Lenny's Podcast Transcripts

Transcript

Elena Verna[00:00:00)]Growth is a fairly new field. You have a lot of renowned interest in growth hacks,

like what is the sure things to get growth. In the age of social media everybody and anybody tries to share their tips and tricks. Oftentimes things that are completely out of context or they are very specific to one example and actually do not apply as a pattern. Lenny Rachitsky[00:00:21)]We're going to start with growth tactics that never work. If you see these items on your roadmap, you should probably not do them. What's number one?

Elena Verna[00:00:26)]We live in tech. There's always lots of startups and startups obviously looking to grow. There is a huge misconception in the field that in order to get growth going, you need a growth team. To figure out your product market fit and how to distribute it,

Powerful words. I'm loving this list already. Elena Verna[00:00:45)]Number two, this was my favorite and it might be a little spicy. Never ever once have I seen a rebrand or redesign, especially of UK marketing site produce good performance results. New CMO comes in designing their website or designing the brand as if it was reflection of their personal taste,

and oftentimes it's promised with our acquisition is going to go up and it never materializes into anything meaningful. Lenny Rachitsky[00:01:12)]A lot of contrary intakes here,

I love this. Elena Verna[00:01:14)]Number three, if every single one of your initiatives that you're doing on growth is an experiment that's a problem. It's almost like a disease,

like a paralyzing disease. Lenny Rachitsky[00:01:28)]Today my guest is Elena Verna, my first ever third time repeat guest. Elena is the smartest person that I know on B2B Growth. She's also hilarious. She's led growth at companies like Miro Amplitude, Dropbox, and SurveyMonkey. She's advised dozens of companies on growth including Superhuman, MongoDB, Netlify, Similarweb, Sanity, Maze, so many more. In our conversation, Elena shares 10 growth strategies and tactics that never work yet that she keeps seeing people and companies invest lots of resources into. She also covers her three favorite growth frameworks that help you wrap your head around how to think about growth, and she also does a short dive into the non-traditional career paths that we both went down. If you spend any time working on product growth or lead people or work with people working on growth, this episode is for you. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing feature episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that,

I bring you Elena Verna.[00:02:32)]This episode is brought to you by Sinch the customer communications cloud. Here's the thing about digital customer communications, whether you're sending marketing campaigns, verification codes or account alerts, you need them to reach users reliably. That's where Sinch comes in. Over 150,000 businesses, including eight of the top 10 largest tech companies globally use Sinch's API to build messaging, email and calling into their products. And there's something big happening in messaging that product teams need to know about, Rich Communication Services or RCS, think of RCS as SMS 2.0. Instead of getting texts from a random number, your users will see your verified company name and logo without needing to download anything new. It's a more secure and branded experience,

And here's why this matters. US carriers are starting to adopt RCS. Sinch is already helping major brands send RCS messages around the world and they're helping Lenny's podcast listeners get registered first before the rush hits the US market. Learn more and get started at sinch.com/Lenny. That's S-I-N-C-H.com/Lenny.[00:03:45)]This episode is brought to you by Vanta. When it comes to ensuring your company has top-notch security practices, things get complicated fast, now you can assess risk, secure the trust of your customers, and automate compliance for SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA and more with a single platform, Vanta. Vanta's market-leading trust management platform helps you continuously monitor compliance alongside reporting and tracking risks. Plus, you can save hours by completing security questionnaires with Vanta AI. Join thousands of global companies that use Vanta to automate evidence collection, unify risk management, and streamline security reviews. Get $1,000

off Vanta when you go to Vanta.com/Lenny. That's V-A-N-T-A.com/Lenny.[00:04:40)]Elena, thank you so much for being here. Welcome back to the podcast, our first ever third-time repeat guest. What an honor Dancing if you're not watching on video. Thank you for being here. I was actually just looking at our first episode, which we recorded almost over two years ago, September of 2022, and someone just today left a comment. People are still finding and watching it, and this comment encapsulates why I love having you on this podcast. This person said, "Wow, every word from Elena encapsulates years of knowledge. This is one to digest, slowly go back to and put on repeat. Thanks for sharing your experience with the world"

Thank you for having me. And my north star metric is insights per minute. That's what I try to use whenever I have any live meetings with people so it squarely fits within what I'm optimizing for. That's great. Lenny Rachitsky[00:05:37)]That needs to be my KPI on this podcast, "Insights per minute."

I think you have it. I think your insights per minute is pretty high. Lenny Rachitsky[00:05:44)]That is. I do shoot for that, although I have learned you also needed to feel good and feel their story. There's an interesting combo stuff. You can't just be insight, insight,

