10 growth tactics that never work | Elena Verna (Amplitude, Miro, Dropbox, SurveyMonkey)

growth is a fairly new field you have a lot of renowned interest in growth hacks like what is the like sure things to get growth in the age of social media everybody and anybody tries to share their tips and tricks often times I things that are completely out of context or they are very specific to one example and actually do not apply as a pattern so we're going to start with grow tactics that never work if you see these items on your road map you should probably not do them what's number one we live in

Tech there's always lots of startups um startups are obviously looking to grow there is a huge misconception in the field that in order to get growth going you need a growth team to figure out your product Market fit and how to distribute it it's not something that you can Outsource to somebody powerful words I'm loving this list already so number two this one's my favorite and it might be a little spicy never ever once have I seen a Rebrand or redesign especially of you your marketing site produce good performance results New CMO comes in designing

their website or designing the brand as if it was reflection of their personal taste and often time it's promised with our acquisition is going to go up and it never materializes into anything meaningful a lot of contr in takes here I love this number three if every single one of your initiatives that you're doing on growth is an experiment that's a problem it's almost like a disease like a paralyzing disease today my guest is Elena BNA my first ever third time repeat guest Elena is the smartest person that I know on bdb growth she's also

hilarious she's LED growth at companies like Meo amplitude Dropbox and Survey Monkey she's advised dozens of companies on growth including superhuman mongodb netlify similar web sanity maze so many more in our conversation Elena shares 10 growth strategies and tactics that never work yet that she keeps seeing people and companies invest lots of resources into she also covers her three favorite growth Frameworks that help you wrap your head around how to think about growth and she also does a short dive into the non-traditional career paths that we both went down if you spend any time working

on product growth or lead people or work with people working on growth this episode is for you if you enjoy this podcast don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube it's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously with that I bring you Elena Verna this episode is brought to you by cinch the customer Communications Cloud here's the thing about Digital customer Communications whether you're sending marketing campaigns Verification codes or account alerts you need them to reach users reliably that's where cinch comes in

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helps you continuously monitor compliance alongside reporting and tracking risk plus you can save hours by completing security questionnaires with Vana AI join thousands of global companies that use Vana to automate evidence collection UniFi risk management and streamline Security reviews get $1,000 off vanta when you go to v.com Lenny that's V n.com Lenny Elena thank you so much for being here welcome back to the podcast our first ever third time repeat guest what an honor dancing if you're not watching on video well thank you for being here I was actually just looking at our first episode

which we recorded almost two over two years ago September of 2022 and someone just today left a comment uh people are still finding and watching it and this comment kind of encapsulates why I love having you on this podcast uh this person said wow every word from Elena encapsulates years of knowledge this is one to digest slowly go back to and put on repeat thanks for sharing your experience with the world well thank you for having me and my Northstar metric is insights per minute that's what I try to use whenever have any live meetings

uh with people so it squarely fits within what I'm optimizing for so that's great that needs to be my K on this podcast insights per minute I think you have it I think I think your your insights per minute is pretty high that is I do shoot for that although I have learned you also need it to feel good and feel their story you know there's like an interesting combo of stuff you can't just be Insight Insight Insight you know people well yeah it's all about how you present them too storytelling is a big portion

of it actually to stick yeah all right already inside that's an inside right there uh there's two areas that I want to 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 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 going to start with growth tactics it never works maybe just frame what we're going to talk about talk about what this list uh and collection of tactics that we're going to talk about is yeah so uh 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 10 years or so experienced 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 10 years of

experience of doing growth you have a lot of um uh renowned interest in growth hacks like what is the like sure things to get growth what is the sure thing to get that metric up how can I uh contribute to success of 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 uh this and that uh people are grasping for the often times uh 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 um 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 uh 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 ahead 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 um here comes the

AE and off they go uh and the recycle and cycle starts all over in order to populate those positions so I think that there's just a lot of uh 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 um pieces of information on this for people to learn from

amazing all right what's number one uh number one I have to start with hiring there's lots of positions open all the time uh there's uh so many from head of growth to growth PM uh there's a lot of 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 actually happening in hiring that I just want to start off on the

list it's not a road map item but oh my gosh there's just like so much fault that is happening here and um I did write on it about it on your on your blog of hiring for uh growth so there's a little bit of a reference to that and one of the biggest blatant issues that I see is uh hiring too soon for growth there's we live in Tech there's always lots of startups um 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 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 five million 10 million in AR some of the companies don't even create growth teams until they're 1002 200 million in AR because to figure out your product Market fit and how to distribute it uh it's not something that you can Outsource to somebody it's not somebody that with a shiny resume can come over and

all sudden wave a magic wand and all a sudden you have viral campaigns and bunch of signups coming through and everybody is paying and everybody's retaining that just doesn't happen so I see that mistake happening a lot I really believe that the founder Le 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 uh learn from and optimize and innovate on and that first wave of growth has to be a Founder

Le and there's two specific reasons uh that I inchor 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 chanela 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 g- 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 hypothesis on and you can start applying experimentation don't even think about growth team 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 going to be the solution to your problem until you have strong retention already have a really high score on the Shan L score if you don't have a ton of data yet and party 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 to your point a lot of companies wait a lot longer yes yes um 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 going to be growing and what is the rest of the companies doing so honestly the longer you wait the better as you talk about this sales is a part of what you describ here like for 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 B2B SAS you probably don't hire head of growth

for even longer right you hire sales first or what's your advice it depends it depends on how you're actually going to collect the monies if your money collection is going to happen through sales team primarily then you absolutely should be hiring sales way before growth in fact in the sales L companies growth teams are not necessarily needed even that much you might 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 uh 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 like companies yeah higher sales absolutely uh unless you're starting to do selfs serve Revenue so you're trying to have product sell itself uh through potentially premium acquisition trial acquisition position um or you actually having product Le activation monetization that's when you would need a growth person so if you're starting with self- serve monetization growth higher should be probably first before sales uh your sales um are going to be more opportunistic in nature versus

if your sales like company uh go ahead hire sales uh wait for growth until you're ready to Overlay product Le growth on top of your sales motion okay that's an excellent clarification so basic what I'm hearing the advice is higher ahead of growth only when you have clear product Market fit and your product Le company and Beyond a million RR ideally something like that right and I won't say you product Le company you are relying on product Le motion to resolve a lot of the growth levers uh within you because you don't have to be

fully product Le company but uh so if product let's say acquires people uh let's say with the SEO or semm and then its product is to activate them and then sales closes them sales uh would be obviously important as well but growth would have to be com in a little bit sooner as well so if you have any product lit components where product is responsible for acquisition activation monetization or retention that's where growth comes in okay that that we talked deeply about that specific Topic in our first conversation just want to go deep there I

to bring it back this is like it keeps happening I I need to repeat it well you need you need to repeat it three times right before it sticks to people so hopefully this is the third time 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 amazing excellent uh anything else before we move on to number two no let's move on to number two let's do it okay so number two uh this is

on the other side on the matur company where I see a trend over and over uh and it's becoming even more prominent right now of uh when company's growth slow down slows down which inevitably happens for a lot of businesses uh it happens for a variety of reasons we're not going to go into the reasons as to why growth can uh can be slowing down and then they hire a shiny growth head to fix the problem to basically saying hey our business is slowing down we're on the decline we're going to bring this person we're

