Insight certainty 4/5 debate potential 3/5

Early-stage growth teams should target 50% wins, not 1% optimizations

Ryan Wiggins · Ryan Wiggins: Scaling WhatsApp from 0-100M; How to Build a Growth Team; Mercury Neobank | E1016 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · May 19, 2023 · at 16:02

Ryan Wiggins is VP of Growth and Analytics at Mercury. He discusses experimentation strategy for early-stage companies on 20VC.

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“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”

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