The Exchanges

Q was VP of Product and Growth at Patreon. And finally, before Patreon, Adam was Head of Growth at Lyft, where he was one of the first growth and marketing employees and grew the team to 18 people. Do you hire a tenured Head of Growth who can then build out their own team first? Or do you hire younger growth reps, growth engineers, growth product people? What's the right decision?

A It depends on a few factors. So the first thing I'd say is, do you have a growth model as a company? Has leadership team as the founder, CEO done the work of understanding how does this business grow? What do our loops look like? What brings new people to the product? What keeps them around? What monetizes them? So that's like the starting point. Secondly, you have to ask yourself, based on this model, do we know what org functions and skills are necessary to iterate on this model? And to test out our hypotheses. And then finally, my next question is sort of how involved does the founder want to be in running the team? Ideally, they want to stay very close, but sometimes they really don't. They want to be very hands-off. If those three things are true, then I recommend hiring someone around like the director level or a touch below that. Someone who wants to be a player coach. You can build processes for testing and iterating on the model. They can create a baseline of data if it doesn't exist. They're really good at communicating. So they can share knowledge across the org and kind of start to build out that team. There's really is like a sweet spot here. Two 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 they've maybe only seen it done one way before. They just sort of like w…

AI assessment note: “I recommend hiring someone around like the director level or a touch below that.”

Q Yeah, what one company growth strategy have you most been impressed by recently?

A Yeah, I'm really impressed with companies taking advantage of new features in, in iOS. So things like companies like Lockett, where they're taking advantage of widgets, uh, on the home screen and, and things like that, which are like interactive modules that you can, um, implement. 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, hugely viral, sharing oriented around photos. It's like this nice middle ground between like sort of an annoying social media broadcast that everyone turns off and a one-to-one message that has like no viral, uh, coefficient. So like, I really like what that, with that company and that founder has been doing.

AI assessment note: “Lockett, where they're taking advantage of widgets”

Q When you map it out, should there be very few steps or question, is it the fewer the better from input to output?

A Yeah, I think the, the advice that I give to people is try to, don't overcomplicate it. Try to create as simple of a structure as possible. A typical loop will have maybe between like three and six steps, um, depending on, on, uh, the speed of that loop and, and, and the, the complexity of the product. But yeah, I, I definitely don't, don't build out a loop that has like 47 steps in it because That's not going to help you with prioritization, right? Um, you're, you're going to look at that and go, well, we're no better off than we were before. It's like too granular, uh, in a way. So like to come back to our lift example in that financial viral loop, it's very simple, right? Person signs up, person takes a ride, person invites someone, that person signs up, that person takes a ride. The cycle repeats itself within that loop. You've got a bunch of levers for optimization. You have the incentive structure, You have the conversion rate from sign up to taking a ride. You have the rate of which people invite other people. You have the number of invitations sent. Each one of those things is like a concrete, uh, uh, lever that can be worked on and improved upon to make that loop spin faster and grow bigger.

AI assessment note: “A typical loop will have maybe between like three and six steps”

Q I heard them. I felt like I was back at school, which was, you know, not that long ago, but I was kicked out. So I don't know. It went that well. Um, but, uh, my question to you is, um, If we go through them, can you just give me an example of what each one means so I actually know? So number one was number one was what?

A A quantitative exercise. Yeah. So your quantitative exercise is maybe you give somebody a dummy data set and I've actually done this before with, with growth PMs and things like that. So you give somebody a dummy data set and they have to organize and draw insights from that data set and make recommendations against it. So you might say like, here's a whole list of, um, Users and sort of cohort behavior and things like that. What are you observing here? And what do you think this means? They could be wrong, but you want to see how they like manipulate data. Can they build a cohort chart? Can they do, um, you know, some of the basic like building blocks of growth and understand at least quantitatively, what are we observing with this set of users? Oh, everyone seems to drop off at week three. Okay. That's really interesting. What are you going to do with that information? Well, I'm going to dig into What happens in week three in the product experience? Are we sending people a communication? Are we not sending people like all of that sort of stuff? So that's sort of like your quantitative exercise. Um, that's one. Then you've got a prioritization exercise. So the prioritization section might be things like you share some data or sort of snippets of your growth model, and then a list of themes and tactics for them to sort through. Um, and you say, how might you prioritize this bas…

AI assessment note: “So your quantitative exercise is maybe you give somebody a dummy data set”

Q But I do, but I do want to start, you know, when we look today at some of the growth you've been a part of, Patreon, Lyft, I'd love to hear, what was that entry into growth for you?

