The Exchanges

Q Now I would love to start with a little bit on you. So first question is how did you make your way into the world of startups? And then kind of secondarily, how did you make your way to Mercury today?

A Well, I started my career in a customer support role at Facebook right out of college. I didn't really know what I wanted to do, but one day someone offered a sequel class and I took that class and it basically changed my life. I kind of used that in my support job. I, I tried to basically figure out why I was getting yelled at so much, uh, and Tried to improve what we were doing with customer support. Um, then a couple of years later when I was looking for a new job, it turns out that what I was doing the whole time was growth. That got me connected to Alex Schultz and a team at Facebook known as growth marketing that sits at the intersection of data, product, and marketing. And I spent six years there helping grow different products across Facebook, things like Facebook ads, workplace, uh, product in London, uh, and WhatsApp, uh, where I spent about three years really going deep on how we, uh, grow some products. I learned a ton, but at some point I wanted to go explore some earlier stage problems, and so started to look and stumbled across Mercury. And how I ended up at Mercury was that I started some conversations and then took a look at the product and immediately knew that I wanted to join. For those in your audience who aren't aware, Mercury is banking for startups. Uh, we offer a product that helps startups, uh, solve all their banking needs, uh, and It's such a better …

AI assessment note: “started to look and stumbled across Mercury. And how I ended up at Mercury”

Q I'm just interested, like, when you say sequencing matters a ton, what does that mean, and how do people get sequencing wrong?

A Often I found that when someone is asking me about trying to grow something, they want acquisition, but what they actually have is conversion and retention problem. And so, you know, you have to look at the full funnel of that experience and understand, is there a drop-off? One example of this with WhatsApp business when we launched pretty early on is, you know, we had a product that was starting to get really strong adoption. Team really wanted to go do some acquisition. But when I kind of went through this growth system, the thing that I found was that retention Was dropping off in an enormous scale. I mean, it was something that was actually really concerning some of the lowest retention I've seen. And as we dug into that a lot further and we started to talk to customers, one of the things that we found was the transition from the WhatsApp consumer app to the WhatsApp business app was broken. It kind of was some technology that didn't exist. You kind of lost some chats along the way, but if you're a business starting a new app, losing chats is actually the most critical thing. And so, you know, you could just switch back to the consumer app and get going. And so one of the things that we started to do before we actually focused on pouring fuel on the fire with acquisition was we fixed that initial transition that the common cluster was going through. That basically doubled r…

AI assessment note: “they want acquisition, but what they actually have is conversion and retention problem.”

Q I mean, I have to ask on review, when you think about growth decisions that you've made, talk to me about a growth decision you made without data to back it up. How did it go, and what were some takeaways for you?

A Yeah, I mean, at Mercury, there were a ton of these, especially early on because we were a pretty small company at the time, and we didn't have a ton of data to inform what we were doing. But one example of this is that, you know, the experience that I had when I joined Mercury was the product is the differentiated experience. And so one idea we had was, ah, that, you know, maybe we should build a product demo so people can see our product. But we thought about how to do that in a Mercury, and we went and looked out at other demos. They either didn't exist, or they kind of think about the value for the company. They try to extract an email. They try to walk you through these really annoying steps. You can't actually explore the product, and so what we built was a product demo where we just remove all the friction. You can see the product. You can go to demo.mercury.com, and we added a little open account button at the top, and we just put it out. We didn't know if it would work, but it was kind of an experiment. Let people see the product to play around with it. And if they want, they can decide to use it. It, the reception has been like a while from that. I mean, over a thousand accounts have signed up. We've had some huge deposits, basically sales size deposits have come in without talking to anyone. It's become a huge growth lever and it even helps with things like recruitin…

AI assessment note: “one example of this is that... we built was a product demo where we just remove all the friction”

Q So, if we think about that holistic picture of growth being what most leaders get wrong about growth, in terms of what growth people get wrong about growth, what do growth people get wrong about growth?

