How to make your first growth hire?

Recently, I’ve helped a few founders/growth leaders with thinking about how to make their first growth hire, and I want to share a few thoughts with you.

Question #1: Do I need a Growth PM or a Growth Marketer?

Growth can mean so many different things.

There are different skill sets: growth product managers, growth marketers/UA/Channel managers, CRM marketers. Which one should I consider as my first growth hire?

There are also people with experiences in different focus areas: acquisition, activation, referral, retention, monetization. Experience in which area is most valuable to me?

My simple answer is: your first growth hire should match your initial growth lever.

First, build your growth model and identify the most important lever to drive the initial growth: paid channels, referral/WOM, content/videos, influencers, etc.

Then, match your first growth hire’s skill set to that initial growth lever.

If a certain skill set is missing within your current teams, that adds to the importance of hiring for that.

Example #1, a fintech app I work with figured out a pricing model with a efficient payback period time for paid acquisition, and they can get their CAC back relatively quickly. For them, the initial growth lever is paid acquisition.

So I recommended their first hire to be an awesome paid social channel expert. Because paid social acquisition is proven to work, and due to their fast payback, they can quickly deploy the money to paid ads again. So they want to scale that paid growth loop ASAP. This also frees up the founder’s timeto focus on product development and organic growth loops.

Example #2, I talked with a founder whose product is a Chrome Extension to enable better collaboration. I suggested their first growth hire to be a growth PM ideally with experience in building product-led growth loops such as team invitation and referral. They were able to find a growth PM with previous B2C2B experience, which will be really valuable for their product.

Question #2: Should I hire a Head of Growth or a Junior person?

If you can hire a really good head of growth/senior person at an affordable rate, by all means, go for it.

However, typically, for an early/seed stage or Series A company, you don’t have the brand or capital to hire a really awesome head of growth/VP Growth. And if you try to go that route, you risk finding the wrong one or a bad one. Plus, some growth leaders expect to manage a team, rather than being hands-on, which doesn’t work for a small and nimble startup.

I think starting from an experienced Growth PM or Growth Marketer is a good strategy.

Try to find someone who is very analytical and good with data, who learned how to do certain aspects of growth from their previous company (either product or marketing or analytics), and who is smart and curious enough to learn the other aspects of growth.

Someone who is willing to take lower pay/equity than a seasoned growth leader and is motivated to prove himself/herself and work towards becoming a growth leader someday.

For an early-stage startup, drive, scrappiness and fast-learning ability are really the key qualities you are looking for in this first growth hire.

I often told the founders: when I joined Growthhackers.com a few years ago, my title is PM Growth, but I was literally doing everything from FB ads, Medium blog, data analysis, product AB testing, drip campaign, event tracking/analytics tool implementation, conference organization, and community building. And I have never done any of that before.

You want to try to find that younger version of me as your first growth hire:)

Credit: Meme Guy

Question #3: What other options do I have?

As a founder of an early-stage startup, you have multiple options when thinking about starting growth functions and making first hires:

1. Hire a marketing/growth agency: this works well if you already tested out certain growth channels, and need to execute/scale. Paid channels such as FB & Google and CRM marketing such as emails/pushes can be handled this way relatively easily.
2. Find a senior growth advisor: this can bring a lot of value if you are trying to figure out your overall growth strategy. If you can find an advisor with growth experience in your industry/area, you literally can learn from the first-hand experience that is tested and proven by more matured products, to accelerate your growth and avoid deadly mistakes. It is a very high ROI investment.
3. Make your first growth hire: even though this is eventually needed, option 1 and option 2 can still provide different values in different scenarios. And you can use a combination of these 3 options to cover growth strategy, execution, and team building.

Last but not least, make sure you send your first growth hire my First 90 Day growth plan so that they can set up the foundation for growth :)

You can connect with me at https://www.linkedin.com/in/hilaqu/ or hui.qu.2009@gmail.com