Dear startup founder, you do not need a growth person

“Growth” is the hottest and most misunderstood buzzword in tech right now.

This is up there with celebrating funding rounds as successful milestones.

Having worked at great early stage startups and now doing Growth at Dropbox, I’ve had a lot of conversations with founders regarding Growth.

Here are some common statements I’ve heard from founders and my response to them:

“I have users, but I need a Growth person to make my users stay and share the app more”

It sounds like your users aren’t too into your product. You may also have some pretty significant leaks somewhere in your user journey.

Your priority should be to figure out how to make a product your users actually love.

What you need is a good Product Manager.

They’re the ones who will do the magic of what looks like creating something out of nothing. They will be the ones who will find out what users want and design a product they love.

Users can’t be forced to do anything they don’t want to do. If your users aren’t already sharing your product with their friends/colleagues then you haven’t built anything which improves your users’ lives.

Rather than worrying about getting your product into more people’s hands, figure out who your devout users are. If you don’t have any, figure out why your users aren’t sticking around.

A PM builds the initial bridge which connects a user’s desire to action. A Growth person then comes in and reinforces that bridge to make it more appealing or easier to travel across.

In other words, a Growth person doesn’t build new features. We generally don’t take things from zero to one. We take them from one to 100.

A big misconception is a Growth person can magically make a product’s user base grow. I’ve never met anyone who can make the user base of a shitty product sustainably grow.

Focus on the difficult task of building something people love. It’s the most important task you could do for your company.

“I have Product Market Fit, I just need to get the product into more hands.”

Congratulations on finding a group of users who want to buy your product!

Now hire a marketer.

A good marketer will pay for their own salary in spades. If exposure is what you need, then a marketer will make it happen. Good marketers will handle your SEO, ads, copy, email marketing, and the many other forms of communication your startup needs to thrive.

Companies often make the mistake of hiring a Growth person and making them do User Acquisition marketing.

Please don’t do this.

New Growth people often find themselves in this trap. Accepting a job, thinking it was real Growth, but ends up being User Acquisition marketing.

When you make this mistake, both sides lose. The person you hired will quickly realize they’re not going to do the things they want to do. You end up with a person who isn’t interested in the work they’re tasked to do.

Just because a person does Growth, does not mean they’re going to be good at User Acquisition. I do Growth at Dropbox, but if you had a $100,000 Adwords budget and no idea what to do with it, I’d recommend you do the opposite of what I say.

I like to think I’m a pretty good at Growth, but if I have to be honest… I’m a terrible marketer.

“So you’re a Growth Hacker!”

Please don’t call me that.

Growth is not “Growth Hacking.”

Growth Hacking is total bullshit. Growth Hacking is neither sustainable nor repeatable. It can’t even guarantee positive results over a defined period of time. Just because some clever trick worked for one company, definitely does not mean it will work for you.

Ben McRedmond of Intercom wrote a great blog aptly titled “Growth Hacking is bullshit.” In this he states there are no silver bullets in growing your company. Instead it is an accumulation of a thousand tiny wins.

If you’re looking for someone to immediately skyrocket Growth for you, then you will be sorely disappointed.

“Oh sorry… So then what is Growth?”

Growth is when a person takes an established product/feature/page and runs experiments on it to move a specific engagement metric.

The vast majority of these experiments will be inconclusive or negative. Despite this, do not think you wasted your time. For example, what if I remove the entire customer testimonial section of a landing page and conversions stay flat?

Does that mean I have learned nothing?

No, now I can continue experimenting with more confidence that customer testimonials don’t have a large effect on conversions.

When you’re testing new hypotheses to understand user behavior, you chip away at dangerous assumptions.

When you chip away at dangerous assumptions, you’re able to understand your users’ motives better.

When you understand your users’ motives, you have an easier time finding ways to make your users happier.

“When should I look for a Growth Manager?”

You need Product Market Fit.

As previously mentioned, Growth Managers generally do not build new features, they expand upon them. This means your product needs to have that base sustainability.

People need to be already using it and liking it a lot. There needs to be common behaviors (i.e. posting a photo) that exist. Once these behaviors exist, Growth Managers can come in and work to increase said behavior.

You need a significant amount of traffic.

Running an experiment on a page which does not draw in traffic will be a waste of time and bring you no conclusive results.

A quick visit to Evan Miller’s sample size calculator can tell you how much traffic you need to run an experiment. For example, if your landing page has a 5% conversion rate and you want to run an experiment which removes the customer testimonial page, you need 27,066 visitors. Wanna test another variant with it? Now you need 40,599 visitors.

Mind you, this is only for one experiment. Ideally you would want to be able to run multiple experiments at the same time. In order to do that you need a lot of traffic. Running one experiment on a landing page per month will not be enough to justify a full time job.

I know it will be tempting to test anyways even though you have a small amount of traffic. Do not do that. It’s very important to reach statistical significance.

I mean, you wouldn’t flip a coin 5 times, see that it landed on heads four times and conclude that 80% of all coin flips are heads, right?

Need more traffic? Again, hire a good marketer.

You need reliable logging

“The only thing worse than no data is bad data.”

Data is the lifeblood of a Growth Manager.

We need solid and sound logging and analytics to be able to do our jobs well. The way we know if an experiment is successful or not, is by looking at the metrics the experiment will affect.

This could mean a button click, a purchase, or any kind of engagement. If you are not tracking these actions, it will be impossible for us to know the results of the experiment.

Data is how we see which direction we need to move. Giving someone bad data is like giving someone a faulty compass.

You need to be able to direct some engineering and design resources to Growth

Experiments are built.

Too many times have I seen Growth Managers be completely bottlenecked by a lack of engineering or design resources. This creates a significant hurdle on the person you hired to grow your user base.

What usually ends up happening is they end up creating a pretty half-assed execution to test their hypothesis. Successful growth has a lot to do with the rate in which you’re able to experiment/learn.

The more you experiment, the more you learn.

The more you learn, the more you earn.

I understand some people might disagree with my thoughts or maybe you’re a Growth person and have some statements early stage companies have said to you. If that’s the case, please leave a comment with your objection/story or tweet me @willietran_.