Verified Expert Growth Marketing Agency: Right Side Up

Right Side Up is not your typical growth marketing agency. As a former entrepreneur and in-house growth marketer for startups like Eventbrite, founder Tyler Elliston says he created RSU as a way to help his former self. RSU recruits a collective of expert growth marketers and partners them with various companies, but unlike a traditional agency, RSU actively encourages growth teams to hire their top talent.

It may seem counterintuitive, but two and a half years later, with more than 250 marketers in their “growth collective”, and having helped 120+ companies, Tyler seems to be fulfilling his vision. Learn more about RSU’s unique approach to growth marketing for startups.

On what makes Right Side Up unique

“They can support individual channel marketing needs across all levels of seniority and sophistication, as well as a full-fledged interim VP of Marketing needs.” Micah Moreau, SF, VP, Growth Marketing, DoorDash

“There are a number of lessons that I learned as an in-house marketer and a founder, that have become the underpinning for how we operate the business. Great performance comes from great marketers, not from companies or brands. It’s really about the person doing the work. So, our goal is to find the best marketers as they are today, instead of training junior talent, which is a common agency practice.”

Advice to startup founders

“A lot of what we consider growth marketing is simply scaling a one to one conversation with a prospective customer. So, if you can get a prospect in front of you and you can persuade them, how do you do that? How do you talk about it? That’s your positioning. What are you offering them?

That’s your value prop. I would recommend doing one on one conversations at a small scale before you try scaling it. Be in touch with your customer and then think about growth as automating what’s happening on a very small scale.”

 

Below, you’ll find the rest of the founder reviews, the full interview, and more details like pricing and fee structures. This profile is part of our ongoing series covering startup growth marketing agencies with whom founders love to work, based on this survey and our own research. The survey is open indefinitely, so please fill it out if you haven’t already.


Interview with Right Side Up founder Tyler Elliston

Yvonne Leow: Tell me a little bit about how you got into growth and why you decided to start Right Side Up.

Tyler Elliston: I came to the Bay Area in 2006 because I wanted to help build tech companies. I went to Berkeley to get my MBA and basically gave myself two years to figure out how to best plug into the startup community.

I eventually started a company and raised venture capital, but I really struggled to crack customer acquisition, and of all the hats I wore as an entrepreneur, growth marketing felt particularly fun and challenging. So, I went on this quest to find the answers to customer acquisition, and it was difficult to find people who could help me unlock growth channels. I often heard, “Oh, I did this for my company,” but it wouldn’t work for us.

After that experience, I kept focusing and learning about growth. For my next job, I led performance marketing for an early stage startup and built my own skill set as a growth marketer until I became an expert. I continued to seek out the best growth marketers.

I was constantly trying to learn, like “Okay, what channels are working, when and why do they work, and possibly most importantly, how do I evaluate who does or doesn’t know what they’re talking about.” The most notable startup I worked at was Eventbrite, where I was leading performance marketing globally.

Right Side Up is a company that I started two and a half years ago, and at its core, it is my effort to help founders who are where I was 10 years ago. On a mission to find people that can help them grow their business, or give them really hard to swallow feedback about their product/market fit, which is frankly the feedback I needed as a founder.

For in-house growth leaders, which is a role I was in for a number of years, we want to make them a rockstar. We want to help them prioritize the right things at the right time and provide staffing support along the way.

Yvonne Leow: The structure for Right Side Up is pretty unique. Can you talk a little bit about why you decided to create a company with marketing residents, and how partnerships work?

Tyler Elliston: There are a number of lessons that I learned as an in-house marketer and a founder, that have become the underpinning for how we operate the business. Great performance comes from great marketers, not from companies or brands. It’s really about the person doing the work.

So, our goal is to find the best marketers as they are today, instead of training junior talent, which is a common agency practice. We want to find the person who has cracked Snapchat and is spending half a million dollars a month on a channel that many think won’t work on a direct response basis. We want that marketer.

We’re very marketer centric. This is why we always put our talent in front of a prospective client before ever asking them to sign an agreement. It’s not like you sign an agreement with us and then you get whoever you get.

We want a client to know who they’re working with and believe in the person that’s actually going to be doing the work. We never obfuscate it. There’s never anyone in the background who the client doesn’t know about.

