tried to copy them, since something sometimes just doesn't work again,
Eric Janssen
They got me that. So that program was the sign up to get get a friend to sign up to get more space, right?
Emily Lonetto
Yeah. And what's brilliant about that is, they didn't do it in a way where it felt transactional, to the point where you didn't feel shady for getting a kickback for getting a friend on board. Most people will probably didn't even know what storage was online at that time, because a lot of people had external hard drives and Dropbox was trying to pitch for Cloud Storage. And they did it in a way that was so visual as well, where basically, you'd hit their landing page, it would get you to sign up and it showed basically this rocket ship that was trying to take off and you were at x percentage when you first started and you would gain, I guess further traction as you started to invite people. And at each level, you'd get X amount of gigabytes for free. And that part was really great. But they also gave away in kind rewards. So instead of focusing on monetary, they were focusing on the storage, the actual product that they were giving. And they were only giving more of their product to the people who actually helped grow their product, which is also pretty brilliant. So you ended up having hundreds of students referring other students who would care about it, and wanted to max out how much storage they would have and get the same friend to do the same thing. And it resulted in a crazy amount of growth and a small period of time.
Eric Janssen
You talked about the element of design there, the rocket ship, launching, it just made me think of the cross functional component of this role. So like they would have in order for Dropbox to execute that campaign. Like what you live in that like a higher tech SAS world now, what teams would be involved in a campaign like that.
Emily Lonetto
So I'm extremely biased and think design thinking should be put into absolutely everything. Because one of the most universal languages out there that doesn't need to be translated as design. And we talked about that with metrics. We talked about that with math and those types of situations. But really, the first thing that people notice about any product is, what does it look like? How does it feel? What does it make me feel, and those often don't come from reading and they don't come from someone explaining it, it will come from a gut instinct reaction. And that's all design thinking and can be controlled. I think with a program like Dropbox. There's like a brilliant article on first round on growth designers. Dropbox has a crazy team. For that I would highly recommend reading for anybody who's interested in that space. But I would definitely think your design growth team would be in there. Typically on growth teams, you'll have a growth analyst, you'll have a growth PM, as well as growth marketer. And I think with that one like it very clearly, it was like a team trying to figure out how can we communicate something which was the cloud and was not really easy to understand into something that was and people love being able to fill out basically bars, and they understand that a rocket ship needs to go up. Those are all basic things that we as humans already knew. And I think they did a really brilliant job at bringing that in.
Eric Janssen
Cool. So that's a big example that most would be familiar with. Can you think about some maybe lesser known good growth examples that you've either been a part of or heard of?
Emily Lonetto
Yeah, um, I feel like I talk about this one all the time. So I'll just like breeze through that one. And there's another one that I think is brilliant. But with Tilt, for instance, we were payments app, easy way to send requests and split payments between friends. And when we grew almost exclusively, especially at the beginning, through colleges, college and university students started out in the States. And when we came to Canada, we realized that we couldn't grow in the same way where we couldn't grow through frats and sororities, which we did in the States. And instead, we really had to focus on how are we solving more frequent use cases, with different audience types. So we went after student organizers, your heads of households, your friends that are always rallying you to go out or get dinner, you're, you know, type A hold the group together type of friend. And that's way harder to target online than it is to be like, frat member or sorority member. And I think one of the things that we did brilliantly there was beyond our ambassador program, which basically prioritize referrals for us, but we launched send them request money, which was basically interact a transfer using credit cards. So you get points to which students loved. And the way that we did that one was we had this campaign where it was called David's the worst. It personified the worst aspects of all of our friends without asking any of them. So it quickly talked about Meet Dave, Dave is the worst, he never pays for a share of the internet. But he's always streaming make de fe, and a bunch of scenarios like that which were not as sexy as the fun parties down in the States. But were actual use cases that help our product grow. So we were explaining what the product did in really relatable, very frequent use cases, with students and really simple CTA make Dave pay. So people click that they would look up Dave on send requests. So they would download and actually look up this fake person that we made, and he would pay them back. And it would be this instant cycle. It was brilliant in the sense because it didn't just get people to sign up for something, it actually got them to use the product. And then they would have money waiting for them. So naturally, would set off all the other triggers for them to set up their direct deposit, etc. And then if they didn't, the money would come back to us. So it ended up becoming also super cost effective for us and ended up killing our actual inap referral program.
