Elena Verna
Growth advisor and operator who has led growth at Miro, Amplitude, Dropbox and SurveyMonkey.
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Beliefs
Korrents What they believe 26 beliefs — each backed by an exact quote.
Each is a — compiled by korrents.com, not by them: the one-line wordings are korrents', the quotes are theirs.
Recent
A startup does not need a growth team to start growing, because the first wave of growth has to be founder-led.
I really believe that the founder led growth is not being popularized enough that you do not need growth teams until you actually can start running experiments on your user base
10 growth tactics that never work | Elena Verna (Amplitude, Miro, Dropbox, SurveyMonkey) Said 19 Jan 2025
A company with ten customers has no data, and a growth team cannot function without data.
if you have 10 users or 10 customers, that's not data. That's a G sheet with your customers and you don't need a growth team for that.
10 growth tactics that never work | Elena Verna (Amplitude, Miro, Dropbox, SurveyMonkey) Said 19 Jan 2025
Whether a company hires sales or growth first is decided by how it collects money, not by how big it is.
It depends on how you're actually going to collect the money. If your money collection is going to happen through sales team primarily, then you absolutely should be hiring sales way before growth.
10 growth tactics that never work | Elena Verna (Amplitude, Miro, Dropbox, SurveyMonkey) Said 19 Jan 2025
Show 23 more
Hiring a head of growth to reverse a declining business is destined to fail, because the cause of the decline is deeper than the missing team.
If you have the overall business slowing down, your head of growth is destined to fail because the reason business is slowing down is much deeper than not having a growth team.
10 growth tactics that never work | Elena Verna (Amplitude, Miro, Dropbox, SurveyMonkey) Said 19 Jan 2025
A growth team's ceiling is a ten to fifteen percent lift, which is never enough to reverse a company that is already sliding.
Growth team can optimize. Growth can maybe lift it by 10, 15% maybe that's enough for you even that like is on the upper end of what growth team would be able to do if there is a slow down trajectory
10 growth tactics that never work | Elena Verna (Amplitude, Miro, Dropbox, SurveyMonkey) Said 19 Jan 2025
A rebrand or marketing-site redesign has never once produced good performance results.
never ever once have I seen a rebrand or redesign, especially of your key marketing site produce good performance results.
10 growth tactics that never work | Elena Verna (Amplitude, Miro, Dropbox, SurveyMonkey) Said 19 Jan 2025
Promising that a homepage or marketing-site redesign will drive acquisition is a failed promise, and usually a million-dollar one.
But to ever promise a homepage redesign or marketing site redesign in order to drive more acquisition is a failed promise that is going to be led by lots of agency money spending, uh often a million dollars plus
10 growth tactics that never work | Elena Verna (Amplitude, Miro, Dropbox, SurveyMonkey) Said 19 Jan 2025
Copying a competitor's flows is the fastest route to mediocrity, because nobody who copied somebody else ever led a market.
because copying competition is like the fastest way to mediocrity because you'll never be a leader if you copied somebody else.
10 growth tactics that never work | Elena Verna (Amplitude, Miro, Dropbox, SurveyMonkey) Said 19 Jan 2025
Industry benchmarks are a dangerous target because every company defines the underlying metric differently.
So, taking also any benchmark that is derived from competition and saying this is where we should be is also so dangerous because it might not even be applicable depending on how you define the metric.
10 growth tactics that never work | Elena Verna (Amplitude, Miro, Dropbox, SurveyMonkey) Said 19 Jan 2025
There are no shortcuts in growth; there are only patterns and frameworks.
I mean, I've been doing this for over 15 years. If there were any shortcuts, I'd be all over them. There are patterns and there are frameworks, but there's no shortcuts.
10 growth tactics that never work | Elena Verna (Amplitude, Miro, Dropbox, SurveyMonkey) Said 19 Jan 2025
Your growth problem is not unique, and treating it as unique is a pure opportunity cost.
but I'm very sorry to break it to all of you, but your problem is not unique. I'm 99% sure of that. Your problem has been felt by somebody somewhere and probably many, many places
10 growth tactics that never work | Elena Verna (Amplitude, Miro, Dropbox, SurveyMonkey) Said 19 Jan 2025
No growth initiative should ever be started from scratch.
And number one thing that whenever you have an initiative or whenever you have a metric that you need to go and move, do not start from scratch ever. Do not start from scratch.
10 growth tactics that never work | Elena Verna (Amplitude, Miro, Dropbox, SurveyMonkey) Said 19 Jan 2025
Success in growth is the output of a lot of failures, so the real constraint is how much time you have left to fail in.
My big motto like life motto in growth is that you have to fail to learn. You can't just constantly succeed. Success is an output of a lot of failures.