It's all about how you present them too. Storytelling is a big portion of it actually to stick. Lenny Rachitsky[00:06:00)]Already insight. That's an insight right there. There's two areas that I want to spend time on with you, and these are areas I know you've been thinking a lot about. One is growth tactics that never work, that people keep spending time on and waste their time on. And I know you have a nice list of things you've seen that just don't work that people keep trying. And then two is growth frameworks, your favorite growth frameworks to help people wrap their mind around how to think about growth and grow their product. We're going to start with growth tactics that never works. Maybe just frame what we're going to talk about,

talk about what this list and collection of tactics that we're going to talk about is. Elena Verna[00:06:36)]Growth is a fairly new field compared to marketing or product management or engineering. There's a lot of people that are now accumulated that have 10 years or so experience, but there's also a lot of newcomers and because there's ratio of actually newcomers, it's much higher than those people that have five, 10 years of experience of doing growth. You have a lot of renowned interest in growth hacks. What is the sure things to get growth? What is the sure thing to get that metric up? How can I contribute to success with the company the fastest way possible? All of these shortcuts and obviously in the age of social media where everybody and anybody tries to share their tips and tricks and this and that,

people are grasping for oftentimes things that are completely out of context or they are very specific to one example and actually do not apply as a pattern or simply not even applicable to their type of business whatsoever.[00:07:35)]There's just a lot of failure happening in growth teams. Actually, I think growth teams are becoming one of those departments that has a higher head of growth firing rate than even CMOs because people are coming in, there's a bunch of expectations, "Hey, you're ahead of growth or you are a growth pm or you're a growth marketer, you're supposed to drive growth." And when that growth does not happen, here comes the axe and people off they go and the recycle and cycle starts all over in order to populate those positions. I think that there's just a lot of misinformation I would say probably out there in terms of what growth actually is and how it should be done in the companies. And today I just want to cover some of the biggest ones that I see as a patterns as I'm advising companies,

as I'm operating in companies because it's just so blatant yet there's very few pieces of information on this for people to learn from. Lenny Rachitsky[00:08:31)]Amazing. What's number one?

Elena Verna[00:08:34)]Number one, I have to start with hiring. There's lots of positions open all the time. There's so many from head of growth to growth PM there's a lot of rotation, as I said that is happening in the field. Very few growth people actually stay in the job for over a year or two years. There's a lot of constant churn and constant rehiring. And when you doing hiring, there's a lot of mistakes that are actually happening in hiring that I just want to start off on the list. It's not a roadmap item, but oh my gosh,

there's just so much fault that is happening here. And I did write about it on your blog of hiring for growth. There's a little bit of a reference to that and one of the biggest latent issues that I see is hiring too soon for growth.[00:09:17)]We live in tech, there's always lots of startups. Startups are obviously looking to grow and there is a huge misconception in the shield that in order to get growth going, you need a growth team, absolutely not true. In order to get the growth going in the company, a founder and the founding team have to figure out how to make it grow to the first, let's say a million, 5 million, 10 million in ARR. Some of the companies don't even create growth teams until they're a hundred, 200

million in ARR because to figure out your product market fit and how to distribute it's not something that you can outsource to somebody. It's not somebody that with a shiny resume can come over and all of a sudden wave a magic wand and all of a sudden you have viral campaigns and a bunch of signups coming through and everybody's paying and everybody's retaining.[00:10:09)]That just doesn't happen. I see that mistake happening a lot. I really believe that the founder led growth is not being popularized enough that you do not need growth teams until you actually can start running experiments on your user base, which means that you have volume of users that you can learn from and optimize and innovate on,

and that first wave of growth has to be founder led.[00:10:35)]And there's two specific reasons that I incur on, which is before you have growth team, before you would think about growth team first you need to have solid PMF, product market fit, means that you have a solution to a problem and you have customers not only coming in and solving that problem with your solution, but they're also retaining and staying with you. There is a good retention. You can use channel score of how many people would say that they cannot live without your product as well, but there's some sort of PMF. And then number two, you have data growth cannot function without data. If you have 10 users or 10 customers, that's not data, that's a G-sheet with your customers and you don't need a growth team for that. Until you have data that you can actually do an analysis and you can create hypotheses on and you can start applying experimentation,

don't even think about growth team. Lenny Rachitsky[00:11:32)]Just to summarize a few of the things you just said, just for folks, you basically have seen startups look for a head of growth to join and solve their growth problem and your insight there is just almost always that is not going to be the solution to your problem until you have strong retention already, have a really high score on the channel score if don't have a ton of data yet and party advice is just the founder should continue to do this for as long as possible. A million ARR is one milestone a lot of people recommend. To your point,

a lot of companies wait lot longer. Elena Verna[00:12:06)]Yes. And honestly, the longer you wait, the better it is because that way your entire company will be trained to be responsible for growth as opposed to putting this one island with a growth team and saying, "They're going to be growing," and what is the rest of the company doing? Honestly, the longer you wait,

the better. Lenny Rachitsky[00:12:24)]As you talk about this, sales is a part of what you described here, like hiring your first sales person. And I guess how do you think about your first head of growth versus salesperson? Is there anything advice there is? Like for B2B SaaS, you probably don't hire head of growth for even longer, you hire sales first or what's your advice?

