10 growth tactics that never work | Elena Verna (Amplitude, Miro, Dropbox, SurveyMonkey)

Growth is a fairly new field. You have a lot of renowned interest in growth hacks. Like what is the like sure things to get growth in the age of social media, everybody and anybody tries to share their tips and tricks. Oftentimes things that are completely out of context or they are very specific to one example and actually do not apply as a pattern.

We're going to start with growth tactics that never work. If you see these items on your roadmap, you should probably not do them. What's number one?

We live in tech. There's always lots of startups. Startups are obviously looking to grow. There is huge misconception in the field that in order to get growth going, you need a growth team to figure out your product market fit and how to distribute it. It's not something that you can outsource to somebody.

Powerful words. I'm loving this list already.

So number two, this was my favorite and it might be a little spicy. Never, ever once have I seen a rebrand or redesign, especially of a UK marketing site produce good performance results. New CMO comes in designing their website or designing the brand as if it was reflecting of their personal taste. And oftentimes it's promised with our acquisition is gonna go up and it never materializes into anything meaningful.

A lot of contrarian takes here. I love this.

Number three, if every single one of your initiatives that you're doing on growth is an experiment, that's a problem. It's almost like a disease, like a paralyzing disease.

Today my guest is Elena Verna, my first ever third time repeat guest. Elena is the smartest person that I know on B2B growth. She's also hilarious. She's led growth at companies like Miro, Amplitude, Dropbox, and SurveyMonkey. She's advised dozens of companies on growth, including Superhuman, MongoDB, Netlify, SimilarWeb, Sanity, Maze, so many more. In our conversation, Elena shares 10 growth strategies and tactics that never work. Yet, that she keeps seeing people and companies invest lots of resources into. She also covers her three favorite growth frameworks that help you wrap your head around how to think about growth, and she also does a short dive into the non-traditional career paths that we both went down. If you spent any time working on product growth or lead people or work with people working on growth, this episode is for you. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Alaina Verna. This episode is brought to you by Cinch, the customer communications cloud. Here's the thing about digital customer communications. Whether you're sending marketing campaigns, verification codes, or account alerts, you need them to reach users reliably. That's where Cinch comes in. Over 150,000 businesses, including eight of the top 10 largest tech companies globally, use Cinch's API to build messaging, email, and calling into their products. And there's something big happening in messaging that product teams need to know about: Rich Communication Services, or RCS. Think of RCS as SMS 2.0. Instead of getting text from a random number, your users will see your verified company name and logo without needing to download anything new. It's a more secure and branded experience. Plus, you get features like interactive carousels and suggested replies. And here's why this matters: US carriers are starting to adopt RCS. Cinch is already helping major brands send RCS messages around the world, and they're helping Lenny's podcast listeners get registered first, before the rush hits the US market. Learn more and get started at cinch.com/lenny. That's S-I-N-C-H.com/lenny. This episode is brought to you by Vanta. When it comes to ensuring your company has top-notch security practices, things get complicated fast. Now, you can assess risk, secure the trust of your customers, and automate compliance for SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and more with a single platform, Vanta. Vanta's market-leading trust management platform helps you continuously monitor compliance alongside reporting and tracking risk. Plus, you can save hours by completing security questionnaires with Vanta AI. Join thousands of global companies that use Vanta to automate evidence collection, unify risk management, and streamline security reviews. Get $1,000 off Vanta when you go to vanta.comlenny. That's v-a-n-t-a.comlenny. Elena, thank you so much for being here. Welcome back to the podcast, our first ever third time time repeat guest. What an honor. Dancing if you're not watching on video. Well, thank you for being here. I was actually just looking at our first episode, which we recorded almost two years, over two years ago, September of 2022. And someone just today left a comment. People are still finding and watching it. And this comment kind of encapsulates why I love having you on this podcast. This person said, wow. Every word from Elena encapsulates years of knowledge. This is one to digest slowly. Go back to and put on repeat. Thanks for sharing your experience with the world.

Well, thank you for having me. And my North Star metric is insights per minute. That's what I try to use whenever I have any live meetings with people. So it squarely fits within what I'm optimizing for. So that's great.

That needs to be my API on this podcast. Insights per minute.

I think you have it. I think your insights per minute is pretty high.

That is, I do shoot for that. Although I have learned you also needed to feel good and feel their story. You know, there's like an interesting combo of stuff. You can't just be insight, insight, insight, you know, people.

Well, yeah, it's all about how you present them too.

Storytelling is a big portion of it actually to stick. Yeah. All right, already insight. That's an insight right there. There's two areas that I want to spend time on with you, and these are areas I know you've been thinking a lot about. One is growth tactics that never work. that people keep spending time on and waste their time on. And then you have a nice list of things you've seen that just don't work, that people keep trying. And then two is growth frameworks, your favorite growth frameworks, to help people wrap their mind around how to think about growth and grow their product. So we're going to start with growth tactics that never work. Maybe just frame what we're going to talk about, talk about what this list and collection of tactics that we're going to talk about is.

Yeah, so growth is a fairly new field compared to marketing or product management or engineering. So there's a lot a lot of people that are now accumulated that have 10 years or so experience, but there's also a lot of newcomers. And because there's ratio of actually newcomers is much higher than those people that have five, 10 years of experience of doing growth, you have a lot of renowned interest in growth hacks. Like, what is the, like, sure things to get growth? What is the sure thing to get that metric up? How can I contribute to success with the company the fastest way possible? So all of these shortcuts and obviously in the age of social media where everybody and anybody tries to share their tips and tricks and this and that, people are grasping for the oftentimes things that are completely out of context or they are very specific to one example and actually do not apply as a pattern or simply not even applicable to their type of business whatsoever. So there's just a lot of failure happening in growth teams. It's actually, I think, growth teams are becoming one of those departments that has a higher head of growth firing rate than even CMOs because people are coming in, there's a bunch of expectations, hey, you're head of growth or you're a growth PM or you're a growth marketer, you're supposed to drive growth. And when that growth does not happen, here comes the axe and people off they go. And the recycle and cycle starts all over in order to populate those positions. So I think that there's just a lot of misinformation, I would say probably out there in terms of what growth actually is and how it should be done in the companies. And today I just want to cover some of the biggest ones that I see as a patterns as I'm advising companies, as I'm operating in companies, because it's just so blatant yet there is very few pieces of information on this for people to learn from.

Amazing. All right. What's number one?

Number one, I have to start with hiring. There's lots of positions open all the time. There's so many from head of growth to growth PM. There's a lot of rotation, as I said, that is happening in the field. Very few growth people actually stay in the job for over a year or two years. So there's a lot of constant churn and constant rehiring. And when you're doing hiring, there's a lot of mistakes that are actually happening in hiring that I just want to start off on the list. It's not a roadmap item, but oh my gosh, there's just like so much fault that is happening here. And I did write about it on your blog of hiring for growth. So there is a little bit of a reference to that. And one of the biggest blatant issues that I see is hiring too soon for growth. There is we live in tech, there's always lots of startups. Startups are obviously looking to grow. And there is a huge misconception in the field that in order to get growth going, you need a growth team. It's like absolutely not true. Absolutely not true. In order to get the growth going in the company, a founder and the founding team have to figure out how to make it grow to the first, let's say a million, 5 million, 10 million in ARR. Some of the companies don't even create growth teams until they're 100, 200 million in ARR because to figure out your product market fit and how to distribute it, Uh, it's not something that you can outsource to somebody. It's not somebody that with a shiny resume can come over and all of a sudden wave a magic wand and all of a sudden you have viral campaigns and bunch of signups coming through and everybody is paying and everybody's retaining. That just doesn't happen. So I see that mistake happening a lot. 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, which means that you have volume of users that you can learn from and optimize and innovate on. And that first wave of growth has to be founder-led. And there's two specific reasons that I anchor on, which is before you have growth team, before you even think about growth team. First, you need to have solid PMF, product market fit. means that you have a solution to a problem and you have customers not only coming in and solving that problem with your solution, but they're also retaining and staying with you. So there is a good retention. You can use a Chamela score of how many people would say that they cannot live without your product as well. But there's some sort of PMF. And then number two, you have data. Growth cannot function without data. So 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 until you have data that you can actually do an analysis and you can create hypotheses on and you can start applying experimentation. Don't even think about growth team.

