22 - Challenges With Short Customer Journeys in the Baby Industry with Aaron Pollack, CMO at Nanit

Aaron Pollack, CMO at Nanit, joined me on the Modern Startup Marketing podcast.

Prior to joining Nanit in 2017, Aaron held various marketing roles at global brands such as Canary, BlackBerry, GreatCall and SiriusXM.

Nanit was founded in 2016, has ~65 people, and is based out of NYC. They JUST finished raising Series C! ($75M total)

Nanit has created an HD baby monitor that lets you track your baby’s sleep, breathing motion, and growth. So you get the sleep analysis, personalized tips, and immediate alerts, and of course the 1080p overhead view of your baby. And there’s even a digital baby album that's tracking milestones that you can share with your family. An entire baby monitoring solution.

P.S. Aaron doesn't have any kids, and that may be the secret to being so successful with his marketing and growth efforts - not falling back on assumptions and continuously learning more from Nanit's buyers.

Here's what we hit on:

Aaron's "lean and mean" marketing team of 7 people and what they're responsible for;

Nanit as both a product + SaaS company and how they think about pricing;

Using stage + lifestyle as part of their targeting efforts;

How they're using Pinterest successfully (vs. just the typical Facebook and Insta);

Working with partners like The Bump that have highly targeted marketing capabilities;

Using Criteo for retargeting;

Some challenges within the category (customer journey is 4-5 months!) which makes marketing/educating difficult;

How Nanit's personalized sleep coaching for parents increases WOM;

How parents and the category has changed over the last 5 years so that more people want this (pricier) baby monitoring solution;

How Aaron helped take the company from Series B to Series C;

Some of Aaron's top marketing ideas;

Why the pandemic fundamentally changed the type of plan consumers buy (more than 25% of users are not parents!);

How Aaron and team keep their marketing fresh (HINT: there's a Super Parents group);

People make recommendations based on what works for them - most of the time it doesn't work for Nanit;

What's wrong with being obsessed with "going viral" (HINT: going viral should never be the goal but can be a nice result);

Aaron's "favorite failure";

Aaron's secret special ingredient for his winning chili recipe.

You can find Aaron on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/aaronpollack

Find out more about Nanit: www.nanit.com

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You can find Anna on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/annafurmanov or visit this website: www.furmanovmarketing.com

Thanks for listening!