Planting the Growth Seed

Learnings from coffee with Andrew Chen

The following is a summary of the learnings we took away from Andrew Chen over coffee sometime back in 2012. For a more elaborated article, please refer to this post: Thinking about Growth

If you’ve been working on Growth for some time, most of the ideas here should be very familiar to you. If you’re just beginning to think about Growth, the following ideas should be relevant.

1. Make sure your product has achieved Product Market Fit (PMF). Only work on growth after you have achieved PMF!

2. Build a viral/ feedback loop. In order to achieve sustainable, scalable growth, there must be a growth model. Marketing campaigns (eg. ads, press mentions, etc) are effective in causing growth spikes, but require a self-sustaining and scalable mechanism to maintain that growth.
(a) Develop a model of what a successful user looks like
(b) Design and optimise the product for the successful scenario
(c) Design something that is better for users in the long run, although they might complain in the short run
(d) Choose a focus to start optimizing from

3. Have a consistent product description/ positioning
(a) Use a strong positioning that customers get, ideally by anchoring on an existing disruptive category
(b) Optimize on the homepage/ landing page design. Refer to 5 Learning Points from Udemy’s Growth Hacking course

4. Adopt a culture for growth by building a Growth team for rapid experiments and prototyping. The key is to iterate fast, move quickly, and conduct lots of experiments and letting the numbers guide our engineering schedule.

5. Track some of your key stats
(a) # new users
(b) viral factor, k, and all its sub-components
(c) usage patterns
(d) DAU/MAU (See Andrew’s post on this here: What factors influence DAU/MAU? Nature versus nuture)

For the story and examples of what we did, read more on this post: Thinking about Growth