A Yeah. So I started my career, um, as what I would call like a quantitative marketer. Um, I tried to be an engineer in school, but I kind of gravitated towards business and consumer psychology instead. Didn't really love engineering. Still love engineers. Don't get me wrong. Love it. Love my engineering friends, but I couldn't be one. Um, and then I was kind of in the right place at the right time, uh, early in my career. And I caught this wave of web analytics and experimentation. This was like, Pre Google Analytics. This is like Urchin, like way back in the day when Offermatica was the only testing tool out there, well before like Optimizely and all these other things. Um, and so I got like really deep into marketing channel and conversion optimization. I think that was like part of the engineer brain that I had. Um, it basically lived in Excel. I started writing front end code as a hobby, um, just when I got bored. Um, and then My career kind of went through this series of step function changes in responsibility and scope. And I had a couple of really big jumps. So the first one was when I left like sort of the kind of cushy public company world, slow moving. 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. Um, and Lyft was like getting a graduate degree in company buildin…

AI assessment note: “I joined a company called Zimride as their head of growth.”

Q Well, I, I want to dive in before we kind of discuss, you know, the meat of the show. I do want to dive into those two experiences with Lyft and with Patreon, you know, such incredible companies and hyper growth. If you were to isolate one or two key takeaways for you from your time at each, what would they be? Do you think?

A Yeah, it's a great question. I think from Lyft, it's probably the impact of speed on decision-making and a healthy relationship with failure. Like I think a growth person has to be almost immune to failure because you get so many things wrong in your career. Um, but at Lyft, we moved so incredibly fast. 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. Um, and it really sort of changed my tolerance for making bets and assessing risk. And I've sort of, that's been like the bar that I've held up at every other company that I go to is how fast we can move, right? Um, so that's Lyft. And then at Patreon, um, Patreon, I think it would really be like respect and reverence for our customer. So I think one of the, one of the things that growth people can get a bad rap for is just sort of being like a, like a bull in a China shop, sort of like growth at all costs. Right. But there were more than a few times at Patreon where we did something that seemed like it was in the best interest of our customers and we were really wrong. And boy, did we hear about it when that happened? Uh, when you work with creators, they have the biggest and loudest megaphones on the internet. Um, and you really learn to respect their input into the product building process and decision-making. So that's defi…

AI assessment note: “from Lyft, it's probably the impact of speed on decision-making and a healthy relationship”

Q When you map it out, should there be very few steps or question, is it the fewer the better from input to output?

A Yeah, I think the, the advice that I give to people is try to, don't overcomplicate it. Try to create as simple of a structure as possible. A typical loop will have maybe between like three and six steps, um, depending on, on, uh, the speed of that loop and, and, and the, the complexity of the product. But yeah, I, I definitely don't, don't build out a loop that has like 47 steps in it because That's not going to help you with prioritization, right? Um, you're, you're going to look at that and go, well, we're no better off than we were before. It's like too granular, uh, in a way. So like to come back to our lift example in that financial viral loop, it's very simple, right? Person signs up, person takes a ride, person invites someone, that person signs up, that person takes a ride. The cycle repeats itself within that loop. You've got a bunch of levers for optimization. You have the incentive structure, You have the conversion rate from sign up to taking a ride. You have the rate of which people invite other people. You have the number of invitations sent. Each one of those things is like a concrete, uh, uh, lever that can be worked on and improved upon to make that loop spin faster and grow bigger.

AI assessment note: “Try to create as simple of a structure as possible.”

Q What questions do you like to ask there that really test the behavioral elements and essences of whether this person is a prick or not?

A Yeah, great question. Um, I ask questions, uh, that get at people's level of risk tolerance, grit, and humility. Um, so I ask questions about times when people were sure that they had the right answer to something, and they ended up being wrong, and then how they communicated that to folks. I ask people on, like, how they recovered from that and iterated towards a better outcome. I'll ask questions about their ability to influence, Tell me about a time where you convinced your CEO of something, that they were completely on the other end of the spectrum opposed to you. Or tell me about a time where, um, you, uh, did something wrong and got a piece of feedback about it. And how did you respond to that feedback? What, what was it? What did you do with that? How have you learned from it? What have you done better in the future? So I'm really trying to understand their ability to grow and change. And like you said, not be a jerk. If someone is not good at taking feedback or learning, you can suss that out in an interview process. Uh, there's a, like, there's a heavy level of ego that you can detect in an interview process by how these people, uh, how people answer questions. So, yeah, those are some of the things that I ask folks.