going to put this team together and our growth is going to accelerate that just does not happen if you have the overall business slowing down your head of growth is destined to fail because the reason business is slowing down is much deeper than not having a growth team growth team can optimize growth can maybe lifted by 10 15% uh maybe that's enough for you even that like is on the upper end of what growth team would be able to do uh if there is a Slowdown trajectory but what's important is that if you have core

product and core marketing issues growth team will not be able to fix them for you you're going to have to address the big elephant in the room as to why business is slowing down in the first place as opposed to just plopping a growth team on the issue and expecting them to do Miracles while the rest of the business continues chugging on the same trajectory that caused the slowdown in the first place wow that is a I've never heard this point before and it's such an important one and it's very related to your first point

growth isn't going to build a product people want they will help you grow it exact if your business is slowing your product Market fit basically might be disappearing and growth isn't solving that problem disappearing it may be degreg it may be uh being uh eaten by a competitor uh because uh there's somebody that is stomping on your territory the point is growth can amplify great product Market fit and growth can help you grow faster once you're already growing but if you're slowing down and you have issues with either your go to market strategy or your

core product strategy uh with your core product Market fit growth is going to be absolutely helpless uh to do anything and it's honestly it's a huge waste of money because at those size of the companies uh you would need fairly large growth teams in order to tackle every single product flow and interface that would uh that is already out there and invented so it's a huge expense Roi on it may be at least one to one like what you put into it you might get that much out of it but it's not going to be

enough to create a J curve of the re acceleration by just relying on growth team so I think it's just like this is where the name growth team is like plays against it because like oh we're looking for growth do you have a growth team no that's actually actually I don't have a better idea by the way how to name it but uh this is where I think it's um misunderstood that there is the Silver Bullet of a perfect head of growth perfect growth team that can reverse the trajectory of the business so then for

folks that are thinking about oh wow maybe I shouldn't be hire header growth when should you hire header growth when you're kind of an established company if you're declining in in your Revenue growth or whatever other metric that you're looking at your weekly active users or whatnot see at least that you're able to Plateau it so you can stop the decline so there is already a visible trajectory that your core product and your core marketing teams are able to at least reverse the degreg of the metrics ideally you would even start to see some immediate

um signs of life that there is uh potential in the business in the pockets and then you can put growth uh into it to really blow it up to uh to the full extent uh but if you're in a decline just just just just just don't do it because there's going to be very disappointing results in the year or so awesome okay great one let's move on number three okay number three uh so this one's my favorite and it might be a little spicy because um if there's any marketers listening out here but doing Rebrand

and more specifically homepage redesign to drive growth oh this one hurts me so much and I've lived through so many of these and never ever once have I seen a Rebrand or redesign especially of Y marketing site produce good performance results now there's many reasons as to why you might want to do a Rebrand why you might want to redesign your marketing site because you're trying to enter a new market new category your product has evolved then you need to do a full updates but those are almost like it's it's a lagging indicator that something

needs to change and you're changing it and then you know that you're going to have to optimize the hell out of it in order to actually bring it even to the previous performance results so it's like a stepping stone back but there is a much bigger room for uh upside that you can get to but you going to have to work to get to that upside but yet so many companies um this is a story that happens all the time I hire a new CMO new CMO comes in they like okay what's inside my house

here my house is not designed to my liking let me repaint these walls I want this shade of blue let me put the couches over here and they start uh almost designing their website or designing the brand as if it was reflection of their personal taste and often times it's promised with our acquisition is going to go up our category penetration is going to go up our um our education or like awareness is going to go up and uh it never it never materializes into anything meaningful because again if you're doing it as a step

towards unlocking new Global Maxima sure I love that do it go after it know that you have a ton of work ahead of you in order to actually unlock that Global Maxima but to promise a homepage redesign or marketing site redesign in order to drive more acquisition is a failed promise that is going to be led by lots of agency money spending uh often a million dollars plus lots of arguing about which shade of blue your uh brand color is going to be and uh 8 to 10 months at the minimum of development and a

very lackluster results afterwards man I'm loving this list already this is great uh to your point it may still be worth doing if you're coming into it eyes wide open this isn't going to drive growth but we're setting ourselves up for a future brand that's world class and we know our current brand stinks and our homepage needs to be refresh we're just if you're aware it's not going to drive growth it might be okay I mean every single time I've seen a marketing site at least Rebrand it's been a step back in performance that then

is being treated as a fire drill to fix don't don't just don't do it if if you expect like immediate results out of it or at least educate the team on how long it's going to take to get to the point uh where you think that there's going to be upside from your away from your original brand so I've experienced this not just with marketing sites but like most redesigns redesign of the product prodesign how much how much product and Engineering work go into like just changing a logo in your in your product or changing

colors it's insane with no results ever there's no results and to your point it's like okay well we've spent six months redoing onboarding everything we've built Builds on this new design and experience so we can't not launch it because it's every team is working on this new world so we're just GNA launch it and then we're gonna claw back we're going to figure out how to get it back right that's how it go uh it's it's it's a it's a new starting point and that start point is going to be much lower than your current

optimized experience that you have whether it's well optimize or not optimize it doesn't matter it's gone through some level of optimization versus Rebrand is always a shot in the dark it might be prettier sure uh but that doesn't mean it's going to perform well so uh obviously Never Say Never sometimes it might work and if it worked for you I am so glad but that's an outlier and don't treat it as a pattern yeah and I was just going to say say I think everyone listening to this that is working on something like this is

probably thinking no I think we have a good shot at this it's we've really thought deeply about this and it might actually be really positive in your experience like it sounds like you've seen it work like in like occasionally or is it just never the best I've ever seen is that it produced net neutral results and It produced as better ability to optimize towards something bigger that's the best case scenario so if you're working on it my biggest advice is not to say you stop uh just understand that the goal here is not to drive

at launch in the 7-Day readout after launch some increased uh performance the goal here should be we will launch we will probably see a hit model out in forast for a hit and then give yourself two to three months at the minimum ideally more like six months to really optimize it back to a good standing where it can potentially outperform but you need to bake in that 3 to six months of work after the launch which is what a lot of companies and teams forget to do because they just move on because like big initiative

big pop and off we go to our next project I love that we're only at number three this is amazing let's do number four okay uh number four uh is uh obsessing over your competition okay so there's a a little bit of um um gotcha here I tear down companies all the time I have thousands of Gmail accounts that I sign up for any and every product I go through their entire experience I look at their monetization strategies I look at their activation uh I do it across direct competition uh of the company that I'm

working with as well I know I want to know what I'm playing against so uh knowing what your competition is doing is extremely important being inspired by some uh aspects of what your competition is um doing in their experience is a wonderful place to originate an ideation or potentially try to implement um into your product as well but blatantly saying hey we're going to copy all of these best tactics or all of these flows because hey they're doing better than us let's just rip them and uh do exactly the same why is why is an

iron boarding looks the same as this on boarding this company is so successful that's where things really go wrong because every single experience is very unique to their customer to their Channel you don't even know if you're getting their actual experience or you use some tester cell or you're getting some personalized thing based on what you where you signed up from of who you said that you are so you don't even know what actually the like overall thing uh looks like most of the time and uh putting that into your product just leads to very

subpar results and uh there's a lot of Drive especially like to have it as a shortcut okay we don't want to go through the so ideation or user research we don't want to do user inter interviews why do we don't want to do ab testing it works for them it must work for us let's just like go and do it and um it fails 95% of the time now there are certain pieces that I would rightly recommend I already said inspiration like I use it for inspiration all the time I'm like okay what's cool what

is everybody doing uh so because I want to just stay in the know on uh what other people are implementing and if hopefully if it's in the control experience it works uh and it worked better I use web archives a ton for logged out Pages too I'm like okay how did it look last year why does their homepage look this way uh this way or the pricing page and I analyze that and I try to extrapolate some uh results I also think that there's a lot of patterns you start to notice as you start tearing

down all of these companies you're like oh these elements are always the same that means all of these companies are arriving to these things uh and they seem to be winning elements and you can take those elements and put them into your product but you can never skip the ideation the design the user research the customer interview the experimentation step and you should always balance it with actually innovating yourself in your product because copying competition is like the fastest way to mediocracy because you'll never be a leader if you copied somebody else leader is by

default is somebody that is able to separate themselves from the pack and something else and if you are trying to just be I don't know who ever trying to be like the mediocre middle of the pack but uh maybe it's a good starting point but never never never the end goal the only other thing that I'll say before I I'll stop talking is benchmarks benchmarks are also very dangerous here to use because benchmarks are usually done on all of the competition and all of the softwares out there and the way people Define numbers is so

different from company to company like even if you look at like something as simple as signups okay how many signups uh should you be on average getting or like your conversion from prospecting visitor to a signup or from a signup to activated user it so depends on how do you define prospect visitor some companies Define it as old traffic some Define it as new traffic some of them Define it on the new I uh IP address new persistent ID how Google analytics defines it how amplitude defines it then you so like all of these definitions

are so different so taking also any Benchmark that is derived from competition and saying this is where we should be is also so dangerous because it might not even be applicable depending on how you defined the metric and one of the things that all of those benchmarks uh benchmarking data fails is like to actually look at specific definitions and that's not to say that benchmarks are not extremely valuable data point in your decision making because it's an input that you should leverage to say what it could be possible but to just BL blindly take it

and set it is uh just a sure way to fail any of your initiatives and efforts you're telling me that there's no shortcuts uh I wish there were I mean I've been doing this for over 15 years if there were any shortcuts i' be all over them there are patterns and there are Frameworks but there's no shortcuts so people hearing this they're like okay don't copy the competition use it for inspiration it's a little hard to know exactly the line between those two is there an example that you can think of where you took really

interesting inspiration from someone and it worked for a company you're working with or you copied someone and it just like oh that failed that was a bad idea I use competition to understand the general framework of how people collect some information or resolve certain steps so for example uh sharing model so many products like hey can you share this with somebody well you can go and spend so much time of like figuring out how it should look or you can go to slack you can go to figma you can go to miror you can go

to notion like Okay Google like how are they doing sharing model you can look at all of that and say okay here's all of the here's all of the common elements that all of them have here's the pieces that I think will apply to my product here's things that do not and here's what I can derive from it I use it as an input into ideation but I never use it as a destination for the result uh if that if if that makes sense because it's very helpful to not start from scratch the empty empty

start problem problem is real and competition is a wonderful way to not have that and to have an input into it but uh never to just say oh we we can skip the design cycle off we go or just like slap our collar on it if it works for them it's going to work for us so I have extensive mirror boards with everybody's onboarding flows with everybody's pricing Pages their sharing model their invite colleagues models that I reference all the time but there have never been the the like exact thing that I would use for

any company as opposed to say hey I think this is a great starting point for you here are the things that I think will work very well for your company and for your pro uh for your product and take these elements the rest you need to go and do themselves so at least that way there's a starting point and this is why I also started doing a lot more of like my own owness prototypes like skeletons of here's the elements that you should do in these flows like I have one for pricing page I have

one for homepage but you need to put in your own ump into it in order for it to actually work what made me realize this back in the day was thinking edbb especially thinking about people looking at our flow and being like this is they've got it all figured out we're just going to copy what they've done because they're so thoughtful and have tested everything and knowing how that has not happened and how so much of this was guesswork and we hate so much of it just thinking about people trying to copy this thinking we

know what we're doing it's like what are you guys even thinking oh my God I actually had that happen to me um a Dropbox not so long ago somebody reached out and they're like oh I'm look like it was like some page and activation flow and they're like oh I love this page this is so cool I love what you've done here and like I'm going to go take it to my company I'm like I I I we haven't touched it in 10 years like this this page is like only visible for like small cohort

of people like please don't do it like please don't copy it like it performs like I know it's out there but it's not meant to be out there nobody like thoughtfully put it out there so like that's definitely a huge uh a huge uh failure point that you can run into right if it's like a fancy company you assume they're just so smart and diligent about every little pixel and decision who if people only knew of how much craziness is happening in those big companies and how much chaos there is oh man that's a whole

podcast episode whole other podcast yes okay number five okay I have this one it's a little bit meta but I see it um happening all the time we love to think that our problems are unique like I'm working in this company and like we have this growth problem and we need to go and figure out the solution from the grounds up maybe this is like a little bit uh related to the competition point but I'm very sorry to break it to all of you but your problem is not unique I am 99% sure of that

your problem has been felt by somebody somewhere in probably many many places um and you're trying to re-engineer solution is time lost to Market and has huge opportunity cost so I my biggest thing that I try to get people is like don't create don't think that you have unique problems you don't I know we love to like it would be fun to have something unique to learn but with so many startups with so many people in our industry uh in your industry whichever industry that is your problem has been solved by somebody or at least

that there's a lot of failures on the problem that you should be learning from and number one thing that whenever you have an initiative or whenever you have a metric that you need to go and move do not start from scratch ever do not start from scratch say the the worst thing that you can do because you're going to waste so many cycles on trying to do something that probably has already been solved so which means like how how do how do you approach this um as a result well you can look at competition and

how they're solving the problem that's one input for sure uh you should go find people that have solved this problem because there are people there and people love to talk about what they do so take advantage of that human psychology and go find those people and just ask them how did you do it what did you do what happened uh obviously not all the time everybody's going to respond but we have LinkedIn we have X go out there um find the people that you think or ask around in your network of who you think might

have similar Solutions and just go talk to people it would be incredible shortcut like if you're talking about an actual Haw that is a hack uh to get to an optimal solution and then the last thing uh that would also say is that solving any one problem uniquely is extremely inefficient we are evolving so fast in our Market you need to be able to patternization or I need to figure out the framework on how to solve not only this problem but other problems the faster you'll be able to get at least to like 60% of

the solution there and then you can do very authentic implementation of whatever you want to do but to go from 0 to 60 manually as a oneoff we do not have time in the industry right now to do it unless you want to be left behind bam powerful words is there is there an example that comes to mind if you doing this either the wrong way just like thinking this was unique and realizing I should have talked to people or where you actually realized something was not unique I'll give you actually an example uh that

I had when I was at Meo uh at Meo we were first uh trying to stand up community and um I was tasked to do it and I've never done it before uh so I'm like I was banging my head around at the like against the wall and I'm like okay how do I do it like like what's software do we use where do we acquire users like what kind of content is going to go in there so I like approaching it almost like a finding like product Market fit and I'm like I I have