So just to summarize a few of the things you just said, just for folks, you basically have seen startups look for a head of growth to join and solve their growth problem. and your insight there is just.

Almost.

Always that is not going to be the solution to your problem until you have strong retention already, have a really high score on the Seanell score if you don't have a ton of data yet. And part of your advice is just the founder should continue to do this for as long as possible. A million AR is like one milestone a lot of people recommend. To your point, a lot of companies wait a lot longer.

Yes, yes. And honestly, the longer you wait, the better it is because that way your entire company will be trained to be responsible for growth, as opposed to putting this one island with a growth team and saying they're going to be growing and what is the rest of the company is doing. So honestly, the longer you wait, the better.

As you talk about this, sales is a part of what you describe here, like hiring your first sales person. And so I guess how do you think about like your first head of growth versus sales person? Is there anything advice there? Like for B2B SaaS, you probably don't hire head of growth for even longer, right? You hire sales first or It depends.

On how you're actually gonna collect the monies. If your money collection is gonna happen through sales team primarily, then you absolutely should be hiring sales way before growth. In fact, in the sales led companies, growth teams are not necessarily needed even that much. You might have a growth marketing team, which is really a demand gen team that is rebranded for growth marketing so they can charge you 20 to 30% more in their salaries. But at the end of the day, sales is doing your monetization. They are doing your activation. They are doing your retention and success efforts. So for sales like companies, yeah, higher sales, absolutely. Unless you're starting to do self-serve revenue. So you're trying to have product sell itself through potentially freemium acquisition, trial acquisition, or you actually having product-led activation, monetization. That's when you would need a growth person. So if you're starting with self-serve monetization, growth higher should be promptly first. Before sales, your sales are going to be more opportunistic in nature versus if you're sales like company, go ahead, higher sales, wait for growth until you're ready to overlay product-led growth on top of your sales motion.

Okay, that's an excellent clarification. So basically what I'm hearing the advice is hire ahead of growth only when you have clear product market fit and you're product-led. company and beyond a million ARR, ideally, something like that. Right.

And I won't say your product-led company. You are relying on product-led motion to resolve a lot of the growth levers within you because you don't have to be fully product-led company. But so if product, let's say, acquires people, let's say with the SEO or CM, and then its product is meant to activate them and then sales closes them, Sales would be obviously important as well, but growth would have to be coming a little bit sooner as well. So if you have any product-led components where product is responsible for acquisition, activation, monetization, or retention, that's where growth comes in.

Okay, that, that, we talked deeply about that specific topic in our first conversation. I just want to go deeper. I needed to bring it back.

This is like, it keeps happening. I need to repeat it. Well, you, you need, you need to repeat it three times right before it sticks. to people. So hopefully this is the third time.

Absolutely. I'm only saying that because I, people may be wanting more of what you're describing, and I will point them to our first episode, which goes deep on that one topic.

Amazing.

Excellent. Anything else before we move on to number two?

No, let's move on to number two.

Let's do it.

Okay. So number two, this is on the other side on the matured company where I see a trend over and over, and it's becoming even more prominent right now of when companies growth slow down, slows down, which inevitably happens for a lot of businesses. It happens for a variety of reasons. We're not going to go into the reasons as to why growth can't be slowing down. And then they hire a shiny growth head to fix the problem. So basically saying, hey, our business is slowing down. We're on the decline. We're going to bring this person, or we're going to put this team together and our growth is going to accelerate. That just does not happen. 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. Growth team can optimize, growth can maybe lifted 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 slowdown trajectory. But what's important is that if you have core product and core marketing issues, growth team will not be able to fix them for you. you're going to have to address the big elephant in the room as to why business is slowing down in the first place, as opposed to just plopping a growth team on the issue and expecting them to do miracles while the rest of the business continues chugging on the same trajectory that caused the slowdown in the first place.

Wow, that is a, I've never heard this point before, and it's such an important one. And it's very related to your first point. Growth isn't going to build a product people want. They will help you grow it.

Exactly.

And if your business is slowing, your product market fit basically might be disappearing and growth isn't solving that problem.

Disappearing, it may be degrading, it may be being eaten by a competitor because there's somebody that is stomping on your territory. The point is growth can amplify great product market fit and growth can help you grow faster once you're already growing. But if you're slowing down and you have issues with either your go-to-market market strategy or your core product strategy with your core product market fit, growth is going to be absolutely helpless to do anything. And it's honestly, it's a huge waste of money because at those sizes of the companies, you would need fairly large growth teams in order to tackle every single product flow and interface that would, that is already out there and invented. So it's a huge expense, ROI on it, maybe at least one to one. like what you put into it, you might get that much out of it, but it's not going to be enough to create a J curve of the reacceleration by just relying on growth team. So I think it's just like, this is where the name growth team is like plays against it because like, oh, we're looking for growth. Do you have a growth team? No, that's actually, I don't have a better idea, by the way, how to name it, but this is where I think it's Misunderstood that there is a silver bullet of a perfect head of growth, perfect growth team that can reverse the trajectory of the business.

So then for folks that are thinking about, oh, wow, maybe I shouldn't be hiring head of growth. When should you hire head of growth when you're kind of an established company?

If you're declining in your revenue growth or whatever other metric that you're looking at, your weekly active users or whatnot, see at least that you're able to plateau it so you can stop the decline. So there is already a visible trajectory that your core product and your core marketing teams are able to at least reverse the degradation of the metrics. Ideally, you would even start to see some immediate signs of life that there is potential in the business in the pockets. And then you can put growth into it to really blow it up to the full extent. But if you are on a decline, just don't do it because there's going to be very disappointing results in the year or so.

Awesome. Okay, great one. Let's move on. Number three.

Okay, number three. So this was my favorite and it might be a little spicy because if there's any marketers listening out here, but doing rebrand and more specifically homepage redesign to drive growth. Oh, this one hurts me so much. And I've lived through so many of these and never ever once have I seen a Rebrand or redesign, especially of your marketing site, produce good performance results? Now, there's many reasons as to why you might want to do a Rebrand, why you might want to redesign your marketing site, because you're trying to enter a new Market, new category, your product has evolved, and you need to do a full updates. But those are almost like is a lagging indicator that something needs to change and you're changing it. And then you know that you're gonna have to optimize the hell out of it in order to actually bring it even to the previous performance results. So it's like a stepping stone back, but there is a much bigger room for upside that you can get to, but you're gonna have to work to get to that upside. But yet so many companies, there's a story that happens all the time. I hire a new CMO, new CMO comes in. They're like, okay, what's inside my house here? My house is not designed to my liking. Let me repaint these walls. I want this shade of blue. Let me put the couches over here. And they start almost designing their website or designing the brand as if it was a reflection of their personal taste. And oftentimes it's promised with our acquisition is gonna go up, our category penetration is gonna go up. our education or awareness is going to go up. And it never materializes into anything meaningful because again, if you're doing it as a step towards unlocking new global maxima, sure, I love that. Do it, go after it. Know that you have a ton of work ahead of you in order to actually unlock that global maxima. But to ever promise a homepage redesign or marketing site redesign in order to drive more position is a failed promise that is going to be led by lots of agency money spending, often a million dollars plus, lots of arguing about which shade of blue your brand color is going to be, and eight to 10 months at the minimum of development and very lackluster results afterwards.

Oh man, I'm loving this list already. this is great. To your point, it may still be worth doing if you're coming into it eyes wide open. This isn't going to drive growth, but we're setting ourselves up for a future brand that's world class and we know our current brand stinks and our homepage needs to be refreshed. We're just, if you're aware it's not going to drive growth, it might be okay.

I mean, every single time I've seen a marketing site at least rebrand, it's been a step back in performance that then is being treated as a fire drill to fix. Don't, don't, just don't do it. If, if you expect like immediate results out of it, or at least educate the team on how long it's gonna take to get to the point, where you think that there's gonna be upside from your, away from your original brand.

So I have experienced this not just with marketing sites, but like most redesigns, redesign of the product, redesign of the website.

How much product and engineering work goes into just changing a logo in your product or changing colors? It's insane with no results ever. There's no results.

And to your point, it's like, okay, well, we've spent six months redoing onboarding everything we've built, builds on this new design and experience. So we can't not launch it because every team is working on this new world. So we're just gonna launch it and then we're gonna claw back. we're going to figure out how to get it back, right? That's how it goes.

It's a new starting point and that starting point is going to be much lower than your current optimized experience that you have. Whether it's well optimized or not optimized, it doesn't matter. It's gone through some level of optimization versus rebrand is always a shot in the dark. It might be prettier, sure, but that doesn't mean it's going to perform well. Obviously, never say never. Sometimes it might work and if it worked for you, I am so glad, but that's an outlier and don't treat it as a pattern.

Yeah, I was just gonna say, I think everyone listening to this that is working on something like this is probably thinking, no, I think we have a good shot at this. We've really thought deeply about this and it might actually be really positive in your experience. It sounds like you've seen it work occasionally or is it just never?

The best I've ever seen is that it produced net neutral results and it produced us better ability to optimize towards something bigger. That's the best case scenario. So if you're working on it, my biggest advice is not to say you stop. Just understand that the goal here is not to drive at launch in the seven day readout after launch some increased performance. The goal here should be we will launch, we will probably see a hit, model out and forecast for a hit, and then give yourself two to three months at the minimum, ideally more like six months, to really optimize it back to a good standing where it can potentially outperform. But you need to bake in that three to six months of work after the launch, which is what a lot of companies and teams forget to do because they just move on because it's like big initiative, big pop, and off we go to our next project.

I love that we're only at number three. This is amazing. Let's do number four.

Okay. Number four is obsessing over your competition. Okay, so there's a little bit of a gotcha here. I tear down companies all the time. I have thousands of Gmail accounts that I sign up for any and every product. I go through their entire experience. I look at their monetization strategies. I look at their activation. I do it across direct competition of the company that I'm working with. as well. I know I want to know what I'm playing against. So knowing what your competition is doing is extremely important. Being inspired by some aspects of what your competition is doing in their experience is a wonderful place to originate an ideation or potentially try to implement into your product as well. But blatantly saying, hey, we're going to copy all of these best tactics or all of these flows because, hey, they're doing better than us, let's just rip them and do exactly the same? Why is an onboarding looks the same as this onboarding? This company is so successful. That's where things really go wrong because every single experience is very unique to their customer, to their channel. You don't even know if you're getting their actual experience or you use some tester cell or you're getting some personalized thing based on what you, where you signed up from, who you said that you are. So you don't even know what actually the like overall thing looks like most of the time and putting that into your product just leads to very subpar results. And there's a lot of drive, especially like to have it as a shortcut. Okay, we don't want to go through the so ideation or user research. We don't want to do user interviews, but we don't want to do A/B testing. It works for them. It must work for us. Let's just like go and do it. And it fails 95% of the time. Now, there are certain pieces that I would rightly recommend I already said inspiration. I use it for inspiration all the time. I'm like, okay, what's cool? What is everybody doing? So because I want to just stay in the know on what other people are implementing, and hopefully if it's in the control experience, it works and it worked better. I use Web Archive a ton for locked out pages too. I'm like, okay, how did it look last year? Why does their homepage look this way or the pricing page? And I analyze that and I try to extrapolate some results. I also think that there is a lot of patterns you start to notice as you start tearing down all of these companies. You're like, oh, these elements are always the same. That means all of these companies are arriving to these things and they seem to be winning elements and you can take those elements and put them into your product. But you can never skip the ideation, the design, the user research, the customer interview, the experimentation step, and you should always balance it with actually innovating yourself in your products. Because copying competition is like the fastest way to mediocrity because you'll never be a leader if you copied somebody else. Leader is by default is somebody that is able to separate themselves from the pack in something else. And if you are trying to just be, I don't know who is ever trying to be like the mediocre middle of the pack, but, maybe it's a good starting point, but never the end goal. The only other thing that I'll say before I'll stop talking is benchmarks. Benchmarks are also very dangerous here to use because benchmarks are usually done on all of the competition and all of the softwares out there. And the way people define numbers is so different from company to company. Like, even if you look at something as simple as signups, okay, how many signups should you be on average getting or like your conversion from prospecting visitor to a sign up or from a sign up to activated user? It so depends on how do you define prospect visitor. Some companies define it as all traffic, some define it as new traffic. Some of them define it on the new IP address, new persistent ID, how Google Analytics defines it, how Amplitude defines it. Then so like all of these definitions are so different. 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 defined the metric. And one of the things that all of those benchmarks, benchmarking data fails is like to actually look at specific definitions. And that's not to say that benchmarks are not extremely valuable data point in your decision making because it's an input that you should leverage to say what it could be possible, but to just blindly take it and set it is just a sure way to fail any of your initiatives and efforts.

You're telling me that there's no shortcuts.

I wish there were. 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.

So people hearing this, they're like, okay, don't copy the competition, use it for inspiration. It's a little hard to know exactly the line between those two. Is there an example that you can think of where you took really interesting inspiration from someone and it worked for a company you were working with, or you copied someone and it just like, oh, that failed. That was a bad idea.

I use competition to understand the general framework of how people collect some information or resolve certain steps. For example, sharing model. So many products like, Hey, can you share this with somebody? Well, you can go and spend so much time of like figuring out how it should look or you can go to Slack, you can go to Figma, you can go to Miro, you can go to Notion, like, okay, Google, like, how are they doing sharing model? You can look at all of that and say, okay, here's all of that, here's all of the common elements that all of them have. Here's the pieces that I think will apply to my product. Here's things that do not. And here's what I can derive from it. I use it. as an input into ideation, but I never use it as a destination for the result, if that makes sense. Because it's very helpful to not start from scratch. The empty start problem is real. And competition is a wonderful way to not have that and to have input into it, but never to just say, oh, we can skip the design cycle, off we go, or just slap our colors on it. If it works for them, it's going to work for us. So I have extensive mirror boards with everybody's onboarding flows, with everybody's pricing pages, their sharing model, their invite colleagues models that I reference all the time, but there have never been the exact thing that I would use for any company as opposed to say, hey, I think this is a great starting point for you. Here are the things that I think will work very well for your company and for your product and take these elements, the rest you need to go and do themselves. So at least that way there's a starting point. And this is why I also started doing a lot more of like my own, all those prototypes, like skeletons of here's the elements that you should do in these flows. Like I have one for pricing page, I have one for home page, but you need to put in your own oomph into it in order for it to actually work.

What made me realize this back in the day was thinking at Airbnb, especially thinking about people looking at our flow and being like, this is, They got it all figured out. We're just going to copy what they've done because they're so thoughtful and have tested everything and knowing how that has not happened and how so much of this was guesswork and we hate so much of it. Just thinking about people trying to copy this, thinking we know what we're doing. It's like, what are you guys even thinking?

Oh my God, I actually had that happen to me at Dropbox not so long ago. Somebody reached out and they're like, oh, I look like it was like some page and activation flow and they're like, oh, I love this page. This is so cool. I love what you've done here. Like, I'm gonna go take it to my company. I'm like, we haven't touched it in 10 years. Like, this page is like only visible for like small cohort of people. Like, please don't do it. Like, please don't copy it. Like, it performs like shit. I know it's out there, but it's not meant to be out there. Nobody like thoughtfully put it out there. So like, that's definitely a huge, a huge failure point that you can run into. Right.

If it's like a fancy company, assume they're just so smart and diligent about every little pixel and decision.

If people only knew of how much craziness is happening in those big companies and how much chaos there is.

Oh man, that's a whole other podcast episode.

Whole other podcast, yes.

Okay, number five.