AI assessment note: “I ask questions about times when people were sure that they had the right answer”

Q Can you tell me about a loop that you've tried personally that went wrong and what you learned from it?

A Oh boy. Um, yeah, I'll tell you about one. Yes. I mean, right. I talked at the beginning about failing a lot, right? So, um, so here's one, um, here's one where it, it, you would think in theory that it would work, but really the sort of psychology of the customer is what kept it from working. So the, the example is, um, let's take an ed tech business. So for a period of time, I was the head of growth for a company called Wyzant, which, uh, was Um, the largest, uh, tutoring marketplace in the United States. So helping you find a local tutor in your neighborhood. Um, we were masters of SEO, local search for like, I need help with calculus in this zip code. Um, 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 it was like a pretty historic flop. So then we started talking to people about, well, why aren't you using this? We started like digging into the why, uh, of what we were observing. 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 them feel like their kid is dumb…

AI assessment note: “we tried to implement a referral loop like Lyft... And no one used it”

Q I love it. Thank you for that. You said about communicating to the wider org. How do you do that? Is that in shared notion docs? Is that in pipe drives? Is that, help me understand, how do you do that and let everyone kind of feel the accountability?

A Yeah. Well, it's definitely not like flare guns and smoke signals and things like that. Um, whether or not it's note, whether or not it's notion or a post-it note or a Google doc or a presentation, like it really depends on the culture of the company and how they communicate. I'm a written communicator. So like when I joined, um, imperfect foods as their chief product officer, chief product and growth officer, I built this out in an Excel file or a Google sheets file, I should say. Um, And I had like specific rows, specific milestones, my plan and very specific deliverables and what success would look like. And I worked with the CEO who I was reporting to, to align on this stuff and say, hey, you're good with this. This looks like the work that I should be doing because I think this is the work that I should be doing. And then I shared it with everybody who I was working with, the entire executive team, my own team, which was like 20 or 30 people at the time. So like I just published it far and wide. I was like, Hey, whole company, this is a public document. You want to see how an executive spends their time? This is what I'm doing for the next three months. Um, I'm a big fan of over communication, so yeah.

AI assessment note: “I published it far and wide. I was like, Hey, whole company”

Q your friends before this show, speaking of references, and they said you were world class, world class, when it came to cross-functional communication. So, this is tough, because not many growth people are, um, having interviewed quite a few. Um, So what does great cross-functional comms look like? And like, as granular as possible, what do you do to make growth an integrated and welcome part of a multi-functional org?

A Yeah, I have a pretty strong feeling. I know who told you this about, about me, um, because he is also a master communicator himself. Um, so I, I've iterated on this quite a bit, uh, and I have a few frameworks that I, that I follow. So like first, one of my absolute, like must have expectations for myself and for anyone that I hire is that they have to over communicate until everyone gets it. That the most knowledgeable person Always thinks that everyone else has the same level of understanding as them, and they're always wrong. You have to simplify and over-communicate, and I expect, like, myself and everyone on my team to be the ambassador for our work with stakeholders. It builds trust. It's ridiculously important. Second thing I do is I adjust communication to the person or the group. So sometimes sending that CEO or CFO an email is not the right approach. You've got to sit down, And like take them through it in a one-on-one environment and make sure that they really understand the what and the why. That's hard. It's time consuming, but it saves you time in the long run. The third thing that I do is I create reliable, predictable communication streams. So for example, at Patreon, I had a weekly email. I started at the first week that I got there. I didn't even know very much about the business, but I started sending this communication. It went out to a core group of stakeh…

AI assessment note: “create reliable, predictable communication streams. So for example, at Patreon, I had a weekly email”

Q Well, I, I want to dive in before we kind of discuss, you know, the meat of the show. I do want to dive into those two experiences with Lyft and with Patreon, you know, such incredible companies and hyper growth. If you were to isolate one or two key takeaways for you from your time at each, what would they be? Do you think?