Elena Verna[00:12:42)]It depends on how you're actually going to collect the monies. If your money collection is going to happen through sales team primarily, then you absolutely should be hiring sales way before growth. In fact, in the sales led companies, growth teams are not necessarily needed even that much. You might have a growth marketing team, which is really a demand gen team that is rebranded for growth marketing so they can charge you 20 to 30% more in their salaries, but at the end of the day, sales is doing your monetization. They are doing your activation, they are doing your retention and success efforts. For sales like companies, yeah, higher sales,

absolutely. Unless you're starting to do self-serve revenue.[00:13:23)]You're trying to have product sell itself through potentially freemium acquisition, trial acquisition or you actually having product led activation, monetization, that's when you would need a growth person. If you're starting with self-serve monetization, growth hire should be frankly first before sales. Your sales are going to be more opportunistic in nature versus if you sales led company, go ahead, hire sales,

wait for growth until you are ready to overlay product-led growth on top of your sales motion. Lenny Rachitsky[00:13:57)]That's an excellent clarification. Basically what I'm hearing,

the advice is hire your ahead of growth only when you have clear product market fit and you're a product-led company and beyond a millionaire ARR ideally something like that. Elena Verna[00:14:11)]Right. And I won't say you're product-led company. You are relying on product-led motion to resolve a lot of the growth levers within you because you don't have to be fully product-led company. But if product, let's say acquires people, let's say with the SEO or SEM, and then its product is meant to activate them and then sales closes them, sales would be obviously important as well, but growth would have to come in a little bit sooner as well. If you have any product-led components where product is responsible for acquisition, activation, monetization or retention,

that's where growth comes in. Lenny Rachitsky[00:14:48)]We talked deeply about that specific topic in our first conversation, just for folks,

I need to repeat it. You need to repeat it three times right before it sticks to people. Hopefully this is the third time. Lenny Rachitsky[00:15:01)]Absolutely. I'm only saying that because people may be wanting more of what you're describing and I will point them to our first episode,

Amazing. Lenny Rachitsky[00:15:10)]Excellent. Anything else before we move on to number two?

Elena Verna[00:15:13)]No,

Let's do it. Elena Verna[00:15:16)]Number two, this is on the other side on the matured company where I see a trend over and over, and it's becoming even more prominent right now of when companies growth slows down, which inevitably happens for a lot of businesses, it happens for a variety of reasons. We're not going to go into the reasons as to why growth can be slowing down and then they hire a shiny growth head to fix the problem, to basically saying, "Our business is slowing down. We are on the decline. We're going to bring this person, or we're going to put this team together and our growth is going to accelerate." That just does not happen. If you have the overall business slowing down,

your head of growth is destined to fail because the reason business is slowing down is much deeper than not having a growth team.[00:16:03)]Growth team can optimize, growth can maybe lift it by 10, 15%. Maybe that's enough for you. Even that is on the upper end of what growth team will be able to do if there is a slow-down trajectory. But what's important is that if you have core product and core marketing issues,

growth team will not be able to fix them for you. You're going to have to address the big elephant in the room as to why business is slowing down in the first place as opposed to just plopping a growth team on the issue and expecting them to do miracles while the rest of the business continues chugging on the same trajectory that caused the slowdown in the first place. Lenny Rachitsky[00:16:41)]Wow, I've never heard this point before and it's such an important one and it's very related to your first point. Growth isn't going to build a product people want,

Exactly. Lenny Rachitsky[00:16:54)]If your business is slowing,

your product market fit basically might be disappearing and growth isn't solving that problem. Elena Verna[00:16:59)]Disappearing, it may be degrading, it may be being eaten by a competitor because there's somebody that is stomping on your territory. The point is growth can amplify great product market fit and growth can help you grow faster once you are already growing. But if you are slowing down and you have issues with either your go-to-market strategy or your core product strategy with your core product market fit, growth is going to be absolutely helpless to do anything. And it's honestly, it's a huge waste of money because at those size of the companies,

you would make fairly large growth teams in order to tackle every single product flow and interface that is already out there and invented.[00:17:45)]It's a huge expense. ROI on it, maybe at least one to one. What you put into it, you might get that much out of it, but it's not going to be enough to create a J curve of the reacceleration by just relying on growth team. I think it's just like this is where the name growth team plays against it because, "We're looking for growth. Do you have a growth team?" No. I don't have a better idea by the way how to name it, but this is where I think it's misunderstood that there's the silver bullet of a perfect head of growth,

perfect growth team that can reverse the trajectory of the business. Lenny Rachitsky[00:18:26)]Then for folks that are thinking about, "Wow, maybe I should be hiring head of growth," when should you hire head of growth? When you're an established company,

Elena Verna[00:18:33)]If you are declining in your revenue growth or whatever other metric that you're looking at, your weekly active users or whatnot, see at least that you're able to plateau it so you can stop the decline. There is already a visible trajectory that your core product and your core marketing teams are able to at least reverse the degradation of the metrics. Ideally, you would even start to see some immediate signs of life that there is potential in the business, in the pockets, and then you can put growth into it to really blow it up to the full extent. But if you are on a decline,

just don't do it because there's going to be very disappointing results in the year or so. Lenny Rachitsky[00:19:18)]Awesome. Great one,

let's move on. Number three. Elena Verna[00:19:23)]Number three, this is my favorite, and it might be a little spicy because if there's any marketers listening out here, but doing rebrand more specifically, homepage redesign to drive growth. This is what hurts me so much and I've lived through so many of these and never ever once have I seen a rebrand or redesign, especially a UK marketing site, produce good performance results. Now, there's many reasons as to why you might want to do a rebrand, why you might want to design your marketing site because you're trying to enter a new market, new category,

