The Ledger, every show

“So I really believe very strongly that your first head of growth is your founder, and their first hires, I wouldn't start by hiring somebody senior.”

“When you find you probably already have the right answer and you probably just don't like it. So the reason you're not growing is because you're missing some important piece of information about the business model, about the market, about your customers. When …”

“Ads, you know, let's just be specific. We're talking about Meta and Google. Those are the main ways you buy, and they're sold at auction, which means ultimately they're going to go to the people who can pay the most, which means the most well-funded companies,…”

“Ads are a very good way to get traffic quickly for testing. So suppose, you know, you're an early stage B to B company and you have very little traffic and you've come up with three, you've interviewed all your customers and you found there's three different b…”

“They spent hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing campaigns, building products that, frankly, nobody ever used”

“The biggest mistake with North Star, and it's a very reasonable one, is they choose their North Star as revenue, or profits.”

“The best, I'll say categorically, the best growth people I hired and managed in my time at PayPal had no marketing experience, had no product experience at all.”

“They will become a nerd to that in a year, but at the moment, the window's kind of still open.”

“When I look back on it, all of our growth, all of like, 95% of it came from like five things.”

“We start with people who are customers who just became customers for a couple of reasons. First of all, the purchase journey is still fresh in their heads, but also If they didn't buy, they might not actually be your good customer. They might not have bought b…”

“I don't care how much effort it is to do the experiment. I care if this works, how big can it be? Because a lot of times people will just work on a piece of the funnel or something that even if it did amazingly well, You know, it's only move the needle by thre…”

“If you don't know how to grow the product yourself, you know, you're hiring someone else not to be your head of growth, but to like be your figure out how to grow this business person. And that's an extremely hard job. And most of the people who can actually d…”

“Personally, my best growth people I ever hired had no product and marketing experience at all. They were analytical thinkers, former scientists who had a bias for action and good people skills and start to get them stuck in on pieces of the problem.”

“You know, the instinct for some people, product people is we have some happy customers. We're not growing. Let's add the features the other customers want and hope if we add enough features that we'll grow. And that's usually, you know, not the problem. The pr…”

“And there's one question we asked, which can very reliably weed out teams we don't want to work with. And it's the premortem question. Okay. Suppose we're two years out. And this didn't work, and you've completely failed and missed your goals. What probably we…”

“So what seems like a very, you know, contrary to popular wisdom, make the boarding flow longer and ask lots and lots of questions actually really helped to build intent. And then by the time they get to the paywall, they had a surprisingly high conversion rate…”

“When I look back on my time at PayPal, 90% of our growth came from, like, 10% of the stuff that we did.”

“How much of growth is actually figuring stuff out? Is actually information discovery rather than running playbooks, doing best practices, copying what other companies did?”

“The hardest thing about figuring stuff out Is, honestly, I think it's hubris. I think it's that people come in and they don't realize they need to figure stuff out. They have their best practices, they have what worked in their last job, they have what they he…”

“So a lot of times you'll get the best customers in situations where you're actually introducing friction into the funnel.”

“So in the beginning, you, it's premature to start optimizing. You need to figure out the big stuff first. Once you've got one lever working, two levers working, then you can start devoting resources to optimizing and trying to squeeze more juice out of that le…”

“I mean, if I were running a company and you had a gun to my head and I had to choose one, I'd say science. Because science without art can deliver business results. And art without science, just, if it does, it's very rare and exceptional down to luck. It just…”

“Like a startup needs to be good at one and a half things tops”

“So first of all, I think the exception on paid below a hundred million in ARR is it's a good way to get eyeballs quickly for testing. So it's a good way to validate stuff quickly, but it shouldn't obviously be the crux of your growth early on.”

“Every successful startup finds this kind of exact moment of highest need and figures out a way to insert themselves there.”

“In a week for 500 bucks, you can just test a bunch of ads. So you have one ad design and six different now you can headlines and you show it to like a lookalike audience or highly selected target that looks like your customers. And these ads won't be profitabl…”

“I've actually found, even when I worked for kind of unknown startups, the general broad inbound Tends to work. I find the mistake people make is that they apply too many filters to the search, right? You know, you write the job spec, and the recruiter's like, …”

“The way you get promoted in a lot of companies, in product, in marketing, is by doing the stuff you're supposed to do, but doing it faster and doing more of it and making fewer mistakes and managing more people and more budget and making good decks. And none o…”

“I think the biggest mistake early on in hiring is just being, you know, dazzled by the names on a CV and where you've worked in the past and what you've done. And I think I already said I have very little use for experience. And if you worked for a successful …”

“I think there needs to be a part of it that's in person. A lot of it is really solitary, a lot of it is almost like coding, like spending time with data, Talking to customers, making sense of interviews, refining and designing creative, setting up experiments.…”

“When you have a larger company, it needs to stand outside. It needs to be cross-functional and diverse, because growth people have a fundamentally different orientation, different approach to life than other groups, but they need to have really good relationsh…”

“Cause every one of these great growth people started as an SEO person or an analyst or a content marketer. And just learned and grew, or an engineer, and just learned and grew very quickly.”

“AI models can now do design and copy better than 90% of people.”

“I mean, Europe produces incredible talent, but what you see is a lot of the best talent in Europe is going to move to an environment that's more friendly to startups in terms of regulatory, in terms of funding, in terms of pools of labor, in terms of tax rates…”

“And then here in London, I think the top growth hacker is a chap named Milan Paris. And he runs growth at transfer wise.”

“In the beginning, most startups, you just get one thing working really well. That's good and bad news, right, if you're a founder. It means you don't have to do all the things on your slide, but you can't afford to anyway, so the key is to find your 10% of wor…”

“So they changed it to photo books in five minutes and they quadrupled their install conversion rate overnight.”

“Actually, they're going to make over forty million bucks this year. They're growing. They are profitable, bottom line profitable. They're not taking investment and they've sold five million photo books and other products and photo products.”

“Step one, Was to map the growth model, just map the customer journey in terms of behavioral metrics from the point they first become aware of the product to the point where they're happy and engaged in using it and looking for like, what are the bottlenecks?”

“If you apply resources to the bottleneck, it makes the whole system run faster. And if you apply resources anywhere else, it's wasteful and inefficient.”

“I encourage teams to Post an experiment in Slack and get everyone to vote on which one they think is going to be the winner and let the founder and the head of products and the head of growth be very public about their bets. And then they're going to be wrong …”

“I think the mistake people make is they turn up there and they say, buy our product. Or they get you to the homepage and it says, book a demo. And those are very high intent. And then they're like, oh, no one's signing up. Those are very high intent, end of th…”

“So Bob took this and they just took their newspaper ads and moved them from wherever they were into the obituary section. And it worked. They increased their sales by like, 70%.”

“When you're in a big company where having the right answers like five or 10% of the problem and getting the entire organization and to change people's mindset and align resources ends up becoming like 80 or 90% of the problem.”

“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…”

“If you take, you know, your six functional heads in your business, engineering, product sales, whatever, and say, give me your best ideas for making money. They're going to give you six different strategies with six different resource So that's moving in six d…”

“I think that's a really good test of the strength of product market fit.”

“You can have product market fit with six customers, and next year it's seven customers, and you don't have a business.”