A Yeah, it's a great question. I think from Lyft, it's probably the impact of speed on decision-making and a healthy relationship with failure. Like I think a growth person has to be almost immune to failure because you get so many things wrong in your career. Um, but at Lyft, we moved so incredibly fast. 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. Um, and it really sort of changed my tolerance for making bets and assessing risk. And I've sort of, that's been like the bar that I've held up at every other company that I go to is how fast we can move, right? Um, so that's Lyft. And then at Patreon, um, Patreon, I think it would really be like respect and reverence for our customer. So I think one of the, one of the things that growth people can get a bad rap for is just sort of being like a, like a bull in a China shop, sort of like growth at all costs. Right. But there were more than a few times at Patreon where we did something that seemed like it was in the best interest of our customers and we were really wrong. And boy, did we hear about it when that happened? Uh, when you work with creators, they have the biggest and loudest megaphones on the internet. Um, and you really learn to respect their input into the product building process and decision-making. So that's defi…

AI assessment note: “I think from Lyft, it's probably the impact of speed on decision-making”

Q I heard them. I felt like I was back at school, which was, you know, not that long ago, but I was kicked out. So I don't know. It went that well. Um, but, uh, my question to you is, um, If we go through them, can you just give me an example of what each one means so I actually know? So number one was number one was what?

A A quantitative exercise. Yeah. So your quantitative exercise is maybe you give somebody a dummy data set and I've actually done this before with, with growth PMs and things like that. So you give somebody a dummy data set and they have to organize and draw insights from that data set and make recommendations against it. So you might say like, here's a whole list of, um, Users and sort of cohort behavior and things like that. What are you observing here? And what do you think this means? They could be wrong, but you want to see how they like manipulate data. Can they build a cohort chart? Can they do, um, you know, some of the basic like building blocks of growth and understand at least quantitatively, what are we observing with this set of users? Oh, everyone seems to drop off at week three. Okay. That's really interesting. What are you going to do with that information? Well, I'm going to dig into What happens in week three in the product experience? Are we sending people a communication? Are we not sending people like all of that sort of stuff? So that's sort of like your quantitative exercise. Um, that's one. Then you've got a prioritization exercise. So the prioritization section might be things like you share some data or sort of snippets of your growth model, and then a list of themes and tactics for them to sort through. Um, and you say, how might you prioritize this bas…

AI assessment note: “A quantitative exercise. Yeah. So your quantitative exercise is maybe you give somebody a dummy data set”

Q What's been the biggest fuck up growth experiment wise you've had?

A Oh, um, this is probably a Patreon. Uh, it is, I actually was just talking about this at Reforged in a class yesterday. Um, we, uh, did a bunch of experimentation around moving, uh, payment processing fees from the creator to the fan. So making the patron pay for it. We tried to understand what that would do to conversion. Um, we had a really good quantitative sense of this. Um, We didn't talk to a single creator about it, and we announced that we were rolling this out, and the world imploded. The internet literally caved in on top of Patreon. That was how angry people were. Um, there were articles written. There were apologies written. First thing we did was we doubled down and we're like, no, this is why we need to do this. And creators were like, uh, uh, not having it. There were, it was named the fiasco. We did it right at the end of the year. It ruined my December. It was a very dark time for me, but quantitatively it looked great. So we were like, yay, experiments. Um, it was bad. We ended up backpedaling, rolling it back. Uh, And learned a very valuable and painful lesson, but it, it punched us in the mouth for several months. Our growth rate slowed down. Creators lost a ton of trust in us. They felt like we were just like every other tech platform. And that was like the last thing, like we lost a lot in, in doing that. Um, they have since recovered. We recovered. I kept…

AI assessment note: “experimentation around moving, uh, payment processing fees from the creator to the fan.”

Q How do companies that you've advised most go wrong in trying to create loops?

A Hmm. I think it's a great question. The first thing I would say is they try to think that everything is a loop. Uh, it's really only a loop if it is a closed circuit that feeds back into itself. So a lot of people would be like, well, um, what about business development and partnership? Like that's a loop, right? Like we get this partner and that feeds in here and then we get another partner. And, um, A lot of times I say, well, okay, in theory, yes, but that's a very slow process. How long is a single cycle of that? And how much work do you have to put in to maintain that? Does getting a new partner close the next partner? Probably not. You still have to put a lot of energy in from like your business development or your M&A or whatever. And so stuff like that is where companies get really hung up. That's one. The second place is trying to have too many loops and focusing on too many things. It's better to narrow and focus on just a core set of things, uh, uh, at the beginning and really extract as much value out of those before, uh, getting distracted and moving on to the next thing. Um, and so like focus and thinking that everything is a loop are kind of two big, big problems that I see with a lot of my, uh, a lot of the companies that I work with.

AI assessment note: “The first thing I would say is they try to think that everything is a loop.”

Q Can you tell me about a loop that you've tried personally that went wrong and what you learned from it?