A I mean, I think ultimately is that the product experience matters. I see far too many growth leaders jump to notifications, upsells, or things like that. But in my experience, there's usually one thing that drives most of the results and people get too bogged down in trying a hundred growth hacks to actually move a number, but really you have to kind of find the right thing. I'll give you like one classic example from WhatsApp, uh, that we use a lot and the kind of the consumer experience, which is that, you know, as we talked about in France and the United States or some of those markets, Uh, WhatsApp isn't used by everyone. Um, but in those markets, uh, people still sign up for WhatsApp. And it turns out when you sign up for WhatsApp and you have no one to talk to on WhatsApp, you don't use WhatsApp. And so what we were doing is we were looking at inviting as a mechanism for how we could increase kind of utility of WhatsApp in these markets that WhatsApp wasn't, uh, wasn't working. And so, you know, we tried a bunch of different entry points throughout the product to invite people. But the thing that we found was that an entry point, when you're searching for someone that doesn't have WhatsApp, Was the top entry point. It kind of became 10 X bigger than any other entry point. And it makes sense because the context of what you're trying to do in that app was met by that entry.…

AI assessment note: “I see far too many growth leaders jump to notifications, upsells, or things like that.”

Q Ok, so we do that. Say we are the first person in the growth org at a company, as hypothetically speaking, someone actually hired me. Uh, what should they be? How should they do it? What tests should we run? What advice do you have for that as the first growth person in an org?

A This has been the niche that I have found myself in, in my career, and it's something that I truly love and enjoy doing. And so I have a couple of different things that I think are really important. I mean, early on in the kind of journey of a growth leader at a company, I think there are a couple of things that should really happen. First, I think that growth leader should go through the customer journey from discovering the product and becoming an active customer. Go through it like a customer would kind of end in, take screenshots at every step. Aggregate that and share that back with the team. 99% of the time that I've done this, I found that the team hasn't actually looked at that experience in a while because it gets lost in the changes, and so taking kind of a fresh set of eyes at this problem is something that is kind of really important for setting a good foundation. The second thing is I think there are a couple of analyses that are really critical to, to run. First, I think you have to understand where your users come from and how has that changed over time. That can give you an insight into, like, You know, what are the dynamics that are driving growth of this business? Second, I think, I think you have to think about what's the funnel from someone showing intent to becoming an active customer. Where are the drop off points? What are the friction points? What's work…

AI assessment note: “First, I think that growth leader should go through the customer journey”

Q Speaking of growing in ways you didn't expect, I mean, Facebook and WhatsApp are two meteoric growth case studies over the last 10 years. I'm just fascinated when you review those years that you spent at both organizations or within the organization there, what are one to two of the biggest takeaways for you, Ryan, from seeing firsthand the hypergrowth there, and how did that impact your mindset?

A My time at WhatsApp was actually probably the most interesting contrast to help me kind of discover a lot. Of what I've learned about growth. And, you know, I joined WhatsApp in 2017, um, and basically WhatsApp was very different than everything I had learned at Facebook. And, you know, for six years at Facebook, the thing I had learned was that data is core to everything. You kind of understand funnels, you instrument things, you don't make a decision without having some data to the table. But when I joined WhatsApp, it had a billion and a half users, and it really only had about one product manager, about two to three data people working on it. So I took that as an opportunity to go to school, and I think it's a story that hasn't really been told about WhatsApp, about why WhatsApp got to where it was, and so I'm going to tell that story, and then I'll come back to what I learned. So what I learned about WhatsApp and how WhatsApp grew was really kind of three things. First, it was the right product for the right market. If you look at the market at the time when WhatsApp launched, apps, uh, the app stores and smartphones were just launching. SMS prices across the world were about 10 cents a message. And the second thing is that WhatsApp built a product that was really simple and it was reliable. They focused ruthlessly on the core things you should do, which is be able to send…

AI assessment note: “for six years at Facebook, the thing I had learned was that data is core”

Q Why has the U.S. been a challenging market for WhatsApp, do you think?

A I mean, I think it really comes to competition in the marketplace. I mean, when you look at the dynamics in the United States, some of the things that happened were, one, SMS was very cheap early on and included in a lot of plans, uh, phone plans that people bought. Second, there were a strong amount of competitors, things like, you know, a really robust SMS network, iMessage has become really big in the United States, uh, Messenger for the Facebook product of the messaging app. So you just have a lot of competitive dynamics that weren't quite the same as in a market like India, where SMS is 10 cents. So like, you know, you're actually competing against 10 cents versus the marginal cost of incremental data.

AI assessment note: “I mean, I think it really comes to competition in the marketplace.”

Q I mean, I have to ask on review, when you think about growth decisions that you've made, talk to me about a growth decision you made without data to back it up. How did it go, and what were some takeaways for you?

