The Exchanges

Q Totally. Okay, so you've helped me hire this great, great candidate, and we're onboarding them. Uh, we've spoken before about the first 90 days, and so I want to start there. You've broken it down into first week, first month, and first quarter. I love this article, which I'll include in the links. What do we want to achieve in the first week?

A Yeah. I think first week is really about get a lay of the land. I would say the five things you want to focus on, learn about what tools you have. Like, do you have Optimizely as the experimentation tool? Do you have a product analytics tool like Amplitude? And also understand the past initiatives, like what worked or didn't work. The second thing is dive into historical data, like gross people crave for data. If you can do that, that's great. The third thing is meet with your manager, your CEO, And other leaders, and then the first thing, meet with your own team, your collaborators, like engineers, designers, analysts, or your people in your team. And the last one is try to sit in a customer call or go to a user research session, listen to your customers to just get a feeling of who they are.

AI assessment note: “I would say the five things you want to focus on”

Q So we have that as a first week. That's a, that's a busy first week, Hila. I impressed with your productivity. Um, next first month as a founder, what should I expect you to do in the first month?

A Yeah. I think first month you need to begin to generate some results. Like I think growth is all, like, like I mentioned, growth is a discipline and a results, but the quicker you can generate results, the easier it will be for you as a growth leader, a growth practitioner to move forward. So I would say, try to find some early wins, try to do some quick fix, try to just make some impact. Um, the five things I pick for first month is pick a growth metric. The first one. Second, identify a focus area where you want to work on, like rather than you want to change DAU on the first day, what are the smaller things, specific thing you want to work on? Launch some experiments, like try your best, change something. Analysis wouldn't change results. Um, you need to do something to change results. The fourth thing is set up some communication mechanism with your customers and also with your stakeholders. Like if you Sit in product, but sales VP is an important person to be happy with, like try to set up that communication channel. And the last one is start to fill in the gaps in infrastructure to data. If you need to re instrument some tracking to get better data, or if you need to look into some tools, start to look into that.

AI assessment note: “The five things I pick for first month is pick a growth metric.”

Q How do the best practices in China differ to those in the US?

A That's something I can talk about all day long, but they're, the most popular role in China's growth space is called operation. It doesn't exist here in US at all. I was confused initially, but what is behind that is because the average labor cost in China is lower. So a lot of things that tend to be automated here in the US are handled by human, and that's called the role of operation. Um, and like, think about rather than using the product experience to onboard a new user. We have a WeChat group. We have a, someone in there responsible for talk with everyone to onboard you into a new program or new product. Um, yeah, that's a, that's one of the big ones. And WeChat is another big one. WeChat doesn't exist in US. It is a super app combining Facebook, payment, um, Slack, everything, and that completely changed the trajectory of growth, how growth has been done.

AI assessment note: “the most popular role in China's growth space is called operation.”

Q Totally. Okay, so you've helped me hire this great, great candidate, and we're onboarding them. Uh, we've spoken before about the first 90 days, and so I want to start there. You've broken it down into first week, first month, and first quarter. I love this article, which I'll include in the links. What do we want to achieve in the first week?

A Yeah. I think first week is really about get a lay of the land. I would say the five things you want to focus on, learn about what tools you have. Like, do you have Optimizely as the experimentation tool? Do you have a product analytics tool like Amplitude? And also understand the past initiatives, like what worked or didn't work. The second thing is dive into historical data, like gross people crave for data. If you can do that, that's great. The third thing is meet with your manager, your CEO, And other leaders, and then the first thing, meet with your own team, your collaborators, like engineers, designers, analysts, or your people in your team. And the last one is try to sit in a customer call or go to a user research session, listen to your customers to just get a feeling of who they are.

AI assessment note: “first week is really about get a lay of the land. I would say the five things”

Q Oh, it'll be a great chat, but I want to start with a little bit on you and provide some context. We see Acorns, we see GitLab, and the world of growth, it's a new world, so how did you make your way into the world of growth and come to lead some incredible growth orgs at Acorns and GitLab most recently?