A Oh boy. Um, yeah, I'll tell you about one. Yes. I mean, right. I talked at the beginning about failing a lot, right? So, um, so here's one, um, here's one where it, it, you would think in theory that it would work, but really the sort of psychology of the customer is what kept it from working. So the, the example is, um, let's take an ed tech business. So for a period of time, I was the head of growth for a company called Wyzant, which, uh, was Um, the largest, uh, tutoring marketplace in the United States. So helping you find a local tutor in your neighborhood. Um, we were masters of SEO, local search for like, I need help with calculus in this zip code. Um, 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 it was like a pretty historic flop. So then we started talking to people about, well, why aren't you using this? We started like digging into the why, uh, of what we were observing. 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 them feel like their kid is dumb…

AI assessment note: “We tried to implement a referral loop like Lyft... And no one used it.”

Q What questions do you like to ask there that really test the behavioral elements and essences of whether this person is a prick or not?

A Yeah, great question. Um, I ask questions, uh, that get at people's level of risk tolerance, grit, and humility. Um, so I ask questions about times when people were sure that they had the right answer to something, and they ended up being wrong, and then how they communicated that to folks. I ask people on, like, how they recovered from that and iterated towards a better outcome. I'll ask questions about their ability to influence, Tell me about a time where you convinced your CEO of something, that they were completely on the other end of the spectrum opposed to you. Or tell me about a time where, um, you, uh, did something wrong and got a piece of feedback about it. And how did you respond to that feedback? What, what was it? What did you do with that? How have you learned from it? What have you done better in the future? So I'm really trying to understand their ability to grow and change. And like you said, not be a jerk. If someone is not good at taking feedback or learning, you can suss that out in an interview process. Uh, there's a, like, there's a heavy level of ego that you can detect in an interview process by how these people, uh, how people answer questions. So, yeah, those are some of the things that I ask folks.

AI assessment note: “I ask questions about times when people were sure that they had the right answer”

Q I love it. Thank you for that. You said about communicating to the wider org. How do you do that? Is that in shared notion docs? Is that in pipe drives? Is that, help me understand, how do you do that and let everyone kind of feel the accountability?

A Yeah. Well, it's definitely not like flare guns and smoke signals and things like that. Um, whether or not it's note, whether or not it's notion or a post-it note or a Google doc or a presentation, like it really depends on the culture of the company and how they communicate. I'm a written communicator. So like when I joined, um, imperfect foods as their chief product officer, chief product and growth officer, I built this out in an Excel file or a Google sheets file, I should say. Um, And I had like specific rows, specific milestones, my plan and very specific deliverables and what success would look like. And I worked with the CEO who I was reporting to, to align on this stuff and say, hey, you're good with this. This looks like the work that I should be doing because I think this is the work that I should be doing. And then I shared it with everybody who I was working with, the entire executive team, my own team, which was like 20 or 30 people at the time. So like I just published it far and wide. I was like, Hey, whole company, this is a public document. You want to see how an executive spends their time? This is what I'm doing for the next three months. Um, I'm a big fan of over communication, so yeah.

AI assessment note: “I built this out in an Excel file or a Google sheets file”

Q your friends before this show, speaking of references, and they said you were world class, world class, when it came to cross-functional communication. So, this is tough, because not many growth people are, um, having interviewed quite a few. Um, So what does great cross-functional comms look like? And like, as granular as possible, what do you do to make growth an integrated and welcome part of a multi-functional org?

A Yeah, I have a pretty strong feeling. I know who told you this about, about me, um, because he is also a master communicator himself. Um, so I, I've iterated on this quite a bit, uh, and I have a few frameworks that I, that I follow. So like first, one of my absolute, like must have expectations for myself and for anyone that I hire is that they have to over communicate until everyone gets it. That the most knowledgeable person Always thinks that everyone else has the same level of understanding as them, and they're always wrong. You have to simplify and over-communicate, and I expect, like, myself and everyone on my team to be the ambassador for our work with stakeholders. It builds trust. It's ridiculously important. Second thing I do is I adjust communication to the person or the group. So sometimes sending that CEO or CFO an email is not the right approach. You've got to sit down, And like take them through it in a one-on-one environment and make sure that they really understand the what and the why. That's hard. It's time consuming, but it saves you time in the long run. The third thing that I do is I create reliable, predictable communication streams. So for example, at Patreon, I had a weekly email. I started at the first week that I got there. I didn't even know very much about the business, but I started sending this communication. It went out to a core group of stakeh…

AI assessment note: “I have a few frameworks that I, that I follow.”