A Yeah, I mean, at Mercury, there were a ton of these, especially early on because we were a pretty small company at the time, and we didn't have a ton of data to inform what we were doing. But one example of this is that, you know, the experience that I had when I joined Mercury was the product is the differentiated experience. And so one idea we had was, ah, that, you know, maybe we should build a product demo so people can see our product. But we thought about how to do that in a Mercury, and we went and looked out at other demos. They either didn't exist, or they kind of think about the value for the company. They try to extract an email. They try to walk you through these really annoying steps. You can't actually explore the product, and so what we built was a product demo where we just remove all the friction. You can see the product. You can go to demo.mercury.com, and we added a little open account button at the top, and we just put it out. We didn't know if it would work, but it was kind of an experiment. Let people see the product to play around with it. And if they want, they can decide to use it. It, the reception has been like a while from that. I mean, over a thousand accounts have signed up. We've had some huge deposits, basically sales size deposits have come in without talking to anyone. It's become a huge growth lever and it even helps with things like recruitin…

AI assessment note: “one idea we had was, ah, that, you know, maybe we should build a product demo”

Q Ok, so we do that. Say we are the first person in the growth org at a company, as hypothetically speaking, someone actually hired me. Uh, what should they be? How should they do it? What tests should we run? What advice do you have for that as the first growth person in an org?

A This has been the niche that I have found myself in, in my career, and it's something that I truly love and enjoy doing. And so I have a couple of different things that I think are really important. I mean, early on in the kind of journey of a growth leader at a company, I think there are a couple of things that should really happen. First, I think that growth leader should go through the customer journey from discovering the product and becoming an active customer. Go through it like a customer would kind of end in, take screenshots at every step. Aggregate that and share that back with the team. 99% of the time that I've done this, I found that the team hasn't actually looked at that experience in a while because it gets lost in the changes, and so taking kind of a fresh set of eyes at this problem is something that is kind of really important for setting a good foundation. The second thing is I think there are a couple of analyses that are really critical to, to run. First, I think you have to understand where your users come from and how has that changed over time. That can give you an insight into, like, You know, what are the dynamics that are driving growth of this business? Second, I think, I think you have to think about what's the funnel from someone showing intent to becoming an active customer. Where are the drop off points? What are the friction points? What's work…

AI assessment note: “First, I think that growth leader should go through the customer journey”

Q You said act on super quick there. I think we'll both recognize that people are generally too slow to let people go if it's not working out well. If it's not going to plan, how long should we give ahead of growth and a growth higher? And they may be different there to prove their worth and prove their value.

A I mean, I think in most cases you can understand three to six months if someone is working out. And that doesn't mean that they have to be totally changing the directory of your company in three to six months. But the question is, are they leading to a quality of work that is the kind of understanding choosing of smart bets and showing that they can execute on problems that is leading to like any success. It has to be focused on the inputs and the quality of those inputs. And sometimes the output takes a while, you know, some, for some of the roles that I've taken, it's taken me Uh, you know, six to six months to 12 months to actually see a win, but that kind of early inputs of how they're interacting with the team, how they're kind of coming to conclusions, and then what they're building is, I think, enough to be able to tell, like, this is going to be successful or it's not. And then you have to have a hard conversation and understand, can they, can they change that trajectory? And if they can't, then, you know, it's time to let it go. But, you know, the thing I found about letting people go is that you're always happier When we do, then you ever would expect.

AI assessment note: “I think in most cases you can understand three to six months if someone is working out.”

Q The final one, my friend, when you look at the landscape of great product experiences, other than Merchery, what one product experience, company, growth strategy have you been most impressed by recently?

A I mean, one that I really love is Substack. Um, Substack is a product that has built an incredible platform for a very targeted customer subset and provided a ton of value with them, but then as they've gone kind of through the journey of building that initial product that provides value to writers, They started to add on things that they can uniquely do because they have a network. They've added ways to recommend, uh, you know, newsletters between different writers. They've added, you know, a mobile app that is quite compelling and has kind of these features. They just launched a new kind of network effects product. And I think to me, the interesting thing about Substack is they're aligning their incentives behind their core customer. And when you see that happen, you know, the, the, the world is their oyster. And it's something I'm really stoked about, uh, and really excited to see how they've taken off.

AI assessment note: “one that I really love is Substack. Um, Substack is a product that has built”

Q What are the best and what are the worst there? What are the green flags in how they describe those experiences and what are the red flags?

