The Ledger, every show

“In the beginning, sometimes before product market fit, you're just still figuring out how you deliver value to customers. And when you learn that actually it's something fundamentally different, Then you might want to change your North Star.”

“If you tell people things, they may or may not listen, but if you ask them questions, it forces them to think. So once I have it, explain the North Star to the whole team, I have each manager go around and ask each person, explain to me how your work impacts t…”

“So it's kind of a false distinction, but there's really only like six channels in the world. If you think about how are the ways you find out about stuff, You hear from a salesperson, some partner brings you in to enable you to do something, you see some ads, …”

“It's not like, you know, I mean, I see, I know you, you're a runner, like, it's not like you practice every day and you get a little bit better every day and after a year you've cut 30 seconds off your mile or whatever. It's like nothing, nothing, nothing, som…”

“A good headline on a landing page completes the sentence, now you can. So I'm trying to do this, and oh, now you can, you know, close out your quarter in minutes, not, Days. Or whatever it is that they're trying to do.”

“Hire people, I say hire people who can do 50% of the hard things you need and figure out the other 90%.”

“Scientists are always aware of what they don't know. Unlike, you know, most people in most jobs, you're just always, you're wrong all the time. You're at these, you see these big gaps in humanity's understanding of whatever your discipline is. And you've got t…”

“And on the other hand, because it's a weekly cadence, it pushes the pace. You're like, we have our meeting on Monday. I need to have my experiments done by then. And, you know, the cadence of experimentation and learning is critical.”

“Most people track Signups and conversions for their paid stuff, but they don't look at customer value.”

“If your conversion goes from one percent to 10%, you're not gonna 10 x that number again. So that's where eventually you know, there's just no getting around kind of doing the fundamentals.”

“It's hard because the doubling down is really down in the trenches of a really tweaking and optimizing”

“So in an early stage startup, I think there just comes a point where your company becomes the growth team, right? Like you go through fundraising, you go through building your product, and sort of the eye of Sauron turns, and it's like time to do growth, becau…”

“Like, you know, when I was hiring these brilliant scientists, the other trait I was screening for was sociability. And people who could just go make friends with the engineers, and the data scientists, and everybody, and just get stuff from people who didn't r…”

“If you go to some of these sites like Calm or Noom, they have these long convoluted onboarding flows that do a really good job of roping people in Getting them through the whole kind of information journey and building intent. And that's a neat thing because i…”

“If you look at any of those silver bullets, and actually, you know, the people, and you saw what happened, you realize it was the result of a lot of trying stuff, and failing, and iterating, and optimizing.”

“There's a bunch of companies like PayPal, Airbnb, Facebook, Hotmail, Twitter, LinkedIn, Dropbox, WhatsApp, Quora, Reddit. A bunch of companies who've gotten really big, really fast, without doing any traditional sales or marketing.”

“Across the entire team at 500, we can maybe think of two companies who came in and they had the right metrics and they were tracking them properly.”

“Sean Ellis invented the term when he worked at Dropbox”

“Once they improve the top of funnel, people got to the same old paywall and were 65% more likely to convert, had better retention, fewer returns, higher lifetime value.”

“And in their welcome email, they just changed it with the top specific jobs people wanted. And they put in 15 links, Amazon driver, you know, warehouse operative, this and that. And a lot of times it was the same job, just written in three different languages,…”

“They ended up growing 20 to X in 18 months off the back of the strategy.”

“Amazon's North Star from 1996 was repeat purchases.”

“At 500 startups, we tend to hire people who've got operating backgrounds rather than out of finance or venture.”

“We have a business in there now. And the first easy thing we did was we had them, you know, do a four cell test on the main call to action button on their homepage. And three days later, they had a 20% lift in conversion just from that.”