Q was VP of Product and Growth at Patreon. And finally, before Patreon, Adam was Head of Growth at Lyft, where he was one of the first growth and marketing employees and grew the team to 18 people. Do you hire a tenured Head of Growth who can then build out their own team first? Or do you hire younger growth reps, growth engineers, growth product people? What's the right decision?

A It depends on a few factors. So the first thing I'd say is, do you have a growth model as a company? Has leadership team as the founder, CEO done the work of understanding how does this business grow? What do our loops look like? What brings new people to the product? What keeps them around? What monetizes them? So that's like the starting point. Secondly, you have to ask yourself, based on this model, do we know what org functions and skills are necessary to iterate on this model? And to test out our hypotheses. And then finally, my next question is sort of how involved does the founder want to be in running the team? Ideally, they want to stay very close, but sometimes they really don't. They want to be very hands-off. If those three things are true, then I recommend hiring someone around like the director level or a touch below that. Someone who wants to be a player coach. You can build processes for testing and iterating on the model. They can create a baseline of data if it doesn't exist. They're really good at communicating. So they can share knowledge across the org and kind of start to build out that team. There's really is like a sweet spot here. Two 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 they've maybe only seen it done one way before. They just sort of like w…

AI assessment note: “I recommend hiring someone around like the director level or a touch below that”

Q because they're very relevant to what you just said. You said kind of about the immunity to failure. I agree. As long as there's lessons that can be learned from the failure, and with speed sometimes there's not the lessons, and it's just you kind of fail the same thing. So how do you think about learning from failure in growth? Is that post-mortems? Is that reviews? What is that?

A It's sort of all of the above. Um, I think like really we do a lot of experimentation and growth, and that might be prototyping, that might be quantitative experimentation. Um, and you're going to be wrong probably more often than you're right. Uh, especially as you do more and more things, um, it gets harder to be right over the long term. And so what you have to do, like a failed experiment is fine. As long as you take something away from that, you learn something new about your customer, you learn something new about your growth model, or your business, or whatever. Um, that's sort of super important to me. And so, yeah, I've done it through postmortems. I document experiments really, really well. Um, make sure that I share that stuff really broadly with the company, because everyone can benefit from that stuff that we're learning. Um, And yeah, you just have to develop a thick skin because growth is about taking a lot of shots on goal, structured shots on goal, not just like firing the spaghetti cannon at the wall, but, um, but, uh, with that structure, you're still going to be wrong a good healthy percentage of the time. Um, so yeah, so that's how I think about it.

AI assessment note: “I've done it through postmortems. I document experiments really, really well.”

Q Totally agree with you there, especially if it's a team of one, having a head of is, uh, rather ironic. Um, the question is, do you hire a tenured head of growth who can then build out their own team first, or do you hire younger growth reps, growth engineers, growth product people? What's the right decision? Growth leader or growth juniors?

A Yeah, I, I think that's a really, uh, it's highly variable. Um, it depends on a few factors. So the first thing I'd say is, do you have a growth model, uh, as a company have the leader, has the leadership team as the founder CEO done the work of understanding how does this business grow? What do our loops look like? What brings new people to the product? What keeps them around? What monetizes them? So that's like the starting point when you're evaluating. Secondly, then you have to ask yourself, based on this model, do we know what org functions and skills are necessary to iterate on this model and to test out our hypotheses? And then finally, my next question is sort of how involved does the founder want to be in running the team? Ideally, they want to stay very close and connected to the work, but sometimes they really don't. They want to be very hands-off. So If they, if those three things are true, um, then I recommend hiring someone around like the director level or a touch below that, uh, someone who wants to be a player coach. You can build processes for testing and iterating on the model. They can create a baseline of data if it doesn't exist. They're really good at communicating so they can share knowledge across the org and kind of start to build out that team. There's really is like a sweet spot here. To junior. And you just have a bunch of order takers that can't pr…

AI assessment note: “I recommend hiring someone around like the director level or a touch below that”

Q The second element there, which is you mentioned kind of Patreon and, um, sometimes getting it wrong and customers being upset. How do you figure out whether to use Data or whether to use intuition when making growth decisions. Intuition could say, no, I know they will love this. They prefer something else. How do you think about data versus gut?

