My guest today is Juney Ham, co-founder and CEO of Beacon. He was previously an executive at Expedia and Airbnb, and CMO of Hired.com. This is Part 1 of the interview where we explore Juney’s career and path to CMO. Tomorrow we will explore the Hired.com business.
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Transcript
Edward: My guest today is Juney Ham. Today we covered Juney's career and path to CMO, University of Pennsylvania, PriceGrabber, Expedia, Airbnb, Upside, Hired, and Porsche. He's now the co-founder and CEO of Beacon, a talent consultancy. We're lucky to have him here today.
Juney, I usually start these discussions with how you got your first CMO role, but for you, I want to talk about how you got your first marketing role. Because you started as a software engineer, then became a product manager and a data analyst, and then you were hired to run search marketing for PriceGrabber. Why did they hire you for that job?
Juney: First off, Ed, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here and chat with you about all things marketing. To answer that question, I first need to go back to my earlier experience as a software engineer. I graduated with a CS degree. I started my first job in software engineering, and the first project I landed for the company happened to be building software for the marketing team.
If you recall, in the early 2000s, Google and AdWords had just launched and it was building momentum. There was already Overture, which was Yahoo's platform. The whole performance marketing industry was just starting to coalesce, and so the timing was really great.
I was fortunate to get into all aspects of business, from a marketing perspective through the system's lens. Everything from keyword generation to performance data, analytics, bid optimization algorithms, and even building user interfaces for the marketing team to access the system itself, and manipulate controls.
I was able to do that in my first go-around in the role. I'm really, really lucky to be in that environment. One of the things that I enjoyed and ultimately craved was to be able to make recommendations and to provide decisions based on the analysis I was doing. Writing SQL queries directly into the database and from there pulling insights and areas of optimization for the marketing team.
I think that it was an amazing opportunity to see how marketing, which is a business function, and me sitting in the engineering role, to understand how those decisions were made and how they evaluated those decisions. I think the thing that got me—both in terms of this is really exciting, and also, I don't love this—is the recommendations that I would provide. I spent a lot of time making those recommendations and thinking about the implications. Sometimes they were acted upon and sometimes they weren't. They didn't provide me a ton of context as to why either way.
That whole journey was what led me to discover that my passion was more in the strategy side of the business and wanting to be a part of the decision-making process versus being the person building software, systems, and tools so that that team could do the work that I wanted to do as well.
Going back to your question about being hired to run search marketing, they came to me knowing that I didn't have any marketing experience. One of the questions that the hiring manager had was why should we hire you? You have no actual marketing experience.
I gave them a little bit of that context around my time as a software engineer and how that led to my passion for wanting to make decisions around marketing. But also, I put it back to them. I said you know this already about me. I believe in a different approach and I walk them through—if they were to hire me—the marketing team would not look like a marketing team.
It would be a team of engineers and a team of analysts. If they are okay with that, if they want to take that leap of faith with me, then let's go do this. Otherwise, they're better off hiring somebody else with actual marketing experience. I guess the rest is history. They ended up making that decision, and ultimately, going down the path where we did approach search marketing—at least for that company—very differently. It ended up having a meaningful positive impact on the business.
Edward: Yeah. I think when marketing hasn't been run with math and you replace it with marketing run entirely by math, math tends to beat non-math. I think there's something in both math and non-math together, but if you have to choose one or the other, I think most companies are realizing that math wins.
After PriceGrabber, you moved through companies getting progressively bigger jobs, but basically staying in the world of search. But then in 2011, you jumped to run all of the digital marketing for Airbnb. How did that transition happen?
Juney: Airbnb had been reaching out to me for a good part of my tenure at Expedia. I had built a bit of a relationship with the company in advance of taking the job. Given that, you and I had overlapped a fair bit at Expedia, you know some of the major changes that the company was going through around that time. We were all going through that. It was at times chaotic, and I think I was in the process of having this conversation with Airbnb that was gaining momentum.