Okay, I have this one. It's a little bit meta, but I see it happening all the time. We love to think that our problems are unique. Like, I'm working in this company and, like, we have this growth problem and we need to go and figure out the solution from the grounds up. Maybe this is, like, a little bit related to the competition point, but I'm very sorry to break it to all of you, but your problem is not unique. I am 99 sure of that. your problem has been felt by somebody somewhere in probably many, many places. And you trying to re-engineer solution is time lost to market and has a huge opportunity cost. So I think my biggest thing that I try to get people is like, don't create, don't think that you have unique problems. You don't. I know we love to, like, it would be fun to have something unique to learn. But with so many startups, with so many people in our industry, in your industry, whichever industry that is, your problem has been solved by somebody, or at least that there's a lot of failures on the problem that you should be learning from. And number one thing that whenever you have an initiative or whenever you have a metric that you need to go and move to not start from scratch, ever to not start from scratch, it's like the worst thing that you can do because you're gonna waste so many cycles on trying to do something that probably has already been solved. So which means like how do you approach this as a result? Well, you can look at competition and how they're solving the problem. That's one input for sure. You should go find people that have solved this problem because there are people there and people love to talk about what they do. So take advantage of that human psychology. and go find those people and just ask them, how did you do it? What did you do? What happened? Obviously, not all the time everybody's gonna respond, but we have LinkedIn, we have X, go out there, find the people that you think or ask around in your network of who you think might have similar solutions and just go talk to people. It would be incredible shortcut. Like if you're talking about an actual hack, that is a hack. to get to an optimal solution. And then the last thing that I would also say is that solving any one problem uniquely is extremely inefficient. We are evolving so fast in our market, you need to be able to patternize your solutions. Patternize, is that a word? Make patterns. Make patterns out of your solutions. So more you can stop looking at it as a unique data point or unique problem and more as there is, I need to fit it into existing pattern or I need to figure out the framework on how to solve not only this problem, but other problems. The faster you'll be able to get at least to like 60% of the solution there, and then you can do very authentic implementation of whatever you want to do. But to go from zero to 60 manually, as a one-off, we do not have time in the industry right now to do it unless you want to be left behind.

Bam. Powerful words. Is there an example that comes to mind of you doing this either the wrong way, just like thinking this was unique and realizing I should have talked to people, or where you actually realized something was not unique in that?

I'll give you actually an example that I had when I was at Miro. at Miro, we were first trying to stand up community, and I was tasked to do it, and I've never done it before. So I'm like, I was banging my head around, like, against the wall, and I'm like, okay, how do I do it? Like, what software do we use? Where do we acquire users? Like, what kind of content is gonna go in there? So I was, like, approaching it almost like a finding, like, product Market fit. And then, like, I I have. I I will fail so much. doing it. And I honestly only have a year to get to some sort of traction before this is going to get shut down because company is impatient, company is moving fast. So if this is going to be a failure point, it's either going to be taken away from me, which is fair, or we're just going to close the door on it, which would be a huge failure, both on my point and for company as a whole. So I went and I started talking to a bunch of people that have done communities, and I remember talking to Kara Lo. from Atlassian, who has stood up community. I actually hired her as an advisor afterwards. And she's like, well, are you talking about a user community or an agency community or a partner community? And I'm like, my mind was blown. I'm like, I wasn't even considering all of these angles because I was just literally thinking about users only. And she's like, well, you shouldn't necessarily start with a user community. If you want some results out of it, go to agency or partner communities first. She would outline it to me in like in a structural way for me to like grasp my head around it and then implement something that had much better results at the end that I wouldn't even gotten to probably until six, eight months later if I didn't talk to her. So I think it has to come with a place of knowing that you don't know everything and humility to say, hey, I need help. And I might have a already fancy title at that point. I was an interim CMO at Miro and I'm like, I don't know how to do this. And it actually earns you a lot more credit than you think. And a lot of people are afraid to admit that they don't know how to solve a problem. And that's why they start from scratch. But you need to really put your ego aside. and get some help faster than trying to hit every single failure point along the way.

And the thing that'll really hurt your ego is failing. And so the more you could do to avoid failing and being successful with this initiative by talking to people doing research.

It should be fair. Failure is going to be unavoidable. If you talk about growth, growth is about failure. My big motto like life, motto and growth is that you have to fail to learn. You can't just constantly succeed. Success is an output of a lot of failures. But the question is, is how much time do you have to fail? And a lot of times we don't realize how many failure Cycles we're gonna have to go through before we get a success. And that company or even Market has no time for that. and so still expect to fail for sure, but the timeline for failures is going to be shortened quite a bit.

Okay, so we've gone halfway through your list. There's 10 items on this list, right?

Yes, yes. Okay, this one is a good one.

I'm excited to chat with Christina Gilbert, the founder of one schema, one of our long time podcast sponsors. Hi, Christina.

Yes. Thank you for having me on, Lenny.

What This is the latest with one schema. I know you now work with some of my favorite companies like Ramp, Vanta, Scale, and Watershed. I heard that you just launched a new product to help product teams import CSVs from especially tricky systems like ERPs.

Yes, so we just launched one schema file feeds, which allows you to build an integration with any system in 15 minutes, as long as you can export a CSV to an SFTP folder. We see our customers all the time getting stuck with hacks and workarounds. And the product teams that we work with don't have to turn down prospects because their systems are too hard to integrate with. We allow our customers to offer thousands of integrations without involving their engineering team at all.

I can tell you that if my team had to build integrations like this, how nice would it be to be able to take this off my roadmap and instead use something like OneSchema and not just to build it, but also.

To maintain it forever. Absolutely, Lenny. We've heard so many horror stories. of multi-day outages from even just a handful of bad records. We are laser focused on integration reliability to help teams end all of those distractions that come up with integrations. We have a built-in validation layer that stops any bad data from entering your system, and OneSchema will notify your team.

Immediately of any data that looks incorrect. I know that importing incorrect data can cause all kinds of pain for your customers and quickly lose their trust. Christina, thank you for joining us, and if you want to learn head on over to oneschema.co. That's oneschema.co. Let me summarize the first five real quick and then we'll keep going. So the first is wait longer than you think to hire ahead of growth. Wait until your product market fit, maybe a million ARR, especially if you're self-serve oriented. Number two is if your growth is declining, the head of growth won't solve that problem. First, stop the decline at least. Third is redesigning your homepage, marketing page. Rebranding is not only not going to help you grow, it's going to probably hurt growth and slow things down. And so just go into that wide eyes wide open. Four is don't just copy the competition and assume they know what they're doing and assume that what they do is going to work for you. Use it as inspiration. On the other hand, look at and get inspiration from experts, competition, trends, things like that to help you solve your problem, which you think is no one solved before it turns out every problem you're solving, someone has solved in some way, most likely.

Yes, especially in growth. I mean, I know this can apply to a lot of product management and to marketing as well, but in growth, when you're talking about how do I lift activation or have a really big drop off between activation and monetization, these things are a lot more patternized. than you would expect them to be. So go and find those patterns as opposed to trying to re-engineer it.

Awesome. Okay, let's keep going. Number seven.

All right, so next one. Next one is a little spicy one, too. And that is as part of growth, you owning some channels. A lot of growth teams own acquisition. So owning channels and growth prioritizing SEO, SEM, social is one of the biggest mistakes I think a growth team can do. Now, obviously, I'm not saying don't do SEO or don't do SEM, so organic search or paid search. I'm not saying that. However, as a growth team, your number one priority is to create your owned or your earned channel. so channel that you've earned and that nobody else can compete in but you. What do I mean by that? When you're doing organic search or paid search, you're making Google richer. Great for Google. Google is an incredible company, but by dumping money into paid marketing, you are paying them and you're paying for their distribution and access to their distribution. if you're doing social too, like you're doing, let's say, Instagram or whatnot, paid advertising in Instagram, that's great. But all of that works on algorithm. 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. You are playing with other players and you're competing against them in somebody else's channel. Now, the on the other side, there can be your own earned channel. What is an earned channel? It really goes into the concept of product-led growth acquisition, which means you're relying on virality, on word of mouth, on user-generated content in order to attract new acquisition through top of the funnel. So why is that earned? And why do I put that above, let's say, organic search, which is SEO obviously is wonderful. But again, search just goes to Google. That's great. Versus if you build your own user generated content in your own community, nobody else can compete with you in that. That is yours. Your competitors cannot buy their eyeballs. Their people are going to be attracting other people. Referrals from people to people are everything. So, Lenny, if I, let's say I sign up for, say, superhuman and I invite you into it, that is much stronger acquisition tactic versus you looking for and finding superhuman, let's say, on paid marketing advertisements. And especially with our age right now where search as an interface is changing towards AI interface and the AI interface is giving a lot less credit to all of the content. Content is almost becoming a database. and there's a new UI that is being developed on it. Before it was Google was the UI, and now AI is coming in with a new UI, and there's not as much control that you have over this new UI that is being developed. Focusing on these earned channels that you own becomes the utmost priority. And if you don't have them on your growth roadmap, you are 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, your competition in those channels is only going to go up. You're constantly going to be praying to log algorithm gods to giveth your way, but they, again, they can take it at any point. And it's really one of those fundamental growth team failure points if they don't spend enough time on virality and user generated content to create their own earned acquisition. Wow.

