Earlier, I discussed our common obsession with Product Market Fit that has led to false beliefs such as “Product Market Fit is the only thing that matters.” A byproduct of that false belief are statements such as:

“We are focused on product-market fit right now. Once we have that we’ll test a bunch of different channels.”
There are two major issues with this statement. I’ll break them down separately. 

While Product Market Fit isn't the only thing that matters, it is important, so it makes sense that there are no shortage of blog posts explaining Product Market Fit, and how to get it. 

Instead of echoing the many great Product Market Fit explainer posts out there, I'm going to focus on the 5 elements of Product Market Fit that I believe are most misunderstood and overlooked:

I’ve been lucky to have been part of building, advising, or investing in 40+ tech companies in the past 10 years. Some $100M+ wins. Some, complete losses. Most end up in the middle. 

One of my main observations is that there are certain companies where growth seems to come easily, like guiding a boulder down hill. These companies grow despite having organizational chaos, not executing the “best” growth practices, and missing low hanging fruit. I refer to these companies as Smooth Sailers - a little effort for lots of speed.

In other companies, growth feels much harder. It feels like pushing a boulder up hill. Despite executing the best growth practices, picking the low hanging fruit, and having a great team, they struggle to grow. I refer to these companies as Tugboats - a lot of effort for little speed.

I rarely accept guest posts on this blog, but this opportunity was too good to pass up.  A couple months ago Tal Raviv (Growth PM @ Patreon) sent me a short email - "Brian, the results are in.  We doubled (yeah, doubled) new creators in our onboarding." 

My immediate response, holy f*ing YES!!!! My second response, lets write about this.  I've spoken/written about the importance of onboarding a lot before. The number of solid cases/examples out there is few and far between.  So Susan Su, Head of Marketing at Reforge, dug in with the Patreon team to produce this amazing piece.  It covers:

• How Patreon decided and defined a leading indicator activation metric.
• The challenges they faced with that metric.
• The six hypotheses they tested, where the hypotheses came from, what worked and what didn't. 

Growth is still an emerging discipline, and not everyone has a structured growth team within their org. But, let’s say you get to start from scratch and build the ideal growth team. What people and roles would you start with?

Andrew Chen and I recently sat down to look at a few configurations to consider as you're scaling up a team around growth. We've broken up the conversation into three videos, with notes below each video. 

Videos

1. The Minimum Viable Growth Team -- 1 to 3 people
2. The 10-20 Person Growth Team -- The 1-5-10 Ratio and Growth Specialization
3. 50-Person Growth Team and Beyond -- Where Growth Drives Product

Data Isn’t Constantly Maintained -> Data Becomes Irrelevant / Flawed -> People Lose Trust -> They Use Data Less

If the above looks familiar, you’re not alone. I estimate that greater than ⅔ of data efforts at companies fail.

This is trouble because data plays a key horizontal role in the growth process and mindset. Without good data, it’s not possible to run a legitimate experimentation cycle.

Today, I’ll take a look at 4 reasons why well-meaning data efforts fail so often, and what you can do about it.

Most growth communities, forums, and email lists will inevitably have that thread that goes: 

“Hey, what are the benchmarks everyone’s seeing for X?” 

I constantly find people seeking out benchmarks or pointing to benchmarks, and we’ve all been there -- who doesn’t want some normalizing data to understand whether we’re on track or not?

The desire is further fueled by many companies releasing “benchmark reports.”  I understand why. It makes for sexy content marketing.

But there’s one small issue:

Growth benchmarks are mostly useless. There is a better way, which I'll outline below.

Andy Carvell joined SoundCloud in 2012, when the company was just over 80 employees and 10 million monthly active users.  The service now boasts over 150 million registered users, and monthly actives in the high tens of millions. I recently spoke with Andy as part of a 1 hour interview covering:

How he brought a web-first product to mobile
Activity notifications, rich push, and other techniques for driving mobile growth and retention
Andy’s “Mobile Growth Stack” for 2017

In the early days of building the growth team at HubSpot, we spent a few months optimizing onboarding in our product and produced some meaningful improvements. As the team expanded, I wanted to dedicate a full-time team to onboarding, but I got a few versions of the following questions from other executives: 

“Why do you want to put a full-time team on that? I thought you guys were done optimizing onboarding?”

The mentality of “done” is the exact opposite of the mentality of high performance growth teams. Change is constant. Change is difficult. Not adapting to change is fatal.

I recently wrote about the most common mistakes with CAC (customer acquisition cost) that can derail growth efforts before you even get started because CAC is a metric that's foundational to growth strategy.

In this post, we'll look at the faulty myth of "Average CAC," and the most meaningful CAC segmentations that you should be paying attention to instead.