A So believe it or not, I was a biology major and I suck at doing experiments in the lab. I caused actually some explosions. Um, everyone is safe, so don't worry, but I always loved idea of scientific experiment. So I got my MBA. I transitioned into the business world initially as a data analyst. Uh, but very quickly I found that doing data analysis is awesome, but I don't get to do anything with my awesome recommendations. The PMs, the marketers, they don't take my, Recommendations. So I joined a very small startup called growthhackers.com. Um, And I become a product manager growth. And back then that title is confusing, like product manager growth. What do you exactly do? Um, but I love that role. It really allowed me to use my analytical background, my product manager background, my marketing background, and pretty much do everything. Uh, and from there I become kind of this growth person. I joined Acorns, uh, and ended up leading their entire growth team as VP growth. And most recently I joined GitLab building their growth team from scratch as well. Now I work as a growth advisor. So like I'm really deep into the world of growth.

AI assessment note: “I transitioned into the business world initially as a data analyst.”

Q So when I, when I hear you, I hear kind of pretty extensive growth orgs, and I'm thinking, wow, this is quite a developed org, and that's quite a costly growth team. If we peel it back for an early stage founder thinking about hiring their first growth hires, when do you advise founders on when's the right time to make the first growth hire?

A Yeah, I think the overall principle you probably heard many times is get your product ready first, right? Find your PMF and, and hire thinking about hiring for growth, but I would love to add some nuance to it. Um, for example, I talked with a founder. He has a product that's a Chrome extension enable collaboration, right? He has 10 people in his team. He's talking with me about growth and hiring for growth. I suggest him to hire a gross PM or lead gross PM right now, even before raising the Series A. Why? Because for his product, that collaboration, right? That viral growth is so critical. It's almost part of the product. So you want to figure that out early on. He ended up finding someone from, I think previously from Dropbox with that viral growth experience. And that's awesome. That helped him actually raise the next round. So If your product has a social collaboration, network effect, that kind of thing, think about Slack, LinkedIn, right, or, or anything like, or, or Airtable, Figma, hiring for growth early on, a little bit earlier, will allow you to engineering those growth loops into the product itself, and that can be very powerful.

AI assessment note: “overall principle you probably heard many times is get your product ready first”

Q I totally agree with you on like the inputs is what you work on. Can I ask, when do you change that metric? Number one, most important one.

A Yeah, um, I think the North Star metric shouldn't be changing very frequently. Otherwise, it's north, it's not a North Star metric. It's a south, like, east to west star metric, right? It's all over the place. That should be, like, for the, even, like, it doesn't change for several years, or at most, like, once per year, right? You reevaluate the big focus for the company. But the focus area metric, like I mentioned, right, the free-to-pay conversion rate, The retention rate, the specific input metric, um, I tend to reevaluate that quarterly with my team. Like, did we make enough headwind on this one so that we can move to the next one or we want to continue?

AI assessment note: “I tend to reevaluate that quarterly with my team.”

Q I love it. And I, I spoke to Josh before the show and he said that I really had to dig in on the Acorns journey because you were so instrumental to building that growth organ, really making sure it worked so efficiently. He asked what tactic really worked and what did you learn from that?

A Yeah. Yeah. I think like, I would say there are definitely some, I would say mega learning from my Acorns experience. Um, first of all, the company really starts as a product that people love. Like we have a feature called Roundup, Roundup your spare change so that you can invest with this very small amount of money. Our early adopters loved it and that powered the initial word of mouth growth. And from there, I think one thing we did right is that we layered on multiple growth channels. So like initially it's word of mouth. We quickly expanded it to paid like Facebook. We're very early in capturing the Facebook wave. We added paid referral and then we divide the diversified into more paid channels. We added new product life so that we can charge more. And then that higher revenue allow us to unlock a higher Uh, CAC in paid channels or more paid channels. I think that layering on really helped. That's one learning. The other one I would say is, uh, we established a full funnel growth team. By full funnel, I mean marketing, growth product, analytics, design engineer. We sit together. I manage that team. So, um, I'm responsible for acquisition, how to get people download the app, but also I'm responsible for getting them to sign up Invest their money, uh, become a paid customer, retain, and maybe try other products, right? So like that really full funnel approach allow us to unlo…

AI assessment note: “I think one thing we did right is that we layered on multiple growth channels.”

Q now we have, like, the definition, the meta definition of growth there. It, the, the way that growth is implemented changes drastically, whether it's B to C or B to B. For, for founders listening, kind of, we have both that listen. How does it differ between B to B and B to C, and how should a B to B growth team look compared to a B to C?