Okay. This is incredible. Like, this is its own podcast episode in theory that we could do of how to actually do this. We're not going to cover the strategy. Also, this may not necessarily work for every company. Your point is that's, you can go other ways, but this is by far the most powerful, most effective, cheapest, most likely to succeed if you can figure this out.

It's not cheapest. It's actually costs a lot of product and engineering and even marketing resources. to stand up. So it's just, it's not the cost of a budget, but it's cost of people that will have to work to create your own channel, so to speak, for acquisition. And you're right, maybe that's not for everybody, but it's actually applicable to more products than people realize because every single product has some sort of team functionality, some sort of roles that they need to do. Every product can drive word of mouth. loop. Not actually, that's not true. Not every product can drive word of mouth loop, but they can drive recommendations and they can create user generated content. One of those tactics usually applies to at least one product. So there is an opportunity to create some sort of earned channel, even though it might feel unnatural at the beginning, depending on how you reach PMF and how you've scaled in the first couple of stages of it. But if you're not exploring and if you are not investing into it or at least trying and failing within it, I think that you are really leaving too much of your growth future into the hands of somebody else that you have no control over.

So the advice here is your growth team, it's okay if they work on SEM, paid growth basically, and SEO, but most of your effort and investment should be in earned channels, owned channels. specifically, virality user generated content.

Diversify. Just diversify your strategy so not all of it is reliant on somebody else giving you access to their distribution. Now, for example, a Dropbox. Over 50% of acquisition comes through sharing. So I load something into my Dropbox. Maybe I need to send it out for signature. Maybe I need to just share this file to transfer to somebody. Maybe I just need to share this file as a final delivery to my clients that I was working with. Well, that recipient then is now aware of Dropbox, so it solved the brand awareness. By that action of sharing, you actually almost activated that recipient too, so you don't need to educate them anymore on how the product works and whatnot. 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. And it's only for Dropbox to lose, so to speak. And we actually had our own growth pod focused on it because to optimize both sender experience and the recipient experience because it was such a powerful growth loop and growth engine that driven the company. And every business should have an attempt at one of these.

I think this is gonna be a really good push for a lot of growth teams to think about what can we do here. Okay, number seven.

Number seven. We've talked about this, at least a little bit in our last podcast too, but I see this as a question that comes up all the time and something that people are afraid of to invest, which is a mistake. Every single company starts with their growth efforts focused either on product led growth. Hey, I'm going to have everything being done self serve or on sales and marketing. I'm going to have sales team and then I'm going to have marketing team and they're going to do all of the work and my product is just going to create the functionality. And that's good and fine for a while, depending on how long that while is, but not overlaying every single way that you can grow through product, through marketing and through sales as an evolution. is a huge mistake that a lot of growth teams fail to iterate on and innovate on. The way that I'd best be comparing it is if product has a product market fit, which is great, that product market fit is not going to last that product forever. They're always going to have to have a second horizon. They're always going to have to have a product market fit expansion efforts in order to continue to grab as many people and solve as many people's problems as possible and increasing their TAM. Well, the same comes with growth. 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 gonna need to evolve it. And that Evolution needs to come through overlaying other growth models on top of it. So a you are diversified away from just one growth model failing because a lot of times you're going to get into a situation of law. I love Andrew Chan's article here. It's called a law of shitty click-throughs where you just if you over optimize the same thing over and over again, it's just it has minimal returns. And some growth models have very limited time span. Some of them are huge. Some can grow for like sharing loop at Dropbox. it's 17 years in the making and it's still firing. Good for it. Like, that's amazing. But that's very much an anomaly. Most of growth loops spin out their ability to produce meaningful results for you within the first five to six to seven years. So continuously overlaying those different growth models. And what I'm specifically talking about is product-led growth, marketing-led growth, sales-led growth, and introducing it into this ecosystem constantly is what really separates companies that can continue growing for a long periods of times versus the ones that can see a really big blip, potentially even unicorn type of growth rates of 70, 80, 100, whatever plus percent. And then it starts to slow down. And don't wait till that slowdown happens. You need to really start thinking about different ways that you can attract people to grow so you are not leaving a gap. in the market that somebody else can enter and own, as opposed to you playing in every way and where you can interact with your customer.

The way I think about this is the S-curves of every growth model and growth lever. Eventually it'll help and then slow down and see you want to find the next S-curve on things that'll grow your business.

Yes, absolutely. The way that I see it often is that especially when growth teams, they hit a really big result out of some initiative. They just like keep trying to focus on it over and over again. And sometimes that focus is warranted. Like I said, our sharing loop at Dropbox has its own growth team against it. Great. But at the same time, a lot of that's not warranted for all of the growth or you need to realize that there's no more juice to squeeze out of this thing. and then you need to go and you need to move on. Which actually brings me to my, like a little bit of a next thing too, is you need to do it every 18 months. Because a lot of them are going to fail. And every five years or so, you for sure need a new channel, new growth loops, new tactics, new engines, so to speak, to power your growth engine. Whether it's overlaying sales on top of self-serve, whether you're doing a lot of let's say virality right now in terms of acquisition, and you're going into marketing a lot heavier. But every five years, something big has to start taking a big portion of your volume. And for that, every 18 years, you need to introduce something new. Sorry. Yeah. For every 18 months, you need to introduce something new in order for it to continue evolving.

And was that number eight of the list we're going through? That's like a bonus piece of advice. No, that's just a bonus piece of advice. Okay, cool. Okay, got it. And so the advice here essentially is you'll find something that is helping you grow, assume that will slow down at some point, start thinking about other levers and growth models to layer on top of that. Something I've seen, let me know if you agree, is usually there's gonna be like one lever that has most of your growth for a long, long time. and so all other things are not going to be as big, but they are still important.

Yeah. So the way I think about it is I try to focus 20 to 25% of growth teams time annually, not every given sprint or not every given quarter, but annually to introduce a new growth loop or to introduce a new channel or to introduce something new that can potentially bring us additional bump to our growth engine. I know that a lot of it is going to fail. None of it is gold on any growth metrics because you cannot goal it immediately, let's say, on monetization or immediately on acquisition. You're just going to cut it at its knees immediately if you're not going to let it evolve into something that can be monetized, that can be responsible for acquisition. So, like example on Miraverse, which is a user-generated content library of all of the mirror boards that people create. It took us probably 18 months until we started putting metrics expectations on it. Before that, it was a thing that we were testing, and it was being used by a lot of people, but we're like, we don't even know exactly quite how this is gonna fit all together. And then it started taking off as both engagement engine as well as acquisition engine. But it's important to constantly give room to try those new ideas. Otherwise, you're gonna find yourself that your growth loops and your growth engine is slowing down and you don't have time to find that second horizon. And that is the worst situation to be in. That's where growth starts to slow down and to recover out of that is impossible because you need revenue, you need revenue, you need revenue, you need revenue. And these growth loops on average take six months, a year, a year and a half to start producing even visible revenue. So that's why you need to start layering it very soon into your initiatives.

To make this even more concrete for people that are starting to like, oh shit, I gotta do this, can you just give us a list that doesn't have to be exhaustive of potential growth loops, levers, methods, engines for folks to consider? You've mentioned a few, but just give a list of people like, okay, got it. Maybe we'll try one of these.

I'm really big on creating a growth loop out of user generated content. I think with everything that is happening with AI and SEO at the moment, your biggest claim to fame on content strategy will be harnessing user generated content, whether it's user generated templates, whether it's user generated case studies, review, whatever it is, you need to start investing into it now, creating a library out of it, using it for Activation purposes, using it than for acquisition purposes, using community to spark the conversations around it. Like that can be a really wonderful strategy that everybody should consider of whether there's juice in it within your product. Other ones can be, hey, we're very, let's say, individualistic product, but can we actually create a referral mechanism for it. For B2C, that's actually very straightforward. A lot of B2C products thrive on referrals. For B2B, it can be more of invitation of other team members into the product to complete other jobs to be done. Hey, I've done this. I need my manager to see it. Can I create a report to share with my manager? And all of a sudden it starts to spread within the company. So creating additional almost product functionality that then creates these loops potentially for you. So it can be a slew of things. Obviously, I'd highly recommend just understanding all of the menus of these earned tactics. I should do a blog post on that actually. And then just see what works for you or not, because at least ideation step of it has to happen if you especially you're relying on search engines for your acquisition. Start thinking about some of the earned channels as soon as possible.

