The Ledger
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Recent Facebook growth veterans often lack zero-to-one startup scaling experience
“Like if you were at Facebook in the last five years, you might not have learned how to do zero to one growth. You might've learned how to do a hundred to a million growth, much higher level.”
Competent VP of Growth candidates will not join pre-product-market fit startups
“That VP growth is usually not going to want to join, like, kind of an empty team, or definitely not, like, a pre-product market fit product, if they know what they're doing.”
Growth teams should sit inside the product organization under the CPO
“If you put growth outside a product, You kind of set up a potential conflict between the two. Really at the end of the day, growth is often effectively a product team. They have product people, engineers, data scientists. They work more with like the code that…”
B2B SaaS startups should not hire consumer growth experts
“I wouldn't hire like a consumer expert for like a B to B SaaS business, because it's just such a different world.”
Growth teams should directly own core onboarding and monetization flows
“Ideally, growth owns the product areas, and it's not just kind of a layer on top of core products. So usually growth would have ownership over the core onboarding flow and the monetization flow and maybe the logged out pages, or those might be owned by marketi…”
Growth teams should ask for forgiveness 40% of the time
“Forgiveness, 40% of the time, and then permission 60%. So mostly you should be on board with the team, but occasionally, yeah, you want to be a little bit that loose cannon who delivers amazing results.”
High-volume A/B testing is becoming less effective for modern startups
“So I think this high volume A-B testing growth is a little less focal. Optimizing for the users on a lower volume basis is incredibly important for a lot of the successful startups today.”
Optimizing solely for top-of-funnel signups degrades downstream user quality
“So to make that real, oftentimes people will pick one metric, just like signups, and they'll pull really hard on it, like more, more, more, more signups. But then we've all seen stories of like these unintended consequences, where they're like, they make the s…”
Growth teams should use six-month macro planning cycles instead of quarters
“I'm kind of a big fan of six-month macro planning cycles, because one year is very hard to, like, plan ahead, and then one quarter is just too short to really get a tremendous amount done.”
A startup's first growth team needs one PM, two engineers, half designer
“I think the first hire, first it goes to founder, then it goes to like a small growth team. One PM, two engineers, like half a designer or something like that.”
Paid user research participants default to giving biased, pleasing feedback
“Oftentimes people are trying to look good and trying to say the right thing, partly because you're probably paying them. You're probably giving them a 50, a hundred dollar gift certificate to like participate. So they want to kind of try to make you happy. It'…”
Founders should evaluate new growth leaders at six months, not two
“I'd have different thresholds at six months and one year. I wouldn't have very strong thresholds after like one or two months. So really after one or two months, you're expecting them to get some good context and understand what the org needs and to start sett…”
Calendar invites represent an underappreciated viral growth vector in B2B SaaS
“It really is like a fundamental viral mechanism of like meeting people through calendar entries and one-to-one meetings, especially in this remote work world. So I think it's kind of under reflected on viral opportunity that's still really prescient today.”