Another truth that influences how we operate is that we’re a collection of specialists. Growth marketing has become increasingly specialized, and specialists usually outperform generalists in growth. We don’t want to be in a position where someone comes to us and says, “Hey, I want this very particular skill set,” but because we have somebody on payroll, we feel pressured to give them that person.

It might be kind of the right fit, but it’s not perfect. We want to get the perfect fit. That’s ultimately why we operate as a collective of marketers. Some of them are full-time with us, but many of them are not. We do that specifically so that we can tailor the staffing approach to the needs of the client.

Yvonne Leow: How long is each engagement with a partner?

Tyler Elliston: We don’t require any duration contractually. We typically are hoping that an engagement will last a few months for at least 10 hours a week. It’s not a hard requirement, but it is a stake in the ground that we talk about internally. In practice, we often parachute in for a particular problem, we help them solve it, and then we often transition our work to an in-house team member.

Another belief that we have is that in-house marketers often outperform agencies and freelancers, so we don’t want to be a barrier to that. We want to help our clients build their growth teams, so when they have a team in place, we want to help train them, and ultimately when they’re in a good place to execute well, we want to hand it off.

We often say we look for longevity in partnership, not in project. We have clients where we’ve done over five different engagements. Each one lasted anywhere between two to nine months. We’re not opposed to a project ending as long as we’ve accomplished our goal and someone capable is taking it on in-house. Then we’re happy to say, “Okay, great. Tell us what else you need. Let us help with something else.”

Yvonne Leow: So, you’re going to find me the best growth marketer you can find, then you’re going to plant them in my company, teach me everything they’ve learned about the industry, and give me the option to hire them. I’m sure a lot of people would love to work with RSU, but what are you looking for when it comes to potential clients?

Tyler Elliston: The only hard requirement we have is that we want to be treated like a partner, not a vendor. We tend to get really invested in the projects that we’re participating in. We’re an extension of their in-house team. Some clients are great about it and treat us like a partner, and a few clients have had negative experiences with agencies and vendors, and that’s made a true partnership difficult. We’ve worked with over 120 companies in the last two and a half years. At least 115 of them have been a delight.

We also want to work with anyone that has a tough growth problem, and at the very least, we want to have a phone call and we want to give them free advice. We regularly tell companies, “You don’t need any growth marketing right now. Focus on product market fit.”

We had a company, which did end up hiring us, but it was a year after our first conversation. It was a mobile app company and their LTV was something like $0.35. I was like, “Well, there’s no way this is going to be ROI positive. Don’t do this yet. You don’t need us now. Come back when your LTV is higher.”

They came back when it was like $0.50. I told them, “No, keep going.” Well, they came back when it was over $1.25. They hired us and we did some testing that was ROI positive.

The conversations that commonly lead to engagements are series A through series C companies that are often moving from a phase where they’ve had generalists doing everything, and they want to move to, “Okay, now we really want to be best in class.

We’ve had this scrappy three-person team, now we just raised $50 million dollars and now we want to go from three to 5, 10, or 20. We know that’s going to take a long time. So hey, can you help us A) craft the growth organization we need to build and B) can you jump in on this or that project and help us reach excellence in a way that our generalists can’t?”

In terms of company size, there’s really nothing too small. I would say that product-market fit is really important for growth marketing. Yes, we can give a seed stage company somebody that can run ads just to get people going through their funnel, but that’s performance marketing for the sake of customer development and research. That’s not really growth marketing.

Yvonne Leow: What is your business model as an agency? How does it work with the collective?

Tyler Elliston: The most typical pricing is an hours-based retainer. It’s not value based so if you say, “How much does it cost?” We’re not going to answer, “Well, how much is it worth to you?” Instead, it’s “Hey, for what you’re describing that you need, we think this will take 12 hours a week.

That’s an estimate, but that’s what we think.” So we’ll do a retainer based on 12 hours a week at X dollars an hour, and if we’re routinely going under it, then we’ll come back and reduce it. If we’re routinely going over it, we’ll come back and ask for more and you can make the decision at the time if you want to do it.

Yvonne Leow: Are your marketers embedded in a client’s office space?