I I will fail so much doing it and I honestly only have a year to get to some sort of traction before this is going to get shut down because company's impatient company is moving fast so if this is going to be a failure point it's either going to be taken away from me which is fair or we're just going to close the door on it which would be a huge failure both on my point and for company as a whole so I went and I started talking to a bunch of people that have done

communities and I remember talking to carolo uh from atlassian uh who has stood up um uh Community I actually hir tour as an adviser afterwards and then and she's like well are you talking about a user Comm Community or an agency Community or a partner community and like my mind was blown I'm like I like I wasn't even considering all of these angles because I was just literally thinking about users only and she's like well you shouldn't necessarily start with it user Community if you want some results out of it go to agency or partner

communities first she would outline it to me in like in in the structural way for me to like Gras my head around it and and and then Implement something that had much better results at the end that I wouldn't even gotten to probably until six eight months later if I didn't talk to her so I I think it's it it has to come with a place of knowing that you don't know everything and humility to say hey I need help and I might have a already fancy title at that point I was a interim CMO

at mro and I'm like I don't know how to do this and it actually earns you a lot more credit than you think and a lot of people are afraid to admit that they don't know how to solve a problem and that's why they start from scratch but I need to really put your ego aside and get some help uh faster uh than trying to hit every single failure point along the way yeah and uh the thing that'll really hurt your ego is failing and so the more you could do to avoid failing and being

successful with this initiative by yeah talking to people doing research it it should be fair failure is going to be in avoidable if you talk about growth growth is about failure uh my big Moto uh like life Moto in growth is that you have to fail to learn you can't just constantly succeed success is an output of a lot of failures but the question is how much time do you have to fail and a lot of times we don't realize how many failure Cycles we're going to have to go through before we get a success

and the company or even Market has no time for that and uh so still expect to fail for sure but the timeline for failures is going to be shorten quite a bit okay so we've gone halfway through your list there's 10 items on this list right yes yes there's it next one is a good one I'm excited to chat with Christina Gilbert the founder of one schema wi of our longtime podcast sponsors hi Christina yes thank you for having me on Lenny what is the latest with one schema I know you now work with some

of my favorite companies like ramp vant scale and Watershed I heard that you just launched a new product to help product teams import csvs from especially tricky systems like erps yes so we just launched one scheme of file feeds which allows you to build an integration with any system in 15 minutes as long as you can export a CSP to an SFTP folder we see our customers all the time getting stuck with hacks and workarounds and the product teams that we work with don't have to turn down prospects because their systems are too hard to

integrate with we allow our customers to offer thousands of Integrations without involving their engineering team at all I can tell you that if my team had to build Integrations like this how nice would it be to be able to take this off my road map and instead use something like one schema and not just to build but also to maintain it forever absolutely Lenny we've heard so many horror stories of multi-day outages from even just a handful of bad records we are laser focused on integration reliability to help teams end all of those distractions that

come up with Integrations we have a built-in validation layer that stops any bad data from entering your system and one schema will notify your team immediately of any data that looks incorrect I know that importing incorrect data can cause all kinds of pain for your customers and quickly lose their trust Christina thank you for joining us and if you don't learn more head on over to on schema. that's ones schema. let me uh summarize the first five real quick and then we'll keep going so the first is wait longer than you think to hire head

of growth wait until your product Market fit maybe a million AR especially if you're self- serve oriented number two is if your if your growth is declining thee of growth won't solve that problem first stop the decline at least third is redesigning your home page marketing page uh rebranding is not only not going to help you grow it's going to probably hurt growth and slow things down and so just go into that white eyes wide open four is don't just copy the competition and assume they know what they're doing and assume that what they do

is going to work for you use it as inspiration uh on the other hand look at in get inspiration from experts competition Trends things like that to help you solve your problem which you think is no one solved before it turns out that every problem you're solving someone has solved in some way most likely yes especially in growth I mean I know this can apply to a lot of uh product management into marketing as well but in growth when you're talking about how do I lift activation or I have a really big drop off between

activation and monetization these things uh are a lot more patternization so next one next one is um a little spicy one too and uh that is um part of growth you owning some channels a lot of growth teams own acquisition so uh owning channels and growth prioritizing uh SEO sem social um is one of the biggest mistakes I think a growth team can do now obviously I'm not saying don't do SEO or don't do sem so organic search or paid search I'm not I'm not saying that however as a growth team your number one priority

is to create your owned or your earned channel uh so channel that you've earned and that nobody else can compete in but you what do I mean by that when you're doing organic search or Page search you're making Google re richer great for Google Google is an incredible company but by dumping money into paid marketing you are paying them and you're paying for their distribution and access to their distribution if you're doing social too like you're doing let's say Instagram or what not paid paid advertising in Instagram that's great but all of that works on

algorithm and algorithm can give it but algorithm can also take it away at any point and you have no control because you don't own those channels you are playing with other players and you're competing against them in somebody else's Channel now the on the other side there can be your own earned Channel what is an earned Channel this really goes into the concept of product L growth acquisition which means you're relying on virality on Word of Mouth on uh user generated content in order to attract new acquisition through top of the funnel so why is

that earned and why do I put that above let's say organic search which is SEO obviously is wonderful but again search just goes to Google that's great versus if you build your own user generated content and your own Community nobody else can compete with you in that that is yours your competitors cannot buy their eyeballs there people are going to be attracting other people referrals from people to people are everything so lny if I let's say I sign up for say superhuman and I invite you into it that is much stronger acquisition tactic versus you

looking for and finding superhuman let's say on paid marketing advertisements and especially with our age right now where search as an interface is changing towards AI interface and the AI interface is giving a lot less credit to all of the content content is almost becoming a database and there's a new UI that is being developed on it before it was Google was the UI and now ai is coming in with a new UI and there's not as much control that you have over this new UI that is being developed focusing on these earned channels that

you own becomes the outmost priority and if you don't have them on your growth road map you're going to be in some really big trouble over the next year to two years because your cost of acquisition is only going to go up your competition in those channel is only going to go up you're constantly going to be praying to log uh algorithm Gods to giveth your way but they again they can take it at any point and um it's really one of those fundamental growth team failure points if they don't spend enough time on virality

and user generated content to create their own earned acquisition wow okay this is incredible like this is its own podcast episode in theory that we could do of how to actually do this we're not going to cover the strategy also this may not necessarily work for every company your point is that's you can go other ways but this is by far the most powerful most effective cheapest most likely to succeed if you can figure this out it's not cheapest it's actually costs a lot of product and engineering and even marketing resources to stand up so

it's just it's not the cost of a budget but it's cost of people that will have to work to create your own channel so to speak for acquisition and you're right maybe that's not for everybody but it's actually applicable to more products Than People realize because every single product has some sort of Team functionality some sort of roles that they need to do every product can drive Word of Mouth Loop not well actually that's not true not every product can drive Word of Mouth Loop but they can drive recommendations and they can create user generated

content one of those tactics usually applies to at least one product so there is an opportunity to create some sort of earned Channel even though it might feel un natural at the beginning depending on how you reach pmf and how you've scaled in the first couple of stages um of it but if you're not exploring it and if you're not investing into it or at least trying and failing within it I think that you are really leaving too much of your growth future into the hands of somebody else that you have no control over so

the advice here is your growth team it's okay if they work on sem pay growth basically and but most of your effort and investment should be in earned channeled owned channels specifically verality user generated content diversify just diversify your strategy so not all of it is reliant on somebody else giving you access to their distribution now for example uh at Dropbox over 50% of acquisition comes through sharing so I load something into my Dropbox maybe I need to send it out for Signature maybe I need to just share this file to transfer to somebody maybe

