Want to Blitzscale? Move faster! Faster! Even faster!

When Mark Zuckerberg says “Move Fast and Break Things”, he really really means it.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, at F8

Mark was very fast at launching Facebook. He was fast at improving Facebook, and growing Facebook. Starting with Harvard, going to other universities, and now to the world. You don’t get to 1.49 billion monthly active users by moving slow.

This “Move Fast and Break Things” mantra is the life blood of a startup from the early phases to the blitzscaling mode.

In the earliest phases of the business, speed is absolutely essential to get to product market fit. The faster you ship a product the better. The faster you iterate and learn the better. As Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, loves to say:

“If you aren’t embarrassed by your product’s launch, you shipped too late.”

But the speed doesn’t stop there. The focus is no longer 100% on product, early growth, and reaching product market fit. After reaching product market fit, it’s then off to the races. It’s now time to focus on getting to market and scale.

Getting to Scale is still about the Scientific Method

In the earliest phases of the company, I find myself spending a lot of time chatting with users and potential users. Figuring out what worked and didn’t work, and quickly scrapping together changes to the site and pushing it live to see how users react. Broken down, it is the scientific method with some gut instinct:

1. Talk to users
2. Come up with some hypotheses
3. Test and repeat

In the next stage of the company (after product market fit), I was surprised to see a lot of the same testing methods. In the movies and publications, this is where the companies become “overnight successes.” It just seems to happen. Allen Blue, a product co-founder of LinkedIn, breaks it down nicely:

1. Plan: Come up with a growth hypothesis
2. Execute the growth plan
3. Iterate and learn on the growth plan quickly
4. Adjust product market fit as you grow.
5. Move faster than the competition.

All major companies had many competitors, but ultimately were able to dominate the market share because of their ability to move faster and iterate on their growth hypothesis. Just as your first product is always wrong, your first growth tests are also always wrong. Find the ones that work and milk them. The speed is key.

How Do I Grow?

Coming up with Growth Hypotheses is fun! But also really difficult. If every company were successful at getting rocketship growth, we’d have a lot more large companies.

Over the course of the last couple of weeks I was lucky to hear people chat about their own growth journeys: Allen (LinkedIn), John Lilly (scaling Mozilla), Jen Pahlka (Code for America), Mariam Naficy (Minted, Eve.com), and Eric Schmidt (Google). They each leveraged their own growth hypotheses to get to scale.

Patterns:

• Viral Growth — Users want to share it with each other Examples: Gmail, Skype, Dropbox, Hotmail
• Network Effects — The more who use the product, the more valuable the product becomes to the group (and the more likely somebody else is the join) Examples: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter
• Communities — People are part of a community or movement with like-minded people. Examples: Mozilla, ProductHunt, Code for America, Slack
• Awareness — Using advertising, SEO, partnerships, PR, social media to build awareness Examples: Mint, Robinhood

It wasn’t that they just used these growth patterns; they did it faster and better than their competitors. There were many professional networks that also had network effects working for them. You likely don’t know any of their names aside from LinkedIn.

What if I’m not Viral Nor Have Community?

While many patterns emerged through the talks surrounding growth, I still struggled to transition my mind to scalable growth strategies like growth through communities, network effects, and more, especially when thinking about things I worked on. When a product isn’t a network, community based, nor inherently viral? How does a product grow if it doesn’t obviously fit into something above?

John provided a great response on Twitter:

I decided to look at a couple of companies and products where it isn’t clear to me how they will grow yet (I may be wrong so please let me know) and think through potential growth strategies.

GOOGLE PHOTOS

I don’t know what the user numbers look like on Google Photos, but a surprising number of people I know use it. It is one of the best designed products I know and a personal favorite (congrats Bradley Horowitz).

Things I Notice:

• Photos has PR, but isn’t super aggressively in the news.
• Strong Twitter presence but engagement isn’t through the roof.
• People share it, but it doesn’t push users to share it. No real incentive to share the product; even if you love the product you likely won’t share.
• Rating on the app store seems like a way that’s used to gain some views. Seems to do well on SEO too.
• Google can probably shove it in people’s faces. But I haven’t seen that

My Growth Hypothesis if I were on the Team:

Get people’s friends to ask Google Photo users “How did you do that?” The Photos app itself may not be something that people will actively engage with and share all the time, but the photos ARE. When something beautiful shows up on Instagram (and obviously isn’t an Instagram filter), people ask, “How did you do that?” Same for on Twitter. When Meerkat arrived, I was curious. I wondered what it was. People love sharing new, cool content like this because it makes them look cool. Google Photos Assistant is great at creating unique content. If Google Photos can control the storage of the photos as well as encourage sharing of this unique content, I think people will wonder what editing or app they’re using to create this amazing content.

A Google Photos automatically generated GIF. It’s cool! Wouldn’t you ask how I did this too? Looking good Silvia Li

MAGIC

Magic is a service that allows you to text it to ask for anything. Basically get anything you want done through text message. It took the world by storm when it first came out and raised from many top investors. It’s been a lot quieter (at least since the initial buzz). I personally use many of its free options, like asking it for the CalTrain schedule. I love it’s simple experience, crafted by Mike Chen and his team.

Things I Notice:

• Grew organically and very quickly when it launched. While the press has stopped reporting about it, I’d bet it’s still growing quickly
• Word of mouth and press seem to be the primary growth drivers right now
• It’s all about one to one conversations, similar to a normal personal assistant. People don’t normally talk about or share publicly about their personal assistants.
• Trust? The https://getmagicnow.com/ site looks too good to be true, and a little sketchy. Seems like initial/temporary barrier to scaling past early adopters/tech community. Intuition tells me it’s going to be expensive too

My Growth Hypotheses if I were on the Team:

• Trying Virality — Magic breaks down human services into a direct transaction that is dead sample. Because it makes everybody go “WOW” and also involves direct transactions, it seems like there is a way to incentivize sharing similar to Dropbox and Uber. Offer a discount on both sides for referrals and make users’ jaws drop.
• Incentivize users of On-Demand Companies — My guess is that Magic users are ones who have some extra cash and value convenience. This sounds a lot like the regular users of Uber Black Car, DoorDash, Postmates, and more. In a world where Magic connects to all of these services, they likely target many similar customers too. Magic funnels into on-demand companies. What if each of those on-demand companies could serve as an ambassador for Magic? I’m usually not a fan of partnerships, but perhaps Magic could partner with those companies to provide a combination of growth and rev share to the on-demand startup.

Your Team Needs to Grow With You

I know that if I have a product that works, I can hire a marketing and sales and distribution team, and I can do it in a week. — Eric Schmidt

I’ve never had to grow a team. It just seems really really hard. There are so many things to think about.

Is this person smart? Does he/she fit our company culture? Every hire after the founders is critical to the success of the company.

I won’t write much about scaling the team aside from the importance of having a strong hiring thesis and understanding when and who is needed. The talk with Eric Schmidt covers this nicely:

CS183C Session 8: Eric Schmidt

Thanks so much to Chris Yeh, John Lilly, Reid Hoffman, and Allen Blue for teaching CS183C. Easily the best class I’ve taken. Ever. It’s challenges me to think deeply about things I see and work on. Never enjoyed a homework essay so much! 😀 😀

If you made it this far

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