Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:05:22 · Elena Verna, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:05:22] S0: 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. [00:05:36] S1: That needs to be my KPI in this podcast, insights per minute. [00:05:40] S0: I think you have it. I think I think your your insights per minute is pretty high. [00:05:44] S1: That is... I do shoot for that. Although I have learned you also need it to feel good and feel the story. You know, there's like an interesting combo of stuff. You can't just be insight, insight, insight. You know? People like [00:05:54] S0: Well, yeah. It's all about how you present them too. Storytelling is a big portion of it actually to stick. [00:05:59] S1: Yeah. All right. Already insight. That's an insight right there. There's two areas that I wanna 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 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 gonna start with growth tactics that never work. Maybe just frame what we're gonna talk about, talk about what this list and collection of tactics that we're gonna talk about is.
00:06:35 · Elena Verna
[00:06:35] S0: Yeah. So growth is a fairly new field compared to marketing or product management or engineering. So there's a lot of people that are now accumulated that have ten 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, ten years of experience of doing growth, you have a lot of renowned interest in growth hacks. Like, what is the like sure thing 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's very few pieces of information on this for people to learn from.
00:08:31 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:08:31] S1: Amazing. All right. What's number one?
00:08:33 · Elena Verna
[00:08:33] S0: 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 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's a little bit of a reference to that. And one of the biggest blatant issues that I see is hiring too soon for growth. 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, 5,000,000, 10,000,000 in ARR. Some of the companies don't even create growth teams until they're one hundred, two hundred million in ARR. Because to figure out your product market fit and how to distribute it, 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 a sudden you have viral campaigns and a bunch of signups coming through and everybody's 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.
00:10:35 · Elena Verna, Lenny Rachitsky
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 Chanel 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 cheat 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. [00:11:31] S1: 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 almost always that is not gonna be the solution to your problem until you have strong retention already, have a really high score in the Sean L 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. Your point, a lot of companies wait a lot longer.
00:11:31 · Lenny Rachitsky, Elena Verna
[00:11:31] S1: 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 almost always that is not gonna be the solution to your problem until you have strong retention already, have a really high score in the Sean L 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. Your point, a lot of companies wait a lot longer. [00:12:05] S0: 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 gonna be growing and what is the rest of the company is doing. So honestly, the longer you wait, the better. [00:12:23] S1: As you talk about this, sales is a part of what you described here, like hiring your first salesperson. And so I guess how do you think about, like, your first head of growth versus salesperson? Is there anything advice there is... Like, for b to b SaaS, you probably don't hire head of growth for even longer. Right? You hire sales first or what's your advice?