Alex Schultz argues that startups should not create separate growth teams; instead the whole company should act as the growth team and the CEO should lead growth and set a single North Star metric. He gives examples: Facebook used monthly active users, WhatsApp published message sends, Airbnb measures nights booked, and eBay leaders focused on gross merchandise volume. Schultz advises choosing one metric aligned with mission/values, recognizing many metrics are correlated, and ensuring the company sticks with that North Star long-term so everyone’s work is aligned toward growth.
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Startups should not have growth teams. The whole company should be the growth team. The CEO should be the head of growth. You need someone to set a North Star for you about where the company wants to go, and that person needs to be the person leading the company. In my opinion, from what I've seen, Mark put out monthly active users as the number he made the whole world hold Facebook to as the number that we cared about. If you look at what Yan has done with WhatsApp, I think it's another great example. He, he always published send numbers. If you're a messaging application, sends is probably the single most important number. If people use you once a day, you're not really their primary messaging mechanism. So Yan published the sends number inside Airbnb. They talk about nights booked. They always benchmark themselves against how many nights booked they have compared to the largest hotel chains in the world. When you are operating for growth, it is critical that you have that North Star and you define it as a leader. The reason this matters is the second you have more than one person working on anything, you cannot control what everyone else is doing. And the thing is, it's not clear to everybody what the most important thing is for a company. It would be very easy inside ebay for people to say, you know what, we should focus on revenue, or you know what, we should focus on the number of people buying from us, or you know what, we should focus on how many people list items on ebay. And Pierre and Meg and John, those guys, as various leaders always said, no, it's the amount of gross merchandise volume that goes through our site. It's the percentage of e commerce that goes through our site. That is what really matters for this company. Which means when people are having a conversation, you're not in a room, or when they're sitting in front of their computer screen and thinking about how they build this particular product or this particular feature in their head. It's going to be clear to them that it's not about revenue, it's about gross merchandise volume or it's not about getting more registrations. Registrations don't matter unless they become long term active users operating for growth. What you really need to think about is what is the North Star of your company? What is the one metric where if everyone in the company is thinking about it and driving their product towards that metric and their actions towards moving that metric up, you know in the long run your company will be successful. And by the way, they're probably all correlated to each other, so it's fine to pick almost any metric. Whichever one you feel the best about that aligns with like your mission and your values probably go for that one. But realistically, daily active users fairly correlated to monthly active users. We could have gone with either one amount of content shared. Also very correlated to how many users there are, because guess what? You add a user, they share content. So lots of things end up being correlated. Pick the one that fits with you and that you know you're going to be able to stick with for a long time. But have a North Star.