Emily Lonetto
Oh, interesting. So Dave actually paid them they got real dollars from going through the process of getting David Exactly.
Emily Lonetto
We also experimented with a button on that, that said publicly shame, Dave, instead of share. And you'd be surprised by how many people will click a button just because of curiosity.
Eric Janssen
Yeah, that's awesome. So if we got in the next level here, so you were part of the team, when they were going live in the States, you had a bunch of learnings. They say, we're gonna go to Canada, great. We've got a Canadian woman on the team, she's gonna help us out, she must know the Canadian market. What did that first meeting? Like? How did you figure out how to do that? Like, what what's the thinking process to figure out how to come up with that campaign?
Emily Lonetto
So I think like, what was really awesome about tilt was we had such an amazing country manager and such an amazing like, there was a beginning team that was led by Sarah Stockdale who's an amazing growth leader out in Toronto, and was my very first like, I think, super strong mentor, when I was in university, and especially coming out now, she's an amazing person to look up and look up to. But I think they had this really interesting opportunity with Tilt, where it actually took coming to Canada came from our country manager, Tim, who is now the GM at checkout 51. And he messaged James, who was the CEO of tilt, and said, Hey, I'm looking to raise money for the ski trip, I believe that I'm going with my friends when you come into Canada. And it turned into this large conversation about why aren't you guys here? Why don't we have anything like this. And he ended up spearheading that. And he ended up starting to build out what was basically a test concept out here and ended up becoming the fastest growing arm of Tilt, because of the natural frequency, like we weren't going after big parties that happen maybe once a month, we were going after every day, types of types of transactions, like paying someone back for coffee, spending dinner spending a taxi, because at the time, Uber split wasn't a thing. But I thought that was really great, but kind of being on that team. And when we actually had to think more interestingly enough, had to break off from some of the learnings that we had from the American team was, there came a moment in our growth, where we kind of sat down as a Canadian team and realized that we weren't going to grow like our big brother did, basically. And it's an interesting moment where it's very similar to when you talk to your parents at one point, when you're a little bit older, and you realize they don't know everything. And it's awkward, and you have this like gut feeling that you need to say something and you need to disagree publicly, or you need to pivot a little bit. And it takes a while. And that's exactly what happened with us. Like there's a while where we were doing things that we knew weren't gonna 100% work, because that's what we were told to do. And then it eventually broke off into, like, send request money, for instance, was a feature that probably was never going to work in the States because of Venmo. But it was everything for our growth here. And that came from like, well over a year of pushing from our team, getting feedback, dealing with our ambassadors growing the channels that we knew, like, also helped with our other arms. So we had this strong pulse on who our customers were and what they wanted. And we lead with that data.
Eric Janssen
So if we were to try to do this, like case style, so you say you join the team. Yes, the team got allocated a budget for the launch, presumably like there's some sort of resources available. Don't know what they were, you've got a certain team that's making that success. Sure. So the first meeting, like let's get let's get nitty gritty, did you did you say like, okay, we're going to launch in Canada, the goal is to get X amount of Canadian users.
Emily Lonetto
I would say in this test, probably Yeah. It was probably how many people are we going to get in order to prove that it's actually gonna work here and then of those people, like, how many of them are going to be let's say like students are they going to be Outside of that, so what we had is like we had a lot of mini tests that were going to like we didn't know if we were going to be campus oriented, like we were in the States. We didn't know what schools. We didn't know. Like, how do you deal with a campus school versus a city school? We started to do tests on, should we double down on going into universities? Or should we start looking elsewhere. And we started that as well with a better example, maybe like later on, once we proved our students was, we essentially tried to do ritual, at one point using Tilt, which I don't think that many people know that we tried, because clearly, it wasn't very successful. And we partnered, actually, with a lot of companies here in London, which is interesting, including, there's like a little yogurt shop down the street that I remember, used to troubleshoot for. But basically, we had X amount of money, we set a goal if we wanted to get X amount of vendors, and we wanted to increase their sales by x. And those were all things that we're looking for the big metric at the beginning was can we actually get vendors on board. And we had, we set time limits on that. And that was really, honestly, it's very similar to when you're first starting out that business and you're trying to do any proof of concept, you have a time limit, you have things that are non negotiable, and you're trying to prove a point.