A The thing that I'm really looking for is the ability to understand the system behind what's happening. Can they, can they understand that it's not just about, you know, adding an entry point, but actually there's a value that matters for a person at a given, uh, drop off point and that, that they can understand that there's something broader beyond just the one change they made and kind of find consistent wins or, you know, break it down into like, how could you take that and maximize something? Um, those are some of the dimensions that I'm really looking for in that background is, you know, Can, can they, can they think broader than just the example, uh, about their kind of role and how they entered that? Great people I find are people that, uh, you know, are able to take a problem, which is like, how do we get more people to sign up, break it down into composable pieces and then figure out, you know, this, the seven things that you should try. And then this one works. Oh, let's take that one thing that works and, and 10 exit. Um, that is often the thing that I'm looking for in that kind of background thing. In the worst cases, the thing that I see is, you know, someone that is just kind of, Running a playbook. Uh, someone that is, you know, just doing the thing that either their company would do or, you know, we could find on a blog or things like that. Like to me, you have t…

AI assessment note: “In the worst cases, the thing that I see is... Running a playbook.”

Q Can I just dive in and ask, when you look at the growth of WhatsApp, did it ever not go up and to the right? Was there ever a quarter where it was flat, or where it wasn't meteoric?

A So I think that, that WhatsApp hit S curves along the way, kind of throughout. And some of the, when you look at like an overall WhatsApp growth trajectory, the thing that it looks like is a just straight up upwards trend. But as you break it down by countries, you find that, you know, some of the countries overweigh the, the kind of growth of other kind of segments of what was happening in WhatsApp. So, you know, India coming online and reaching, I think around six hundred million smartphones over the course of the last 10 year has been Just a huge boon to WhatsApp's growth and has been something that kind of always adds, uh, incremental numbers and it's kind of become a really saturated product in that market. But there are some markets where WhatsApp wasn't as big and, you know, like the United States has been a country where WhatsApp has some adoption, uh, but has it quite reached a scale of, uh, you know, total growth and it's sometimes been flat and sometimes even negative over that course of time. And so thinking about, Kind of overall versus the sub-segments is, is one way of looking at some of the differences there.

AI assessment note: “has sometimes been flat and sometimes even negative over that course of time”

Q Is that what you mean when you said to me before that most leaders get growth wrong, they don't understand that three-pillared segments of growth? Or did you mean something else by most leaders get growth wrong?

A I mean, that's exactly it. I mean, at the end of the day, growth is a system. Um, and often when I get asked to come in and grow something, what most people are actually, you know, think they're asking about is, uh, growing acquisition, but I actually think that's where it's totally wrong because often, uh, if you look at the kind of growth journey from acquisition, getting in front of someone to conversion, someone kind of going through a funnel, uh, to then activation and retention, there are often problems that exist in that bottom funnel that make it such that If you were just to go try to do acquisition, you wouldn't reach kind of a scale that you need to, and so you have to think about that kind of full customer journey, and then think about the levers that you can pull in that journey, and sequencing matters a ton for how you actually drive an impact that is kind of at scale.

AI assessment note: “I mean, that's exactly it. I mean, at the end of the day, growth is a system.”

Q I totally get you. Can I ask you, in terms of like, you know, building the team around us, you said before, before we kind of jumped to hiring this full growth team, you said that building with the minimum number of people possible is actually maybe better. Why do you think it may be better to have less people, and what are the advantages of that leaner team?

A I mean, I think at some level, I strongly believe in the principle of Metcalfe's law. And for those of you who aren't aware that the Metcalfe's law is the notion of in a communication system, the number of nodes in a communication system mean that the complexity and the value of that communication system grows exponentially. And so when you think about that, if you have a huge team, it is more complex to get anything done because you're having to coordinate across a bunch of people. And so the thing that I look for is, is there, you know, One to four people that can get something done and trying to keep things as small as possible to iterate as quick as possible, keep the communication loops tight, keep the alignment tight, and it helps prioritize. It helps you think about what is the most important thing to do and how can we go execute on that very quickly. Um, and so I usually start very small and, you know, as you start to do that kind of explore then exploit mindset, um, that is kind of the, the fundamental principle of explore, but At some point you do need to scale it up and you need to start adding more resources to help kind of take things bigger, but that has to come from something that's working much like, you know, a product has to actually be working before you bring in a growth team. I think your growth team has to be working before you kind of scale a growth team …

AI assessment note: “keep the communication loops tight, keep the alignment tight, and it helps prioritize.”

