Jalin Somaiya:
infinite photography
and squashing the bell curve
Jalin’s a serial CMO who runs marketing transformations for scale-ups.
With analytical precision and creative flair, he’s worked for a series of unicorns and soon-icorns, from payments disruptor Mollie and neobank Tide to the remote working platform Omnipresent - leaving lean teams and transformed metrics behind him.
I met Jalin when we worked together for search software giant Algolia - and found a real mentor, who’s transformed the way I think about lots of aspects of my work. In fact, he’s a big influence on many people: sitting on boards, advising start-ups and publishing thought-leadership - like this viral playbook.
So, I started by asking where his approach comes from.
“You should experiment more frequently and more radically”
“I’m interested in what we unlock when we combine the analytical and the intuitive.
I remember finding, as a teenager, a book about photography and an SLR camera my parents had bought in the 1970s.
I got excited about both the technical side - f-stops, shutter speeds, film speeds - and intuitive, creative choices. How much contrast? How much colour? The combination fired my imagination. It became my thing.
Marketing thrives on the same mixture.
Data and commercial understanding on the one hand, aesthetic judgement on the other.
You work analytically to establish the right goals and metrics. That’s a challenge in itself: pretty much every team I’ve worked with over the years has - at some point - optimised for the wrong outcomes and struggled with measurement. Then, on the creative side, you start with ideation - the broader the better. And for great copy and design, you need flair and intuition.”
photo: Jalin Somaiya
“That dramatic mix of demands is one of the reasons that marketing - although it’s built on seemingly simple things like ads, landing pages and emails - is so difficult to do well.
And so important commercially. Any funnel - any sequence of events leading to a sale - is a set of conversion percentages multiplied together. But the percentages vary dramatically depending on the quality of execution - the creative side. The right creative interventions at the right points of the funnel can improve sales volumes by most of an order of magnitude.
So the question becomes - how do you develop the most effective interventions as quickly and cheaply as possible?”
“A lot of us develop our ideas as if iteration were difficult and expensive. But it isn’t anymore.
To go back to photography - film used to be expensive, and took days and days to process. Whereas now, you can take an infinite number of photos at zero cost and ditch 99% of them if you want to.
That totally changes how you should take photos. If you think of all the photos you take, plotted as a bell curve - with lots that are middling and a few really good or totally awful ones at either end - you’ve got three ways to increase the number of really good photos you take.
You can move the bell curve to the right by becoming a better photographer. But that’s difficult and takes time. You can take a lot of photos, throw 99% of them away and just keep the best 1%. Which is what people are starting to do.
Or you can do high-variance photography.
That means you take weird photos. Very low or high angles, drastically under-exposed or over-exposed. You'll get grain and blur -. but one in ten will be an absolute winner. That’s a better ratio than you’ll get if you approach things just with brute force.
Those last two tactics are the statistically rational response to a world where photos cost you nothing - make your bell curve bigger by taking a lot more photos, and make the tails fatter by taking more risks”
photos: Jalin Somaiya
“In marketing, and frankly, most areas of life, we need to embrace that sort of statistical approach.
We try to get things slowly, surely right the first time. Whereas if bites at the cherry cost very little, as often in the digital world, you should experiment more frequently and more radically.
Product teams tend to do this a lot better than marketing teams.
If you go to a CPO and ask them whether we can build this particular feature and do it soon, even as the CEO of the company, the response will be - ‘OK, we’ll run a prioritisation process, and if it gets through, an early version will make next quarter’s roadmap.’
If you make an equivalent request to a marketing team, the answer will either be emotive or based on experience at other companies and in other situations.
Really, the answer in the second scenario should be the same as the first. That’s why I run my marketing teams with roadmaps and sprints: a stripped-down version of how product teams work. And I redefine as much of the team’s work as possible as experiments and launches, rather than slightly formless business-as-usual.”
“These iterative processes are very powerful.
As a species, we once lived in a world where iteration was slow and costly. Now it’s cheap and fast, we should be iterating constantly - even though that goes against our intuitions. It’s worth it because iterative improvement is, ultimately, exponential improvement.
It’s how the best web products work, particularly those with large audiences that let you get to statistically meaningful test results faster, which improve at sometimes frightening speed. Social media sites, with their huge audiences, are testing and iterating constantly. The impressive - and scary - consequence is that the average time a user spends on TikTok daily is now measured in hours, not minutes.
I actually ran my home renovation like this.
I worked with the architect to test and iterate - on-screen, then with physical models and by building incrementally. We had no idea where we'd end up but trusted the process. We also worked directly with lots of sub-contractors rather than one potentially inflexible main contractor.
It was hard work for the two years of the renovation. But the result, which is richer and better than anything we could have come up with initially, is something we derive pleasure from every day. The project was short-listed for an architectural award and the architect’s given talks to the architecture community about the way we worked.”
photo: Jalin Somaiya
“My career’s had three parts, so far
I cut my teeth in management consulting, which taught me to speak the language of the CEO and the CFO. Then I spent seven years across ops, strategy and marketing at Google. And in the last decade I've been interim CMO to some really interesting small and mid-sized companies.
I’ve now run marketing transformations for ten scale-ups - getting their metrics moving in the right direction faster. I do it through that same mixture of maths and art, strategising and iteration.
As an interim CMO, when I walk into the company, I'll know less about the product and audience than anyone in the building.
I bridge the gap through data and process, initially. I'm a bit more rigorous, whether it's about quantitative or quantitative data, than most marketers. And on the process side, I run my marketing teams using that stripped-down agile methodology - iterating and crowd-sourcing ideas to drive faster improvement.
In the next phase, I develop and test hypotheses about how marketing’s going to win for the company and structure efforts explicitly around that strategy. And I often refresh company positioning, to improve conversion rates through the funnel.
My sweet spot is large VC-backed scale-ups, because they’ve got size and complexity on the one hand - and a growth imperative on the other.
When a business is spending tens of millions a year on marketing, their team's going to be substantial, with interesting specialisations and processes. And if they’re backed by VC money, their valuation’s predicated on high growth.
It’s a tricky combination, and I thrive on it.”
Find out more about Jalin’s work and how to get in touch with him at www.jalinsomaiya.com