A Yeah, that's a, that's a great question. I had the, um, pleasure to build both teams. I built a B to C growth team at Acorns. I built a B to B growth team at GitLab, and it is an experiment for myself as well, to be honest. So I think B to C growth team, as I mentioned, um, I usually think the full funnel team is the most powerful. Like, like I mentioned, right? I have growth marketing, um, Who is more mostly focused on acquisition. They, there are the channel experts. They want to get more users to download the app, sign up for a product via all different channels. There is the life cycle marketing aspect, like thinking about email, push notification, messaging, how to engage your existing users. And there are basically CRM specialists in those teams. And then the last piece is the growth product team. Where I have growth product manager, engineer, designer, analyst, they work on all sorts of experiments, how to make signup flow more efficient, how to get new users onboarded quickly, how to increase conversion rate. Um, they, they kind of basically do a lot, a lot of experiments across the entire user journey. And then there is the data analyst component. So that's the most typical B to C growth team. Like you have User acquisition, lifecycle marketing, growth product, and data analyst. And they usually report to the product org. Like I reported to chief product officer. I rep…

AI assessment note: “I built a B to C growth team at Acorns. I built a B to B”

Q Can you ask what would be some really big red flags for you when engaging in this interview process where you'd be really worried when you saw them in the interview process?

A One of my favorite question I ask is what is the most unexpected experiment result you saw and what do you do after it? And the reason I like that interview question is because first of all, people get prepared about their most successful experiments. I don't want to ask for that for sure. Unexpected is in a way that they must have done a lot of experiments and then they have something unexpected and what they do after to dissect that results and to take out kind of the, the issues and figure out the next steps is critical. If I hear them, Look, no, I don't have any unexpected experiments. Everything work as I planned. That's a red flag because that's not possible. Like, 60% of A-B testing fail. If you have done growth or experiments, you should have something. That's one. The other red flag, I would say too big of an ego. Like, like lack of self-awareness. And I think that's a, that's a, that's a, in general one, like not just growth, but for growth is even A bigger red flag, because you will fail a lot of times. You need to work with a lot of different teams. You need to be willing to negotiate, have a communication, uh, or rather than prescribe your thing to everyone. Like, that's another one.

AI assessment note: “Everything work as I planned. That's a red flag because that's not possible.”

Q debate on it, it's, it's an output. It's not an input. It's like, you know, amount of sessions created will drive the revenue. Uh, amount of referrals made will drive the, like, the output is the revenue, but it's not the input. Do you see what I mean? It's a result. So what is the North Star Met? How do you advise founders on how to choose an all-star metric?

A Yeah, exactly. I think North star metric need to be in the intersection of three things. The first thing is the business objective revenue usually is the business objective, right? Sometimes it's something else. The other thing is users are getting value from your product. Like you need to think about users because otherwise the revenue may not last. Right. And the third thing is the strategic direction, the strategic focus of the company at this time. Maybe for this year, right? As an example, like, like Uber, um, um, they, they may choose say like, let's focus on safety for this year because there are all sorts of incidents. Like that's the most important thing we want to focus. Maybe it's not revenue, uh, at this moment in this year, um, maybe in their early stage, right? They may focus on user growth or rider growth or driver growth at some given time. And then later stage, they may focus on Um, revenue, right? Because that's the right moment to focus on that. So North Star metric need to be reflecting your business objective, user getting value, but also your strategic direction. So when I joined at GateLab, I talk with our CEO, we have a, we have ARR, not ARR, ARR growth as our North Star metric for the company, which is fine. But for me as a growth leader, right? Or for any other teams, I need to break that down into inputs exactly as you mentioned and work on the inputs…

AI assessment note: “North star metric need to be in the intersection of three things.”

Q So when I, when I hear you, I hear kind of pretty extensive growth orgs, and I'm thinking, wow, this is quite a developed org, and that's quite a costly growth team. If we peel it back for an early stage founder thinking about hiring their first growth hires, when do you advise founders on when's the right time to make the first growth hire?

A Yeah, I think the overall principle you probably heard many times is get your product ready first, right? Find your PMF and, and hire thinking about hiring for growth, but I would love to add some nuance to it. Um, for example, I talked with a founder. He has a product that's a Chrome extension enable collaboration, right? He has 10 people in his team. He's talking with me about growth and hiring for growth. I suggest him to hire a gross PM or lead gross PM right now, even before raising the Series A. Why? Because for his product, that collaboration, right? That viral growth is so critical. It's almost part of the product. So you want to figure that out early on. He ended up finding someone from, I think previously from Dropbox with that viral growth experience. And that's awesome. That helped him actually raise the next round. So If your product has a social collaboration, network effect, that kind of thing, think about Slack, LinkedIn, right, or, or anything like, or, or Airtable, Figma, hiring for growth early on, a little bit earlier, will allow you to engineering those growth loops into the product itself, and that can be very powerful.