Q is the hardest question that not enough people actually get right in their own business. When you think about WhatsApp, it could be the number of messages sent today, it could be the number of times you return to the app on a daily basis, it could be the number of contacts you have that use it. How do you advise founders on the right metric that determines user success?

A At the end of the day, there's a reason people use a product and stick around in it. You know, one of the most common analyses I do when I kind of start on a growth problem is think about what is the retention curve, so up the percent of people that start, what percent of people stick around, and basically try to correlate that with actions people take early on. For WhatsApp, if you look at that, you know, one of the things that matters a lot is having people to talk to, and so the more people you have to talk to, the more likely you are to stick around on using WhatsApp, but actually that's not the thing that matters. What matters is the one person that you want to talk to. And we can't necessarily know that one person, but we know that if you have more people, you're more likely to have the one person. And so you have to think about what's kind of the core dynamic of the app. What's the value the user receives? And then what's the thing that helps represent the actions that people take that lead to that? An example of that is, you know, the Facebook, 10 friends in 14 days. It really is about having kind of connections on the app that make it so that you have content that you can see and experience the core value of the product. And then kind of the growth effort is how you drive that action that leads to the retentive behavior.

AI assessment note: “try to correlate that with actions people take early on”

Q So, if we think about that holistic picture of growth being what most leaders get wrong about growth, in terms of what growth people get wrong about growth, what do growth people get wrong about growth?

A I mean, I think ultimately is that the product experience matters. I see far too many growth leaders jump to notifications, upsells, or things like that. But in my experience, there's usually one thing that drives most of the results and people get too bogged down in trying a hundred growth hacks to actually move a number, but really you have to kind of find the right thing. I'll give you like one classic example from WhatsApp, uh, that we use a lot and the kind of the consumer experience, which is that, you know, as we talked about in France and the United States or some of those markets, Uh, WhatsApp isn't used by everyone. Um, but in those markets, uh, people still sign up for WhatsApp. And it turns out when you sign up for WhatsApp and you have no one to talk to on WhatsApp, you don't use WhatsApp. And so what we were doing is we were looking at inviting as a mechanism for how we could increase kind of utility of WhatsApp in these markets that WhatsApp wasn't, uh, wasn't working. And so, you know, we tried a bunch of different entry points throughout the product to invite people. But the thing that we found was that an entry point, when you're searching for someone that doesn't have WhatsApp, Was the top entry point. It kind of became 10 X bigger than any other entry point. And it makes sense because the context of what you're trying to do in that app was met by that entry.…

AI assessment note: “I think ultimately is that the product experience matters.”

Q I'm an early stage founder, Ryan, and I'm thinking about adding my first growth hire. Should it be a growth leader who can hire their growth team, or should it be a jack of all trades growth person who is much more versatile? How do I think about that right profile type leader or more junior?

A I think that there can be some early roles around setting up infrastructure from an engineering perspective or from a marketing standpoint where you're getting kind of the measurement of your product or the conversion tracking set up. But I think you should bring in a growth leader pretty early once you do kind of understand that it's time to grow, because you want that person to basically architect the system of growth that you're building for your company. And I think that's like a pretty critical aspect of this. And so how I think about this is, you know, lay some early foundation, get to know that it's working, but then pretty quickly bring in a journalist growth leader that can start to think about, you know, where do we want to take this and how do we kind of maximize what we have?

AI assessment note: “bring in a growth leader pretty early once you do kind of understand”

Q How long do you wait? How much signal is enough signal? And I just see people try things, and they're like, well, we need more time. Like, a week isn't enough. How do you determine when enough data is enough to decide whether to continue or to cut something?

A I mean, there, there's actually a science to this, which is that, you know, when you run an experiment, you can measure the, uh, uh, measurable impact of an experiment, um, and the sample size you need to be able to affect that experiment. And so, you know, there's some online calculators. If you just go, go Google, uh, sample size calculator for an experiment, this is something I use all the time because basically, you know, if you're trying to make a one percent change, you need a huge audience. If you're trying to make a, you know, really big change, you need a small audience. And so the things I think about are like, what's the size of impact we actually expect to change? How quick can we measure that and how many people are going through an experience? And if you can't measure an experiment with, uh, the kind of sample size that you have, it's not even worth running the experiment. And so, you know, that's kind of one of the science pieces of this. The other thing is I think sometimes you have to look at the input metrics. Maybe there's a downstream action, like messaging someone that is willing to take a little bit, but you know, does someone have contacts? Do they, you know, uh, import their contacts? Do they invite someone? Those are actions that lead to an output. And so thinking about the difference in input metrics versus output metrics is one dimension that I think …

AI assessment note: “Google, uh, sample size calculator for an experiment, this is something I use”

Q As a growth leader, here's the channels that we're using. Do you want to take a channel that is working and make it better or take a channel that is not working and try and make it work?