your product has evolved and you need to do a full update. But those are almost like it's a logging indicator that something needs to change and you're changing it and then you know that you're going to have to optimize the hell out of it in order to actually bring it even to the previous performance results.[00:20:22)]It's like a stepping stone back, but there is a much bigger room for upside that you can get to, but you are going to have to work to get to that upside. But yet so many companies, there's a story that happens all the time. I hire a new CMO, new CMO comes in, they're like, "What's inside my house here? My house is not designed to my liking. Let me repaint these walls. I want this shade of blue. Let me put the couches over here." And they start almost designing their website or designing the brand as if it was reflection of their personal taste. And oftentimes it's promised with our acquisition is going to go up, our category penetration is going to go up,

our education or awareness is going to go up.[00:21:10)]And it never materializes into anything meaningful because again, if you're doing it as a step towards unlocking new global maxima, sure, I love that. Do it. Go after it. Know that you have a ton of work ahead of you in order to actually unlock that global maxima. But to ever promise a homepage redesign or marketing site redesign in order to drive more acquisition is a failed promise that is going to be led by lots of agency money spending, often a million dollars plus, lots of arguing about which shade of blue your brand color is going to be, and eight to 10

months at the minimum of development and very lackluster results afterwards. Lenny Rachitsky[00:21:58)]Oh man, I'm loving this list already. This is great. To your point, it may still be worth doing if you're coming into it eyes wide open, this isn't going to drive growth, but we're setting ourselves up for a future brand that's world-class and we know our current brand stinks and our homepage needs to be refreshed. If you're aware, it's not going to drive growth,

it might be okay. Elena Verna[00:22:19)]Every single time I've seen a marketing site at least rebrand, it's been a step back in performance that then is being treated as a fire drill to fix. Just don't do it if you expect immediate results out of it,

or at least educate the team on how long it's going to take to get to the point where you think that there's going to be upside away from your original brand. Lenny Rachitsky[00:22:48)]I've experienced this not just with marketing sites,

but most redesigns. Redesign of the product. Elena Verna[00:22:53)]Product redesign. How much product and engineering work comes into just changing a logo in your product or changing colors? It's insane. With no results ever,

there's no results. Lenny Rachitsky[00:23:06)]And to your point, it's like, "We've spent six months redoing onboarding. Everything we've built builds on this new design and experience, we can't not launch it. Every team is working on this new world, we're just going to launch it and then we're going to claw back. We're going to figure out how to get it back."

That's how it goes. Elena Verna[00:23:26)]It's a new starting point and that starting point is going to be much lower than your current optimized experience that you have. Whether it's well optimized or not optimized, it doesn't matter. It's gone through some level of optimization versus rebrand is always a shot in the dark. It might be prettier, sure, but that doesn't mean it's going to perform well. Obviously never say never. Sometimes it might work, and if it worked for you,

I am so glad. But that's an outlier and don't treat it as a pattern. Lenny Rachitsky[00:23:57)]And I was just going to say, I think everyone listening to this that is working on something like this is probably thinking, "No, I think we have a good shot at this."

Lenny Rachitsky[00:24:00)]... is working on something like this is probably thinking, "No, I think we have a good shot at this. We've really thought deeply about this and it might actually be really positive." In your experience, it sounds like you've seen it work occasionally, or is it just never?

Elena Verna[00:24:15)]The best I've ever seen is that it produced net neutral results and it produced us better ability to optimize towards something bigger. That's the best case scenario. So if you're working on it, my biggest advice is not to say you stop. Just understand that the goal here is not to drive at launch, in the seven-day readout after launch,

some increased performance.[00:24:38)]The goal here should be, we will launch, we will probably see a hit, model out and forecast for a hit, and then give yourself two to three months at the minimum, ideally more like six months, to really optimize it back to a good standing where it can potentially outperform. But you need to bake in that three to six months of work after the launch, which is what a lot of companies and teams forget to do because they just move on. Because it's like big initiative, big pop,

I love that we're only at number three. This is amazing. Let's do number four. Elena Verna[00:25:13)]Okay. Number four is obsessing over your competition. Okay,

so there's a little bit of a gotcha here. I tear down companies all the time. I have thousands of Gmail accounts that I sign up for any and every product. I go through their entire experience. I look at their monetization strategies. I look at their activation. I do it across direct competition of the company that I'm working with as well. I want to know what I'm playing against.[00:25:45)]So knowing what your competition is doing is extremely important. Being inspired by some aspects of what your competition is doing in their experience is a wonderful place to originate an ideation or potentially try to implement into your product as well. But blatantly saying, "Hey, we're going to copy all of these best tactics or all of these flows because, hey, they're doing better than us. Let's just rip them and do exactly the same. Why isn't our onboarding looks the same as this onboarding? This company is so successful." (00:26:20): That's where things really go wrong because every single experience is very unique to their customer, to their channel. You don't even know if you're getting their actual experience or you use some tester cell or you're getting some personalized thing based on where you signed up from, who you said that you are. So you don't even know what actually the overall thing looks like most of the time and putting that into your product, it just leads to very subpar results. And there's a lot of drive, especially to have it as a shortcut. "Okay, we don't want to go through this ideation or user research. We don't want to do user interviews, but we don't want to do A/B testing. It works for them. It must work for us. Let's just go and do it." And it fails 95%

of the time.[00:27:08)]Now, there are certain pieces that I would rightly recommend. I already said inspiration. I use it for inspiration all the time. I'm like, "Okay, what's cool? What is everybody doing?" So because I want to just stay in the know on what other people are implementing and hopefully if it's in the control experience, it works and it worked better. I use web archives a ton for locked out pages too. I'm like, okay, how did it look last year? Why does their whole page look this way, or the pricing page?

