Product-Focused Marketing Magic & Crowdfunding Culture with Co-Founder & CMO of Chip, Alex Latham – Episode 19

Being a successful CMO takes a determined individual with a great skill set, but there’s much more to learn from those who do so alongside being a Co-Founder…

The resilience that Alex Latham has shown is exhibited marvellously in Chip, one of the UK’s fastest-growing FinTech startups with a huge customer base of over 200,000 users. 

In this month’s Scale of One to Tech, we learn the resilience and collaboration that makes an admirable Co-Founder, the product-focused approach we’re yet to see from many CMOs, and how to create content that stands head and shoulders above the rest of an increasingly competitive FinTech market.

This episode covers

• Key qualities of a CMO, and what to look for in a great Co-Founder

• Chip’s remarkable crowdfunding campaigns, raising over £30m
• Standing out in an increasingly competitive FinTech market through innovative content
• The difficulties that shaped Alex & Chip, and proved their commitment to customer experience

This month’s episode is sponsored by WeDiscover. WeDiscover has supported high growth companies like carwow, Thread, fy!, and many more. As specialists in paid search and marketing technology, WeDiscover aims to be the most consistent source of growth for their clients. If you’re a scale-up with multi-million-pound growth targets, or an already big and successful company looking to invest smarter, our friends at WeDiscover we’ll make a great extension to your team. You can click the link in the show notes or go to https://www.we-discover.com/.

Links & references

Alex Marriner: https://www.linkedin.com/in/digitalmarketingrecruitment/

Acquire Digital Talent: 

https://www.linkedin.com/company/digital-marketing-recruitment-london/

https://www.acquiredigitaltalent.com/

Alex Latham: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-latham-98498449/

Chip: https://www.linkedin.com/company/get-chip/

The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hard-Thing-About-Things-Building/dp/0062273205

Episode highlights

“Before Chip, I had basically messed around in a few different startups. I always knew that marketing and startups was my thing, so I did a lot of marketing in very small tech companies, and became this whole jack-of-all-trades marketing guy for tech companies.” – 5:20 – Alex Latham

“At the end of the meeting with Simon, he basically said to me that Pineapple Punk sounds really cool, but I’d much rather work with you on Chip, then I had to fess up that it was actually just me, that Pineapple Punk didn’t really exist and it was just me. Luckily, he thought that was quite a ballsy thing to do. He could have laughed me out the room, but six years on we’re still Co-Founding Chip. ” – 8:45 – Alex Latham

“The last crowdfunding we did was in September last year, we raised £11m, and at one point it was so popular that we brought down Crowdcube’s servers, which was a very stressful half hour while that happened. It’s blowing my mind how popular crowdfunding at Chip is. It’s really part of our culture, it’s part of what we do – we want to bring users on board and into our journey.” – 13:15 – Alex Latham

“As Co-Founder my job’s more 360 in terms of looking at the overall strategy of the business. But I also think, as a marketer, it enables me to concentrate on the product, which a lot of CMOS probably don’t do which I think is a mistake. I think CMOS should be focusing on the product they’re selling.” – 17:00 – Alex Latham

“I spend a lot of time with my team focusing on customer acquisition, be it through our bog standard channels, but also optimising and then building a strategy around that. For the CMO, that’s super important, that’s the bread and butter.” – 27:50 – Alex Latham

“More specific things I judge my marketing team on are demonstrating creativity, demonstrating execution to very high standards, and demonstrating the use of data to form whether that creative decision was the right one. I think we’ve cut marketing down to its bare bones. That is what we do, right? We come up with creative ideas, and we take them to market and see if they’re any good at all.” – 31:45 – Alex Latham

“If someone is starting a business, go for it – it’s one of the most amazing experiences possible, and you’ll learn a hell of a lot, but you have to have that resilience. You have to be willing to accept that this is gonna be tough, but give it a crack and absolutely go for it.” – 35:50 – Alex Latham