Deviate Labs spent 12 years building marketing funnels for other companies. Meanwhile, our own growth engine consisted of referrals, SEO, a paid ad or two, a Mailchimp account nobody touched, and good vibes.
The problem was that it worked.
For years, there wasn't much reason to fix it. Then the formula stopped working.
I was promoted to project manager in April, and fixing our funnel became my problem.
What I thought would be a simple funnel implementation spiraled into figuring out who Deviate Labs is and who we’re for. After interviewing my coworkers, I discovered, to my dismay, that they all had very different answers.
Meanwhile, getting this funnel launched had become my chance to prove to a skeptical boss that I could handle this new role.
For my job’s sake, I needed to get the funnel launched ASAP. For Deviate Labs’ sake, I needed to slow down and get the team to agree on who we actually were.
Why did we not market ourselves?
Because not marketing ourselves kept working.
Deviate Labs started in 2014 with a cold call to a company that had recently pitched on Shark Tank. Our founders proposed innovative marketing ideas that they certainly weren't equipped to deliver.
But with no team, no history, and no structure, they made it work. They delivered on those far-out ideas. The client was so satisfied that they referred other Shark Tank companies to Deviate Labs.
For the next couple of years, referrals did most of the work. Then the founders co-wrote Growth Hacking: Silicon Valley's Best Kept Secret, which somehow became its own lead engine.
As someone who's done digital marketing his whole career, I still can't believe one book brought in that much business. But it did.
Startups came in left and right looking for growth hacking. And every time we had to choose between spending time marketing ourselves or doing work for the clients already coming in, client work won.
Why wouldn't it? The leads were already there. The better our old growth engine worked, the less reason we had to build a new one.
Until this year.
So why fix it now?
Well, just one more super fun history fact: over the past decade, the market moved on from growth hacking.
Which would be a huge issue if we hadn't already moved on ourselves.
Every one of our 100+ client engagements taught us more about building repeatable systems instead of one-off wins. A hack is an exploit, and exploits get patched. What worked on Facebook in 2015 doesn't work now, and the agencies that only knew the exploit didn't survive the patch.
So at some point we stopped selling hacks and started selling systems. Systems with tracking that shows what's actually happening, a roadmap with real dates against a KPI everyone agreed on, and a loop of testing, measuring, and reporting that keeps running after launch. We still take the growth hacking creative swing. We just build the foundation first, so whether it lands or not, we're still ahead.
The problem was that this evolution happened slowly, one client at a time. There was never some big meeting where everyone decided, “Deviate Labs is different now.”
We changed. The story we were telling about ourselves didn't.
And eventually, that gap became hard to ignore.
So how would you fix it?
That's what Raymond asked me in my interview for the role of project manager in April. I'd been an analyst at Deviate Labs for two years at that point.
My answer was quick and neat. I told him about design thinking, the Stanford-popularized process I'd learned in college:
- Interviews with key stakeholders
- Brainstorming based on the interviews
- Coming up with an idea
- Prototyping and iterating
That process takes what, like 15 seconds to say in an interview? We’re currently on month 3.
Step 1 Step 0
The interviews were supposed to be the easy part. I mean, it’s just talking to some coworkers about their opinions. Right?
The more interviews I did, the more I realized the disagreement went way beyond how we should market ourselves. We had different opinions on our ideal clients, what made us valuable, how we should operate, and where Deviate Labs should go next.
One person thought our growth-hacking creative stunts were what made us hard to replace. Another thought they were unpredictable and didn't scale.
One wanted to niche hard into B2B SaaS because we'd had a lot of success with past B2B SaaS clients. Another warned that niching at all would have alienated some of the clients from our most successful engagements.
I thought we were on step 1 of the process, but it felt more like step zero. Before we could start building anything, we had to slow down and straighten out who we were as a company.
You can’t build a successful lead engine for a company that nobody describes the same way twice.
The step where we argue
So we got everyone on a call. Several calls, actually.
The interviews had given me a pile of conflicting opinions. So I put them all into one document, grouped them by topic, and brought it to the team. If we were going to move forward, we needed to make some important decisions.
I kept the opinions anonymous, which lasted for all of five minutes. Pretty quickly, people were recognizing their own arguments and defending them out loud.
Normally, putting a bunch of conflicting opinions in one document and asking everyone to debate them sounds like a great way to ruin an afternoon.
But Raymond, one of our founders, has made honest feedback a fundamental part of how we operate. If I write bad ad copy, he tells me it's bad and why. He doesn't say it's great and quietly rewrite it before it gets to the client.
That made these conversations surprisingly productive. When someone got hit with an opinion different from theirs, they didn’t get defensive. They sat with it, ingested it, and debated the idea instead of the person. That allowed us to make some tough decisions.
Here are two that changed the direction of the project.
Who even are we?
Should we stop calling ourselves a growth marketing agency and start calling ourselves a performance marketing agency?
Our engineering lead argued to switch to performance marketing. Better search volume, better SEO, and a term a prospect understands immediately. Oh, and we're really good at it.
The project managers argued that performance marketing describes a service, while growth marketing describes how we think. Although we create systems, we haven't forgotten our growth hacking roots. We once got a company 10,000 beta signups on a $350 budget. Nobody hires a performance marketing agency for that.
Where we landed: growth marketing stays because it honestly describes the company and reflects our history. But the engineering lead was right about the search volume, so performance marketing will be incorporated into our key pages. It's a real service, we're excellent at it, and it's what people are typing into Google.
The niche we almost picked
Prior to the interviews, the team was all but set on niching down to B2B SaaS.
What the interviews surfaced was that we'd been reading B2B SaaS wrong. It wasn't the target, it was a signal. The reason our past B2B SaaS engagements went well wasn't because those companies sold software. It was because they arrived with the parts already in place: real funding, product-market fit, a way to handle a lead once we sent them one, and someone accountable for marketing.
“Someone accountable for marketing” turned into the phrase "CMO's best friend." A CMO knows what they need. What they don't have is a team that can build the roadmap, execute the strategy, bring back real data, and hand them something they can defend to their board.
So we stopped looking for an industry and started looking for the components: real funding, product-market fit, a way to handle a lead once we send them one, and someone accountable for marketing.
When it stopped being theoretical
The weight of the decisions we were making didn't really hit me during the calls.
It's surprisingly easy to debate the future of a company when the options are still bullet points in a Google Doc.
Then we changed the homepage.
That was the first moment any of this felt permanent.
The homepage was one of the first things I saw when I applied to Deviate Labs as an intern. I remember reading through it trying to figure out what this company actually was, what kind of work they did, and whether I wanted to be part of it.
Two years later, I was helping decide what that same page would say to the next person.
That's when this stopped feeling like an internal marketing project. I wasn't just documenting what Deviate Labs already was anymore. I was helping decide what we wanted it to become.
Which was exciting. Also, quite terrifying.
Because once we changed the homepage, we had picked a direction. Now we had to prove we could actually build toward it, and I had to prove I could lead it.
At least the questions we'd spent the last two months arguing over had answers. We knew who we were, who we wanted to work with, and how we wanted to talk about ourselves.
I hoped the hard part was finally over.
(editor’s note: It was not.)
We had solved the identity problem and created an execution problem.
Someone still had to build the content, the lead magnet, the funnel, the nurture sequence, and the site updates. And everyone I could assign it to already had a full-time job: helping clients.