Ultimately, I was excited about what Airbnb was doing. I was excited about the opportunity that running all of the online marketing would entail. With any big decision that I've made in my career, there's usually that component of which I don't know how this is going to play out, or I don't know how to do this. Some of that energy is so that I can be pushed into a zone of discomfort. I know myself enough to know that doing that allows me to grow and as it's how some of my best work actually ends up happening.
Edward: That's why you're interested in the job, but why did they want you? How are they comfortable giving you the authority over things like email, social, and SEO when you really had no experience in those areas?
Juney: It's a great question. It's interesting. One of the reasons I was actually optimistic was that online marketing reported to the CTO, Nate (at the time). He had run some of the early experiments and some of the growth hacking initiatives when Airbnb was in its infancy and prior to my joining. I think he understood the importance of online marketing as a whole, having this foundation of data metrics and analytics.
A lot of the conversations that Nate and I had were around things that were very, very tacticiany topics—writing queries directly into the database and wanted to see the entire team SQL or some of the optimizations we did across various channels.
Even though I didn't have any experience in email, affiliate marketing, or referral marketing, I think there was this understanding that my core experience and expertise that I've built-in analytics, as well as online marketing, particularly around SEM and a little bit of SEO was enough for them to take a bet on me. Because of the way that we approached those core channels together, we were very, very, in line philosophically about what to do there.
I think that the approach that Nate had around wanting to scale some of the paid marketing channels, which was, at the time, one of the most important initiatives, the company was very much in line with how I was thinking about scaling it. He understood that there was a little bit of learning that I had to do to take on something like email or partner marketing, and he was okay with that.
It was this idea that the spike that I had in marketing aligned with Nate's philosophy around how to scale the online marketing program at Airbnb, and also aligned with the near-term, mid-term priorities around which channel they wanted to focus on.
Edward: You spent three years after Airbnb as an entrepreneur before coming back into the traditional workforce as CMO at Hired. Was your responsibility there the same as Airbnb with a bigger title, or was it a broader scope?
Juney: It was a broader scope. At Airbnb, I was mostly focused on online marketing—paid search, social, SEO, lifecycle partner marketing. A lot of the work that we did outside of that, I had partners working on, and they were often in different departments, so conversion rate optimization, working on many pages, or even the referral program sat in a different part of the organization.
At Hired, I ran all of it plus had a dedicated team of product managers and engineers for some of the growth initiatives, and I also was in charge of brand product marketing, pressing columns. It was a much more horizontal marketing role where I was responsible for online, which is a big part of the marketing initiative and the budget for both candidate marketing and employer marketing. But I also ran some of the more brand-oriented and pressing columns oriented on efforts as well. It was like a true CMO role, which I would not consider the Airbnb role of CMO role.
Edward: A lot of that starts becoming marketing that's not math. I assume when you're running the branding work for Hired, you weren't just plugging in those numbers into a spreadsheet and getting an answer. How did you develop those skills? How are they comfortable with you taking on the non-math parts of marketing?
Juney: I would say the reason why Hired ultimately went with me was that similar to Airbnb, there were a lot of things that Hired was focused on and were near-term priorities and strategic initiatives the company cared about.
That was a lot of the online work and the performance marketing work that I did at Airbnb, Expedia, and previous roles. But my experience as an entrepreneur at the upside, which is the Fintech company I started and sold prior to joining Hired, was definitely in the trenches experience building the brand. Thinking about how to leverage the online marketing work that I did in previous roles and ethics in my career, and feeding that into how do I build a brand from scratch?
How do I position this company? How do I think about these elements that I previously not done before, and leverage some of the experience that I had to try and grow into the role (if you will)? I think that experience, just as a whole, allowed me to understand where I can apply some of the data-driven decision-making or the analytical components of what I did into things like testing messaging.