A When you have something working is the first priority to make that thing work as well as it can. Um, so I always start with how can you maximize what is working and accelerate it? But ultimately you start to face this question of when should you stop working on a lever or when is there bigger upside elsewhere? And so I think a lot about when do you hit diminishing returns and when is there kind of opportunity costs that you're not, that you're not actually capturing because you're focused on something. And so what I'm looking for is kind of that constant evaluation of, You know, what, what do we think we can gain? What do we kind of have in front of us in this channel? What else could we be working on? And how do we kind of like, you know, make that trade off of impact, cost, and excitement about those kind of different options?

AI assessment note: “When you have something working is the first priority to make that thing work”

Q need to build that growth team more. We want to embark on that process. And so we're going to start hiring Ryan. We are hiring for our growth team, but also we're aware that candidates often for startups are non-obvious and underappreciated, uh, often kind of the obvious, bluntly are kind of the biggest companies earning the biggest salaries. Where do you find great non-obvious talent and growth talent, Ryan?

A I mean, what I really look for is the change agents, particularly in operational roles. And Some of this comes from the bias of my journey into this role, but where I started, I started in the Facebook Austin office, which is an operational team that handled customer support operations for some different Facebook teams. And the people that stood out in that where they could get things done both kind of within the teams that they're working on, but then actually impacting kind of the core product of Facebook are the people that you want to be looking for as kind of a untapped talent that is not yet being reached. And so I think a lot about who are the people that are being able to make changes from difficult positions or places that you wouldn't expect change to be happening from. In those roles, you kind of learn a level of scrappiness, you learn customer empathy, you learn humility that sets you up for success in a bunch of ways that like, you know, the traditional kind of PM that has started right out of college doesn't necessarily have. And so I look for someone that has been making some changes and been able to kind of affect that change. You know, at Mercury, one of the best PMs I've worked with was someone that came from customer support. She taught herself how to code, and she was able to kind of, like, just learn all these small little tasks that helped her do her job b…

AI assessment note: “what I really look for is the change agents, particularly in operational roles.”

Q What are the biggest red flags for you if you have someone join at first 30 to 60 days where you're like, ah, it's not working out. What are the big red flags as to why that would be?

A There's kind of three things that I really look for as red flags. One is I, not team. Are they thinking more about themselves and their position than kind of how the team operates and the broader kind of mission of the company? You really want to see someone that is adopting and adapting to the company that you're working on. Second, are they thinking about sustainability and systems? If someone's just coming in and, you know, launching a new notification in their first month, they're probably looking for the quick wins that kind of show that they're looking, uh, they're, they're, they're making progress, but not Things that are actually going to lead to long-term success. And so, you know, what's the sustainability of what they're doing and will it be something that is a repeatable pattern or is it kind of behaviors that are kind of quick wins that, uh, you know, may be annoying to customers, but you may not see that annoyance early on. And the last one is ignoring feedback. You know, I think early in this kind of first month to three month period, the thing that you want to do is have a really good feedback cycle with the leadership and cross-functional peers. And if someone is not taking feedback about like, Hey, You might want to focus on this rather than this. You know, that's a huge red flag to me and something that, uh, you know, we've got to act on super quick because b…

AI assessment note: “There's kind of three things that I really look for as red flags.”

Q What about growth in France? What's the story there?

