The Wisdom Wall

“For any founder in the first year, investing in paid as the means of growth is a death trap.”

“Unless you've been in the business for five years plus, You do not know your LTV. Period.”

“paid marketing to me is, uh, Is a cheap way out, and it's not competitively defensible. I should say cheap. It's actually the most expensive way out, and it's not competitively defensible at all, and it's not sustainable.”

“Like, you still have to invest in SEO if you want to have the baseline of growth. But is SEO gonna be the reason that you're gonna win in your business? I don't think so. It's just something that you have to do. This is not gonna be the reason why you're gonna stand out and win.”

“if you can use your company to help people build a better social presence that they can use to do marketing for your company, then who cares if they build a personal brand in the meantime, they become your biggest marketing agent, the most powerful marketing agent. And encouraging that, I think you have to look at it…”

“less than 10% should be paid in the more scaled mature company can be 30, 40%, but anywhere over 50%, I would be very uncomfortable on the reliance on paid”

“unless your conversion window is under three months, I would say don't start with paid marketing as your growth lever, because you will never be able to make it spin fast enough, because you don't, you have such a long conversion windows.”

“allowing flexibility in your monetization model for ad hoc purchases can mean the world of incrementality for your overall monetization capture potential. We just introduced top ups at lovable and it's been absolutely wild because in every other job I've ever held in my entire life, I've always thought about something…”

“because like, otherwise, like I said, all of the SaaS functionality is getting commoditized and democratized, and it's just like anybody can do everything now.”

“If you look at your overall marketing spend, your free giveaways, whether it's part freemium, whether it's discount codes or whatnot, has to be bigger than your paid marketing spend.”

“I know that that constant noise is part of our retention strategy. That constant noise is what drives a lot of resurrection for us as well, because people feel like it's a living, breathing thing that is constantly growing and evolving, and they always want to come back and try it again, as opposed to us getting into…”

“both of us together, it's almost like old guard of Sarah's and new guard of like truly employees that don't have that context, that don't have that baggage is what creates a perfect harmony that pushes the company forward. Because you can prevent stupid mistakes from happening with Sarah's, but then you can push into…”

“there is incredible products that have never seen the light of day and died of slow death because they never had a growth model. And there's also a lot of really terrible products that have incredible growth models and the multi-billion dollar businesses right now.”

“So I think hiring pre-product market fit, big, big mistake. Hiring right after product market fit without actually figuring out how to create some of the traction is a big mistake as well.”

“And by the way, there is incredible products that have never seen the light of day. And died of slow death because they never had a growth model. And there's also a lot of really terrible products that have incredible growth models and the multi-billion dollar businesses right now.”

“I think hiring pre-product market fit, big, big mistake. Hiring right after product market fit without actually figuring out how to create some of the traction is a big mistake as well.”

“I believe, for example, that it's founders responsibility to come up with original hypothesis for growth model. And then everybody immediately goes into, I need to hire head of growth. Wrong. Because you need to hire a settler. You need to hire a settler that's going to go and prove out whether your hypothesis is…”

“Growth is a trust problem now.”

“it's no longer about the software functionality that you're trying to grow. You're really trying to create, um, what I call minimum lovable product out of every single little thing that you touch because software is now almost being judged by the emotion that it can invoke with a human as opposed to just core basic…”

“First of all, I wouldn't, for any founder, I would suggest really deploy founder-led social, employee-led social, build in public, recruit people to be your biggest fans, to be your cheerleader, so to speak. And then you can start thinking about, okay, where else do I want to be? Do I want to buy a billboard? Do I want…”

“if you think that your employees are so easily, easily sway to go somewhere else, just if they get reached out by the right company, what are you doing? Like there is some really bad cultural issues in your company where, whether it's motivation based, whether it's just like ambitions based with who you hiring, because…”

“For simple productivity tools, intensity is almost an anti-metric because intensity means like I'm getting stuck, like I'm doing too much where this actually is supposed to be easy.”

“I think that when the functionality was very expensive to produce, we could afford to obsess about competitors a little bit more. With the functionality and the speed of development happening so much faster now, it almost paves the way for you to just have a very opinionated, uh, point of view of where you need to go…”

“And in the world where product functionality becomes more commoditized of what you can create, distribution and growth becomes the reasons to win. So whoever has the best distribution that is earned, that is competitively defensible, that is sustainable, ah, that is predictable, is going to be the winner in the market.”

“On the other side, I also think that not putting any pressure of growth on your original founding team of those first 30 50 people is a mistake. If you immediately hire head of growth or growth team and say, hey, none of my PMs, none of my marketers are responsible for growth at all, because I'm immediately outsourcing…”

“On the other side, I also think that not putting any pressure of growth on your original founding team of those First, 30, 50 people is a mistake. If you immediately hire head of growth or growth team and say, Hey, none of my PMs, none of my marketers are responsible for growth at all because I'm immediately…”

“I think the biggest mistake that I seen in the companies hiring is they chase after that head of growth position from the beginning without understanding who internally can create that growth evolution as opposed to creating growth revolution with an external talent that can potentially just be rejected out of the…”

“If you look at your revenue as a measurement of performance, you're not even data informed. You're just financially driven.”

“By the way, I use Google Analytics all the time, but it's very rarely, unless that there's, you have GA-threes that you can actually drill them into the cohort behavior. That you can exit data informed stage with just being on Google Analytics.”

“any new growth team has to initially rely on intuition or just overall feeling within the company of what needs to be worked on because you don't have data at the beginning.”

“Also, the one that has completely died down is walk me tours. Um, before we would fix the problems in the product UI by creating elaborate walk me tours. I see those dying down quickly, less and less. You need to focus on fixing your UX as opposed to just slapping a walk me tool on top of it. So it becomes less and…”

“So oversimplification and overminimalization are not the tactics that work now that worked five years ago.”

“I actually think that what you need to find is your early super users and your early super adopters. Those people that are really excited about your products and you should pull them in to be your community managers. You should pull them in to be your community ambassadors. You should deploy them to be your biggest…”

“Habitual zone for our minds is somewhere on daily or weekly basis. Anytime you move into being monthly, You're in the forgettable zone.”

“It's actually not so much about like, it's more about comments. So yeah, you like, um, maybe you repost, but it's the comment that makes the biggest difference, uh, where the algorithms pick up, uh, right now.”

“knowing the key predictive indicators that will lead you into the decline, not just looking at revenue, because when moment revenue starts declining, it's already too fucking late. So like, you need to know like beforehand, what will I see? What will lead? What will warn me of that decline? Just so you at least have a…”

“Not having data team ready for growth team. So hiring growth teaming before you have data analysts or data literacy in your company before you're data informed or hiring growth and not attaching any data analysts into their for you. Because if you do that, what is growth person or growth hire supposed to do? Use their…”

“And then there's number two, expecting wins right away. You hire your growth, your growth person, your growth team, and then the three months you expect the forecast lift where you put assumptions that they didn't drive forecast lifts. It's the worst thing that you can do to growth team in terms of really messing up…”

“CEO or the leadership team do not understand the value that growth team is meant to provide and what their Success looks like and what their goals are. It's going to get rejected by the system. There has to be buy-in top-down if you're creating growth team. Otherwise, everything falls apart.”

“So if you see somebody that has ownership desires, that they want stability, they want ability to finish something from very start to the very end, probably not going to be great on your growth team. Your growth team has to be flexible.”

“going after just saying, oh, everybody's hiring growth PMs, or everybody's hiring growth marketer, without actually understanding where the friction is lying within your growth system, to hire for the role that will be able to unlock that friction based on the hypothesis that you have of that growth model is the…”

“I'll tell you number one mistake, not having data team ready for growth team. So hiring growth team even before you have data analysts or data literacy in your company before you were data informed or hiring growth and not attaching any data analysts into their purview.”

“expecting wins right away. You hire your growth, your growth person, your growth team, and then the three months you expect the forecast lift. It's the worst thing that you can do to a growth team in terms of really messing up their onboarding, in terms of them creating that predictable, sustainable system.”

“I learned from Fareed, who was director of growth at Slack, that premortems are far more effective than postmortems.”

“So really being an enabler, to the company, as opposed to whole source of all of the ideation and the win is the key here in order to create successful relationships with the rest of the teams.”

“The way I think through ability to unlock your strategic thinking and to really learn more from the market Is to do advising for other companies as well. It helps you look at your problems in your full-time role a lot more strategically. It helps you understand if there's what you're seeing is just the individual…”

“There's three main levers that fall into growth model, which is how do you acquire customers? How do you monetize your customers? And how do you retain those customers? Those three levers uniformly apply across any given product to achieve maximum distribution.”