Eric Janssen
Andso are you the team is presumably all together in the same room, and you're like, here's some red bull and some pizza, like, brainstorm ideas, like how do you come up with here the things that we're going to test?
Emily Lonetto
Yeah, so that's actually very similar to how we were I tell, minus the red bullet was like, a lot of Soylent, but would actually sit in the small room in our lifestyle office, and we only had one meeting room until it Canada. And it's pretty funny when people think about that, because of how big Tilt had grown in our office, just like we just didn't. But we would sit in this room, probably more frequently than once a quarter because of house we were growing. And we would actually just like talk through everything, everybody would sit down, and we would brain dump absolutely everything that was going on, put everything out on sticky notes on basically anything to get out of our head. And then we would start to basically triage like, what are the things that are add ons to stuff that we already do? What are big bets that we haven't tried? What are things that are very obviously duds, and we would start to go through that. And sometimes we would get into like task groups of like, here's a big bet, we're gonna put a few people on this, try it. And other times, we'd have people being like, Oh, I know how to do X thing really, really fast. I'm gonna take all these things, and you just run out of the room and you start doing it,
And who, who moderated that, who controlled the crowd?
Emily Lonetto
A lot of times, it would always be set, like one person probably sit down and be like, Guys, we need to talk. And that person would probably take the helm at the beginning. But it was really collaborative. Honestly, in a lot of cases, one of the reasons why I loved being in a startup outside of school was, I didn't feel like age was anything. My dad says all the time, mainly because he's old, but he'll say age is just a number. And I didn't really believe it until being in an industry that is honestly like so driven. And so like amazing for young minded people who are ready to speak their perspectives and really want to own that. And in all those scenarios, they were super collaborative, like, obviously, I'd probably start off as a newer, add being a little bit more quiet and just like coming in with my own like details and my own opinions on things that people had already put out. But six months in at that point, I'm like, the one being like, Hey, guys, I want you guys to come sit in a room with me. And that's honestly kind of some of the beauty that comes along with fast growing and sometimes hard problems.
Eric Janssen
Cool, cool. Those Yeah, those details are helpful. I just always trying to envision like, Okay, how, how did this actually, we came up with this idea for this great thing, but like what actually happened,
Emily Lonetto
There's like a surprising amount of lack of structure and a lot of these things. Because structure tends to bind a lot of growth, it tends to really bog down things. And we, as humans, I feel and a lot of times really try to put ourselves into little boxes, we like to organize the reason why there's huge stores dedicated to jazz organization. And I think there's room for that. But in a lot of cases, like it's a lot more abstract. Trying to solve these growth problems is basically like trying to not just like put things together that have come in a box, but you're like gathering the materials. And you are building these components, and then you're figuring out what tools will put them together.
Eric Janssen
Cool. So if there were someone that wanted to get started, where would I go? Do you have any really like amazing could be for each of the tiers, beginner intermediate expert places to go people to meet books to read blogs to follow whatever, like where would I even start?
Emily Lonetto
Yeah, I'm a huge fan of like Brian Balfour and Andrew Chen. Their work with reforge. Casey winters is also a huge contributor to that. They're all amazing growth leaders, x, Pinterest, at Uber and at HubSpot. And I would definitely recommend following reforge.com their blog there is great. They also if you are a young professional in your company will sponsor you. They do this amazing educational program, I've gone through it I know a ton of leaders that have to it's great. Other things that I would also recommend is if you let's say, want to practice being a growth leader, and a lot of those things, like try your own little startup like and I don't mean like, legitimize yourself incorporate and do all of that. It's like, hey, if you want to figure out how does the company sell merchandise, sell merchandise, like if you want to figure out, Okay, how does someone grow an app? Like, why don't you throw something up on envision and get your friends to go through it and figure out okay, like, what did I do wrong? Or can I even mimic something that I use on an everyday basis, this is a thought, thought exercises don't need to be started just because you have a job or just receive a task, you can just do it? Yeah.
