Insight certainty 3/5 debate potential 3/5

Building growth loops before product-market fit wastes resources

Kieran Flanagan · Kieran Flanagan: Hiring Tips for Growth; North Star Metrics; Hubspot's Mistake | 20VC #916 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Aug 10, 2022 · at 10:41

Kieran Flanagan, SVP of Marketing at HubSpot, advises early-stage founders against focusing prematurely on growth tactics like virality loops and onboarding flows before securing product-market fit.

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“A lot of the times I've talked to founders in pre-product market fit, they're obsessed over things that just are not that important right now. They don't need to worry about how do I build great onboarding flows. They don't need to worry about how do I build virality loops, which everyone wants to do, and very few people can actually build them. And so you have to grow into the problems you want. I think most of them, even though I've said there's reasons to do growth pre-product market fit, but nearly all of the time it is sometimes a waste of energy and a waste of resources.”

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