From Zero to Unicorn: A Playbook for Explosive Startup Growth with Ankit Maloo

The world of start-ups never stands still. In the USA alone, north of 4.7 million new companies are founded every year. However, most people know that about 70% of them don't even make it past the five-year mark. From well-known entrepreneurs like Elon Musk to lesser-known examples, it's usually the same people who are racking up success after success in the startup world.

One of these lesser-known startup growth specialists is Ankit Maloo. As a founding partner of Cogito Group, a comprehensive growth consultancy, Ankit brings a wealth of expertise, having scaled many high-growth companies, including two unicorns. His move from management consulting to growth expertise has given him a unique perspective on the difficulties faced by modern businesses.

I spoke to Ankit about his experience of taking startups to the top and tried to elicit the valuable secrets he has.

Ade: Ankit, you have a track record of helping dozens of startups, including two unicorn startups. Can you briefly tell us how you got to this point and what were the most important steps to acquire these skills?

Ankit: I have worked with many companies and founded a couple of my own as well. Originally, I started out with a typical management consulting path, working with big established companies. It gave me experience in how businesses think and how they function. At the same time, I realized that this field just isn’t my true passion.

In my first growth role, I was the only growth manager and we were at seed – which means I had the leeway to try a lot of hacky stuff. I experimented with almost everything there, and a lot of it had no benchmark. I learned all about attribution and the importance of measurement. I think that is a great starting point - you learn how to attribute results to a channel - sometimes obvious (like Google ads) and sometimes not (it takes multiple channels to convert).

And the more you measure, the more you develop an instinct of what any experiment would do. You perfect these two, and then it’s all about coming up with hypotheses and quickly validating and invalidating them.

A lot of people tend to think growth is about some complex stuff. In my experience, you start with one channel, get the basics right, go deep, and experiment. One rule we had was that whenever we were testing something we should be able to conclusively say whether an experiment failed or succeeded. The Why part comes later when you swap out the variables to see if it’s the channel, messaging, or other factors. This helps a lot in developing the skillset. Post that, it’s just exposure. I still test out the organic reach of any new social app I hear about. It’s not even that I would put out a great post, but rather a below-average post to see the reach. This tells me how a channel would perform organically if I floated a brand/influencer post early.

Ade: In your opinion, what are the most effective growth marketing techniques at the moment, and what makes them so effective?

Ankit: This is a very interesting phase when it comes to growth. Meta and Google (the two most popular channels) have been saturated and the costs are too high for new and upcoming startups to make any headway. Marketing is inherently anti-inductive, you need to be doing things others aren’t. And then, with AI, it’s a different ball game altogether.

For B2B companies, we have been actively doing demand generation, and it has been mighty effective. You identify a bunch of companies (your ICP) who would immediately benefit from your offering - they may not know it yet - and then target them via all kinds of content on channels like LinkedIn, Meta, etc. They would occasionally sign up, but more often than not, you convert these when you reach out to them via email.

It gets opened because they have an idea of what you do, and would readily book a call with you. We call it the ‘billboard strategy’. Imagine, someone put a huge billboard right outside your home that you see every day you go to work, and when someone from this company reaches out to you, you are likely to chat and convert because you unknowingly built a familiarity with the brand.

Ade: Can you walk us through a recent case where you helped a company grow? When did you get involved, what did you do, and what was the outcome?

Ankit: We work with companies at multiple stages - some are pre-product market fit, some are in a growing phase. For a typical growth stage company, our goal is to simply the value proposition and help the user get to that value as quickly as possible.

There is this post Series A company I recently worked with. Backed by YC, A16Z, Craft Ventures etc. We helped them with inbound lead generation. When I got involved, they were averaging about 8-10 demos a month, with 3-4 of them converting. Now, it’s a tough vertical where you cannot have a full self-serve use case, given the complexity of the product. And then, it’s December 2023, when few companies are buying Saas tools in the market, given the AI hype.

We came in, looked at the product, and then realized their potential customers did not understand why they would need it.

We then focused on leveraging short/quick AI-based demos in their domain as a lead magnet. Promoted these pages, and whenever we captured a lead, told them about the second-order effects of the value this company provides. We took them to about 60 demos a month in four weeks, with a ~70% conversion rate. Nailing the lead magnet was the hardest part. It took us about 5 iterations to get there.

Ade: Currently you're heading the marketing agency Cogito Group. What services do you specialize in, and what are your USPs?

