Sean Everett uses The Goonies piano scene to explain growth strategy: instead of testing one marketing channel at a time or blasting all of them, world-class teams run a handful of complementary experiments in parallel, orchestrated like an orchestra to create coordinated results.
Good morning. What does the classic 1980s movie Goonies have to do with finding growth? Well, I'm going to use that as a metaphor so it sticks in your brain, and we're going to extract a little knowledge today. So first things first, principle on growth. How do we do this? Well, the old principle is plant a lot of seeds, Water them equally, and then invest in the ones that grow. But how do you figure out which seeds to plant, where to plant them? Where do you look? What's a fertile field? That's what we're going to get into today with this Goonies metaphor. Okay. So here's the thing, right? You have a number of different channels, sales channels, marketing channels, could be partnerships, could be resellers, could be social media. And that's LinkedIn, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, yada yada, you name it till the end of time, right? Reddit. Um, you've got a sales team, inside sales, outside sales, cold calling, 1,000 calls, 1,000 emails. Um, you have contract negotiations. So out of all of these, what do you do, right? You got like PR, you've got blogging, you've got SEO, on-site, off-site, backlinks. That's a lot. So here's the thing, here's the concept, right? Imagine you push down on a lever and something pops out the other side. Now this lever push down I talked about is essentially one of those channels, right? So you could go really heavy into an investment into a lot of tweets, right? So that would be one lever you push down. That has a cost associated with it, just like energy to push a button, right? And that cost is someone's time. Maybe it's financial, maybe you run an ad. Okay, what pops out the other side? That's revenue, that's growth. That's a user who subscribes, a user who pays attention to it, an impression, an engagement, a purchase ideally, right? That's how we run a business. So that's one, right? So imagine that's Playing one note on a piano. I'll get to the Goonies part here in a second. You might be able to see where this is headed. Okay, so what I've found is a lot of people or a lot of companies, because they're so busy, they kind of take a haphazard approach to playing this piano. So they'll either, if they're just like super duper hypothesis testing focused, they'll just do one note at a time. Ding, ding. Ding, across maybe 1 or 2 channels. It's really slow. Often you'll find that maybe it doesn't work quite as well as it could. Other people will push down every key at the same time and it just sounds like noise, like, right? So in Goonies, when they're underground, they end up at this piano and it's a really old piano. And on the back of their treasure map, they found some notes. And they had to play a precise set of notes in series in order to open the drawbridge to get them to their next goal, right? Their next gate. That could be a funding milestone in the real world. You see where this is headed. And so they made some mistakes, right? They hit a couple wrong notes, the door didn't open, the bottom starts to fall away. That's like spending money without a return. Eventually you go out of business if you keep doing that. So they had a treasure map. Who provides treasure maps? Talent. Infinite talent, right? Okay. So here's the thing. Instead of pressing one lever at a time, press 2, 3, or 4 and make sure that those notes work well with each other to create music, not noise. When you do that, good things will happen. So that means your social posts, your SEO, your blogging, and even some of the things you're doing with PR all work in tandem with one another. When you do that, you can play some beautiful music. So when that happens, people will have sort of a positive reaction to it instead of just being super duper spammy. Then you can still run your hypothesis testing framework, right? Where You prioritize a list of tests and you measure those by amount of effort, amount of cost, amount of impact, and amount of speed that you can test these against. But the real world-class talent that does this is able to run multiple tests simultaneously and set up these things in an elegant way, almost like a beautiful note that's being played. The really best in the world, the quote Michael Jordans, Are able to play an orchestra, right? And they build a beautiful symphony. So that is what Goonies has to do with growth. And so the reason is because maybe that little idea of the Goonies huddled around this old key— this old piano trying to put a drawbridge down before the floor collapses will help you remember How to approach growth because it's not necessarily about what you do. It's the process that you use to get there. So trust the process, folks, and have a great week. All right, that's it for me. Bye.
