Hector Hughes

speaker

245 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 21 Jul

Hector Hughes’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Embracing Marketing Mistakes · EP 120: We Fired 30 People and Nothing Changed · 21 Jul 2026 podcast

And if I look back, what I was saying earlier around most

work that happens is a waste of time like that startup really crystallized that lesson for me because I look back at what I did that year and I could have done I could have done none of it and probably nothing would have changed and actually as the startup we went through a big restructuring around the time I left and we got rid of a 10 person marketing team and most of the 20 person sales team and nothing changed the numbers didn't change at all which is crazy that the sales didn't change

So it just shows that, like, whatever we were doing was just work for work's sake.

Busy fools.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

And the other big learning from that phase was, like, I spent so much time in that head of growth role trying to do all the things that I thought, you know, we should be doing, like, optimizing the website and doing SEO and all this shit.

But, like, the big issue was...

much more fundamental which was like as a company we were trying to be everything to everyone uh and so it was trying to push water up a hill doing anything downstream of that like there was this fundamental issue that we needed to sort out uh and i just spent all of my head all of my time with my head buried in the sand messing around with a few things there's a great question there's a great quote the uh it's better to have an approximate answer to the right question than the exact answer to the wrong question

And I think we spend so much time focusing on the things we can track.

So conversion rate optimization is a classic thing that we spent all this time trying to do these website tests, built this absolute Frankenstein of a website because it was quantifiable.

And I could point to it at the end of the month and say, hey, we move this conversion rate from here to here.

But the much more murky question was like, what do we even stand for as a company and who we're trying to sell to?

And that was a piece of work we just didn't do.

So one of the big learnings from that was like what you are trying to sell is so important and actually the product massively dictates how well you can market it.

So all of the decisions we've made with Unplugged obviously have this very mission-driven side to it, but it's also like everything we do, how do we do something that when you hear about it or see it or try it, instead of going away and telling two people, you go and tell 20 people.

Because if you can do that, it just adds this massive multiplier for everything you do, whether that's going viral on social media or generating word of mouth or whatever it is.

So I think we've always gone for this hype approach of just doing something that can be as talked about as possible.

And yeah, I think a lot of that is just actually standing for something and being different and just doing something that you think should be done rather than...

over trying to validate ideas.

I really can't get on board with this whole idea validation thing where everyone's testing all these ideas.

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