Ankit: We are a full-stack marketing agency. Whenever we start working with a customer, we spend some time on discovery. Looking at their existing analytics, talking to their stakeholders, understanding what has been tried, what worked, and what did not. A growth audit of sorts. This is also the place where we ensure all the table stakes growth related stuff are done and out of the way. Like attribution, SEO, etc..

Then we go through a series of experiments, analyzing the results to identify the most effective channels and messaging. And then help them with scaling. Our goal is to identify, and test out 2-3 step function changes that could alter their growth trajectory. Many times these are slightly high scoped changes where we work closely with the product teams too.

This is where we work closely with our partners – getting to the result we both want is very hands-on, and typically, no one offers this. We have helped companies fix their attribution stack, and helped them test and refine their ICPs too. I have been on Figma design sessions with my clients, discussing on-page designs and how they would likely convert.

We currently are focused on three areas - Demand Generation as I mentioned previously, go-to-market strategy for pre-pmf startups in B2B, and a niche of viral strategies for iphone apps. Given the rolling out of iOS 18, and Apple killing the Contacts API as we knew it, and Apple Intelligence, there is a clear chance for many startups to innovate fast and grow at an exponential pace leveraging those features.

Ade: The past two years have seen the rise of brand-new technologies that have also made their way into marketing. In your view, how does artificial intelligence affect the current marketing industry, and what do you expect to happen in the next 2-3 years?

Ankit: That’s an interesting question. I would start by saying that the basics remain the same. You identify where users derive the most value from, figure out the messaging that works, and the channel that works best. Like every industry veteran who gets asked this question,

There will be changes, drastic ones, that many companies are not prepared for. What AI does is two things - it takes the marginal cost of content creation to zero, and then it democratizes the expertise and makes it accessible to everyone. The analytics, the insights, the strategizing, everything. You can ask one AI model, then ask the other to refine it, and you have a plan that is comparable to anyone in your market.

I expect the popular channels to be flooded with AI generated ads. The competition would be high, and CACs would be higher than ever, so much that it’s practically unsustainable for new startups. Same goes with SEO and SEM. I expect the alternate channels to grow faster - eg: influencer marketing, content marketing, etc.

One thing that I have seen work recently is how well niche audience converts - this gives in to podcast ads, newsletter ads. These are costly on the face of it, but do work remarkably well when we look at the ROI and Lifetime value.

Ade: Are there any other emerging marketing trends that marketers and CEOs alike should watch out for?

Ankit: One thing that caught my eye was influencer marketing and how well it’s working for B2b startups. This holds both for Twitter and LinkedIn influencers. As a CEO, today a must have requirement is to know how to create hype and virality. Involving existing users, influencers, high profile investors are all part of the same. Look at Perplexity, look at Cursor - two companies which stand out in AI for marketing. They don’t run many meta/google ads. They rely on influencers in a niche to grow. They also get the messaging hooks right, in terms of how so many influencers are able to communicate the benefits, use cases, and get others to try it out.

To illustrate, think of a hypothetical AI sales agent. Typical ads talk about how it works, ROI, benefits, etc. A smart and tactful influencer campaign could be a b2b sales influencer posting, “I booked 7 meetings on Labor Day resulting in a revenue of $xxx. Here’s how:” and then the usual thread with the product smartly placed at what they are good at. This is better because this influencer has a high value audience, it shows how to use the product, and establishes what kind of results you would get. It also guides them through the work that needs to be done. \

Ade: You mentioned iOS 18 and Apple Intelligence. I am curious, why do you say there are opportunities here?

Ankit: I am talking about virality. At a high level, it’s hard to grow mobile apps unless you want to spend a lot of funds on ads. However, in B2C, if you can figure out growth loops and those strategies to get your apps to go viral, you can end up on top free/paid app lists.

Until about iOS 17, from a virality perspective, most things are known. The same goes with Android. People would come on your apps, get prompted to share contacts, about half of them would do, and you would slowly grow. With iOS 18 though, Apple made a lot of changes in their APIs and introduced new ones. Apps can now integrate with Apple Intelligence to deliver context-aware features, expanding their use cases and inherently making their content more shareable. Oh, and they killed their Contacts API in the current form. The new one would require users to handpick each contact they want to share with.

So, net net, it becomes a level playing field. Existing apps cannot leverage contacts to grow via social graph, and new apps and existing ones can leverage Apple Intelligence and other features to grow in ways that are still not as well known. Thats what I refer to as a great opportunity for many apps.