Insight
Bonaci: Growth Teams Aren't Doing Their Job Properly If They Aren't Failing
“I think that they should acknowledge that the vast majority of what they work on is going to fail. And that if they're not failing, like, honestly, they're probably not doing their job well.”
Insight
Bonaci: AI Eliminated the Need for Growth Candidates to Be Technical
“You don't need to be nearly as technical as you used to like, AI can help you write the code. It can tell you other ways of doing things. Like it's even just like in that element of like who I would used to like have a bias for hiring. It's totally changed.”
Insight
Bonaci: Early-Stage Companies Should Prioritize Hiring for Potential
“I would always skew more junior. I think hiring for potential, especially early on in the business is far more important.”
Insight
Bonaci: Copying growth playbooks to new companies generally fails
“So even if you understand from past experience, something that's worked, usually just taking like that one playbook or that one tactic and copy and pasting it to a new company, like generally doesn't work.”
Opinion
Bonaci: Most marketers fail at growth by relying on past knowledge
“And I think that's usually lost on a lot of marketers because they don't think in terms of experiments. They think in terms of like, what do I know and how can I apply it here?”
Insight
Bonaci: Growth Teams Should Prioritize Experimentation Velocity Over Perfection
“You should assume if you're doing things right, you should assume the majority of your bets are going to fail, which is why I always believe that velocity is probably more Important than getting things perfect.”
Insight
Bonaci: Startups Scale Successful Growth Channels Far Too Slowly
“And I think most companies or most startups, at least they get to that, ask them to asymptote too slowly. And they should really be scaling much, much faster if they find something that works.”
Insight
Bonaci: Calculating LTV for Early-Stage Startups Is False Precision
“But the reality is it's like false precision. Like you're not going to know where your LTV is if you've been in business for a year or six months or whatever it might be. So I wouldn't over index on that false precision.”
Opinion
Bonaci: Growth Teams Should Operate Independently From Product and Marketing
“I think my personal opinion is I think growth should be independent. I think like the growth team's mandate should be to figure out how to grow the business. And that should be more than just marketing. It should be more than just product. It should mean that …”
Insight
Bonaci: Concentration in a growth channel is not inherently bad
“Concentration in and of itself is not a bad thing. It means that you're doing a good job maximizing an area.”
Insight
Bonaci: Automated AI spending tools produce incremental gains, not growth alpha
“It could be personalized, but almost by definition, that's just going to give you incremental gains on things you're already doing and things that has data on.”
Insight
Bonaci: Influencer Marketing Is the Most Underappreciated B2B Growth Channel
“I don't think most people think of it as a growth channel, but Influencers absolutely is, at least on the B to B side.”
Insight
Bonaci: Growth Alpha Requires Doing What Competitors Believe Will Fail
“I think the way that you find alpha is either by doing things that no one else knows about. I think another aspect is probably doing things that everyone is convinced will not work.”
Insight
Bonaci: Marketers Jump to Execution Without Rigorous Experimental Design
“And I think most marketers tend to jump to let's go do something. Let's go launch something. But the experimental design, like understanding what you're actually able to measure, what you will measure, how long it'll take to get that result. If it's statistica…”
Insight
Bonaci: Growth channels saturate more slowly than most expect
“Having said that, I think like most things saturate probably more slowly than people expect.”
Opinion
Bonaci: Emotional attachment to individual experiments is a growth team culture problem
“No one should be that attached to the experiment that they're running. Like, I think that is a cultural problem.”
Insight
Bonaci: Brand marketing is a high-risk, high-reward long-term bet
“I think that you have to be okay with the fact that most brand marketing is a long-term bet. It's high risk. It's high reward.”
Insight
Bonaci: Start brand marketing when direct response channels saturate
“I think if you, if you're seeing all of your core direct response channels start to saturate, then it's something that you have to start doing.”
Insight
Bonaci: Bad growth hires usually stem from generalists disliking the role's reality
“It's generally been hiring a generalist that ultimately, hey, this isn't for me. I don't want to do this after all. I've never done this problem or I've never done this job before. Now that I'm doing it, I really don't enjoy it.”
Insight
Bonaci: Growth hiring failures stem from manager scoping mistakes
“I think like the number one reason is it was on the manager. It was a mishire. They didn't scope the role effectively or the role changed. The needs of the business changed and they hired the wrong person the wrong profile. I think generally managers try to co…”
Insight
Bonaci: Scaled Startups Ruin Future Growth If They Ignore Brand Investment
“Once you reach a certain size or scale, like if you're not investing in brand as part of like your long-term horizon or long-term bucket of bets, then you're going to screw yourself over in the future.”
Disclosure
At Ramp, the growth team reports directly to a co-founder
“I honestly, that's one of the reasons why I love ramp is the growth team reports to one of the co-founders.”
Disclosure
Bonaci: Ramp's primary growth bottleneck is experimentation velocity
“The biggest bottleneck is probably the velocity of experimentation. Like, there are so many opportunities. We don't have enough time. We don't have enough resources.”
Disclosure
Bonaci: Samsara scheduled his first two weeks to the minute
“Like, actually, this is something I learned from Samsara as well. Like, I remember my first 30 days were written out in excruciating detail. I think the first two weeks were completely scheduled out, like, to the minute for me.”