I just need to share this file um as a final delivery to my clients that I was working with well that recipient then is now aware of drawbox so it solved the brand awareness uh by that action of sharing you actually almost activated that recipient too so you don't need to educate them anymore on how the product works and whatnot and the percentage of those recipients sign up to become drawbox users and that accounts for 50% of acquisition that is a stable earned channel that nobody can compete with and it's only for drawbox to lose

so to speak and we we actually had our own growth pod focused on it because to optimize both sender experience and the recipient experience because it was such a powerful growth Loop and growth engine uh that uh driven the company and uh every every business should have an attempt at one of these I think this is going to be a really good push for a lot of growth teams to think about what can we do here okay number seven for go number seven uh we've talked about this at least a little bit um in our

last podcast too but um I see this as a question that comes up all the time and something that people are afraid of uh to in uh to invest which is a mistake every single company uh starts with their growth efforts focused either on product Le growth hey I'm going to have everything being done self- sered or on sales um in marketing I'm going to have sales team and then I'm going to have Market team and they're going to do all of the work and my product is just going to create the functionality and that's

good and fine for a while depending on how long that while is but not overlaying every single way that you can grow through product through marketing and through sales as an evolution is a huge mistake that uh a lot of Ro teams fail to iterate on and innovate on the way that i' best be comparing it is if product has a product Market fit which is great that product Market fit is not going to last that product forever they're always going to have to have a second Horizon they're always going to have to have a

product Market fit expansion effort in order to continue to uh grab as many people and solve as many people's problems as possible and increasing their team well the same comes with growth if you have a growth model that works for you that's wonderful good for you optimize it grow it scale it create a team that will be be nurturing it and that will be amplifying it but you're going to need to evolve it and that Evolution uh needs to come through overlaying other growth models on top of it so a you are Diversified away from

just one growth model failing because a lot of times you're going to get into situation of um law I love Andrew Chan's article here it's called a law of shitty click-throughs where you just if you over optimize the same thing over and over again is just it's has minimal returns and some growth models have very limited time span some of them are huge some can grow for like sharing loopa Dropbox it's 17 years in the making and it's still firing good for it like that's amazing but that's very much an anomaly most of growth Loops

spin out of uh their ability to produce meaningful results for you within the first five to six to seven years so continuously overlaying those different growth models and what I'm specifically talking about is product Le growth marketing Le growth sales Le growth and introducing it into this ecosystem constantly is uh what really separates companies that can continue growing for a long periods of times versus the ones that can see a really big blip potentially even unicorn type of growth rates of 70 80 aund whatever Plus percent and then it starts to slow down and don't

wait till that slow down happens you need to really start thinking about different ways that you can attract people to grow so you are not leaving a gap in the market that somebody else can enter and own as opposed to you playing in every way and where you can um uh interact with your customer the way the way I think about this is like the s-curves of every growth model and growth lever right eventually it'll it'll help and then slow down and so you want to find the next X esur on things that will grow

your business yes absolutely the the the way that I see it often is that uh especially when growth teams they hit a really big result out of some initiative they just like keep trying to focus on it over and over again and sometimes that focus is warranted like I said our sharing loop at Dropbox has its own uh growth team against it great but at the same time a lot of that's not warranted for all of the grow 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 one which actually brings me to my uh like a little bit of a next thing too is you need to do it every 18 months because a lot of them are going to fail and every five years or so you for sure need new channel New Growth Loops new tactics uh new engines so to speak to power your growth engine uh whether it's overlaying sales on top of self serf whether you're doing a lot of let's say virality right now in terms of acquisition and you 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 for every 18 years you need to introduce something sorry yeah 18 for every 18 months you need to introduce something new in order for it to uh continue evolving and was that number eight of the list we're going through or that's like a bonus piece of advice uh no that's just a bonus piece of advice okay cool uh okay got it and so the advice here essentially is you'll find something that is helping

you grow make assume that will slow down at some point start thinking about other levers and growth models to layer on top of that yeah something I've seen let me know if you agree is usually there's going to be like one lever that is most of your growth for a long long time and so all other things are not going to be as big but they are still important yeah so the way I think about it is um I try to focus 20% 20 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 uh on to our 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 go it immediately let's say on monetization or immediately on acquisition you're just going to cut it at its at its knees immediately if you if you're not going to let it evolve into something that can be monetized that can

be responsible for acquisition so like example on mirrorverse which is a user generated Content Library of all of the mirror boards that people create it took us probably 18 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 like we don't even know exactly quite how this is going to 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 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 um very

soon into your initiatives to make this even more concrete for people that are starting to like oh I got to do do this uh 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 youve mentioned a few just give a list of people like okay got it maybe we'll try one of these I'm really big on creating a growth Loop out of user generated content I think uh 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 uh 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 um using Community to uh spark the uh conversations around it like that can be a really wonderful uh strategy that everybody should consider of whether there's juice in it within your product uh other ones uh 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 uh 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 a sudden it starts to spread within the company so creating additional almost product functionality that then creates these Loops potentially uh for you so it can be a a slew

of things obviously I'd highly recommend uh just understanding all of the menus of these earned tactics I should do a blog post on it actually uh and then just see what what what works for you or not because uh at least ideation step of it has to happen if especially you're relying on search engines for your acquisition start thinking about some of the earn channels as soon as possible and even though you recommend spend more time on earn channels own channels there's also explore SEO explore paid growth right sales absolutely I mean almost everybody that's

paid arguably almost too soon potentially um there's a point to make that shouldn't be a lot of company should not be doing paid right now but SEO social um uh resellers um all all of those are wonderful uh tactics um obviously I skew very heavily towards earn channels just because once you stand that up that's a gift that just keeps on giving and nobody can take that away from you but uh that doesn't mean that other tactics and other channel should not be explored as well amazing let's keep going so we have three to go

number eight so number eight um this one's kind of a doozy and I think a lot of people don't do it I don't know why they don't do it um I think it's such a uh incredible ability to propel forward and that is um what doesn't work as I said in the previous uh growth tactics is trying to think that each problem is unique and you need to solve it on your own maybe this is not so much doesn't work but not hiring advisers is something that I do not recommend for you to do you

can get access to anybody for one hour a week yeah you'll have to pay them so nobody's going to volunteer their hour we're all very very busy but hiring advisers is the biggest career amplification and your business amplification can possibly do because to create a network of people that have all of these data points and those all of the other patterns that you can do is something that can just Propel you so far forward that doesn't mean you have to do everything advisor says that's not the point they're not the strategy Setter but there are

additional input into your decision-making that you otherwise wouldn't have you can go and hire somebody from atlassian you can go and hire somebody from Airbnb that have been and lived through all of this and they can help you solving it through uh solving your problem so I think any growth team that does not have an adviser is a growth team that is underperforming because even me who I've like I've advised so many companies I've operated at so many companies I don't know everything every time I take an operator role I hire advisers for myself because