And I analyze that and I try to extrapolate some results.[00:27:40)]I also think that there is a lot of patterns you start to notice as you start tearing down all of these companies. You're like, "Oh, these elements are always the same." That means all of these companies are arriving to these things and they seem to be winning elements. And you can take those elements and put them into your product, but you can never skip the ideation, the design, the user research, the customer interview,

the experimentation step.[00:28:04)]And you should always balance it with actually innovating yourself in your product. Because copying competition is like the fastest way to mediocrity because you'll never be a leader if you copied somebody else. Leader is by default is somebody that is able to separate themselves from the pack in something else. And if you are trying to just be, I don't know who is ever trying to be the mediocre middle of the pack, but maybe it's a good starting point,

but never the end goal.[00:28:37)]The only other thing that I'll say before I'll stop talking is benchmarks. Benchmarks are also very dangerous here to use because benchmarks are usually done on all of the competition, on all of the softwares out there. And the way people define numbers is so different from company to company. Even if you look as something as simple as signups. Okay, how many signups should you be on average getting? Or your conversion from prospecting visitor to a signup? Or from a signup to activated user? It's so depends on how do you define prospect visitor? Some companies define it as all traffic. Some define it as new traffic. Some of them define it on the new IP address,

new persistent id. How Google analytics defines it. How Amplitude defines it.[00:29:21)]So all of these definitions are so different. So taking also any benchmark that is derived from competition and saying, "This is where we should be,"

is also so dangerous because it might not even be applicable depending on how you define the metric. And one of the things that all of those benchmarking data fails is to actually look at specific definitions. And that's not to say that benchmarks are not extremely valuable data point in your decision making because it's an input that you should leverage to say what it could be possible. But to just blindly it and set it is just a sure way to fail any of your initiatives and efforts. Lenny Rachitsky[00:30:04)]You're telling me that there's no shortcuts?

Elena Verna[00:30:10)]I wish there were. I mean, I've been doing this for over 15 years. If there were any shortcuts, I'd be all over them. There are patterns and there are frameworks,

but there's no shortcuts. Lenny Rachitsky[00:30:20)]So people hearing this, they're like, "Okay, don't copy the competition. Use it for inspiration." It's a little hard to know exactly the line between those two. Is there an example that you can think of where you took really interesting inspiration from someone and it worked for a company you're working with? Or you copied someone and it's just like, "Oh, that failed. That was a bad idea."

Elena Verna[00:30:41)]I use competition to understand the general framework of how people collect some information or resolve certain steps. So, for example, a sharing model so many products like, "Hey, can you share this with somebody?" Well, you can go and spend so much time of figuring out how it should look. Or you can go to Slack, you can go to Figma, you can go to Nero, you can go to Notion. Like, okay, Google, how are they doing sharing model? You can look at all of that and say, "Okay, here's all of the common elements that all of them have. Here's the pieces that I think will apply to my product. Here's things that do not, and here's what I can derive from it." (00:31:19): I use it as an input into ideation, but I never use it as a destination for the result, if that makes sense. Because it's very helpful to not start from scratch. The empty start problem is real and competition is a wonderful way to not have that and to have input into it, but never to just say, "Oh, we can skip the design cycle off we go," or, "Just slap our colors on it. If it works for them, it's going to work for us." So I have extensive Nero boards with everybody's onboarding flows, with everybody's pricing pages, their sharing model,

their invite colleagues models that I reference all the time.[00:32:00)]But they've never been the exact thing that I would use for any company as opposed to say, "Hey, I think this is a great starting point for you. Here are the things that I think will work very well for your company and for your product and take these elements. The rest you need to go and do themselves, so at least that way there's a starting point." (00:32:22): And this is why I also started doing a lot more of my own, almost, prototypes, like skeletons of here's the elements that you should do in these flows. I have one for pricing page, I have one for homepage, but you need to put in your own [inaudible 00:32:36] into it,

in order for it to actually work. Lenny Rachitsky[00:32:39)]What made me realize this back in the day was thinking at Airbnb, especially, thinking about people looking at our flow and being like, they've got it all figured out. We're just going to copy what they've done, so thoughtful and have tested everything. And knowing how that has not happened and how so much of this was guesswork and we hate so much of it. Just thinking about people trying to copy this thinking we know what we're doing. It's like, "What are you guys even thinking?"

Elena Verna[00:33:02)]Oh my God, I actually had that happen to me. At Dropbox not so long ago, somebody reached out and they're like, "Oh, I looked." It was like some page on activation flow and they're like, "Oh, I love this page. This is so cool. I love what you've done here. I'm going to go take it to my company." I'm like, "We haven't touched it in 10 years. This page is only visible for small cohort of people. Please don't do it. Please don't copy it. It performs like shit. I know it's out there, but it's not meant to be out there. Nobody thoughtfully put it out there."

