Suhail Doshi breaks startup growth into five measurable stages: visits, signups, activation, retention, and referral. He argues that founders should focus on making the product easy to understand, simple to start using, and valuable enough that people return.
Chapters
I tried to think pretty hard about what the heck did I care about when I started a company, what mattered to me, what was on my mind. And I think the first thing is just do people even understand what I made? And Mixpanel had a really hard time with that in its first 18 months. We had to change a lot of things. And most people do. The second thing is, okay, great, they understand what it is, but do they like find it relatively easy to use the product on day one? And that's kind of this never ending mission that you'll end up taking when you start your company and when you ship your product. And then the last thing is I tried to pare it down a little bit, but I thought the most important thing would be then next are people coming back and using my product. This is one of the most important things that early founders make a mistake with. From there, I thought that it would also be helpful for you to see it broken down in a formula. And so this is the formula. And I like to think about things from first principles. What are the things that would cause you to grow? And they're pretty simple, right? There's just like people that visit some page or the app, right? Basic, you experience this every day. And then there's like people that sign up. And then of those people, how many of those people did something valuable like watching a video or making a recipe or taking a scooter ride? And then of the people, like how many of those people end up coming back some period of time later? And then how many people will spread that product, tell a friend, share it, maybe even have a sales team, who knows, right? And these five things basically equal growth. And these are your levers. And the thing that I want to point out and I want to stress is that today I'm going to cover the basics, but I want to implore on you that the basics are really important. Even thousand person companies get the basics wrong. With this formula, you should be able to assess anything going wrong in the company. If you have a really confusing landing page, you should be able to figure that out. If your signup process is too difficult, you should be able to figure that out. If you have a product that people don't really value, you will figure that out with just that formula. It's just that simple. And you can get more complicated after that. You could say, okay, landing page views are down all of a sudden. Why? Ooh, let me look at that. Segmented by country. Maybe something happened, maybe I changed something in a different country. So you should be able to assess any reason why you're not growing. Just starting out with that. That's why I say starting simple will last a very long time. This is what it looks like, linking those two ideas together. You have this funnel of people going from visits to eventually retaining and spreading the product. And on each one of these things, you're trying to basically solve one of these three problems. Is it easy to understand? Is it easy to get started? Are people coming back because they find it valuable? And then it loops? And the funny thing about this is, even if you're Airbnb and you're thousands and thousands of people, this process of optimizing each one of these steps is never ending. No matter what scale you're at, you will always be changing something. And you probably have competition, so you'll have no choice. So awesome. And then once you are able to measure those five things and assess what's wrong, you have your levers, and you should be able to take action and fix any of those things. Put a team on it, maybe you're fixing it. It is really that simple.