that is the fastest way to learn anything and I often see these teams that just like try to figure out everything on their own and not have any advisory like advisors on their boards so to speak and not even I'm not even talking like an official board I'm talking not even Advisory board but you can hire somebody like as a contractor that will be your adviser I think is a huge mistake especially in this day and age because we have a big asymmetry of information in our field there's very little available to learn uh because

we're all very Cy because competition but um at the end of the day people know a lot of the stuff and how it worked for them internally and I highly highly encourage you to not try to wing it on your own along those lines there's also advice of just like don't worry about advisors there's you never know if they're going to be useful there's all these hanger on that join your startup and want to help but they're not help if you give one tip for a founder or team that's interviewing advisers looking for an adviser

to vet them to help them find people that are actually great what would your tip be uh I have actually a good one many advisers might not H might not like it though I think that you should not hire an adviser until you do some sort of workshop with them on the problem that you're experiencing see them in action see what kind of information they can provide to you because any adviser that is ky about the what they know is not the type of advisor that you're going to want to have on your team uh

you want to have somebody that has lived through it that can talk to you to your face about it that is able to have hard conversations that is able to provide you a necessary examples that is able to give you and connect thoughts for you for necessary patterns so instead of just saying oh this person looks good let me hire them as an advisor say hey let's have a workshop first I have this problem I think that you can help me fix it pay them for it whatever their rate is for that workshop for sure

but see how they actually interact with your team and then hire them on ongoing retainer basis because that creates an interview Loop that is very practical that is very um quick to understand whether you can work with them they can work with you and whether they have anything to contribute to you and then every single month evaluate whether that advisor should stay with you uh some advisers they need to be with the company for three months and off they go that's fine some of them might stick with you for four or five years but every

single month you should go and say did they add any value and I'm not saying that advisor should have any monetary expectations like Revenue attributions so to speak to them but did you find Value in having conversations with them did they offer anything valuable to you that an awesome tip and I could see why people be like godamn Elena don't say that makes so much sense um okay go number nine go my my last one is also that I see something um way too often uh nowadays on growth teams specifically this is very very growth

problem and that is um too much risk averseness on growth where you starting to test everything if every single one of your initiatives that you're doing on growth is an experiment uh that's a problem and and uh that is something that you should take a look at and say what am I doing and why do I need a precise scientific measurement for every single thing that I touch in order for it to go to production or like to to to hit the market uh it's almost like a disease like a paralyzing disease that slows down

progress that slows down velocity that slows down learnings that um creates very much deter like very um terrible consequences to the output that growth teams uh produce and it's a little bit counterintuitive because experimentation is a way to do growth for growth teams and it's a it's their it's their process growth teams are meant to experiment but I also think that experimenting on everything is something that is quite terrible uh once the team starts to get locked into that state and it's really hard to get out of because they're then afraid to do any change

until or unless that they test so where do you find that balance I imagine people hearing this are like oh yes I this makes sense to me and then they continue to test basically everything what's kind of some her istics you'd recommend for knowing okay just don't test that don't worry about it you don't need credit for that win first of all I think that people should trust their intuition a little bit more data is good but data is only good if you have enough of it uh so if you have low volume real estate

that is going to take you eight months to reach some sort of answer do you really want to test it for eight months like what's the point of it it's my rule of thumb if we cannot collect the sample size in the month we shouldn't test it period because just it's just then it's not fast enough we should just go and do pre versus post pre versus post is pretty powerful uh it's also a way to assess your impact and you can still roll back if if it doesn't work but don't think that everything needs

a scientific explanation uh to whether it needs to be moved forward or not also experimentation cannot be the way that people make decisions in the company there's still so much about knowing your user understanding the market for your brain to connect all of those dots and to know what needs to be an experience that your customers are going to want that yeah if scientific data like a very tight determination of the probability that this is a success is important absolutely do it because it might be a really big strategical pivot that you're planning to do

so it's a data point to validate that all of this extra work will be uh will be needed it might be a very high traffic real estate that even like 0.1% difference will mean millions of dollars for you but other than that it should be just go go go do pre versus post by the way I'm like I'm not saying just like release and release and move on uh release do 7day 24-hour readout 7day readout 28 day readout even come back to it a year later and measure some of the retention um or expansion data

that is associated with it but to test everything is Del uh debilitating to growth teams and it paralyzes them in its uh in its place so kind of look at your initiatives and say where do I need precision and it's important and I can get it fast enough versus where we should just go for it and yeah we will fail there too and that's okay and we can roll back and we can figure out how to um how to make it how to make it better but failure is going to happen regardless and statistics statistics

is tricky like too PE many people take it for face value versus it's just like a directional data point to say there's likely a new distribution that has maybe a different mean and 5% of the chances if you measure 95% statistical significance you might not even be there and yet we like take it for so granted oh it's going to drive this this much lift so I I just think that people stop like in this age of data don't almost rely enough on their own intuition a lot of contrarian takes here I love this Elena

we've reached number 10 okay and I know number 10 is like a special one where it's more than one quick fire so number 10 is going to be my little fire round uh my fire round on like little things that I just see people spending way too much time on it like it hurts my heart because not going to drive any any results on them so uh number one color optimizations for the love of God a blue is a blue is a blue as long as it's accessible and as long as it's bright enough off

you go you do not need to uh test the shades of blue or tested against Green or so on pick a color move on please don't spend time on it that's a 2000 early 2000s tactic it doesn't work anymore we passed that in techn ol sector number two third party signups um a lot of times we think oh we're going to get so much more acquisition if we add Google o or if we add Facebook o or slack o or Microsoft app add whichever o you want to add to it in some cases it's very

important to have thirdparty off uh so for example if you're a developer product please have a GitHub off like it's it's kind of unnecessary developers already have the account there have them connect with it as opposed to create a new one however if you're a productivity product email is fine for the longest time Gmail is nice it's not going to drive more acquisition for you you're just going to do a mix shift into more people using it it's not going to create incrementality it's not going to improve your activation it's not going to improve your

retention it's not a growth tactic it's part of your just customer experience that you want to invest into number three on the fire round uh one email wonders we stress too much about this one email that we're going to send to this one customer group and we're like oh my gosh how much lift is it going to cause it will never cause any lift it will never work as a one-off email too few people open it on average 25% open rate um at best you'll get 40 to 50% open rate too few people click it

uh one email will never do anything if you're going to go into email please think about it as a series about communication about how it interacts with product communication it's a whole strategy it's a whole thing please don't stress about one off email never test a change in one one email it'll never work you're going to have to do the whole goddamn thing and see how it's going to do not just one email just never uh going to work I'm definitely guilty of this one that is a really good one for sure and it's so

obvious in hindsight so I love that you share that yes and then the last one um growth teams are often too obsessed about removing friction because if we remove the steps then more people are going to get to the destination and um to an extent if you have horrible friction in your product where it's just like confusing about what the next step is I agree go fix the friction of the cognitive load that it takes to complete a step that is the friction that you should be working on however just removing steps or yanking or

simplifying things to an oblivion where you lose an identity of what you even do or what you're capable of doing uh is a completely failed growth tactic so simplifying may be an initiative of a different problem that you're solving but if you ever have a line item on your uh road map that says simplified onboarding please please cross it out it's not going to work because simplifying onboarding is an action what is the problem that you're solving you're never trying to solve a problem of simpl simplifying you always have a problem of people are confused