Everything from running different ad copy, and then taking that ad copy and applying it to Media Relations headlines were the types of things that I was able to do. These are things that I have no idea what I'm doing. I'm just figuring it out, but I was able to learn these things over the course of those three-plus years I was running Upside. I think that experience and those anecdotes that I shared with the executive team, were enough to be like, okay, this guy obviously has a deep set of experiences and expertise around online marketing, and we need that.
Even from a brand perspective, messaging, and positioning, he's thoughtful about what that looks like because of his experience building his own company where he had to build a brand from scratch. Some of the lessons that he's learned can be applied to what Hired is going through as they think about evolving and scaling the brand for its constituencies on both sides of the marketplace.
Edward: I want to go back a little bit about your path towards getting there. I have a theory that things people do between their 12 and 14 affect their entire lives. What were you passionate about at that age?
Juney: Twelve, fourteen was like middle school, high school. In middle school, high school, I was definitely into what pop culture would consider nerdy things and played a lot of video games. Much to my parents’ chagrin. I tinkered a lot with computers. I was also really into music. I was in the marching band in high school, and then later on in college, I joined an a capella group.
I was into a variety of things that were artistic, but also technical. If you use the phrase art and science, I had a little bit of both. I even ended up starting a side hustle around building a web design company. I would build websites for other people and things like that. There's a lot of things that if I look back on my early childhood or during that time. Those things have been threads that have continued even to my life today.
I would say the biggest thing for me was going through that experience in high school where I was really into computers. I had friends where we would all talk about and build different configurations of systems and things like that.
I thought that would translate into a successful career in computer science and software engineering. You and I know that building computers and computational mathematics have nothing to do with each other.
For me, Penn was pretty awkward in some ways because it helped me understand, or at least, it made me realize that computer science was not really about tinkering with computers. It was really about math. It was about a lot of theories
Penn's program, at the time, was considered to be fairly theoretical and academic versus Berkeley, which was equal parts theory, but also had a lot of practical experience in education. For me, it was a bit of a wake-up call realizing that computer science and what I thought a software engineer would do had nothing to do with ultimately what I was going to experience in the professional world.
If I'm going to be 100% honest with myself, I would say building the professional skillset that I ultimately have now had very little to do with any intentionality and more with a combination of luck and just refusing to quit. Even though realizing the theoretical components around software engineering, computer science, was just not what I actively enjoyed.
I would say, I was okay at it or pretty good at it, but it wasn't something where I saw myself being 20 years from now, I'm going to be at the top of my field just exploring computer science concepts. That was absolutely not in the hundreds of things that I would want to do down the road.
I think the big thing is I suck with it. I graduated thinking that I didn't really have a future as a programmer, but given that was my degree, and those are the roles that I could probably have the highest likelihood of getting accepted for, I did it. I think that's what ended up also foreshadowing that I wasn't going to be in a role as a software engineer for that long.
Edward: No, it's fascinating. Like at the general assembly, we taught what we thought were the five most core skills for working in a tech company. Which were software engineering, UX design, marketing, product management, and data science and data analytics. I think you're the only person I've ever met in my life that has expertise in all five of those things.
You developed this interesting skill sack that I think has helped you or hopefully has helped you, but almost pushed you towards entrepreneurship, where I think that's where it's probably where it's most valued. Your first stab into large scale entrepreneurship was Upside. Usually, when you start a company like that, you're optimizing marketing for the product, but you reversed it in that situation?
Juney: Yeah, actually, it's a great point. Briefly, Upside was a financial technology company. We helped registered investment advisors, mostly startups to early-mid-market SMB, to early mid-market RIAs develop an online presence and be able to deploy their advice online.
We started out thinking actually about the product as a consumer product. We were starting to build that out. As you or the audience may know, there are companies like Betterment and Wealthfront that had started to solve for the direct to consumer proposition. We were building a product that had a unique angle but still really focused on direct to consumer in the very beginning.