A Yeah, I think that, I think that's a really great question. Um, I almost never rely on gut. Uh, but I also think it's a kind of a failure to over rotate on just quantitative data. So the mistakes that we made at Patreon were, 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 error error, uh, potential. Um, and then, oh, by the way, we forgot to ask a single creator of how they would feel about this change. And so when you do that, you learn that just because the data says something doesn't mean that everyone's going to be excited about that. And even could be the majority of people are not excited about that. So I always, uh, want to blend quantitative assessments with qualitative, uh, discussions with customers, prototyping, like things like that. You can't just do one of those things and expect. A fantastic outcome, a hundred percent of the time.

AI assessment note: “I almost never rely on gut.”

Q When we think about that positioning within the org, you know, we hear the hailed Facebook growth teams, which are obviously standalone and, you know, born in heaven. Um, and then, you know, there's other, there's other companies which integrate them very much into product or marketing or different functional areas. How do you think about the question of whether growth teams should be standalone or baked into existing functions?

A Yeah. And I guess it's a great question. And I, I, I think people have been really hard pressed to try to replicate the Facebook model to a T even people who come from Facebook sometimes struggle with that. Like it's never as clear cut. Right. So I think, uh, where people sit in the org also depends on the growth model and how you grow. So, uh, if you have an acquisition problem or retention problem, a monetization problem that can really tell you like where and how to focus. And then what your product does and what market you're in can really dictate the channels that are available to you for growth. For example, 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. Right. You want to have a product manager that oversees growth. If you've got fantastic retention, um, if you don't grow that way, maybe your best channels are in paid acquisition for growth, then you might prioritize growth in the marketing org. And you might try to find like a, a, a growth marketing hire or something like that. So it really like comes down to, um, you know, where, uh, where, where you put someone is dependent on how you, how you should be growing. One thing I'll add to this though, is. Org design is rarely static. As a leader, you've got to make sure that you communi…

AI assessment note: “where people sit in the org also depends on the growth model and how you grow”

Q I guess at some point, do loops plateau one and then two, should teams have multiple loops concurrently running to ensure efficient growth?

A Yeah, there are definitely plateaus to loops and in ReForge, we call that sort of hitting max scope or hitting your horizon. Um, some loops plateau much earlier than others, uh, depending on how much work it takes to keep the loop spinning. 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 there's a limit to that. Uh, you hit that limit much faster and there's much harder, like efficiency targets to get over in terms of like how to have multiple loops. I typically recommend that companies start with a core thing, one core loop, or maybe two core loops that, um, 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 to sequence into new loops or expand the eligible population that can go into your loop. There's a whole bunch of different strategies to, um, to kind of pushing past that scope, that, uh, scope limiter, um, which we won't go into excruciating detail on this podcast on, but, um, but yeah, there's a bunch of ways that you can do it, including sequencing into new loops.

AI assessment note: “there are definitely plateaus to loops”

Q Also, what an amazing story. That is like an ingeniously creative child. Um, okay, so we, so we've made the offer now. We've done those four, like pretty stringent processes actually. We made the offer that joining amazing onboarding sucks everywhere. How can I, as a founder and as a leader, make the onboarding process as smooth as possible for my mid-level growth first hire?

A Yeah, you're right. Onboarding sucks in the vast majority of companies. Like, and I don't know why. It's, it's not that hard to get right. Um, so the way that I think about this is you've got a new hire coming in. They have a ton of momentum. And a ton of political capital because they've just made it through your hiring gauntlet and you're super excited to have them there. Everyone is like, great. Our savior is here. We're pumped. Those first few months are critical to their success. You think about it, like, think about it like onboarding a customer. This is your activation experience. This is going to drive long-term retention and success of your customer, except now your customer is an employee. So Um, I think about that. I think about it that way. And you've really got to focus setting on setting up this person for success, helping them achieve their first few wins and kind of continue that momentum and capital. So 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. Um, student of that book. It is fantastic. I recommend it to everyone. So I make sure that we have a really clear and agreed upon 30, 60 and 90 day plan. And that other people in the org know what this plan is, not only just me and the person I've just hired, but other people that they're going to interact wit…

AI assessment note: “I make sure that we have a really clear and agreed upon 30, 60 and 90 day plan.”

Q Golf. Love it, love it. Um, I, I totally agree. Okay, so when we think about these new hires, how long do we give if we don't think it's working? Say it's 45 days in, you're like, yeah, the first month of relationship build didn't really go well.