10 growth tactics that never work | Elena Verna (Amplitude, Miro, Dropbox, SurveyMonkey) Said 19 Jan 2025
Acquisition built on somebody else's algorithm can be taken away at any moment, which is why it must sit below earned channels on a growth roadmap.
An algorithm can give it, but algorithm can also take it away at any point and you have no control because you don't own those channels.
10 growth tactics that never work | Elena Verna (Amplitude, Miro, Dropbox, SurveyMonkey) Said 19 Jan 2025
As search turns into an AI interface, a company with no earned acquisition channel on its roadmap is in serious trouble within one to two years.
Focusing on these earned channels that you own becomes the utmost priority. And if you don't have them on your growth road map, you're going to be in some really big trouble over the next year to two years because your cost of acquisition is only going to go up.
10 growth tactics that never work | Elena Verna (Amplitude, Miro, Dropbox, SurveyMonkey) Said 19 Jan 2025
Half of Dropbox's acquisition comes from people sharing files, an earned channel no competitor can buy their way into.
And the percentage of those recipients sign up to become Dropbox users, and that accounts for 50% of acquisition. That is a stable, earned channel that nobody can compete with.
10 growth tactics that never work | Elena Verna (Amplitude, Miro, Dropbox, SurveyMonkey) Said 19 Jan 2025
A growth model that works today still has to be evolved by overlaying other growth models on top of it.
If you have a growth model that works for you, that's wonderful. Good for you. Optimize it, grow it, scale it, create a team that will be nurturing it and that will be amplifying it. But you're going to need to evolve it. And that evolution needs to come through overlaying other growth models on top of it.
10 growth tactics that never work | Elena Verna (Amplitude, Miro, Dropbox, SurveyMonkey) Said 19 Jan 2025
A growth team should spend a fifth to a quarter of its year, measured annually rather than by sprint, introducing a new growth loop.
I try to focus 20% 20 to 25% of growth team's time annually, not every given sprint, not every given quarter, but annually, to introduce a new growth loop.
10 growth tactics that never work | Elena Verna (Amplitude, Miro, Dropbox, SurveyMonkey) Said 19 Jan 2025
A growth team without an advisor is a growth team that is underperforming.
So, I think any growth team that does not have an advisor is a growth team that is underperforming
10 growth tactics that never work | Elena Verna (Amplitude, Miro, Dropbox, SurveyMonkey) Said 19 Jan 2025
Nobody should be hired as an advisor before being paid for a workshop on the actual problem and watched at work.
I think that you should not hire an advisor until you do some sort of workshop with them on the problem that you're experiencing. See them in action.
10 growth tactics that never work | Elena Verna (Amplitude, Miro, Dropbox, SurveyMonkey) Said 19 Jan 2025
If every growth initiative is an experiment, the team has a paralysing disease rather than a process.
If every single one of your initiatives that you're doing on growth is an experiment, uh that's a problem.
10 growth tactics that never work | Elena Verna (Amplitude, Miro, Dropbox, SurveyMonkey) Said 19 Jan 2025
If a test cannot collect its sample size within a month, it should not be run at all.
My rule of thumb, if we cannot collect the sample size in a month, we shouldn't test it. Period.
10 growth tactics that never work | Elena Verna (Amplitude, Miro, Dropbox, SurveyMonkey) Said 19 Jan 2025
Testing shades of a colour is an early-2000s tactic that no longer drives anything.
For the love of God, a blue is a blue is a blue. As long as it's accessible and as long as it's bright enough, off you go. You do not need to test the shades of blue, but test it against green or so on.
10 growth tactics that never work | Elena Verna (Amplitude, Miro, Dropbox, SurveyMonkey) Said 19 Jan 2025
A single one-off email never moves a metric; email only works as a series.
One email will never do anything. If you're going to go into email, please think about it as a series, about communication, about how it interacts with product communication.
10 growth tactics that never work | Elena Verna (Amplitude, Miro, Dropbox, SurveyMonkey) Said 19 Jan 2025
"Simplify onboarding" is an action, not a problem, and a roadmap line written that way will not work.
But, if you ever have a line item on your roadmap that says simplify onboarding, please please cross it out. It's not going to work because simplifying onboarding is an action.
10 growth tactics that never work | Elena Verna (Amplitude, Miro, Dropbox, SurveyMonkey) Said 19 Jan 2025
A full-time job is not the best way to monetise a skill; it is one package among several, and defaulting to it is a faulty plan.
And my contrarian opinion is that full-time jobs are not the best way to monetize the skill that you have. It's one of the packages that everybody should evaluate and take advantage of, but too many people blindly default to that package
10 growth tactics that never work | Elena Verna (Amplitude, Miro, Dropbox, SurveyMonkey) Said 19 Jan 2025
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