We're starting to see that the market was getting crowded around B2C. We were also seeing—in terms of the conversations we were having with everybody from investors to potential end-users to just a broader ecosystem—that there was this gap that wasn't being filled.
We had switched to B2B as an experiment, as a pilot to see what response or what interaction we would get from this audience of RIAs. Originally, we were positioning the product and the company in a very boring way. We're like financial software for advisors with a lack of personality, a lack of messaging or positioning at all, and we were running through a bunch of tests in AdWords.
I was also using that as a way to determine what would our broader messaging be to our audience from a pure information architecture standpoint? How do we actually push the company in a world we're like financial software for advisors isn't just going to cut it? It's not going to differentiate itself from all of the other players out there, whether they were legacy players from generations ago to potential competitors in our MBA peer group.
We were testing this ad out, which was beat the "robo-advisors". It played into this Zeitgeist at a time where RIAs and people—who were seeing Betterment and Wealthfront start to scale—becoming nervous about their own position in that ecosystem. This phrase beat the "robo-advisors". I remember having just an order of magnitude, better performance metrics, and we're like, there's something here.
We ended up using that phrase everywhere. We tested it on our homepage. It was like our hero message. We did some testing around how to pitch reporters and publications, and we found out every time we use the phrase, beat the "robo-advisors", it would just work.
It just made us realize, wow, not only was our product, maybe more appropriate for this audience that was seeking other solutions, but our messaging tapped into something. It tapped into this idea that there were new players in the ecosystem, and you yourself need to do something. But as an individual RIA or as an individual firm, what are you going to do?
You're going to partner with a company like Upside, who can help you beat the competition at their own game. This oriented not just our messaging, but also our roadmap, how we thought about what types of features we would build for this community, and ultimately, how we engage them beyond just things like press and thought leadership.
It was how do we interact with them from a sales perspective? How do we interact with them from a customer success perspective? All of that was rewritten because of some of those early tests we did. This goes back to my earlier point about sometimes I ended up using a data-driven or optimization focused paradigm for something that's as disconnected from that part of marketing as the press, but those are some of the examples of things that I did with the skillset that I had. Having not built a brand before, having not done messaging and positioning before and it ended up working out, at least in that situation.
Edward: What are your productivity tricks? What do you do to be productive that most people don't do?
Juney: I think the biggest thing for me has been, I keep a physical journal, a notebook, and I use all of the online tools that everybody else does, whether it's Asana, Reminders, or different note-taking apps. I found that using a notebook and writing things in them gives you a level of like a tactile feel, and it makes it so that it burrows into your brain a little bit more.
I use a program called bullet journaling, which is a very specific methodology that also appeals to a little bit of design orientedness, where there are specific elements that you used to define whether a task needs to be completed, it needs to be moved into a different category, or if it needs to be pushed out further ahead or into a different section.
That's been helpful because, for me, there's a lot going on running a company as a CEO of any size company is challenging. You have to context shift a lot. You're doing everything from sales to doing account management, to marketing, to finance, to operations, and back to sales, sometimes within an hour of each other.
I would say being laser-focused on using that bullet journal and making sure that it is the thing that I reference all the time—I carry it around with me—has been helpful from a productivity standpoint. Also, recognizing that wherever you're storing that information, your natural tendencies are going to dictate how well or how not well, you use them (so to speak). Also, recognizing that you should lean into those things.
If you are somebody that needs to use Asana organizationally and there are things that you value around Asana around note-taking or task management, but you also know that it's just not going to be that place that you're going to go to all the time. That's okay.
Just find the thing that works for you and make sure that for Asana, you're using it for the benefit of the company and the need that it has. But also making sure not to force yourself to use that platform if you also know that things are definitely going to fall through the cracks because it's just not designed for you. Also, use something like a notebook even to be able to manage all the things that you need to do.
Edward: Juney, this has been fantastic. We're going to continue this tomorrow with a dive into hired.com. Thank you.
Juney: Thanks.
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