So that's definitely a huge failure point that you can run into. Lenny Rachitsky[00:33:42)]Right, if it's like a fancy company,

If people only knew of how much craziness is happening in those big companies and how much chaos there is. Lenny Rachitsky[00:33:57)]Oh man,

that's a whole other podcast episode. Elena Verna[00:33:59)]Whole other podcasts,

yes. Lenny Rachitsky[00:34:00)]Okay,

number five. Elena Verna[00:34:02)]Okay, I have this one. It's a little bit Meta, but I see it happening all the time. We love to think that our problems are unique. I'm working in this company and we have this gross problem and we need to go and figure out the solution from the grounds up. Maybe this is a little bit related to the competition point, but I'm very sorry to break it to all of you, but your problem is not unique. I am 99% sure of that. Your problem has been felt by somebody somewhere in probably many,

many places and you trying to re-engineer solution is time lost to market and has a huge opportunity cost.[00:34:49)]So my biggest thing that I try to get people is don't think that you have unique problems. You don't. I know we love to. It'd be fun to have something unique to learn, but with so many startups, with so many people in our industry, in your industry, whichever industry that is, your problem has been solved by somebody. Or at least that there's a lot of failures on the problem that you should be learning from. And number one thing that whenever you have an initiative or whenever you have a metric that you need to go and move, to not start from scratch, ever. Do not start from scratch. It's the worst thing that you can do because you can waste so many cycles on trying to do something that probably has already been solved, which means how do you approach this as a result? (00:35:41): Well, you can look at competition and how they're solving the problem. That's one input, for sure. You should go find people that have solved this problem because there are people there and people love to talk about what they do. So take advantage of that human psychology and go find those people and just ask them, "How did you do it? What did you do? What happened?" Obviously, not all the time everybody's going to respond, but we have LinkedIn, we have X. Go out there,

find the people that you think or ask around in your network of who you think might have similar solutions and just go talk to people. It would be incredible shortcut if you're talking about an actual hack that is a hack to get to an optimal solution.[00:36:26)]And then the last thing that I would also say is that solving any one problem uniquely is extremely inefficient. We are evolving so fast in our market, you need to be able to patternize your solutions. Patternize, is that a word?

Let's make it a word. Elena Verna[00:36:44)]Make patterns. Make patterns out of your solutions. So more you can stop looking at as a unique data point or unique problem and more as there is, I need to fit it into existing pattern or I need to figure out the framework on how to solve not only this problem but other problems. The faster you'll be able to get at least to like 60% of the solution there. And then you can do very authentic implementation of whatever you want to do. But to go from zero to 60 manually, as a one-off, we do not have time in the industry right now to do it,

unless you want to be left behind. Lenny Rachitsky[00:37:23)]Bam. Powerful words. Is there an example that comes to mind of you doing this either the wrong way of just thinking this was unique and realizing I should have talked to people, or where you actually realized something was not unique?

Elena Verna[00:37:37)]I'll give you actually an example that I had when I was at Nero. At Nero, we were first trying to stand up community, and I was tasked to do it, and I've never done it before. So I was banging my head around against the wall and I'm like, "Okay, how do I do it? What software do we use? Where do we acquire users? What kind of content is going to go in there?" (00:38:02): So I was approaching it almost like a finding product market fit, and I will fail so much doing it. And I honestly only have a year to get to some sort of traction before this is going to get shut down because company is impatient, company is moving fast. So if this is going to be a failure point, it's either going to be taken away from me, which is fair, or we is going to close the door on it,

which would be a huge failure both on my point and for company as a whole.[00:38:29)]So I went and I started talking to a bunch of people that have done communities, and I remember talking to Caroline from Atlassian who has stood up community. I actually hired her as an advisor afterwards and she's like, "Well, are you talking about a user community or an agency community or a partner community?" And I'm like, my mind was blown. I'm like, "I even considering all of these angles because I was just literally thinking about users only." And she's like, "Well, you shouldn't necessarily start with the user community. If you want some results out of it, go to agency or partner communities first." She would applying it to me in a structural way for me to grasp my head around it and then implement something that had much better results at the end that I wouldn't even gotten to probably until six, eight months later,

if I didn't talk to her.[00:39:19)]So I think it has to come with a place of knowing that you don't know everything and humility to say, "Hey, I need help," and I might have a already fancy title. At that point, I was an interim CMO at Nero and I'm like, "I don't know how to do this."

And it actually earns you a lot more credit than you think. And a lot of people are afraid to admit that they don't know how to solve a problem and that's why they start from scratch. But you need to really put your ego aside and get some help faster than trying to hit every single failure point along the way. Lenny Rachitsky[00:40:02)]And the thing that'll really hurt your ego is failing. And so the more you could do to avoid failing and being successful with this initiative by talking to people,

doing research. Elena Verna[00:40:12)]And to be fair, failure is going to be unavoidable. If you talk about growth, growth is about failure. My big motto, life motto on growth is that you have to fail to learn. You can't just constantly succeed. Success is an output of a lot of failures, but the question is, how much time do you have to fail? And a lot of times we don't realize how many failure cycles we're going to have to go through before we get a success, and that company, or even market, has no time for that. So still expect to fail, sure,

but the timeline for failures is going to be shortened quite a bit. Lenny Rachitsky[00:40:54)]Okay, so we've gone halfway through your list. There's 10 items on this list, right?