AI assessment note: “I suggest him to hire a gross PM or lead gross PM right now”

Q Can I just dig in, um, what would some examples of the KPIs be? Would that be like the revenue numbers, the user numbers, the DAOs? What would that be? Just take an example.

A Yeah. Like it will be first of all, like the, the, the North star metric, right? What are the key thing like for a B to B business in maybe revenue for a B to C, maybe users, active users, but also some initial focus areas. For example, uh, for, for one company I work with, they, they, I, I help them figure it out like, um, activating new users, onboarding and, uh, free to paid conversion. Those are one of the, Initial possible focus areas. So in the job description, you don't, don't need to go that deep, but you can talk about, hey, there will be a lot of focus on the, uh, onboarding, activation, conversion, like, um, that will help you track the right expertise and also make your thinking super clear as well.

AI assessment note: “for a B to B business in maybe revenue for a B to C, maybe users”

Q So we have that as a first week. That's a, that's a busy first week, Hila. I impressed with your productivity. Um, next first month as a founder, what should I expect you to do in the first month?

A Yeah. I think first month you need to begin to generate some results. Like I think growth is all, like, like I mentioned, growth is a discipline and a results, but the quicker you can generate results, the easier it will be for you as a growth leader, a growth practitioner to move forward. So I would say, try to find some early wins, try to do some quick fix, try to just make some impact. Um, the five things I pick for first month is pick a growth metric. The first one. Second, identify a focus area where you want to work on, like rather than you want to change DAU on the first day, what are the smaller things, specific thing you want to work on? Launch some experiments, like try your best, change something. Analysis wouldn't change results. Um, you need to do something to change results. The fourth thing is set up some communication mechanism with your customers and also with your stakeholders. Like if you Sit in product, but sales VP is an important person to be happy with, like try to set up that communication channel. And the last one is start to fill in the gaps in infrastructure to data. If you need to re instrument some tracking to get better data, or if you need to look into some tools, start to look into that.

AI assessment note: “The five things I pick for first month is pick a growth metric.”

Q listening to you, but now I get to dive into them. You said in the first week, one, dive into historical data. Many founders don't necessarily have the best data repositories, the best data ready for a growth hire. For founders listening, what from a data preparation side can they do to ensure that, you know, a new growth hire can really ramp up fast on the data preparation side?

A First of all, many Growth person are also data person. Like one of the, my favorite profile to hire is a former analyst to turn growth PM. So if you can find unicorn like that, this person can help you clear, like clean up some of the data as well. So like that's, that's one thing I would share, but on the other hand, um, I would say for B to C product, there are a couple data point or data sources. You should try to have available app store data, It's not enough. If you have an app, you want to have marketing channel attribution data from tools like adjust or, or things like that so that you know which channel is bringing which users, right? That's the number one question. The other question, the other thing is product analytics and user behavior data. A lot of funders in early stage, they use Google analytics is okay, but it's, I would say it's last generation of analytic tool. You want to have tools like Amplitude or Mixpanel or, or things like that. It really require you to have a tracking plan and also instrumented tracking of the events so that you know what users are using in my product. Like where are they come from? Channel, right? What they are doing. That's the product analytics. And then there are a lot of tools in B to C like segment make linking all those data much easier. So that's B to C. B to B. The data situation is in general, much worse. I would say B to B i…

AI assessment note: “you want to have marketing channel attribution data from tools like adjust”

Q I totally agree with you on like the inputs is what you work on. Can I ask, when do you change that metric? Number one, most important one.

A Yeah, um, I think the North Star metric shouldn't be changing very frequently. Otherwise, it's north, it's not a North Star metric. It's a south, like, east to west star metric, right? It's all over the place. That should be, like, for the, even, like, it doesn't change for several years, or at most, like, once per year, right? You reevaluate the big focus for the company. But the focus area metric, like I mentioned, right, the free-to-pay conversion rate, The retention rate, the specific input metric, um, I tend to reevaluate that quarterly with my team. Like, did we make enough headwind on this one so that we can move to the next one or we want to continue?

