David Arnoux: Co-Founder of Growth Tribe

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¡Hola!

All right everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Business Blast podcast. I'm your host Tyler Wagner. Today I have David Arnoux with us. He is the co-founder of Growth Tribe, a company that grew to $5 million in revenue in 2 years teaching people technical skills of the future using speed learning experiences. So welcome to the show, man.

Thanks, Tyler.

Of course, man. Pumped to have you on. We'll jump right in. The first one I have for you, David, is what is the best story from your life that has an underlying valuable message?

Sure. I was thinking about this one, actually. I think the most interesting one from a business point of view is actually sort of my boring holidays as a kid. So ever since I was like 16 or 17, instead of, you know, taking trips during the summer, I actually decided to take an internship at every single summer break. Just to get some job experience. And because I always felt like, you know, I wanted to check out how these companies work. And it's been the best way for me to understand what I hate, which jobs are absolutely terrible for me. And, you know, I've got buddies who studied law for like 4 or 5 years and realized they didn't want to be a lawyer after 4 or 5 years of studying. Like, that first week in the law firm, like, whoa, I don't want to hang out with these people all for the rest of my life. So, um, that's kind of, yeah, a cool little story. Like Test fast, fix later, not just for products or for growth, but also for your sort of career.

Yeah, man, I could not agree more. That's what has helped me out too, just trial and error, a bunch of tries. And then I was like, all right, I don't like this, I don't like this. Okay, podcasting, I like that. And then I just keep going. So yeah, man, that's great advice. The next one I have for you is what is the most valuable piece of information we should know that's within your expertise or industry?

Oh yeah, so we're sort of in the growth industry, growth and training industry. We train people on what's called sort of growth marketing or on artificial intelligence. I'd say the number one most valuable piece of information is the notion of just, you know, screw it, ship it. Ship something as fast as you can, whether it's a new product, a new campaign, a new onboarding for your product. Just try to ship it as fast as possible, don't make it perfect. So that you can get customer feedback as quickly as possible. And then rely on early signals. So if something's going to be amazing or it's going to work really well, you'll usually feel it right at the beginning, even if you don't ship something that's perfect. And the difference between something you're completely happy with and sort of happy with can sometimes be like 2 weeks, 3 weeks, 4 weeks, which accounts for like 5 or 10% of a work year. So we usually say as soon as we're like relatively happy with it— some people call this a minimum delightful product or a minimum delightful experiment, ship it, get it in front of eyeballs, in front of your customer, and get that early feedback as soon as possible.

And could tie in, but what's your best piece of overall business advice? So not necessarily industry-specific.

It's really, I think it's twofold. First of all, it's focus. Our scarcest resource as human beings and as businesses is time. So it's knowing what to focus on. In our case, it's usually we advise focusing on metrics, on specific KPIs or metrics that you want to improve. So really that notion of focus, and then you align that with speed. In our case, it's speed of experimentation. So I have a focus on one specific metric, the most important metric that matters. How fast can I run as many experiments as possible on that metric? There was this really cool quote from Jeff Bezos from Amazon that he put in his last shareholder— letter to shareholders. They attribute their success at Amazon to the number of experiments that they run per year, per month, per week, and per day. So it's really about that speed of putting stuff out there and experimenting.

And if you could give your younger self one piece of advice, what would that be?

Invest in Bitcoin and Amazon stock. I like it.

Two very good things. And in your opinion, what is the key to happiness?

So key to happiness. Happiness, there's actually a biological definition of happiness. It's called homeostasis. It's when your central nervous system is chill, your blood pressure is down, et cetera, et cetera. And so it's figuring out how to achieve homeostasis. I really like the— there's this author called Matthieu Ricard, and he says you shouldn't depend too much on external factors of happiness. We spend so much time optimizing the car we have, the job we have, who we're married with, studies that we do, the watch we have. Where actually we spend so little time on internal optimization. Internal optimization of internal factors go through having a good gut, so good microbiome, staying healthy and doing sports and the regular stuff and meditating. I think that's really the difference. He talks about these monks who were held captive by the Chinese Communist, the Chinese government for 8 years and who were still able to sustain some sort of a level of happiness through internal happiness. And then you have sort of the Jordan Peterson sort of point of view on life, which is basically we shouldn't focus on happiness so much. It's a millennial thing, and life is about how much character you have in the face of suffering. So that's also one way of looking at things.

Yeah, dude, that was a great answer. Thank you. The next one I have for you is what is the best book that you've read and what was the number one thing you learned from that?

Oh yeah, well, that's a tough one because I'm a really big reader, but it would be like, it's Peter Thiel, Zero to One, because it talks about the notion of building a monopoly. And this is one thing I've always done through building companies is always try to create a monopoly. So it's actually not going into somebody else's market, but creating a new category, something that nobody else has. So for example, your podcast is the the only podcast with sort of short interviews, straight to the point, with a very huge quantity. You're the only one, so you don't really have a competition. So it's don't go into a competitive market, create a new category, even though it, even if it's extremely nichey.

Got it.

And what is your favorite quote and why?

Favorite quote? I think this one's from Voltaire and it's an anti-quote quote. It's a witty saying proves nothing, which is basically saying that quotes are worthless. I love it. That is the best quote out, man. That's funny.

Dude, thank you so much for coming on. The last question I have for you before we let you go is where's the best place for people to find you online?

Yeah, LinkedIn. Go to LinkedIn, hit me up. I'm trying to hit 30,000 connections. So it's David, D-A-V-I-D, Arnoux, A-R-N-O-U-X, A-R-N-O-U-X. And check out our company Growth Tribe. It's growthtribe.io.

Perfect, man. Thanks again for jumping on.

Cool.

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