Tyler Elliston: They’re typically welcomed almost as a part-time member of the client team. Sometimes it’s on site, sometimes it’s not. Sometimes they have a company email address, sometimes they don’t. It’s up to the client in terms of what that engagement looks like.

Yvonne Leow: How would you define success for your clients?

Tyler Elliston: Usually it’s one of two goals. One is either learning where it’s like, “Hey, we don’t know if this will work, we just want to execute it with excellence and make sure we don’t get a false negative.” Or it might be they’ve never done podcast advertising but think it’ll work. We can help them answer that question.

In other cases, people bring us in and say, “We’re already spending a quarter million a month on Facebook. We’re running into this problem and we really want you to help us figure out what it’ll take to get our positive ROI to a million a month.” In that case, the goal is very quantitative. If we do not help them get there, then we have failed.

Yvonne Leow: What’s your advice for startup founders when it comes to growth?

Tyler Elliston: First of all, a lot of what we consider growth marketing is simply scaling a one to one conversation with a prospective customer. So, if you can get a prospect in front of you and you can persuade them, how do you do that? How do you talk about it? That’s your positioning. What are you offering them? That’s your value prop. Is your tactic to use endorsement through podcasts or terrestrial radio, or affiliates?

There are a lot of ways to approach it so I would recommend doing one on one conversations at a small scale before you try scaling it. Be in touch with your customer and then think about growth as automating what’s happening on a very small scale.

Two would be to test, test, test. There are a lot of norms out there because they’re true for 70% of the crowd. You may not be part of the 70% and you might find that particularly relevant in emerging channels. Always test, test, test.

The third point is somewhat counter to number two. You don’t have the time and resources to test everything. So, be smart about how you sequence and prioritize those tests. To me, that is one of the hardest questions. And that is where I really do recommend seeking advice from somebody that can pattern match and say “Okay, yeah you might be in the 10% of people that can get Twitter to work for prospecting, but it’s much better odds that you’re in the 60% of people that Snapchat works when targeting 20 to 25-year-olds.”

Yvonne Leow: Cool. What are you most excited about when it comes to the future of RSU?

Tyler Elliston: It is incredibly gratifying to help an early-stage founder and give them the answers that they need. In my view, there is a sea of options that will find ways to take your money and I cherish the role of not being that. What I did not expect is that it is also incredibly gratifying to be on the talent side of helping people, who are often moonlighters, work with amazing companies. These are people who have thought about freelancing but are scared to take the leap. They don’t know how they’re going to get deal flow, and we’ll say, “Look, you’re the best at this. You can do it, and we’ll pull you into all of these projects.”


Founder Recommendations

“Right Side Up has been an excellent value-added partner in social and digital marketing, website and e-commerce development.” – President in St. Louis, Missouri

They can support individual channel marketing needs across all levels of seniority and sophistication, as well as a full-fledged interim VP of Marketing needs.– Micah Moreau, SF, VP, Growth Marketing, DoorDash

“They are able to find and vet highly talented digital performance marketers. Their ability to probe upfront to assess talent and the flexible model of offering hourly work with the option to hire offers us the ability scale and hire rapidly. There are a lot of skilled workers in the Bay area but understanding where they can fit in and true area expertise is hard to do in a basic interview setting, especially if you’re starting from scratch. Right Side Up knows how to get to the best.” – Michelle Lisowski, San Jose, CA, Global Head of Marketing, Uber

“In less than 45 days, Right Side Up provided us with a scalable growth channel that we never thought was possible. Our MoM growth doubled and we’re overachieving on our forecasts.” – Dana Dunford, SF, CEO, Hemlane

“Helping us (especially me) stand up growth. The areas I marked above as “none” should really be “N/A”. I’m sure they know a lot more, but I just haven’t worked with them in these areas.” – Head of Brand Marketing in SF

“RSU has been an instrumental part of our company for a year and a half.  They have led all of our paid acquisition efforts, as well as supplemented a lot of our content, social and email efforts.  With their team we have grown our user base to hit aggressive investor goals. Additionally, they are true experts in their field and excellent advisors on all things marketing when needed.” – Erica Joy Labovitz, SF, Chief Revenue Officer, The Baby Box Co.