AI assessment note: “doesn't change for several years, or at most, like, once per year”

Q test content that works and then spend to get even better. Do you see what I mean? It's like amplification loop. Um, final one, I, Kind of thing. Um, uh, you said before about kind of systems of record and codify these learnings. How do you do that? Do you do it? What tools do you use? Who's responsible for codifying it? How do you do that lesson, um, documentation?

A There are two steps. One is documenting the growth plans or the people doing the experiments is responsible for doing that. And there are so many tools. It doesn't need to be fancy. Like we, we used Google doc. We use the slide deck. You, if you have tools like Confluence or any knowledge documentation system, you can use that. Um, at GitLab, we have everything open source. We have a handbook. So it's open and public. And actually people look at our experiments and it's categorized by like, is this activation acquisition? And you can click in to see what's the hypothesis, what we tested, what's results, what's the next step. That's super critical. That's one. The other step is, I would say is beyond documentation is sharing. You need to proactively share this with your stakeholder, with the team, like make this as valuable as possible because they may stumble upon something that will utilize this learning and make this learning doing more for the entire company. At Acorns, we often run ads that work so well. And we begin to implement that feature in the product. Like we have a calculator, retirement calculator ads. We talk about if you start saving today in, in twenties, in your thirties, what difference does that make, right? In your retirement saving. The ads work so well. We implemented them in email. We implemented a feature in product to kind of for the same concept as wel…

AI assessment note: “the people doing the experiments is responsible for doing that. And there are so many tools.”

Q debate on it, it's, it's an output. It's not an input. It's like, you know, amount of sessions created will drive the revenue. Uh, amount of referrals made will drive the, like, the output is the revenue, but it's not the input. Do you see what I mean? It's a result. So what is the North Star Met? How do you advise founders on how to choose an all-star metric?

A Yeah, exactly. I think North star metric need to be in the intersection of three things. The first thing is the business objective revenue usually is the business objective, right? Sometimes it's something else. The other thing is users are getting value from your product. Like you need to think about users because otherwise the revenue may not last. Right. And the third thing is the strategic direction, the strategic focus of the company at this time. Maybe for this year, right? As an example, like, like Uber, um, um, they, they may choose say like, let's focus on safety for this year because there are all sorts of incidents. Like that's the most important thing we want to focus. Maybe it's not revenue, uh, at this moment in this year, um, maybe in their early stage, right? They may focus on user growth or rider growth or driver growth at some given time. And then later stage, they may focus on Um, revenue, right? Because that's the right moment to focus on that. So North Star metric need to be reflecting your business objective, user getting value, but also your strategic direction. So when I joined at GateLab, I talk with our CEO, we have a, we have ARR, not ARR, ARR growth as our North Star metric for the company, which is fine. But for me as a growth leader, right? Or for any other teams, I need to break that down into inputs exactly as you mentioned and work on the inputs…

AI assessment note: “North star metric need to be in the intersection of three things.”

Q I love it. And I, I spoke to Josh before the show and he said that I really had to dig in on the Acorns journey because you were so instrumental to building that growth organ, really making sure it worked so efficiently. He asked what tactic really worked and what did you learn from that?

A Yeah. Yeah. I think like, I would say there are definitely some, I would say mega learning from my Acorns experience. Um, first of all, the company really starts as a product that people love. Like we have a feature called Roundup, Roundup your spare change so that you can invest with this very small amount of money. Our early adopters loved it and that powered the initial word of mouth growth. And from there, I think one thing we did right is that we layered on multiple growth channels. So like initially it's word of mouth. We quickly expanded it to paid like Facebook. We're very early in capturing the Facebook wave. We added paid referral and then we divide the diversified into more paid channels. We added new product life so that we can charge more. And then that higher revenue allow us to unlock a higher Uh, CAC in paid channels or more paid channels. I think that layering on really helped. That's one learning. The other one I would say is, uh, we established a full funnel growth team. By full funnel, I mean marketing, growth product, analytics, design engineer. We sit together. I manage that team. So, um, I'm responsible for acquisition, how to get people download the app, but also I'm responsible for getting them to sign up Invest their money, uh, become a paid customer, retain, and maybe try other products, right? So like that really full funnel approach allow us to unlo…

AI assessment note: “we layered on multiple growth channels... we established a full funnel growth team”

Q America is actually your ICP when you thought it was younger women. Or, do you know what I mean? They can find elements that you didn't know before, which suggests product market fit. Ok, so when you have, I like that nuance. Next question, how do we know what profile to hire for that first growth hire? Are they senior, junior? What does that hire look like, do you think?