A Yeah. For WhatsApp, there are some markets where WhatsApp is not the main messaging app that exists in the market, and it comes down to a lot of competition in the places, and France is one of those. You know, when we were looking at the growth of what we could do to grow a WhatsApp consumer, we thought about what are the markets in which we can help accelerate towards kind of a true network effect that becomes the main messaging app, and so in France, what we did was we basically took that playbook of finding the product, marketing, and partnerships that we could build, To go accelerate our growth. And we execute that playbook over the course of a year where we worked on things like inviting in the product to make it so that people had the people that they wanted to talk to. We worked on marketing campaigns that WhatsApp had never run, uh, to bring in consumers to WhatsApp. And it turns out that people responded really well to that. We found some pretty novel partnerships as well in that space. And through the, that kind of combination of those three tactics, we were able to accelerate growth in France and see that we were actually increasing our, uh, market share of Uh, WhatsApp and put that on a trajectory to start to win. And it was kind of one of the best successes we've saw, we saw in growing the WhatsApp consumer app. And the interesting thing was that, you know, it wasn…

AI assessment note: “we were able to accelerate growth in France and see that we were actually increasing”

Q So, we, we, we've hired the person. Fantastic. We, we've done it, Ryan. Well done. Uh, they're joining our company. Woohoo. Uh, now we need to onboard them, a kind of segment of the hiring process which is continuously fucked up. So, what is the right way to onboard gross talent? What does that optimal onboarding process look like?

A To me, month one is about getting to know the people, the product, and the kind of processes. So, You know, what I really look for when I'm onboarding someone is an exponential growth trajectory for themselves as being the person in that role. And so in that first month, the thing that I'm really trying to get them in is all the context that we can possibly have. Do they have the right relationships? Do they understand the problem in the customer journey? And do they understand how they can get stuff shipped? And that first month, actually, you may not see much progress, but by month three, what I expect is someone to be starting to form opinions and starting to make changes that are having clear input Into a successful trajectory. And so what I'm looking for there is, are they finding unique insights? Are they making changes and helping ship things that wouldn't have otherwise been shipped? Are they bringing clarity to a strategy and kind of the tactics that we're building and helping kind of bring people along in the communication of what they're doing? And so, you know, that's kind of how I think about it is that one month and then three month timeframes. And, you know, I think that it varies by the person, but that's essentially the path.

AI assessment note: “To me, month one is about getting to know the people, the product, and”

Q What about growth in France? What's the story there?

A Yeah. For WhatsApp, there are some markets where WhatsApp is not the main messaging app that exists in the market, and it comes down to a lot of competition in the places, and France is one of those. You know, when we were looking at the growth of what we could do to grow a WhatsApp consumer, we thought about what are the markets in which we can help accelerate towards kind of a true network effect that becomes the main messaging app, and so in France, what we did was we basically took that playbook of finding the product, marketing, and partnerships that we could build, To go accelerate our growth. And we execute that playbook over the course of a year where we worked on things like inviting in the product to make it so that people had the people that they wanted to talk to. We worked on marketing campaigns that WhatsApp had never run, uh, to bring in consumers to WhatsApp. And it turns out that people responded really well to that. We found some pretty novel partnerships as well in that space. And through the, that kind of combination of those three tactics, we were able to accelerate growth in France and see that we were actually increasing our, uh, market share of Uh, WhatsApp and put that on a trajectory to start to win. And it was kind of one of the best successes we've saw, we saw in growing the WhatsApp consumer app. And the interesting thing was that, you know, it wasn…

AI assessment note: “through the, that kind of combination of those three tactics, we were able to accelerate growth in France”

Q Is that what you mean when you said to me before that most leaders get growth wrong, they don't understand that three-pillared segments of growth? Or did you mean something else by most leaders get growth wrong?

A I mean, that's exactly it. I mean, at the end of the day, growth is a system. Um, and often when I get asked to come in and grow something, what most people are actually, you know, think they're asking about is, uh, growing acquisition, but I actually think that's where it's totally wrong because often, uh, if you look at the kind of growth journey from acquisition, getting in front of someone to conversion, someone kind of going through a funnel, uh, to then activation and retention, there are often problems that exist in that bottom funnel that make it such that If you were just to go try to do acquisition, you wouldn't reach kind of a scale that you need to, and so you have to think about that kind of full customer journey, and then think about the levers that you can pull in that journey, and sequencing matters a ton for how you actually drive an impact that is kind of at scale.

AI assessment note: “I mean, that's exactly it. I mean, at the end of the day, growth is a system.”

Q You said about kind of that one action is much more helpful in a lot of cases than like a hundred little actions or hacks. How do you think about speed of execution and the importance and success of growth teams and kind of growth experiments?