Eric Janssen
I gravitate often to those Amazon style businesses. Because if you're just want to test something out, because literally, I'm looking at our water bottles in front of us, you could say, Alright, I'm going to start a water bottle company, let's pick a way that I could differentiate, maybe I have flashy colors, and it keeps the water colder longer than everybody else. Maybe it doesn't. But I can say that. Let's go through sourcing it, positioning it, marketing it testing a bunch of channels, like what you would learn from a water bottle company that maybe sells $100 in water bottles at the end of the day, like that learning is just so amazing. So you're saying just go do it.
Emily Lonetto
100%. Like I think the learnings you get from, figuring out the questions that you don't immediately think about until you have to solve them. Like those are the ones that make for such stronger stories, a way better learning experience as well like a good example with others water bottles, weather I always use like the Shopify example of like start a Shopify store dropship stuff. Like it's an easy way of just like testing proof of concept. Or I was reading this and spoken to Justin Mars before as the author of traction. And one of the things that he always preaches is like, if you want to figure out will people buy or will people believe in your product? And I think you mentioned this a few times. But will someone actually put their money where their mouth is if they say that your product is great, is why don't you start a landing page for a product that doesn't exist yet. And see if you can get signups for presale or can they put down like a base level order your own little Kickstarter, if you will, it's always an easy example of something that you should be able to have in your toolbox and you should be able to know how to do
Eric Janssen
That's awesome. Last few here advice you give your call at 20 year old self
Emily Lonetto
Buckup and share perspective earlier. Just because you don't see yourself as someone who can make the most I would say pristine model in Excel does not mean that you won't be able to make some of the best suggestions for them moving forward. Own your background and understand what are the things that you learned from some of the stuff that might seem weird to other people, because it's going to be unique to you. And that's going to craft the better parts of your story and probably always well
Eric Janssen
Like playing in a band, for example?
Emily Lonetto
Yes. 100%.
Eric Janssen
Awesome. Last thing I'll ask is, since this goes out to a pretty big community, is there any way that the community can help you? What do you? What are you working on right now? What are you focused on? What are your priorities? And if there's anybody listening who might want to lend a hand? How can we help?
Emily Lonetto
Absolutely. So I think a lot of my focus right now is trying to figure out how I can really scale this community for growth to trying to connect more leaders with honestly like students and mentees and people are trying to learn, create a stronger men like mentor network, because I was really fortunate to find someone amazing out of the gate. And not everyone is. And not everyone is also like the type of person who wants to reach out or feels comfortable doing that. So I would love to talk to anybody who's in the tech space and the aerospace founder, or anyone that's just interested in getting involved. And who also is interested in scaling a community like this out in Toronto,
Eric Janssen
Cool. And best way to find that is through the growth to website. Where do they find you online?
Emily Lonetto
Well, you can find me on wall growth Toronto com or on LinkedIn. You can find me under Emily Lonette, and that's Lonetto. Not e at the beginning.
Eric Janssen
Yeah, awesome. That's great. We could go on for a long time. And I think maybe in the future, we will let's there's a probably a few opportunities to tackle some case studies of like, if you and I were to whiteboard out how would we tackle starting an idea or concept that might make for a fun follow up, but we'll save that for another day. Thank you for joining us. I appreciate you spending some time.
Introduction/Outro
Thanks. You've been listening to the Ivey entrepreneur podcast. To ensure that you never miss an episode. Subscribe to the show and your favorite podcast player or visit ivey.ca forward slash entrepreneurship. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time
Emily Lonetto
Thanks so much.