From one piece 10 growth tactics that never work | Elena Verna (Amplitude, Miro, Dropbox, SurveyMonkey) 26 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
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
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korrents.com
"Simplify onboarding" is an action, not a problem, and a roadmap line written that way will not work.Their words
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.
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Their words
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.
+ 23 more
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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.
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Their words
My rule of thumb, if we cannot collect the sample size in a month, we shouldn't test it. Period.
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korrents.com
If every growth initiative is an experiment, the team has a paralysing disease rather than a process.Their words
If every single one of your initiatives that you're doing on growth is an experiment, uh that's a problem.
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korrents.com
Nobody should be hired as an advisor before being paid for a workshop on the actual problem and watched at work.Their words
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.
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Their words
So, I think any growth team that does not have an advisor is a growth team that is underperforming
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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.
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korrents.com
A growth model that works today still has to be evolved by overlaying other growth models on top of it.Their words
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.
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Their words
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.
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Their words
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.
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Their words
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.
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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.
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Their words
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.
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korrents.com
Your growth problem is not unique, and treating it as unique is a pure opportunity cost.Their words
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
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Their words
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.
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korrents.com
Industry benchmarks are a dangerous target because every company defines the underlying metric differently.Their words
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.
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Their words
because copying competition is like the fastest way to mediocrity because you'll never be a leader if you copied somebody else.
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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
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never ever once have I seen a rebrand or redesign, especially of your key marketing site produce good performance results.
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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
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Their words
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.
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korrents.com
Whether a company hires sales or growth first is decided by how it collects money, not by how big it is.Their words
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.
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korrents.com
A company with ten customers has no data, and a growth team cannot function without data.Their words
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.
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korrents.com
A startup does not need a growth team to start growing, because the first wave of growth has to be founder-led.Their words
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