“They have a strong network of marketers who can plug into an existing business operation very quickly. As I’m building out my marketing org at Yelp, I need specific expertise and I often can’t wait for FTEs, and Right Side Up fills that need really well.” – Dan Kimball, SF, SVP of Marketing, Yelp

“Incredible partners to help us scale our channel base. They truly work as an embedded team of marketers within our org.” – Will Flaherty, NYC, VP of Growth, Ro

“Great at demand testing.  Excellent at distilling data into useful bites and shareable, easy to understand charts. Super responsive and easy to work with and manage.” – Founder in Residence in SF

“Launched our paid marketing/inbound from the ground up.” – Owner in Denver, CO

“RSU did a complete audit of our marketing strategy and execution. The deliverable and actionable steps is by far the most in-depth I have ever received. Not only did they define strengths and opportunities, but how we could immediately improve specific areas that resulted in better metrics and ROI.” – Walt Conrad, Phoenix, AZ, VP Sales and Marketing, Nexa

“Right Side Up is a startup’s best friend. They helped me build a growth marketing team who set up various acquisition channels quickly. Using their contractors, you can run a part-time program that proves ROI and gives you confidence for a full-time investment.” – Serena Satyasai, SF, VP of Marketing and SMB Sales, Plastiq

“I seriously cannot say enough good things about the Right Side Up team. We had an opening on our eCommerce Sales desk and they quickly stepped up to provide a SWOT analysis of our eCommerce strategy, an actionable roadmap to start growing the business and out of the box thinking to stretch our sales beyond our growth goals.

I am a traditional Marketer without much Sales experience so when I was named as the lead of our eCommerce sales department, I was in over my head. I was also down 3 headcounts so the workload was overwhelming. Right Side Up helped me set direction, managed the execution, and identified next steps, without me even asking. The team is habitually 3-5 steps ahead of me and not only makes me feel confident in our direction, but also makes me look good in front of the Board. We are consistently beating Plan and our growth rate has increased 50% vs our rate before they were on the business.

Where I’m finding the most value is that this team thinks out of the box to grow the business profitably while staying on brand and on strategy. I don’t want to divulge our secrets, but basically the “traditional tactics” like banner ads, search, etc. can be left to our competition. Right Side Up has brought very cost effective ideas that are breaking through the clutter to reach our target consumer in a way that our competition isn’t. It’s helping a very small brand like ours grab the attention of new shoppers and the results prove it’s working. This past quarter I came in well over Plan and on budget.

The team started just helping manage eCommerce but has quickly taken over additional work including Board meeting documents, website development, CRM, paid social media, content development, data and analytics and even more. They are my first call when I want feedback on new marketing campaign, have a question on the industry or need someone to bounce ideas off of. What’s even better is that they’ve somehow taken on all of this additional work, but still come in at or under budget on their hours.

Right Side Up is the most versatile, strategic, efficient agency I have ever worked with in my 10 years in CPG.” – Laura Brooks, Chester, MO, Director of Marketing, Solid Gold Pet

“Establishing clear practices with reporting, marketing analytics, measurement, channel-level performance, tracking, etc. The team at Right Side Up is incredible.” – Director of Growth Marketing in SF

“Right Side Up has been a strategic partner, providing as-needed expertise and resources to fill gaps in our team as we scale our business.  They’ve provided lifecycle marketing strategy and execution until we hired a full-time role, provide ongoing SEO consulting on an on-demand basis, and have been instrumental in growing new channels like podcasts. Their flexible approach makes it particularly easy to bring them onboard to make a big impact to the business.” – Dan Visnick, SF, Chief Marketing Officer, HoneyBook

“Most marketing agencies are designed to prevent you from poaching their talent. This is annoying as you build deep relationships with key folks and at some point bringing that function in house makes sense. Right Side Up is designed to put this notion on its head by encouraging you to poach the talent. We found an amazing growth marketer to join our team through Right Side Up.” – Justin Edward Goldman, Philadelphia, PA, Co-founder and CEO, RenoFi

“Right Side Up has helped us dive significant growth through paid social and affiliate programs. Their unique model to place highly specialized functional experts on specific areas of our business has enabled us to scale quickly and drive results.” – Doug Sechrist, SF, VP, Demand and Growth, Zenefits