Jun 15, 2022 · 1h 1m · news
Adam Fishman: Takeaways from Lyft and Patreon; How to Build Viral Loops | 20VC #897 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this episode of 20VC, growth expert Adam Fishman joins Harry Stebbings to discuss his journey at Lyft, Patreon, and Wyzant, sharing frameworks on building growth loops, scaling and onboarding growth teams, and balancing data with customer empathy.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Harry holds 18.7% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Harry as informed peer 2.6 Guest teaching 4.6 Guest disagreement 0.4 Harry pushing back 1.4
speaking balance: gold is Harry, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 25:42 Rejecting Traditional Executive Interviews
Adam directly rejects traditional leadership interview processes as fundamentally broken, insisting that interviewing candidates on the job or working side-by-side is the only true way to assess executive fit.
Hardest push from Harry ▶ 4:38 Challenging Speed vs. Failure LessonsHarry refuses Adam's premise that fast-moving companies can tolerate frequent failure, challenging whether extreme speed prevents growth teams from extracting meaningful lessons and causes repeated mistakes.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 15:33 Defining Growth Loops from ScratchHarry openly confesses he pretended to know what growth loops meant in prior talks, prompting Adam to deliver an foundational breakdown of qualitative and quantitative loops using Lyft's referral model.
Harry holds his own ▶ 54:48 Claiming Authority on Media StrategyHarry steps away from questioning to forcefully assert his own domain expertise in media and content creation, calling most corporate media strategies fundamentally boring and ineffective.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Harry as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Harry pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Banter and Warm-Up: The "Bribes" of Show Prep | 1 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Harry and Adam open with playful banter regarding mutual contact Greylock VC Mike before Adam outlines his career transition from quantitative marketing into early startup growth at Zimride/Lyft and Patreon. | |
| Key Takeaways: Speed at Lyft and Customer Reverence at Patreon | 3 | 3 | 0 | 3 | Adam highlights speed at Lyft and creator reverence at Patreon as key takeaways. Harry probes whether moving with extreme speed prevents learning from failure, which Adam resolves by detailing structured experimentation and thorough documentation. | |
| Balancing Data and Intuition in Growth Decisions | 2 | 4 | 0 | 1 | Adam explains why relying solely on quantitative data alienated creators at Patreon and argues for blending quant with qual insights. He then defines the growth function as connecting users to existing core product value. | |
| Hiring Strategy: Growth Leaders vs. Growth Juniors | 3 | 5 | 0 | 1 | Harry asks whether startups should hire tenured growth heads or junior reps. Adam details why junior hires become order takers and senior hires merely delegate, recommending a director-level player-coach sweet spot. | |
| Growth Team Structure: Standalone vs. Embedded | 3 | 5 | 0 | 1 | Harry references Facebook's standalone growth org model. Adam clarifies that org structure depends on acquisition and product dynamics, comparing the tradeoffs of standalone teams versus embedded functional roles. | |
| Mapping the Mechanics of Growth Loops | 0 | 6 | 1 | 0 | Harry self-deprecatingly admits he nodded along previously without knowing what a growth loop was. Adam appreciates the humility and breaks down self-contained cycles using Lyft's financially incentivized referral loop as an example. | |
| Optimizing, Sequencing, and Plateauing of Loops | 3 | 4 | 0 | 0 | Harry asks operational questions about optimal step counts and loop plateaus. Adam recommends keeping loops simple at 3-6 steps and explains how user-generated loops achieve higher ceilings than paid or company-generated channels. | |
| Common Pitfalls in Creating Growth Loops | 2 | 5 | 0 | 1 | Adam points out that companies fail by assuming everything is a loop or spreading focus across too many loops. He illustrates this with a failed referral loop at tutoring platform Wyzant caused by parental social stigma. | |
| A Step-by-Step Hiring Process for Growth Professionals | 4 | 6 | 2 | 3 | Adam offers a hot take that traditional leadership interviews are broken, then outlines a structured assessment process involving quantitative tests, prioritization, behavioral fit, and reference checks. Harry presses for exact methods to filter out candidate hubris. | |
