Mike Duboe, Partner at Greylock and former Head of Growth at Stitch Fix, outlines the framework used to structure growth experiments and maintain analytical honesty.
“Anyone could submit an experiment idea, even if you're not on the growth team, but we built this very simple kind of one pager framework that included an objective hypothesis you're testing design or resources required to execute the experiment timeline. So how long you need the experiment to run and then what success quantifiably looks like. So you're not actually going and having revisionist history. I'm like, Hey, it actually did work even though, you know, the data showed this. And then finally, the next steps that one takes, if the experiment fails or succeeds.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading:
filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard
(the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Mike Duboe
Insight
Duboe: Direct response attribution models offer false precision compared to holdout testing
“Many growth marketers aim for this, like almost a false sense of precision to give credit to a conversion on any one channel or any fractional set of channels. Oftentimes that's just false precision. And so even though we were highly analytical at stitch fix w…”
Mike DuboeFeb 16, 2023▶ 6:37Mike Duboe: Top 5 Lessons Scaling Stitch Fix to IPO; Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric | 20VC #978 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Duboe: Startups must never hire a growth lead before finding product-market fit
“One principle that for sure is true is like never hire a growth person, pre-product market fit.”
Mike DuboeFeb 16, 2023▶ 13:16Mike Duboe: Top 5 Lessons Scaling Stitch Fix to IPO; Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric | 20VC #978 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Duboe: Turning off paid acquisition is the ultimate product-market fit test
“One measure of product market fit health is what happens when you turn off all non-organic acquisition activities. And so ideally you should see some ongoing user base that's retained and ideally generating new users, even if at a much slower clip, right? If y…”
Mike DuboeFeb 16, 2023▶ 45:51Mike Duboe: Top 5 Lessons Scaling Stitch Fix to IPO; Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric | 20VC #978 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
“The thing that many people miss early on is that paid degrades with scale. Yeah. Everyone says like, you know, you'll get better at it. So you'll fight kind of the laws of gravity that might happen in a short term, but on a long-term time horizon, performance …”
Mike DuboeFeb 16, 2023▶ 46:28Mike Duboe: Top 5 Lessons Scaling Stitch Fix to IPO; Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric | 20VC #978 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
“Most, most consumer companies, if you're not paying back, like if you're a subscription business, you're not paying back within a year, that's probably problematic. Ideally if you're e-commerce, you're paying it back on first transaction”
Mike DuboeFeb 16, 2023▶ 54:42Mike Duboe: Top 5 Lessons Scaling Stitch Fix to IPO; Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric | 20VC #978 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Duboe: Successful growth teams should eventually be absorbed into product and marketing
“If the practice of growth is successful, it should eventually abstract itself away and just be how product and marketing are run.”
Mike DuboeFeb 16, 2023▶ 10:09Mike Duboe: Top 5 Lessons Scaling Stitch Fix to IPO; Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric | 20VC #978 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Made with StarZero
Turn any episode into a week of clips.
This entire site, over 1,200 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable,
runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the
moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.
We use essential cookies to make the site work. With your permission we
also use analytics cookies (Google Analytics and Mixpanel) to understand
usage and improve StarZero. See our Cookie Policy.