A Yeah. Yeah. That's a, that's a great question as well. I think, um, in terms of senior, junior, I usually, uh, when I talk with early stage founders, I advise them to hire kind of an experienced growth PM or experienced growth mass marketer. Don't go for VP growth from the very beginning. Don't go for someone very junior who hasn't done this before, because that kind of middle layer gave you some advantages. They have experience, especially In one of the area, maybe in product or more in the marketing, um, try to find someone who is very analytical, good with data and eager to learn. Like they want to learn the other aspects. They also have the drive to become a head of growth one day. So I think all of those components is more advantageous to the founder and also, um, give you the options, right? You can potentially grow this person into your head of growth or Um, if like that doesn't work out, you can still have the option to hire an external head of growth or to partner with this person. Like when I, when I, as I mentioned, when I joined, uh, growthhackers.com, my title is PM growth, but I was doing everything and I w I was learning everything pretty much new as well. And, um, I was very scrappy. I tried to do things without engineer or without Data without everything. Like, I think you want to find someone who is like that and he can have the potential to become your, uh, h…

AI assessment note: “advise them to hire kind of an experienced growth PM or experienced growth mass marketer”

Q Ok, so we have the KPIs in the job description, we figured out the growth model, we figured out a couple of the growth loops, so we've got a kind of understanding of what sort of profile we want from that understanding. What do we do now, Hila?

A Yeah. The next step is usually, um, try to share this around in your network, in all the growth channels. Like I help pass this along because there's that concentration of people and it's always better to figure out someone who, who know, um, your potential hire. So like try to get referrals, share that like crazy. And then once you begin to get some candidates applications, try to do some screening. Uh, I would say there is a company list that I know that has great growth people, and I share that with the, the, the founders and maybe what is the industry? What is the skill set? Like all those, if there's a perfect fit, right? Awesome. Try to go after them as quickly as possible. Um, from there, I help a couple of founders actually create a take home assignment. Because that is a very nice way to really know their thinking and allow the candidate to share their more comprehensive thinking as well. Uh, and then the last step will be the interview and you need to interview with the founder, the leadership team, your collaborators, and, and maybe someone in your team as well, like engineer designers, but also the VP marketing, VP sales, if you need to work with them.

AI assessment note: “The next step is usually, um, try to share this around in your network”

Q Can I ask you, on the take-home assignment, is that always on your business, like the one that you're hiring for, or is it on the business that they've worked in before? Because obviously they'll have a lot more historical expertise from the business they've worked in before. So how do you do the take-home assignments?

A I try to do it in my business, in the, in the company that's hiring, because you want to get people who are quick at thinking, right? Quick at learning new things. That's essential skill set of a growth person. Um, I have a couple questions I like to use. The, one of those is like, just go to my company's website, go through the entire journey as a new user, pretend you're new, you're exploring, Acorns. You are exploring GitLab. Download the app and try it yourself. Um, construct a new user funnel. Like, how would you, like, what are the steps you will include in the funnel? Uh, what are the numbers and metrics you will try to collect to understand whether this funnel is effective or not? That can help me know, hey, how do they think about things? Do they, how do they think about data? Do they know the most important concepts like aha moments and things like that? Is that funnels? Ended at downloading app. That's a big red flag. Like they don't even go beyond that. Right? So that's one. The other one is I will ask them to propose three experiment ideas and share their hypothesis and how will they measure success metrics? Like that again, help me understand what's their level of growth expertise. Do they have great ideas? Like sometimes we, we do get great ideas from, from candidates and we test them and we let them know as well. If they're like, wait, We have the results back. …

AI assessment note: “I try to do it in my business, in the, in the company that's hiring”

Q So I'm going to unpack some of those elements later, but I want to finish on the first quarter. First quarter, what should you be doing?