| Designing an Effective Onboarding Plan | 2 | 5 | 0 | 0 | Harry highlights how poorly most companies handle onboarding. Adam treats employee onboarding like customer activation, recommending an explicit 30-60-90 day plan built around learning, iteration, and long-term planning. | |
| Communicating and Executing the 30-60-90 Day Plan | 3 | 4 | 0 | 3 | Adam details over-communicating the 90-day plan across the organization. Harry pushes on whether high performers can accelerate this timeline to 30 or 60 days, while Adam emphasizes monitoring trajectory and drive by day 45. | |
| Mastering Cross-Functional Communication in Growth | 3 | 5 | 0 | 0 | Harry cites mutual contacts praising Adam's cross-functional communication skills. Adam outlines his framework: over-communicate core goals, tailor channel mediums to stakeholders, and maintain consistent updates like his Ship It Friday newsletter. | |
| The "Ship It Friday" Strategy and Internal Transparency | 4 | 3 | 0 | 3 | Harry argues that sending unpolished updates consistently is better than delaying for perfection. Adam agrees, emphasizing that prototypes, transparency, and feedback loops drive superior alignment across teams. | |
| Case Study: Repositioning and Rebranding Patreon | 3 | 6 | 0 | 1 | Adam walks through Patreon's repositioning from crowdfunding to membership, detailing how he got founder Jack Conte on board, tested positioning statement qualitative feedback, and ignored social media backlash for two weeks. | |
| Quick-Fire Round: Management, Dying Tactics, and Hiring Pitfalls | 4 | 5 | 1 | 1 | In a quick-fire round, Adam draws parallels between parenting and management frameworks and outlines dead growth tactics like address book scraping. Harry strongly agrees, asserting that most corporate media efforts are boring and poorly executed. | |
| Inside Patreon's Toughest Payment Fee Experiment | 2 | 5 | 2 | 3 | Adam recounts Patreon's disastrous payment fee experiment ('The Fiasco') that alienated creators by ignoring qualitative feedback. When Adam praises photo-sharing app Locket, Harry playfully criticizes its name and searchability. |
Statements from this episode (27)
Fishman: Zimride pivoted to Lyft within five months of his joining
“And I joined a company called Zimride as their head of growth. And we pivoted Zimride to Lyft in about, I don't know, four or five months after I joined.”
Fishman: High execution speed makes most company mistakes reversible
“And when you move at that pace, there's very few mistakes that are actually permanent. Like you can almost change Anything, right? And reverse decisions.”
Fishman: Creator platforms require extreme customer reverence due to public amplification
“When you work with creators, they have the biggest and loudest megaphones on the internet. And you really learn to respect their input into the product building process and decision-making.”
Fishman: Growth experimentation yields more failures than successes over time
“You're going to be wrong probably more often than you're right. Especially as you do more and more things it gets harder to be right over the long term.”
Fishman: Over-rotating solely on quantitative data is an organizational failure
“I almost never rely on gut. But I also think it's a kind of a failure to over rotate on just quantitative data.”
Fishman: Patreon's major growth mistakes came from skipping qualitative creator feedback
“The mistakes that we made at Patreon were typically just looking at numbers and not actually, and thinking, oh, these numbers say that if we do this, it's in the best interest of creators, it's going to work great. Like we know what our bounding boxes and our …”
Fishman: Growth teams connect users to existing value, not new products
“The overall job of a growth function or a growth org is to connect more people to the value that the company is already creating.”
Fishman: Solo practitioners should not hold the Head of Growth title
“Personally, I don't think you should be a head of growth as a solo practitioner. Cause like, yes, you're the head of growth, but like you're, A one person show, right? So I tend to think of the role more in the latter camp, which is like a manager of managers,…”
Fishman: First growth hires should be mid-level player-coaches, not executives
“There's really is like a sweet spot here. To junior. And you just have a bunch of order takers that can't prioritize their way out of a wet paper bag and figure out what they should be doing or to or they've maybe only seen it done one way before. And so they …”
Fishman: Viral products should embed growth within the product organization
“If your product should really be growing like virally via invitation, referral, collaboration, things like that, then you probably want to start with growth as part of the product work.”
