Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:54:11 · Lenny Rachitsky, Elena Verna
[00:54:11] S1: The way I think about this is like the S curves of every growth model and growth lever, right? Eventually it'll help and then slow down and so you wanna find the next S curve on things that'll grow your business. [00:54:24] S0: Yes, absolutely. Way that I see it often is that especially when growth teams, they hit a really big result out of some initiative, they just like keep trying to focus on that over and over again. And sometimes that focus is warranted. Like I said, our sharing loop at Dropbox has its own growth team against it. Great. But at the same time, that's not warranted for all of the... Or you need to realize that there's no more juice to squeeze out of this thing, and then you need to go and you need to move on. Which actually brings me to my, like a little bit of a next thing too, is you'd need to do it every eighteen months because a lot of them are going to fail. And every five years or so, you for sure need a new channel, new growth loops, new tactics, new engines, so to speak, to power your growth engine, whether it's overlaying sales on top of self serve, whether you're doing a lot of, let's say, virality right now in terms of acquisition and you're going into marketing a lot heavier. But every five years, something big has to start taking a big portion of your volume. And for that, every eighteen years, you need to introduce something Sorry. Yeah. For every eighteen months, you need to introduce something new in order for it to, continue evolving.
00:54:24 · Elena Verna, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:54:24] S0: Yes, absolutely. Way that I see it often is that especially when growth teams, they hit a really big result out of some initiative, they just like keep trying to focus on that over and over again. And sometimes that focus is warranted. Like I said, our sharing loop at Dropbox has its own growth team against it. Great. But at the same time, that's not warranted for all of the... Or you need to realize that there's no more juice to squeeze out of this thing, and then you need to go and you need to move on. Which actually brings me to my, like a little bit of a next thing too, is you'd need to do it every eighteen months because a lot of them are going to fail. And every five years or so, you for sure need a new channel, new growth loops, new tactics, new engines, so to speak, to power your growth engine, whether it's overlaying sales on top of self serve, whether you're doing a lot of, let's say, virality right now in terms of acquisition and you're going into marketing a lot heavier. But every five years, something big has to start taking a big portion of your volume. And for that, every eighteen years, you need to introduce something Sorry. Yeah. For every eighteen months, you need to introduce something new in order for it to, continue evolving. [00:55:49] S1: And it was that number eight of the list we're going through or that's like a bonus piece of advice? [00:55:54] S0: No. That's just a bonus piece
00:55:54 · Elena Verna, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:55:54] S0: No. That's just a bonus piece [00:55:55] S1: of advice. Okay. Cool. Okay, got it. And so the advice here essentially is you'll find something that is helping you grow, assume that will slow down at some point, start thinking about other levers and growth models to layer on top of that. Something I've seen, let me know if you agree, is usually there's gonna be like one lever that is most of your growth for a long, long time. And so all other things are not gonna be as big, but they are still important.
00:56:19 · Elena Verna
[00:56:19] S0: Yeah. So the way I think about it is I try to focus 2020% to 25% of growth teams' time annually, not every given sprint or not every given quarter, but annually, to introduce a new growth loop, or to introduce a new channel, or to introduce something new that can potentially bring us additional bump to our growth engine. I know that a lot of it is going to fail. None of it is gold on any growth metrics because you cannot goal it immediately, let's say, on monetization or immediately on acquisition. You're just gonna cut it at its knees immediately if you're not gonna let it evolve into something that can be monetized, that can be responsible for So like example on Miroverse, which is a user generated content library of all of the Miro boards that people create, it took us probably eighteen months until we started putting metrics, expectations on it. Before that, it was a thing that we were testing. And it was being used by a lot of people, but we're like, we don't even know exactly quite how this is gonna fit all together. And then it started taking off as both engagement engine as well as acquisition engine. But it's important to constantly give your team room to try those new ideas. Otherwise, you're going to find yourself that your growth loops and your growth engine is slowing down and you don't have time to find that second horizon. And that is the worst situation to be in. That's where growth starts to slow down and to recover out of that is impossible because you need revenue. You need revenue, you need revenue, you need revenue. And these growth loops on average take six months, a year, a year and a half to start producing even visible revenue. So that's why you need to start layering it very soon into your initiatives.
00:58:12 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:58:12] S1: To make this even more concrete for people that are starting to like, oh, shit, I gotta do do this. Can you just give us a list that doesn't have to be exhaustive of potential growth loops, levers, methods, engines for folks to consider? You've mentioned a few, but just give a list of people like, okay. Got it. Maybe we'll try one of these.
00:58:29 · Elena Verna
[00:58:29] S0: I'm really big on creating a growth loop out of user generated content. I think with everything that is happening with AI and SEO at the moment, your biggest claim to fame on content strategy will be harnessing user generated content, whether it's user generated templates, whether it's user generated case studies, review, whatever it is. You need to start investing into it now, creating a library out of it, using it for activation purposes, using it then for acquisition purposes, using community to spark the conversations around it. That can be a really wonderful strategy that everybody should consider of whether there's juice in it within your product. Other ones can be, Hey, we're a very, let's say, individualistic product, but can we actually create a referral mechanism for it? For B2C, that's actually very straightforward. A lot of B2C products thrive on referrals. For B2B, it can be more of invitation of other team members into the product to complete other jobs to be done. Hey, I've done this. I need my manager to see it. Can I create a report to share with my manager? And all of sudden, it starts to spread within the company. So, creating additional product functionality that then creates these loops potentially for you. So, it can be slew of things. Obviously, I'd highly recommend just understanding all of the menus of these earned tactics. I should do a blog post on that, actually. And then just see what works for you or not, because at least ideation step of it has to happen. If you especially are relying on search engines for your acquisition, start thinking about some of the earned channels as soon as possible.