Elena Verna[00:40:58)]Yes, yes. There's 10

items. Next one is a good one. Lenny Rachitsky[00:41:01)]I'm excited to chat with Christina Gilbert, the founder of OneSchema, one of our longtime podcast sponsors. Hi,

Christina. Christina Gilbert[00:41:08)]Yes. Thank you for having me on,

Lenny. Lenny Rachitsky[00:41:10)]What is the latest with OneSchema? I know you now work with some of my favorite companies like Ramp, Vanta, Scale,

and Watershed. I heard that you just launched a new product to help product teams import CSVs from especially tricky systems like ERPs. Christina Gilbert[00:41:26)]Yes, so we just launched OneSchema file feeds, which allows you to build an integration with any system in 15

minutes as long as you can export a CSV to an SFTP folder. We see our customers all the time getting stuck with hacks and workarounds and the product teams that we work with don't have to turn down prospects because their systems are too hard to integrate with. We allow our customers to offer thousands of integrations without involving their engineering team at all. Lenny Rachitsky[00:41:47)]I can tell you that if team had to build integrations like this, how nice would it be to be able to take this off my roadmap and instead use something like OneSchema and not just to build it, but also to maintain it forever?

Christina Gilbert[00:41:59)]Absolutely, Lenny. We've heard so many horror stories of multi-day outages from even just a handful of ad records. We are laser-focused on integration reliability to help teams end all of those distractions that come up with integrations. We have a built-in validation layer that stops any bad data from entering your system,

and OneSchema will notify your team immediately of any data that looks incorrect. Lenny Rachitsky[00:42:19)]I know that importing incorrect data can cause all kinds of pain for your customers and quickly lose their trust. Christina, thank you for joining us and if you want to learn more,

head on over to oneschema.co. That's oneschema.co.[00:42:33)]Let me summarize the first five real quick and then we'll keep going. So the first is, wait longer than you think to hire a head of growth. Wait until you have product market fit, maybe a million,

or especially if you're self-serve oriented.[00:42:45)]Number two is if your growth is declining, the head of growth won't solve that problem. First, stop the decline at least. Third is redesigning your homepage, marketing page. Rebranding is not only not going to help you grow,

it's going to probably hurt growth and slow things down. And so just go into that wide eyes wide open.[00:43:07)]Four is don't just copy the competition and assume they know what they're doing and assume that what they do is going to work for you. Use it as inspiration. On the other hand, look at get inspiration from experts, competition, trends, things like that to help you solve your problem, which you think is no one solved before. It turns out every problem you're solving someone has solved in some way,

most likely. Elena Verna[00:43:30)]Yes, especially in growth. I mean, I know this can apply to a lot of product management and to marketing as well, but in growth, when you're talking about how do I lift activation or have a really big drop off between activation and monetization? These things are a lot more patternized than you would expect them to be,

so go and find those patterns as opposed to trying to re-engineer it. Lenny Rachitsky[00:43:55)]Awesome. Okay,

let's keep going. Number six. Elena Verna[00:43:57)]So next one. Next one is a little spicy one too, and that is part of growth you owning some channels. A lot of growth teams own acquisition. So owning channels and growth prioritizing SEO, SEM, social, is one of the biggest mistakes I think a growth team can do. Now, obviously, I'm not saying don't do SEO, or don't do SEM, so organic search or paid search. I'm not saying that. However, as a growth team,

your number one priority is to create your own or your earned channel. So channel that you've earned and that nobody else can compete in but you.[00:44:45)]What do I mean by that? When you're doing organic search or paid search, you're making Google richer. Great for Google. Google is an incredible company, but by dumping money into paid marketing, you are paying them and you're paying for their distribution and access to their distribution. If you're doing social too, like you're doing, let's say, Instagram or whatnot, paid advertising in Instagram, that's great, but all of that works on algorithm. An algorithm can giveth,

but algorithm can also taketh away at any point. And you have no control because you don't own those channels. You are playing with other players and you're competing against them in somebody else's channel.[00:45:29)]Now, on the other side, there can be your own earned channel. What is earned channel? It really goes into the concept of product-led growth acquisition, which means you're relying on virality, on word of mouth, on user-generated content in order to attract new acquisition through top of the funnel. So why is that earned and why do I put that above, let's say organic search, which is SEO, obviously, is wonderful? But again, search just goes to Google. That's great. Versus if you build your own user-generated content in your own community,

nobody else can compete with you in that. That is yours. Your competitors cannot buy their eyeballs. Their people are going to be attracting other people.[00:46:21)]Referrals from people to people are everything. So, Lenny, if I, let's say I sign up for, say, Superhuman and I invite you into it. That is much stronger acquisition tactic versus you looking for and finding Superhuman, let's say on paid marketing advertisements. And especially with our age right now where search as an interface is changing towards AI interface and the AI interface is giving a lot less credit to all of the content. Content is almost becoming a database and there's a new UI that is being developed on it. Before it was Google was the UI, and now AI is coming in with a new UI,

