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I haven’t met a founder that loves board meetings. They are a critical part of running a startup, but then can easily become a low ROI activity consuming a ton of the time of the executive team and not helping the company move forward in a meaningful way.
A couple of years ago, multi time founder Dave Balter Founder/CEO of Flipside Crypto and Board Observer at Reforge, suggested a really simple tool that I’ve found really effective a pre-meeting CEO Report To The Board.
In March, LinkedIn launched an AI assisted growth loop. Fareed Mosavat and I recorded a convo where we broke it down step by step. We were shocked when we looked up the stats. From March to June it went from generating 0 to 1M uniques per month according to Ahrefs and is on one of the steepest growth curves we’ve ever seen for a content loop.
In 2016 I created a doc that spelled out my hypotheses for starting Reforge. Many ended up being true (surprisingly) and were the foundation of going from $0M to $30M.
Superhuman was founded in 2015 (3ish years ago at the time of writing this). From their landing page, they are building “The Fastest Email Experience Ever Made.” To this day, you can still not sign up and instantly gain access to their product. Yet, they have received more press, word of mouth, and funding than 95%+ of other products. Why? Because they've done the exact opposite of what most do for product and feature launches. Let me explain...
We’ve all heard the rallying cry of the “One Metric That Matters”.
Choose your north star and focus. Grow 7% week over week. If you grow DAUs, the rest will follow.
But blindly buying into the concept of the one metric that matters (OMTM) is a fatal oversimplification.
In a recent essay, Casey Winters, formerly Growth at Pinterest, says:
“The search for one key metric for a complex ecosystem like Pinterest over-simplifies how the ecosystem works and prevents anyone from focusing on understanding the different elements of that ecosystem. You want the opposite to be true. You want everyone focused on understanding how different elements work together in this ecosystem. The one key metric can make you think that is not important.”
In this post, we’ll expand on Casey’s points, walking through why focusing only on your north star metric is a dangerous way to measure the growth of your business, and how teams should think about setting their metrics instead.
Even the name “One Metric That Matters” is problematic. It sends the message that you only need to focus on one metric to build growth into your product - this misleads many teams.
There are four key reasons that explain why buying into the one key metric philosophy can be deadly. Let’s walk through each reason in detail.
When I joined HubSpot in January 2014 the mission was clear. One, help build the foundation for a new $100M line of business. Two, do it with a freemium and touchless model. The journey was one with many twists, turns, and lessons which I've boiled down into the Four Fits Framework that I went through in the past five posts.
In this post, I will walk you through how we laid the foundation for the HubSpot Sales product and set it on course towards that $100M goal.
You walk into your growth interview after hours of preparation. You’ve perfected your 2 minute pitch, polished your work stories, and maybe even done some case prep. You’re ready to showcase your achievements and you have an answer ready for any question they throw at you.
But there’s one big problem you’ve overlooked - the interview isn’t actually about you.
Most candidates approach the interview process as a way to showcase themselves and their accomplishments. But, the best growth candidates orient the process around the company and its strategy.
After years of interviewing hundreds of people applying for various growth roles, I’ve seen candidates make the same 6 mistakes over and over again. They all tie back to this one core error - thinking the interview is about you.
In this post, I’ll outline the six most common ways those mistakes play out - and look at the mental models that can help you avoid falling into the most common trap that trips up even the strongest growth candidates.
Get the customizable Growth Interview Prep Worksheet that accompanies the post here.
This is part five in a series about 4 Frameworks To Grow To $100M+. Subscribe to get the rest of the series.
In the introduction I explained there are two types of companies:
Tugboats, where growth feels like you have to put a ton of fuel in to get only a little speed out.
Smooth sailors, where growth feels like wind is at your back.
The difference between these two are not the common mantras of build a great product, product market fit is the only thing that matters, or growth hacking.
In part two, I talked about why we should think about Product Market Fit as Market Product Fit, how to lay out your Market and Product hypotheses, and how understanding whether you have Market Product Fit comes down to Qualitative, Quantitative, and Intuitive indicators.
In part three, I covered Product Channel Fit - the concept that products are built to fit with channels, channels are not built to fit with products.
In part four I covered Channel Model Fit - that channels are determined by your model. I went through the ARPU ↔ CAC spectrum and how your product and product tiers need to align on this spectrum.
In part five I covered Model Market Fit - your model influences the target market and vice versa.
Through out the series I've tried to highlight three key points:
1. You need all four Fits to grow to $100M+.
2. You can't think about the four Fits in isolation because together they form an ecosystem for growth.
3. You need to constantly revisit the fits because they are continuously changing, or breaking down.
Let's walk through each of them individually in more detail.
Model Market Fit is the concept that your market (and # of customers within your market) influence your model.
The first time I heard about the underlying concept of Model Market Fit was from Christoph Janz @ Point Nine Capital. He wrote a post called The Five Ways To Build A $100M Business. He then followed that up with Three More Ways, but I'm going to focus on the first five as they represent most of the $100M+ outcomes out there.
Channel Model Fit is simple - channels are determined by your model.
First, what do I mean by “Model?” The two most important elements of your model are: