Growth Model

“They both have this like structural underpinning to them with growth. You have a growth model. You have metrics, you have experiments, you have channels, things like that, but you also need on a day-to-day basis to have creativity. You gotta come up with, like…”

“The way to map your growth model is you start with your North Star, and that's going to be a metric that increments when you deliver value to customers, and something that encompasses the entire funnel, and, you know, you stress test it a bit so it's not creat…”

“I would say the first thing is write the job description. It shouldn't be your standard job description because you, as I mentioned, the first step, there are some like homework for the founder to do. You need to think about your growth model. What are the ini…”

“And it's typically built in a spreadsheet, which has a really nice feature of being very hard to fake. Like you can talk about a business conceptually. But when you actually have to get it to line up and link in a model, it's very hard to not force yourself to…”

“I think importantly, it is not a forecasting tool. So it's not gonna replace what your finance team is building to project the business. In fact, Often the output can be highly variable because you're playing with lots of these assumptions, but it is a great t…”

“If you're modeling a relatively simple SaaS business, those are the only core building blocks you need.”

“The thing that I have gravitated to more as I've done more of this is like one very basic high level conceptual model. So that's like the building blocks you talked about, which as simply as possible describes how the whole system works. And so you start to ge…”

“One of the immediate things that you see when you build these is that you're Growth is much more sensitive to customer retention than you can ever intuit. Because there's a lot of interaction between having a healthy retained customer base and everything you c…”

“The most difficult thing about making that kind of effort Is developing a common currency by which you can trade off their efforts. So like this team is saying they can move this metric by X and this team is moving this metric by Y. I have no way to make those…”

“And if somebody from the outside comes in and just slaps their previous company's growth model onto your product, it's most likely gonna have 99% rejection rate and failure rate within your, with your customers and within your employees, unless you give them a…”

“But to hire a growth person to figure out your growth model from the beginning, I think that's a mistake. Stake and it's a delegation. It's like hiring a product person and saying, I don't know what I want to build, go build it for me, but I want to have succe…”

“The reason I like to give them the data beforehand, and the reason I tell founders that it's cool to give them the model beforehand, because if they were just picking, doing the model themselves, that they can't really challenge themselves. It's kind of like b…”

“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…”

“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…”