in it or people don't know where to go or they get lost in it or uh they're not educated enough that is the problem and simplifying might be a solution but it can never become be a problem on its own and too many growth teams are just obsessed with this notion that came out I think in early 2000s like oh simplifying is like the biggest growth hack that you can do um please don't do it it's only a solution to a very specific problem set of um too much complexity wow that was a big one

to end on that I think will help a lot of people avoid wasting time uh again a whole other podcast conversation could probably Focus just on onboarding advice that you probably have that I know you have um we've reached the last item is there anything else you want to share about this list before we no I think we spent too much time on the list we ready not too much just enough time and kind of on that note I want to call an audible and so we were going to talk through all of your FRA

your favorite Frameworks I like the way this conversation is gone and I want people to get overwhelmed with information so one idea is just just list Maybe favorite growth Frameworks just for folks to go check these out and not spend too much time on each one yep let's do that okay great so the list of my favorite uh growth Frameworks and to me framework by the way it's not a solution it's a pattern it's a pattern that exists across almost every single company out there and it's a starting point for your ideation and to figure

out how uh you can almost shortcut to possible list of solutions as opposed to trying to figure out too hard of how to even Define a problem um on its own so number one um it's probably expected if anybody has read anything or listened to me talk is growth Loops I think anybody who thinks about growth and anybody who thinks about growth in the funnel fashion versus understanding what the growth Loops are uh is missing out on the ability to create sustainable growth engine uh so it's very important to think about action reaction that generates

another action and it's a self contained flywheel they can spin uh a lot of resources on it at reforge Brian balfor and Casey Winters and Andrew Chan wrote a lot about this um highly recommend anybody looking into my next favorite gra uh growth framework is actually written by UL Lenny uh and Dan which is a race car framework everybody has a really hard time often thinking about what are all of the parts of growth initiatives and which are long-term what are shortterm how much are they going to actually uh produce in results and uh race

car framework is wonderful uh because it separates different initiatives into hey there's some engines Loops that are just going to keep on spinning there's some fuel that you're going to need to add into it potential like paid marketing dollars there's some turbo boosts that you may have in your race car that are going to be uh let's say uh big user conferences that you're going to hold um as a as a product or there's lubrications and optimizations that you're going to need to do of course oil into that engine so it actually performs correctly it's

beautiful I talk about it all the time with everybody the next uh favorite growth uh framework for me comes from Bengali and that's adjacent to user Theory I think that one's very powerful in terms of thinking about growth Evolution and uh as we talked about adding different growth models to your uh growth ecosystem different growth Loops but also adjacent users which are outside of your ideal customer profile or ICP out outside of your core user and how growth team can really bring them in and add additional of to your product without even expansion of product

Market fit by just optimizing their experiences I'm going to stop at these three because I think those are the most powerful ones cool on that last one we Bali was on the on the podcast we'll link to that episode if you want to go deeper on the adjacent using user Theory I love how like that was like a few minutes on things that could change people's life if they adopt one of these Frameworks and learn how to think about growth in this way it's like such a powerful uh mental model for thinking about all the

stuff you've been talking about this entire conversation yes I those Frameworks are like my church in my mind of like how my system of beliefs of how I think about growth and how I think about it on a strategic level of owning it as a strategy not just like a tactic or an initiative the Church of Elena Verna amazing okay so before we wrap up I want to bring us over to uh contrarian Corner recurring segment on this podcast where I like to ask the guest if there's something they believe that most other people don't

believe contrarian opinion you might say is there anything that comes to mind uh I do have a very contrarian opinion uh although uh it's not so much related to growth as opposed to maybe your personal uh growth and my contrarian opinion is that full-time jobs are not the best way to monetize the skill that you have it's one of the packages that everybody should evaluate and take advantage of but to many people blindly default to that package and don't explore other options that are uh both available on the market as well as best suited for

their personalities for their interest and for their skill set uh it's like a it's like a default plan that everybody subscribes to that is fa team in itself wow okay wait we got to hear more so what are some other packages I think we're like buying some of these packages these other options but I guess what should people be thinking about when you say this in terms of what can they actually do and explore I I'll premise it to saying I don't want to rain parade on full-time roles they're wonderful on uh your ability to

learn to get the expertise um and it depending on which uh career stage you are at full-time roles might be the absolute necessity for you to to move on to and unlock the next level however full-time roles uh box Us in into one company that may not be a great fit for far as culturally for our skills uh for our Ambitions for our interests life is too short for that and ability to really go and um figure out your own best monetization model just like you work on that for your business you should work for

that on yourself without an assumption that full time is the only option that you should have so what are the other options uh there's so many obviously uh the couple known ones freelancing uh you can be a contractor I do a lot of advising and Consulting because uh for my brain of how I work and how I like to puzzle solve and pattern match it works much better to be horizontal across many companies versus vertical uh on one specific one but that doesn't mean I still don't take those vertical engagements to deepen my knowledge into

any specific topic but overall it's a lot more interesting for me to pattern match across multiple companies and help them grow as opposed to just focusing on one there's interim engagements where there's a predetermined end date to your agreement there's fractional um engagements where you're working part-time um on something as opposed to engulfing yourself completely full-time there's other ways to create courses there's a way to create newsletters and monetize them like you're doing that is such a fantastic job so there's just so many options and people are sometimes Paralyzed by fear of instability that it

creates when you start to explore other options because you don't have that contract with that one company that provides you that paycheck um every two weeks to uh rely on but at the same time uh you can create diversification for your career and you can create stability it just depends on when you need to pull that trigger and when is the right time for you to explore but to spend your entire career only assuming full-time is the only way I think is a complete mistake that a lot of people are doing one of my favorite

posts of yours along these lines which is around increasing what you want to do is increase optionality yes and I guess talk about that because I think it's a really powerful piece of advice so uh this advice of opt career optionality being the ultimate lar for anybody uh in their professional journey is something that I'm uh I'm very strong on because a lot of people have the goal of I don't know maybe I want to be a VP or I want to become a CEO or I don't know I want to be a manager and

I want to like people manage and this becomes their Northstar and they start working towards it but a lot of people when they get to their perceived corporate lot nor Stars find themselves extremely dissatisfied depressed even by how terrible that job is people manage your job I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy because it's a terrible job if you don't enjoy it and you don't know if you're going to like it until you actually do it so I think setting as a title as your goal which so many of us have titles as goals

is very wrong way to think about it as opposed to saying hey my goal professional is actually to have options so I can choose what I want to do so I can choose what fits my life right now that I can choose what fits my skills and that fits my personality and that makes me happy and to get career optionality if that's your goal you start thinking about your progression a lot differently you're not starting to think about it of what will get me to the next title you start thinking about what Will can I

do next year that will increase my option pool and that's very different than just getting to a higher title and if you start thinking about EV valuing an opportunities or like whether you should stay at the company whether you should move at the company from the lenss of does it increase my options if I stay as this company for more one more year or does it keep it the same or does it actually potentially decrease that is the right way to find your ultimate happy place and happy job that brings you energy that brings you

happiness versus just going for a title and then being very disappointed with what that brings along with it amazing advice so so important and something I'll add that I think is a balance to what people may be feeling here is like oh I'll just bounce around all the best logo companies and create this killer resume I think you also need to build depth and actual experience yes that you can tap into if you do any of these things for example a lot of people want to jump to like I'm G to be a newsletter person