A Yeah, yeah. Well, look, I think a lot of this depends on The person and the learning curve. So if they've done growth, but they're in a very new industry where they've never like worked in that space, the learning curve is going to be pretty steep. But I typically give people like, I'd give them that 90 days to find their footing and make solid recommendations and get, get alignment and maybe notch a few small wins in that time. But I think like 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 learning up front. They're asking really thoughtful questions. Um, they've probably done this during the interview process, by the way, and they're moving fast because in growth, time is of the essence. So Like, if you're getting to 45, 60 days, and you're not seeing momentum, I'm not talking about, like, changing the trajectory of the company, because that's hard, right? But I'm talking about, like, there's a feeling that you can get that this person is working hard, and they're moving, and they're hungry to understand and build, and they're like, Chomping at the bit to get going. Um, if you're not feeling that like part of the way through that 90 days, it might be time for a conversatio…

AI assessment note: “I typically give people like, I'd give them that 90 days to find their footing”

Q authentic relationships, and I don't know if it's even, I don't even know if it's more productive, it's more fun. Um, so, yeah, um, listen, I do want to ask one other thing that I was told about your world-class skills, but someone mentioned your insane work on the Patreon rebrand. Tell me, what makes for a successful rebrand? What's required? And where do many go wrong, do you think?

A Yeah, I think the first thing I would say is there aren't a lot of growth leaders who come into a company and then realize that they need to rebrand and reposition the company because that's the main impediment to growth. Um, but that was the situation I found myself in after joining Patreon. Um, first I will say, like, I had a lot of guidance and help. I didn't know very much about branding, so I worked with somebody who had done a lot of repositioning. We paid someone to come in outside and kind of work one-on-one with me, and they were coaching and teaching me, as well as, like, leading workshops, providing some frameworks and things like that. So, like, don't assume that you know what you're doing. Ask for help. That's one. I learned a lot. I know a lot more about what I'm doing now. I could do this again myself, probably without the help. Um, the second thing is that when you're doing work around branding, um, and positioning, there's a lot of teammates who are skeptical that you need to do this work because they're thinking about the day to day and they're like, Hey, the business seems fine right now, but they're not necessarily doing the job of the growth leader, which is to look into the future and see that there's a ceiling that you're going to hit. It's not their job to do that. It's mine. So you have to bring everyone along for the ride, especially the CEO and the fo…

AI assessment note: “you have to bring everyone along for the ride, especially the CEO and the founder”

Q Or you won't get it in the hands of more people, but an exec comes in, has bad culture, bad morale, brings down other functions, fucks up other relationships, and then actually just causes internal discontent. Yeah, I agree with you. Um, what, tell me, what would you most like to change about the world of growth today?

A Oh, um, I'd really like to see a lot more companies take a holistic approach, approach to growth. So that's thinking about acquisition, retention, and monetization together as a system versus just sort of seeing growth as like an acquisition problem, or we're just going to get this marketing team in here and they're going to take care of growth. So that's one thing. And the other thing is I'd like to see a lot more growth leaders, like sort of stop pattern matching. And build a broader skill set around understanding marketing, product, and data, and figuring out what the right tools for the, for the job are, instead of trying to apply the approach that they've taken at a previous company and expecting it to work, uh, uh, a hundred percent at their next thing. Um, so those are two things.

AI assessment note: “I'd really like to see a lot more companies take a holistic approach”

Q because they're very relevant to what you just said. You said kind of about the immunity to failure. I agree. As long as there's lessons that can be learned from the failure, and with speed sometimes there's not the lessons, and it's just you kind of fail the same thing. So how do you think about learning from failure in growth? Is that post-mortems? Is that reviews? What is that?

A It's sort of all of the above. Um, I think like really we do a lot of experimentation and growth, and that might be prototyping, that might be quantitative experimentation. Um, and you're going to be wrong probably more often than you're right. Uh, especially as you do more and more things, um, it gets harder to be right over the long term. And so what you have to do, like a failed experiment is fine. As long as you take something away from that, you learn something new about your customer, you learn something new about your growth model, or your business, or whatever. Um, that's sort of super important to me. And so, yeah, I've done it through postmortems. I document experiments really, really well. Um, make sure that I share that stuff really broadly with the company, because everyone can benefit from that stuff that we're learning. Um, And yeah, you just have to develop a thick skin because growth is about taking a lot of shots on goal, structured shots on goal, not just like firing the spaghetti cannon at the wall, but, um, but, uh, with that structure, you're still going to be wrong a good healthy percentage of the time. Um, so yeah, so that's how I think about it.

AI assessment note: “I've done it through postmortems. I document experiments really, really well.”