And even though you recommend spend more time on earned channels, own channels, there's also explore SEO, explore paid growth, right? Sales.

Absolutely. I mean, almost everybody does paid, arguably almost too soon, potentially. There's a point to make that shouldn't be. A lot of companies should not be doing paid right now, but SEO, social, resellers, all of those are wonderful tactics. Obviously, I skew very heavily towards earned channels just because once you stand that up, that's a gift that just keeps on giving and nobody can take that away from you. But that doesn't mean that other tactics and other channels should not be explored as well.

Amazing. Let's keep going. So we have three to go.

Number eight. So number eight, this one's kind of a doozy and I think a lot of people don't do it. I don't know why they don't do it. I think it's such an incredible ability to propel forward. And that is what doesn't work, as I said in the previous growth tactics, is trying to think that each problem is unique and you need to solve it on your own. Maybe this is not so much doesn't work, but not hiring advisors is something that I do not recommend for you to do. You can get access to anybody for one hour a week. Yeah, you'll have to pay them, so nobody's going to volunteer their hour. We're all very, very busy. But hiring advisors is biggest career amplification and your business amplification can possibly do. Because to create a network of people that have all of these data points and those all of the other patterns that you can do is something that can just propel you so far forward. That doesn't mean you have to do everything advisor says. That's not the point. They're not the strategy setter, but there are additional inputs into your decision making that you otherwise wouldn't have. You can go and hire somebody from Atlassian, you can go and hire somebody from Airbnb that have been and lived through all of this and they can help you solving your problem. So I think any growth team that does not have an advisor is a growth team that is underperforming. Because even me who I've like I've bought so many companies, I've operated at so many companies, I don't know everything. Every time I take an operator role, I hire advisors for myself because that is the fastest way to learn anything. And I often see these teams that just like try to figure out everything on their own and not have any advisory, like advisors on their boards, so to speak. And not even, I'm not even talking like an official board. I'm talking about, not even advisory board, but you can hire somebody like as a contractor that will be your advisor. I think is a huge mistake, especially in this day and age, because we have a big asymmetry of information in our field. There's very little available to learn because we're all very cagey because competition. But at the end of the day, people know a lot of the stuff and how it worked for them internally. And I highly, highly encourage you to not try to wing it on your own.

Along those lines, there's also advice of just like, don't worry about advisors. There's, you never know if they're going to be useful. There's all these hanger-ons that join your startup and want to help, but they're not helpful. If you give one tip for a founder or team that's interviewing advisors looking for an advisor to vet them, to help them find people that are actually great, what would your tip be?

I have actually a good one. Many advisors might not have, might not like it though. 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. See what kind of information they can provide to you. Because any advisor that is cagey about what they know is not the type of advisor that you're going to want to have on your team. You want to have somebody that has lived through it, that can talk to you, to your face about it, that is able to have hard conversations that is able to provide you in necessary examples, that is able to give you and connect dots for you for necessary patterns. So instead of just saying, oh, this person looks good, let me hire them as an advisor. Say, hey, let's have a workshop first. I have this problem. I think that you can help me fix it. Pay them for it, whatever their rate is for that workshop, for sure. But see how they actually interact with your team and then hire them on ongoing retainer. because that creates an interview loop that is very practical, that is very quick to understand whether you can work with them, they can work with you, and whether they have anything to contribute to you. And then every single month evaluate whether that advisor should stay with you. Some advisors, they only need to be with the company for three months and off they go. That's fine. Some of them might stick with you for four or five years. But every single month you should go and say, did they add any value? And I'm not saying that advisors should have any monetary expectations, like revenue attribution, so to speak, to them. But did you find value in having conversations with them? Did they offer anything valuable to you?

That was an awesome tip. And I could see why people would be like, God damn, Elena, don't say that. Makes so much sense. Okay, here we go. Number nine.

My last one is also that I see something way too often nowadays on growth teams specifically. This is very, very growth problem. And that is too much risk averseness on growth, where you're starting to test everything. If every single one of your initiatives that you're doing on growth is an experiment, that's a problem. And that is something that you should take a look at and say, what am I doing? And why do I need a precise scientific measurement for every single thing that I touch in order for it to go to production or like to hit the market? It's almost like a disease, like a paralyzing disease. that slows down progress, that slows down velocity, that slows down learnings, that creates very much, very terrible consequences to the output that growth teams produce. And it's a little bit counterintuitive because experimentation is a way to do growth for growth teams. And it's their process. Growth teams are meant to experiment. But I also think that experimenting on everything is something that is quite terrible once the team starts to get locked into that state and it's really hard to get out of because they're then afraid to do any change until or unless that they test.

So where do you find that balance? I imagine people hearing this are like, oh, yes, this makes sense to me. and then they continue to test basically everything. What's kind of some heuristics you'd recommend for knowing, okay, just don't test that. Don't worry about it. You don't need credit for that win.

First of all, I think that people should trust their intuition a little bit more. Data is good, but data is only good if you have enough of it. So if you have low volume real estate that is going to take you eight months to reach some sort of answer, do you really want to test it? Eight months? What's the point of it? It's my rule of thumb if we cannot collect the sample size in the month, we shouldn't test it, period. Because just then it's not fast enough. We should just go and do pre versus post. Pre versus post is pretty powerful. It's also a way to assess your impact and you can still roll back if it doesn't work, but don't think that everything needs a scientific explanation to whether it needs to be moved forward or not. Also, experimentation cannot be the way that people make decisions in the company. There's still so much about knowing your user, understanding the market, for your brain to connect all of those dots and to know what needs to be an experience that your customers are going to want. That, yeah, if scientific data, like a very tight determination of the probability that this is a success is important, absolutely do it. it might be a really big strategical pivot that you're planning to do. So it's a data point to validate that all of this extra work will be, will be needed. It might be a very high trafficked real estate that even like 0.1% difference will mean millions of dollars for you. But other than that, it should be just go, go, go. Do pre versus post, by the way. I'm like, I'm not saying just like release and release and move on. Uh, release, do seven day, 24 hour readout, seven day readout, 28 day readout. even come back to it a year later and measure some of the retention or expansion data that is associated with it. But to test everything is debilitating to growth teams and it paralyzes them in its place. So kind of look at your initiatives and say, where do I need precision? And it's important and I can get it fast enough versus where we should just go for it. and yeah, we will fail there too. And that's okay. And we can roll back and we can figure out how to make it better. But failure is going to happen regardless. And statistics, statistics is tricky. Like too many people take it for face value versus it's just like a directional data point to say there is likely a new distribution that has maybe a different mean and five percent of the chances if you measure a 95% statistical significance, you might not even be there. And yet we take it for so granted, oh, it's going to drive this much lift. So I just think that people stop in this age of data, don't almost rely enough on their own intuition.

A lot of contrarian takes here. I love this. Elena, we've reached number 10.

Okay.

And I know number 10 is like a special one where it's more than one. Quick fire.

So number 10 is going to be my little fire round. My fire round on little things that I just see people spending way too much time on. It hurts my heart because it's not going to drive any results on them. So, number one, color optimizations. 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 or test it against green or so on. Pick a color. move on. Please don't spend time on it. That's a 2000, early 2000s tactic. It doesn't work anymore. We're past that in technology sector. Number two, third-party signups. A lot of times we think, oh, we're gonna get so much more acquisition if we add Google Auth or if we add Facebook Auth or Slack Auth or Microsoft Auth, whichever auth you wanna add to it. In some cases, it's very important to have third-party auth. So for example, if you're a developer product, Please have a GitHub auth. It's kind of unnecessary. Developers already have the account there, have them connect with it as opposed to create a new one. However, if you're a productivity product, email is fine for the longest time. Gmail is nice. It's not going to drive more acquisition for you. You're just going to do a mix shift into more people using it. It's not going to create incrementality. It's not going to improve your activation. It's not going to improve your retention. It's not a growth tactic. part of your just customer experience that you want to invest into. Number three, on the fire round, one email wonders. We stress too much about this one email that we're going to send to this one customer group. And we're like, oh my gosh, how much lift is it going to cost? It will never cause any lift. It will never work as a one-off email. Too few people open it. On average, 25% open rate. At best, you'll get 40 to 50% open rate. Too few people click it. One email will never do anything. If you're gonna go into email, please think about it as a series about communication, about how it interacts with product communication. It's a whole strategy. It's a whole thing. Please don't stress about one off email. Never test a change in one email. It'll never work. You're gonna have to do the whole goddamn thing and see how it's gonna do, not just one email. Just never gonna work.

I'm definitely guilty of this one. That is a really good one for sure. And it's so obvious in hindsight, so I love that you shared that. Yes.

And then the last one, growth teams are often too obsessed about removing friction. Because if we remove the steps, then more people are going to get to the destination. And to an extent, if you have horrible friction in your product where it's just confusing about what the next step is, I agree. go fix the friction of the cognitive load that it takes to complete a step. That is the friction that you should be working on. However, just removing steps or yanking or simplifying things to an oblivion where you lose an identity of what you even do or what you're capable of doing is a completely failed growth tactic. So simplifying may be an initiative of a different problem that you're solving, but if you ever a line item on your roadmap that says simplify onboarding. Please, please cross it out. It's not gonna work because simplifying onboarding is an action. What is the problem that you're solving? You're never trying to solve a problem of simplifying. You always have a problem of people are confused in it, or people don't know where to go, or they get lost in it, or they're not educated enough. that is the problem. And simplifying might be a solution, but it can never be a problem on its own. And too many growth teams are just obsessed with this notion that came out, I think, in early 2000s, like, oh, simplifying is like the biggest growth hack that you can do. Please don't do it. It's only a solution to a very specific problem set of too much complexity.

Wow, that was a big one to end on that I think will help a lot of people avoid wasting time. Again, a whole other podcast conversation could probably focus just on onboarding advice that you probably have that I know you have. We've reached the last item. Is there anything else you want to share about this list before we- no.

I think we spent too much time on this list. We were ready to move on.

Just enough time. And kind of on a note, I want to call an audible. And so we were going to talk through all of your favorite frameworks. I like the way this conversation has gone. I don't want people to get overwhelmed with information. So one idea is just list maybe your favorite growth frameworks just for folks to go check these out and not spend too much time on each one. Yep, let's do that. Okay.

Great. So the list of my favorite growth frameworks. And to me, framework, by the way, it's not a solution, it's a pattern. It's a pattern that exists across almost every single company out there. And it's a starting point for your ideation and to figure out how you can almost shortcut to possible list of solutions as opposed to trying to figure out too hard of how to even define a problem on its own. So number one, it's probably expected if anybody has read anything or listened to me talk is growth loops. I think anybody who thinks about growth and anybody who thinks about growth in the funnel fashion versus understanding what the growth loops are is missing out on the ability to create sustainable growth engine. So it's very important to think about action reaction that generates another action, and it's a self-contained flywheel they can spin. A lot of resources on that at Reforge, Brian Balfour and Casey Winters and Andrew Chen wrote a lot about this, highly recommended anybody looking into. My next favorite growth framework is actually written by you, Lenny, and Dan, which is a racecar framework. Everybody has a really hard time often thinking about what are all of the parts of growth initiatives and which are long term, what are short term, how much are they going to actually produce in results? And racecar framework is wonderful because separates different initiatives into, hey, there's some engines loops that are just going to keep on spinning. There's some fuel that you're going to need to add into it, potentially like paid marketing dollars. There are some turbo boosts that you may have in your race card that are going to be, let's say, big user conferences that you're going to hold as a, as a product, or there's little locations and optimizations that you're going to need to do of pouring oil into that engine so that actually performs correctly. It's beautiful. I talk about it all the time with everybody. The next favorite growth framework for me comes from Bengali, and that's adjacent user theory. I think that was very powerful in terms of thinking about growth evolution. And as we talked about adding different growth models to your growth ecosystem, different growth loops, but also adjacent users which are outside of your ideal customer or profile or ICP outside of your core user and how growth team can really bring them in and add additional to your product without even expansion of product market fit by just optimizing their experiences. I'm going to stop at these three because I think those are the most powerful ones.

Cool. On that last one, Bengali was on the podcast. We'll link to that episode if you want to go deeper on the adjacent user theory. I love how that was a few minutes on things that could change people's life if they adopt one of these frameworks and learn how to think about growth in this way. It's such a powerful, my mental model for thinking about all the stuff you've been talking about this entire conversation.

Yes, I, those frameworks are like my church in my mind of like how my system of beliefs, of how I think about growth and how I think about it on a strategic level of owning it as a strategy, not just like a tactic or an initiative.

The Church of Elena Verna. Amazing. Okay, so before we wrap up, I want to bring us over to a contrarian corner recurring segment on this podcast where I like to ask the guests if there's something they believe that most other people don't believe. Contrarian opinion, you might say. Is there anything that comes to mind?

I do have a very contrarian opinion, although it's not so much related to growth as opposed to maybe your personal growth. And my contrarian opinion is that full-time jobs are not the best way to monetize the skills 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 and don't explore other options that are both available on the market as well as best suited for their personalities, for their interests, and for their skill set. It's like a default plan that everybody subscribes to that is faulty in itself.

Wow, okay, wait, we gotta hear more. So what are some other packages? I think we're like buying some of these packages, these other options. But I guess what should people be thinking about when you say this in terms of what can they actually do and explore?

I'll premise it to saying I don't want to rain parade on full-time roles. They're wonderful on video ability to learn, to get the expertise, and depending on which career stage you are at, full-time roles might be the absolute necessity for you to move on to and unlock the next level. However, full-time roles box us into one company that may not be a great fit for for us culturally, for our skills, for our ambitions, for our interests. Life is too short for that and ability to really go and figure out your own best monetization model. Just like you work on that for your business, you should work for that on yourself without an assumption that full time is the only option that you should have. So what are the other options? There's so many. Obviously, a couple known ones freelancing. You can be a contractor. I do a lot of advising and consulting because for my brain of how I work and how I like to puzzle solve and pattern match, it works much better to be horizontal across many companies versus vertical on one specific one. But that doesn't mean I still don't take those vertical engagements to deepen my knowledge into specific topic. But overall, it's a lot more interesting for me to pattern match across multiple companies and help them grow as opposed to just focusing on one. There's interim engagements where there's a predetermined end date to your agreement. There's fractional engagements where you're working part-time on something as opposed to engulfing yourself completely full-time. There's other ways to create courses. There's a way to create newsletters and monetize them like you're Landing such a fantastic job. So there's just so many options and people are sometimes paralyzed by fear of instability that it creates when you start to explore other options because you don't have that contract with that one company that provides you that paycheck every two weeks to rely on. But at the same time, you can create diversification for your career and you can create stability. It just depends on when you need to pull that trigger. and when is the right time for you to explore? But to spend your entire career only assuming full time is the only way, I think is a complete mistake that a lot of people are doing.

One of my favorite posts of yours along these lines, which is around increasing, which you want to do is increase optionality.

Yes.

And I guess talk about that because I think it's a really powerful piece of advice.

So this advice of career optionality being the ultimate north star, for anybody in their professional journey is something that I'm very, I'm very strong on because a lot of people have the goal of, I don't know, maybe I want to be a VP or I want to become a CEO or, I don't know, I want to be a manager and I want to like people manage. And this becomes their North Star and they start working towards it. But a lot of people, when they get to their perceived Corporate ladder North Stars find themselves extremely dissatisfied, depressed even, by how terrible that job is. Could people manage your job? I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy because it's a terrible job if you don't enjoy it and you don't know if you're going to like it until you actually do it. So I think setting a title as your goal, which so many of us have titles as goals, is very wrong way to think about it as opposed to saying, Hey, My goal professionally is actually to have options. So I can choose what I want to do. So I can choose what fits my life right now, that I can choose what fits my skills and that fits my personality and that makes me happy. And to get career optionality, if that's your goal, you start thinking about your progression a lot differently. You're not starting to think about it of what will get me to the next title. You start thinking about what will can I do next? that will increase my option pool. And that's very different than just getting to a higher title. And if you start thinking about evaluating your opportunities or like whether you should stay at the company, whether you should move at the company from the lens of does it increase my options if I stay at this company for one more year, or does it keep it the same, or does it actually potentially decrease, that is the right way to find your ultimate happy place and happy job that brings you energy, that brings you happiness versus just going for a title and then being very disappointed with what that brings along with it.

