Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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?
00:12:41 · Elena Verna, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:12:41] S0: It depends. It depends on how you actually gonna collect the monies. If your money collection is gonna happen through sales team primarily, then you absolutely should be hiring sales way before growth. In fact, in the sales led companies, growth teams are not necessarily needed even that much. You might have a growth marketing team, which is really a demand gen team that is rebranded for growth marketing so they can charge you 20 to 30% more in their salaries. But at the end of the day, sales is doing your monetization. They are doing your activation. They are doing your retention and success efforts. So, for sales led companies, yeah, higher sales, absolutely. Unless you're starting to do self serve revenue, so you're trying to have product sell itself through potentially freemium acquisition, trial acquisition, or you actually having product led activation, monetization, that's when you would need a growth person. So, if you're starting with self serve monetization, growth hire should be, frankly, first before sales. Your sales are going to be more opportunistic in nature versus if your sales led company, Go ahead. Higher sales. Wait for growth until you're ready to overlay product led growth on top of your sales motion. [00:13:56] S1: Okay. That's an excellent clarification. So basically, what I'm hearing the advice is hire ahead of growth only when you have clear product market fit and you're a product led company and beyond a million ARR, ideally, something like that.
00:13:56 · Lenny Rachitsky, Elena Verna
[00:13:56] S1: Okay. That's an excellent clarification. So basically, what I'm hearing the advice is hire ahead of growth only when you have clear product market fit and you're a product led company and beyond a million ARR, ideally, something like that. [00:14:11] S0: Right. And I won't say you're product led company. You are relying on product led motion to resolve a lot of the growth levers within you because you don't have to be fully product led company. But so if product, let's say, acquires people, let's say, with the SEO or Centimeters, then its product is meant to activate them and then sales closes them, sales would be obviously important as well, but growth would have to be coming a little bit sooner as well. So if you have any product led components, where product is responsible for acquisition, activation, monetization, or retention, that's where growth comes in. [00:14:46] S1: Okay. We talked deeply about that specific topic in our first conversation. Yes. I just wanna go deeper [00:14:52] S0: I there and need to talk lot bring it back. This is like it keeps I need to repeat it. Need to repeat it three times, right, before it sticks to people. So hopefully this is the third time. [00:15:01] S1: Absolutely. I'm only saying that because I... People may be wanting more of what you're describing and I will point them to our first episode, which goes deep on that one topic. [00:15:09] S0: Amazing. [00:15:10] S1: Excellent. Anything else before we move on to number two?