Fishman: Standalone growth teams eventually fold into product or marketing
“Most of the standalone growth teams that I've seen eventually get folded into one of the other orgs. Product marketing, something like that.”
Fishman: Lyft relied on a give-and-get referral loop to scale riders
“We had a very strong what I would call like clinically a financially incentivized viral loop. So this is your classic, like give, get referral structure. I invite you to lift and you sign up and you get ride credit. And then once you take a ride, I get ride cr…”
Fishman: User-generated growth loops have higher growth ceilings than paid loops
“So things that are generated by users typically have a much higher ceiling because every new user can generate and participate in that loop. Things that are generated by the company Or paid advertising or things like that tend to have lower scopes because ther…”
Fishman: Startups should master one or two core loops before expanding
“I typically recommend that companies start with a core thing, one core loop, or maybe two core loops that that they can really work on for a while, but you have to be able to project that out and see when you're going to start to run out of steam. And then try…”
Fishman: Wyzant's Lyft-style give-get referral loop was a historic flop
“We tried to implement a referral loop like Lyft, where, hey, as a parent, I would invite another person. I would get credit towards tutoring. They would get credit towards tutoring. And we built a really nice system for doing this. And no one used it. And so i…”
Fishman: Referral loops fail in US edtech due to social stigma
“And what we found is that the problem with a invite or sort of referral loop in the United States is that there's a huge stigma associated with needing a tutor. And so parents Don't want to tell other parents that their kid is seeing a tutor because it makes t…”
Fishman: Traditional executive interviewing is broken; side-by-side work works best
“I think that the traditional interview process for leaders is broken and the best way to learn about someone is really working side by side with them.”
Fishman: Failed entrepreneurs make the best early growth hires
“I also like failed entrepreneurs for this role because they have a really good appreciation for how important it is to acquire and retain customers.”
Fishman: Every founder and leader should read 'The First 90 Days'
“I'm a really big fan of the book. I think everyone should read the book. The first 90 days. I have a copy somewhere. It may be like right here on my desk. Student of that book. It is fantastic. I recommend it to everyone.”
Fishman: Growth hires should learn month one, strategize month two, align month three
“Month one is basically learning, building relationships, evaluation of the team. If there is a team month, two is typically iteration and improvement on the growth strategy. Or creation of one if it doesn't exist. And then month three is really like longer ter…”
Fishman: Great growth hires arrive on day one with a plan
“One of the things that separates the good from the great is a lot of the best people that I've worked with, they come in on day one, and they've already been thinking about the business. They've got a plan. They've done some homework. They've done some learnin…”
Fishman: Domain experts falsely assume others share their level of understanding
“That the most knowledgeable person Always thinks that everyone else has the same level of understanding as them, and they're always wrong.”
Fishman: Interactive prototypes are far more effective than text for product communication
“I think a prototype is worth a whole chapter in a book. So I try to communicate with visual aids whenever possible. Like it's really important. Words on a page are great. A picture of what the thing is actually doing is even better. It's something that people …”
Fishman: Patreon repositioned from crowdfunding to membership based on qualitative testing
“We built up a lot of confidence that shifting from crowdfunding to membership, which is what Patreon is now, was sort of the right move.”
Fishman: Social media backlash to brand rebrands fades after two weeks
“Everyone rushes to social media for their hot takes. They don't like this logo. They don't like the way this thing looks. Who designed this? This could be done by a two-year-old with a crayon. Like everyone's negative about it. And then it all fades away in tw…”
Fishman: Hiring growth before product-market fit is disastrous for startups
“If you don't have product market fit, throwing a growth person into the mix is disastrous for your product because the last thing you want to do is put your product in the hands of more people when it sucks.”
Fishman: Locket is an exceptional example of viral product-led growth
“Lockett is really cool. One, it's entirely product-led growth. The story behind how they got started is awesome. They focus on a bunch of those principles that I talked about, scarcity, Of invite and sending to people. It's a super simple product experience, h…”