A Assuming you are lucky and you work hard, you get some quick wins, right? You get some excitement around you. That momentum and excitement is very important. Now you want to take that to build this thing into a more Like program, right? Like culture and make this more formal. Like you have a sustainable growth process that will allow you to generate wins constantly. Um, so there are five things. Again, the first thing is create a growth model, like understand how your product grow. The second thing is a build experimentation program, like make this more form formal Have a cadence. How many experiments are you trying to launch every week? And what is the process, right? Like have this to be a part of your operating system. The third thing is choose a system of records, document learnings, document results is such a big part. Otherwise it get lost. And after two years and new hires begin to do the same experiments you already did like two years ago and didn't work. Um, the fourth thing is start a weekly growth meeting. Again, this is part of the program systemization. And the last thing is create a growth culture. Like growth culture is so critical. A lot of times, um, I saw why growth team fail is like this company doesn't have a culture to nurture it, to make it successful. So yeah, those are the five things I would try to aim for in the first 90 days.

AI assessment note: “those are the five things I would try to aim for in the first 90 days”

Q What are the biggest mistakes you see founders make when it comes to loops?

A I think the biggest mistake is One, don't think about loops. You only think about funnel, right? You don't think about those powerful things. You miss the opportunity of constructing those. The second thing is just by having it there doesn't mean it will work as a loop. Just put four things into a circle and draw a line, connect them, doesn't make it a loop. For example, if I launched a referral mechanism in Acorns, doesn't mean people will use it. Right. There are things you can do to make people to use it. You can add incentive experiment with the experience, make the process super smooth. Think about the motivation, like why this loop will spin, like just put four things there. It doesn't mean it will work. You need to make it work.

AI assessment note: “I think the biggest mistake is One, don't think about loops.”

Q test content that works and then spend to get even better. Do you see what I mean? It's like amplification loop. Um, final one, I, Kind of thing. Um, uh, you said before about kind of systems of record and codify these learnings. How do you do that? Do you do it? What tools do you use? Who's responsible for codifying it? How do you do that lesson, um, documentation?

A There are two steps. One is documenting the growth plans or the people doing the experiments is responsible for doing that. And there are so many tools. It doesn't need to be fancy. Like we, we used Google doc. We use the slide deck. You, if you have tools like Confluence or any knowledge documentation system, you can use that. Um, at GitLab, we have everything open source. We have a handbook. So it's open and public. And actually people look at our experiments and it's categorized by like, is this activation acquisition? And you can click in to see what's the hypothesis, what we tested, what's results, what's the next step. That's super critical. That's one. The other step is, I would say is beyond documentation is sharing. You need to proactively share this with your stakeholder, with the team, like make this as valuable as possible because they may stumble upon something that will utilize this learning and make this learning doing more for the entire company. At Acorns, we often run ads that work so well. And we begin to implement that feature in the product. Like we have a calculator, retirement calculator ads. We talk about if you start saving today in, in twenties, in your thirties, what difference does that make, right? In your retirement saving. The ads work so well. We implemented them in email. We implemented a feature in product to kind of for the same concept as wel…

AI assessment note: “One is documenting the growth plans or the people doing the experiments is responsible”

Q You mentioned Facebook there. I have to dig in on it because Josh brought it up specifically in terms of Facebook ads and optimizing them. I'd love to just go a little deeper. How did you figure out how to optimize Facebook ads and what really worked on Facebook ads for you?

A Yeah. First of all, I think as a disclaimer, this was back in 2008, 2019, right? And you know, the word of Facebook and paid ads change every day, especially I think after 2020 with iOS 14, they make the tracking more strict, everything changed. So specific tactics may not work, but I, I can definitely share the process. We figure a new channel out. I think that is still applicable. So I would say there are a couple of things, um, In terms of process and team, we have a team that we do daily standup, like your typical engineer teams do daily standup, but our acquisition team, we do daily standup. In the daily standup, we will watch where we are in the app store ranking, and we're like, ah, yeah, we're up, or no, we're done, or, or some other companies jumped out from nowhere, and we hate them. So like, that really gave us a lot of, um, Velocity and focus on this. So that's one. And then we have a cross-functional team as well. We have designer and, uh, channel experts and data person and myself in that room together. So we share all sorts of data. We brainstorm experiments. We launch them quickly. I think a big part of making Facebook work is, um, there are a lot of standard best practice. We use lookalike audience. We kind of, uh, optimize towards our, um, Best customers, like who are looking like our best customers. We, that's our goal. Um, but we do large amount of creative,…

AI assessment note: “We use lookalike audience... but we do large amount of creative, creativity testing”

Q user, but you'll also be paying more for them in a lot of cases, which is why I love it when it's like, this is my CAC forever. Um, so I, I totally agree. Now this series is designed for founders who are building out growth teams. And I think that's just a big question on definitions first. How do you define growth and VP or head of growth first?

