How to accelerate growth at early-stage startups

Recently, I got a chance to interview Brady Flynn, product management expert and founder of Primer, a marketing platform and service that has helped companies like Microsoft and hims increase their conversion rates by connecting marketing campaigns with custom landing pages. Brady shared what he’s learned from helping early-stage startups. Here are his tips for accelerating growth.

This is an excerpt from an interview with Brady on scaling early-stage startups. To learn more, check out the full article.

Run the right kinds of tests

We like to say that thousands of tests always leads to results. If you think about running thousands of tests, the top 5% are going to be outliers. You’re going to find things that 2x and 3x your wins within those tests. You need to make sure you’re testing really big ideas.

You don’t want to have everything being a small iteration of the last thing. So as you’re testing, if you’re at a really small stage and you don’t have a lot of traffic, make sure that you’re making these really big changes and tests. This is where having that goal metric is really important. Then afterwards, you can look at these tests and say, “Am I driving towards my end goal?” If not, then let’s just pause this test and move on. That’s really important too, making sure if something is not reaching significance in the amount of time that you expected it to, it’s time to just move on and test the next thing. You’re not looking for really small improvements.

You’re looking for those really big improvements that will cause you to jump and grow. You can test onboarding with lots of steps vs. few steps, conversational onboarding vs. traditional form, video landing page vs. an article style page. Combine the tests with being customer goal and problem focused, and being focused on your main objective, and being laser focused on trying to increase your growth goal, and you’re going to find yourself suddenly hitting your growth goals. You’ll look back on the last month and say, “How did we actually create that big step change? What have we been testing or doing for the last 6 months?” Everything seems like it’s been very incremental. But once you start being customer first and making these really big tests, you’ll start seeing step changes of 30% or 50%, 2x or 3x improvements in your growth that you weren’t getting before.

Look for ways to make a big impact

One of the reasons why you must go after big ideas, especially at an early stage company, is that you don’t have enough traffic or potential customers yet to be able to test those minute things. Facebook will test something, and they’ll be able to say, “Hey, this lifted this statistic by 1%!” If you try to run a test to lift something by 1%, you’ll go out of business before that ever finishes.

So, one thing that early stage companies need to do is test really big changes. Then as soon as you realize that you’re testing something that is unlikely to be a really big change — say you have a 5% improvement and it will take you a month to get significance — you just need to move on. So, try to put a time limit on your testing. “Hey, we want to do a test every 2 weeks, and every 2 weeks we want a certain goal of conversions.” If you want over 100 conversions on a winning variation, then you need to make a big enough change to do that within 2 weeks.

At the end of 2 weeks, if you can’t tell if it will be significant, then just move on until the change is more obvious. You must know when to give up on a test. Set a time frame.

Track retention

One of the most important metrics to track is retention. You’re looking at the retention among those who are paying for your service, whether that be a subscription or return buyers for an e-commerce situation. A lot of times you can measure it by how many people come back and are subscribing. Look at your return rate or retention rate. As you grow, those metrics become more important over time.

If you look back and you see that your retention goes down from 95% to 90%, that has a cascading effect over the course of a year. When you’re making changes to your funnel, it can be a balancing act. You need to also be watching retention on the back end when you’re making changes to your funnel to get your goal conversion. We usually say to have your core metric, which might be new customers as a growth metric. But then also have a couple of other company-health or business-health metrics that you’re watching.

We usually recommend having an overall growth goal, and that’s your North Star. But make sure to have another metric — your current customers metric. Watch those metrics at least monthly, so you can check them every month to see if you’ve made changes that have impacted them in a positive or negative way. It’s important to everyone that it improves month to month, or at least remains stable.

This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by +427,678 people.

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