Amazing advice. So important. And something I'll add that I think is a balance to what people may be feeling here is like, oh, I'll just bounce around all the best logo companies and create this killer resume. I think you also need to build depth and actual experience.

Yes.

That you can tap into if you do any of these things. For example, a lot of people want to jump to like, I'm going to be a newsletter person. I'm going to start podcast, be an advisor before they've done anything real. And you have nothing to actually base your advice on.

You have to earn your right to unlock optionality. And earning that right does usually lie within full-time jobs. That, that is a universal truth. But then at some point you should start not just looking at full-time jobs as the only option that you have. You should start to think about when can you start unlocking new ones and testing the market on it.

The other point is that you've been a great example of is it's not a one-way door. You can have full-time job, go to something else, go back to full-time job, be an advisor, be an intern person, be a newsletter person. You do that really well. You.

Should do it all. It's all a menu of options. and you pick a menu item that fits you best in any given point of your life. It's never say never and never shut the door on anything. Absolutely.

Oh my God, Elena, this was incredible. Before we get to our very exciting lightning round, is there anything else you want to share or leave listeners with? Maybe a last nugget or thought or not?

Because we've covered a lot already.

No, I think we've covered so much. I don't want to overwhelm. Let's do it. With that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready? Yes, I'm ready. First question, surprise, surprise. What are two or three books you've recommended most to other people?

Okay, so I just finished this book that I loved so much. It's not a professional book, but it's Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. It's the same author that wrote Martian. Martian also was made in the movie. So good, so good. I couldn't put it down. I think I read it in two days. straight. So highly recommend that. And the next one that I also started reading right now is Bobby verse. Bobby verse is so good. It actually takes into account of like AI and how we can upload our consciousness in the AI and what can happen with that. So highly recommend it. I think it's actually closer to what potentially can be in the truth for us in the future than not. But I'm a big sci-fi geek, so I read mostly sci-fi books.

I have a sci-fi recommendation for you that comes from Noah Smith. He has, I love his newsletters called Noah Opinion. And he has a list of his favorite sci-fi books that I've been working my way through. It's called, you, may have read it by Werner Vogel, Fire Upon the Deep. Have you heard of this? No. Okay. It's described as not a sci-fi but space, like a space opera where it's epic, the most epic scale of universe story. I'll download it tonight. It'll be on my phone. It takes a little bit to get into. It's quite unique, but you just keep going and it's incredible. And AI plays a big role in it, actually. That's awesome.

Okay.

There you go. Okay, question number two. Favorite recent movie or TV show you really enjoyed?

Yes. I just got to watching Beef on Netflix. It's so good. It's, it's set on, I'm not gonna spoil it for anybody. It's beef. You should watch it. It's a limited series. It's so good. It will run through. I love Veep on HBO. So funny. I've probably watched it two times already, the entire series, and I'll probably watch it more because it just cracks me up every time. I think this is actually how our government works. So I'm very intrigued by that. And then the last one that I really liked that is coming up with the season two now. So you should catch up on season one is Last One of Us. If you don't like zombie movies or zombie shows, don't watch it. But if zombie and apocalypse is your.

Cup of tea, Last One of Us, so good. Or is it Last of Us or Last One of Us? Last of Us. Is it Last of Us? I'm Googling while we talk.

Last of Us. I think it's Last of Us.

Yeah, the Last of Us. Oh, Last of Us.

Okay, Last of Us.

You're saying there's a third season coming soon. That's exciting. I didn't know that. Yeah.

It's so good. Okay, I love it as well.

Great pick. Okay, your favorite product you recently discovered that you really like?

I recently discovered that they make heated shoes and that changed my life. My feet are always cold and these are boots that actually have heated wires through them and I'm obsessed.

And you like charging it? It's like USB plug-in kind of thing.

Yeah, I just come in, I plug them in, and then they go outside, and I'm warm, and I think it's magical. I have a jacket, also heated jacket. Now I have shoes. I'm. I just need my gloves, and I'll be all set.

I love the USB powered clothing. And we should know you live not in Silicon Valley. You live on the East Coast, sort of.

Central. In Central. The. The coldest it gets is, like, 30s here, but I'm always cold, so this is just like. My love language is something heated that I can sit on. I'm that cat that sits underneath the light all the time. And then I also just got AirPods Max. My headphones, I couldn't connect them to my computer. Still technical difficulties on that, but I love them. The sound is amazing. That's my new favorite gadget that I'm obsessed about.

What a cool combination, heated shoes and AirPods. Two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to? that you find useful in work or in life?

Yeah, it's really one progress over perfection. I think that you just need to the velocity of information is far more important than something that I think is perfect. And perfection is outcome that you get to, but progress over perfection all day, any day.

Very appropriate for ahead of growth. person. Yes. Final question. You're not only one of the smartest people I've met on growth. You're also one of the funniest people on social media, especially on LinkedIn. If people aren't following you, they should. They will not only learn, they'll also be highly entertained. Is there a favorite meme that you created that you are very proud of, that you can describe that we might want to link to?

Yeah. So I also want to say a lot of people hate me for doing so much memes as well, because they think it's not serious. And like, and actually, I want to rebuttal that really quickly because I think humor is the best way to disarm people and to point out very painful situations that we're facing with every single day or conundrums without putting anybody on defense. Because we can all laugh at the absurdity of the lives that we live in every single day. And pictures worth a thousand words, and sometimes memes are just the best way to communicate the most those complex situations that we are facing within our corporate world. And they help us understand how common all of those situations are. We're not unique. You're not feeling alone by feeling down about what happened. Everybody's going through the same thing. So that's why I love memes, because they help connect people on both sides, even if you're making fun of one side, because they're like, yeah, that is true. And this is so funny. So I'm a big proponents of that just because I think it's actually a better way to both unite people and just talk about hard problems that otherwise would be not read, if you put it in words. But my favorite meme is actually one of the first ones that I've created. And I think it's from Family Guy, where they have an elephant and a penguin. standing. And then there's Moses, I think, or some biblical character saying, what the hell is this? Looking at the elephant and the penguin. And the result of it is a child that has a penguin body and elephant head. And if you think about elephant as product and penguin as marketing, what the hell is this? Is growth, which is a byproduct, a weird, weird byproduct. of product and marketing merged together that doesn't really fit with either, yet it's its own entity. I don't know. I just, I think that that one's the best to describe to people what growth is.

So appropriate. Also well described. It's hard to describe a meme and make it feel funny. So good job. Thank you for doing that. We'll link to this meme in our show notes. Elena, this was incredible. Thank you again. Thank you for being our first ever third return guest. Hopefully there will be many more episodes of Two final questions. Where can folks find you online if they want to reach out and learn more? And how can listeners be useful to you?

I find me on LinkedIn or my substack. I'm not competing with you, Lenny, but I share a lot of my thoughts and everything that I learned on my own substack is just elenaverna.com LinkedIn is for all of my memes. So go there if you want to laugh, but if you want to learn from what I'm learning, go to my substack. And how you can be useful Tell me what problems you're facing. Now, don't tell me, oh, growth is slowing down. What should I do? I can't help you with that. Too broad. But if you're having a situation, there's often a really good ping for me to go and write about it or to do more research about it. So I just love to hear what's on people's minds so I can both help them connect their dots as well as learn about it myself.

And what's the best way for them to do that? Is it like DM you on LinkedIn?

Any other- DM me on LinkedIn or just reply to my Substack newsletter email. It goes directly into my personal inbox, so I read every single one of them.

That's a really good tip. People don't know that when you get an email on Substack, if you reply, it just goes straight to the author.

Exactly.

Lena, thank you so much for being here.

Okay.

Thank you for having me, Lenny. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lenniespodcast.com See you in the next episode.