A Yeah. Yeah. I think growth is a tricky thing. It is both the results and the discipline. And whenever you have that, um, it is a hard job. Like sales is a result, right? You'll get sales and is also a discipline. It's a function. So, um, growth is by results. I mean, like, what are you trying to grow, right? You want to grow your ARR, your revenue, your, your user base, your metrics, whatever. Um, I think the other layer is you want to grow them sustainably, not just like for a short period of time. And growth as a discipline, there, it is really in my view about using scientific methods to grow business KPIs. Um, like there are the core, uh, methods is around data and experimentation, which is similar to scientific method, right? There are different levers you can grow. You can grow By growing acquisition or activation or revenue retention, all of those, all of those different aspects will lead to growth. You can also grow by different channels. You can grow by product. You can grow via marketing. Like there are also the channel aspects. So growth is both results and the discipline and approach. And in terms of the different titles, I would say there are, there are also. Some different nuances, right? You, you talk about VP, right? VP director, growth PM. Sometimes there is a chief growth officer. Those are the different levels of a growth leader. Um, but you also have differe…

AI assessment note: “It is both the results and the discipline.”

Q I totally get you. I think charting that career trajectory and showing a pathway to a head of growth at a hyperscale company is, is really what excites a lot of the best. Say I decided not to hire this growth hire, and I went for an agency. When does hiring an agency work well, and when does it not work well?

A Yeah, that's a, that's a great question. In general, I think agency should come a little bit later, because if you're thinking about, um, figure out your, your growth mechanism, right? This is pretty fundamental to your business, to your point, like you have PMF, but also you need to have channel, right? You need to have some sort of, uh, unique economics and channel works. Otherwise it's not a viable business. So. Hire agency for that feels very irresponsible and wouldn't work in the most cases. So you need to think about you for building a sky gripper. You need to be the architect. You need to be the growth architect, like a founder need to be very invested in figure out growth channels, and you can hire someone with expertise to work alongside with you. Like that is the main thing, but certain building block Later on may be outsourced, or you may tap into expertise. The, the most things I see may be successful than others is if paid, like is your main channel is your initial growth loop. Um, some agencies are like specialized on that. You can use them to scale, right? Or if you meet kind of a stumble upon certain specific specialized areas like pricing or, or, You need more support in creating creative ads. You don't have capacity in-house. Maybe you can tap into some consultant or, or agency, but I would say the most fundamental things is about figuring out your growth mode…

AI assessment note: “In general, I think agency should come a little bit later”

Q Ok, so we have the KPIs in the job description, we figured out the growth model, we figured out a couple of the growth loops, so we've got a kind of understanding of what sort of profile we want from that understanding. What do we do now, Hila?

A Yeah. The next step is usually, um, try to share this around in your network, in all the growth channels. Like I help pass this along because there's that concentration of people and it's always better to figure out someone who, who know, um, your potential hire. So like try to get referrals, share that like crazy. And then once you begin to get some candidates applications, try to do some screening. Uh, I would say there is a company list that I know that has great growth people, and I share that with the, the, the founders and maybe what is the industry? What is the skill set? Like all those, if there's a perfect fit, right? Awesome. Try to go after them as quickly as possible. Um, from there, I help a couple of founders actually create a take home assignment. Because that is a very nice way to really know their thinking and allow the candidate to share their more comprehensive thinking as well. Uh, and then the last step will be the interview and you need to interview with the founder, the leadership team, your collaborators, and, and maybe someone in your team as well, like engineer designers, but also the VP marketing, VP sales, if you need to work with them.

AI assessment note: “The next step is usually, um, try to share this around in your network”

Q What are the biggest mistakes you see founders make when it comes to loops?

A I think the biggest mistake is One, don't think about loops. You only think about funnel, right? You don't think about those powerful things. You miss the opportunity of constructing those. The second thing is just by having it there doesn't mean it will work as a loop. Just put four things into a circle and draw a line, connect them, doesn't make it a loop. For example, if I launched a referral mechanism in Acorns, doesn't mean people will use it. Right. There are things you can do to make people to use it. You can add incentive experiment with the experience, make the process super smooth. Think about the motivation, like why this loop will spin, like just put four things there. It doesn't mean it will work. You need to make it work.

AI assessment note: “I think the biggest mistake is One, don't think about loops.”