I'm GNA start podcast be adviser before they've done anything real and you have nothing to actually base your advice on very you have to earn your right to unlock optionality and earning that right does usually lie within full-time jobs that that that is a universal truth but then at some point you should start not just looking at full-time jobs as the only option that you have you should start to think about when can you start unlocking new ones and uh testing the market on it the other point is that you've been a great example of

is it's not a one-way door you can have a full-time job go to something else go back to a full-time job be an adviser be an interm person be a newsletter person you do that really well you you you you should you should do do it all it's menu of options and you pick a menu item that fits your best in any given point of your life it's Never Say Never and never shut the door on anything absolutely oh my God Elena this was incredible before we get to our very exciting lighting round is there

anything else you want to share leave listeners with maybe a last nugget or thought or not because we've covered a lot already no I think we've covered so much I don't want to overwhelm let's do it with that we've reached our very exciting lightning round are you ready yes I'm ready first question surprise surprise what two or three books you've recommended most to other people okay so I just finished this book that I love so much um it's not a it's not a professional book but uh it's project Hill Mary uh by Andy wear uh

it's the same author that W wrote Marian uh Martian also was made in the movie uh so good so good I can put it down I think I read it in like two days straight so highly recommend that um and and the next one that I also started reading right now was Bobby verse uh Bobby verse is so good it's actually takes into account of like Ai and how we can upload our Consciousness in the AI and what can happen with that so highly recommended I think it's actually closer to what potentially can be in

the truth uh for us in the future than not but I'm a big uh sci-fi geek so I read mostly sci-fi books I have a Sci-Fi recommendation for you that comes from Noah Smith he has I love his newsletter it's called Noah opinion and he has a list of his favorite sci-fi books that I've been working my way through it's called you may have read it by wner Vogal fire upon the Deep have you heard of this no okay it's a it's described as a not a Sci-Fi but space like a Space Opera where it's

epic the most epic scale of universe story I'll download it tonight it'll be on my list it's it takes a little bit to get into it's like quite unique but you just keep going and it's incredible and AI plays a big role in it actually that's awesome I'll there you go okay uh question number two favorite recent movie or TV show really enjoyed yes I H just got to watching beef on Netflix uh it's so good it's um it's it's it's said on I'm not I'm not going to spoil it for anybody beef you should

watch it it's a limited series it's so good it will it will run through I love vep on HBO uh so funny I've probably watched it two times already the entire series and I'll probably watch it more because it just cracks me up every time I think this is actually how our government works so I'm I'm I'm very intrigued by that and then the last one that I really liked that is coming up with the season two now so you should catch up on season one is last one of us if you don't like zombie

movies or zombie shows don't watch it but if zombie and apocalypse is your cup of tea last one of us so good or is it last of us or last one of us Last of Us is it last of us let's I'm Googling while we talk Last of Us I think it's last of yeah The Last of Us oh Last of Us okay okay Last of Us you're saying there's a third season coming soon that's exciting I didn't know that yeah it's so good okay I I love it as well great pick okay uh your

favorite product you recently discovered that you really like uh I've recently discovered that they make heated shoes and it changed my life uh my feet are always cold and these are boots that actually have heated wires through them uh and I'm obsessed you like charging it like USB plug in kind of thing yeah I just come in I plug them in and then I go outside and I'm warm and I think it's magical uh I have a jacket also heated jacket now I have shoes I'm I just need my um gloves and I'll be all

set love the USB powered clothing and uh we should know you live not in Silicon Valley you live on the east coast sort of Central in central the the the coldest it gets is like 30s here but I'm always cold so this is just is like my my my love language is something heated that I can I can sit on I'm that cat that sits like underneath the the light all the time and then I also just got airpod Max my headphones I couldn't connect them to my computer still technical difficulty is on that but

I love them the sound is amazing that's like my new favorite Gadget that I'm obsessed about what a cool combination heated shoes and airpods yeah um two more questions your favorite life motto that you often come back to that you find useful in worker in life yeah it's really one progress over Perfection I'm um I I think that you you just need to the the velocity of information is far more important than something that I think is perfect and Perfection is a outcome that you get to but uh progress over Perfection all day any day

very appropriate for a head of growth uh person yes final question you're not only one of the smartest people I've met on growth you're also one of the funniest people on social media especially on LinkedIn if people aren't following you they should they will not only learn they'll also be highly entertained is there a favorite meme that you created that you are very proud of that you can describe that we might want to link to yeah so I also want to say a lot of people hate me for doing so much memes as well because

they think it's that serious and like and I actually I want to rebottle that really quickly because I think humor is the best way to disarm people and to point out very painful situations that we're facing with every single day or conundrums without putting anybody on defense because we can all laugh at the absurdity of the lives that we live in every single day and pictures worth a thousand words and sometimes memes are just the best way to communicate the most complex situations that we are facing within um within our corporate world and they help

us understand how common all of those situ situations are we're not unique you're not feeling Alone um by feeling down about what happened everybody's going through the same thing so that's why I love memes because they help connect people on both sides even if you're making fun of one side because they're like yeah that's that is true and this is so funny so I'm a big proponent of that just because I think it's actually a better way to both unite people and uh just talk about heart problems that otherwise would be not R if you

put it in words but my favorite meme is actually one of the first ones that I've created and um I think it's from Family Guy where they have an elephant and a penguin standing and then there's Moses I think or some biblical character saying what the hell is this looking at the elephant and the Penguin and the result of it is a child that has a penguin body and an elephant head and if you think about elephant as product and penguin as marketing what the hell is this is growth which is a byproduct a weird

weird byproduct of product and marketing merg together that doesn't really fit with either yet it's its own entity I don't know I just I think that that one's the best to describe of to people what growth is so appropriate also well described it's hard to describe a meme and make it feel funny so good job thank you for doing that we'll link to this meme in our show notes Elena this was incredible thank you again thank you for being our first ever thirdd return guest hopefully there will be many more episodes of Elena Verna two

final questions where can folks find you online if they want to reach out and learn more and how can listeners be useful to you I uh find me on LinkedIn uh or my substack um not competing with you Lenny but um I share a lot of my thoughts um and everything that I learned on my own substack is just Elena vera.com uh LinkedIn is for all of my memes so go there if you want to laugh but if you want to learn from what I'm learning go to my self stack and uh how you can

be useful uh tell me what problems you're facing now don't tell me oh our growth is slowing down what should I do I can't help you with that too broad but if you're having a situation uh there's often um really good uh Pink for me to go and write about it or to do more research about it so I just love to hear what some people's minds uh so I can both help them connect their dots um as well as learn about it myself and what's the best way for them to do that is it

like DM you on LinkedIn and other uh DM me on LinkedIn or just reply to my substack uh newsletter email it goes directly into my personal inbox so I read every single one of them that's a really good say people don't know that when you get an email on substack if you reply just goes straight to the author exactly Elena thank you so much for being here okay thank you for having me Lenny bye everyone thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcast Spotify

or your favorite podcast app also please please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny podcast.com see you in the next episode