A Yeah, I mean, I think speed is one of actually the most important parts of a growth team, and I think it's something that differentiates a growth team from just a core product team. And really, I think there's kind of two dimensions of speed that really matter. One is having really tightly scoped projects that validate a hypothesis, and two is getting, like, quick, impactful results. And so to break those out a little bit more, one, I think the growth team should constantly be in an explored and exploit mode, where they're placing quick bets, getting quick results, And then doubling down when something's working. And I think that that's kind of an iteration loop that can happen in a matter of days or weeks, not months. And so a team should constant, a growth team should constantly be in that dynamic. The second thing is that I think sometimes teams aim too small. If you're an early stage company, if you're an early stage product, you're looking for something that clearly impacts top line growth. You're not looking for one percent wins. Sometimes not getting a clear signal is a signal in itself. And I think that, you know, sometimes people get lost in like, oh, maybe this is going to improve by 10%. No, we're not looking for 10% wins. We're looking for 50% or things that kind of double behavior that's going to lead to a different outcome, and I think that those things are really…

AI assessment note: “speed is one of actually the most important parts of a growth team”

Q How long do you wait? How much signal is enough signal? And I just see people try things, and they're like, well, we need more time. Like, a week isn't enough. How do you determine when enough data is enough to decide whether to continue or to cut something?

A I mean, there, there's actually a science to this, which is that, you know, when you run an experiment, you can measure the, uh, uh, measurable impact of an experiment, um, and the sample size you need to be able to affect that experiment. And so, you know, there's some online calculators. If you just go, go Google, uh, sample size calculator for an experiment, this is something I use all the time because basically, you know, if you're trying to make a one percent change, you need a huge audience. If you're trying to make a, you know, really big change, you need a small audience. And so the things I think about are like, what's the size of impact we actually expect to change? How quick can we measure that and how many people are going through an experience? And if you can't measure an experiment with, uh, the kind of sample size that you have, it's not even worth running the experiment. And so, you know, that's kind of one of the science pieces of this. The other thing is I think sometimes you have to look at the input metrics. Maybe there's a downstream action, like messaging someone that is willing to take a little bit, but you know, does someone have contacts? Do they, you know, uh, import their contacts? Do they invite someone? Those are actions that lead to an output. And so thinking about the difference in input metrics versus output metrics is one dimension that I think …

AI assessment note: “sample size calculator for an experiment, this is something I use all the time”

Q I'm an early stage founder, Ryan, and I'm thinking about adding my first growth hire. Should it be a growth leader who can hire their growth team, or should it be a jack of all trades growth person who is much more versatile? How do I think about that right profile type leader or more junior?

A I think that there can be some early roles around setting up infrastructure from an engineering perspective or from a marketing standpoint where you're getting kind of the measurement of your product or the conversion tracking set up. But I think you should bring in a growth leader pretty early once you do kind of understand that it's time to grow, because you want that person to basically architect the system of growth that you're building for your company. And I think that's like a pretty critical aspect of this. And so how I think about this is, you know, lay some early foundation, get to know that it's working, but then pretty quickly bring in a journalist growth leader that can start to think about, you know, where do we want to take this and how do we kind of maximize what we have?

AI assessment note: “I think you should bring in a growth leader pretty early”

Q I totally get you. Can I ask you, in terms of like, you know, building the team around us, you said before, before we kind of jumped to hiring this full growth team, you said that building with the minimum number of people possible is actually maybe better. Why do you think it may be better to have less people, and what are the advantages of that leaner team?

A I mean, I think at some level, I strongly believe in the principle of Metcalfe's law. And for those of you who aren't aware that the Metcalfe's law is the notion of in a communication system, the number of nodes in a communication system mean that the complexity and the value of that communication system grows exponentially. And so when you think about that, if you have a huge team, it is more complex to get anything done because you're having to coordinate across a bunch of people. And so the thing that I look for is, is there, you know, One to four people that can get something done and trying to keep things as small as possible to iterate as quick as possible, keep the communication loops tight, keep the alignment tight, and it helps prioritize. It helps you think about what is the most important thing to do and how can we go execute on that very quickly. Um, and so I usually start very small and, you know, as you start to do that kind of explore then exploit mindset, um, that is kind of the, the fundamental principle of explore, but At some point you do need to scale it up and you need to start adding more resources to help kind of take things bigger, but that has to come from something that's working much like, you know, a product has to actually be working before you bring in a growth team. I think your growth team has to be working before you kind of scale a growth team …

AI assessment note: “if you have a huge team, it is more complex to get anything done”