and there's not as much control that you have over this new UI that is being developed.[00:47:05)]Focusing on these earned channels that you own becomes the outmost priority. And if you don't have them on your growth roadmap, you are going to be in some really big trouble over the next year to two years because your cost of acquisition is only going to go up. Your competition and those channel is only going to go up. You're constantly going to be praying to algorithm Gods to giveth your way, but again,

they can taketh at any point. And it's really one of those fundamental growth team failure points if they don't spend enough time on virality and user generated content to create their own earned acquisition. Lenny Rachitsky[00:47:48)]Wow. Okay. This is incredible. This is its own podcast episode in theory that we could do of how to actually do this. We're not going to cover the strategy. Also, this may not necessarily work for every company. Your point is, you can grow other ways,

but this is by far ... Lenny Rachitsky[00:48:00)]Your point is you can grow other ways, but this is by far the most powerful, most effective, cheapest,

most likely to succeed. If you can figure this out. Elena Verna[00:48:08)]It's not cheapest. It's actually cost a lot of product and engineering and even marketing resources to stand up. So it's not the cost of a budget, but it's cost of people that will have to work to create your own channel, so to speak, for acquisition. And you're right, maybe that's not for everybody, but it's actually applicable to more products than people realize. Because, every single product has some sort of team functionality, some sort of roles that they need to do. Every product can drive word of mouth loop... Well, actually, that's not true. Not every product can drive word of mouth loop,

but they can drive recommendations and they can create user generated content.[00:48:46)]One of those tactics usually applies to at least one product. So there is an opportunity to create some sort of earned channel, even though it might feel unnatural at the beginning depending on how you reach PMF and how you've scaled in the first couple of stages of it. But if you are not exploring it and if you are not investing into it or at least trying and failing within it,

I think that you are really leaving too much of your growth future into the hands of somebody else that you have low control over. Lenny Rachitsky[00:49:19)]So the advice here is your growth team. It's okay if they work on SEM, pay growth basically and SEO, but most of your effort and investment should be in earned channel, owned channels, specifically virality generated content?

Elena Verna[00:49:35)]Diversify. Just diversify your strategy. So not all of it is reliant on somebody else giving you access to their distribution. Now, for example, a Dropbox, over 50% of acquisition comes through sharing. So I load something into my Dropbox, maybe I need to send it out for signature. Maybe I need to just share this file to transfer it to somebody. Maybe I just need to share this file as a final delivery to my clients that I was working with. Well, that recipient then is now aware of Dropbox,

so it solved the brand awareness.[00:50:09)]By that action of sharing, you actually almost activated that recipient too, so you don't need to educate them anymore on how the product works and whatnot. And the percentage of those recipients sign up to become Dropbox users, and that accounts for 50% of acquisition. That is a stable earned channel that nobody can compete with, and it's only for Dropbox to lose, so to speak. And we actually had our own growth pod focused on it. Because to optimize both sender experience and the recipient experience, because it was such a powerful growth and growth engine that driven the company,

and every business should have an attempt at one of these. Lenny Rachitsky[00:50:51)]I think this is going to be a really good push for a lot of growth teams to think about what could we do here?

Number seven. Four to go Elena Verna[00:50:58)]Number seven. We've talked about this at least a little bit in our last podcast too. But I see this as a question that comes up all the time and something that people are afraid of to invest, which is a mistake. Every single company starts with their growth efforts focused either on product-led growth. Hey, I'm going to have everything being done self-serve or on sales in marketing. I'm going to have sales team and then I'm going to have marketing team and they're going to do all of the work and my product is just going to create the functionality. And that's good and fine for a while depending on how long that while is. But not overlaying every single way that you can grow through product,

through marketing and through sales as an evolution. Is a huge mistake that a lot of growth teams fail to iterate on and innovate on.[00:51:53)]The way that I best be comparing it is if product has a product-market fit, which is great, that product-market fit is not going to last that product forever. They're always going to have to have a second horizon. They're always going to have to have a product-market fit expansion efforts in order to continue to grab as many people and solve as many people's problems as possible and increasing their team. Well, the same comes with growth. If you have a growth model that works for you, that's wonderful, good for you. Optimize it, grow it, scale it, create a team that will be nurturing it and that will be amplifying it, but you're going to need to evolve it, and that evolution needs to come through overlaying other growth models on top of it. So, A, you are diversified away from just one growth model failing,

because a lot of times you're going to get into a situation of law.[00:52:48)]I love Andrew Chen's article here. It's called a Law of Shitty Clickthroughs. Where if you over-optimize the same thing over and over again, it has minimal returns, and some growth models have very limited time spans. Some of them are huge, some can grow for sharing loop at Dropbox. It's 17

years in the making and it's still firing. Good for it. That's amazing. But that's very much an anomaly. Most of growth loops spin out their ability to produce meaningful results for you within the first five to six to seven years.[00:53:21)]So continuously overlaying those different growth models, and what I'm specifically talking about is product-led growth, marketing- led growth, sales-led growth, and introducing it into this ecosystem constantly is what really separates companies that can continue growing for a long periods of times versus the ones that can see a really big blip, potentially even unicorn type of growth rates of 70, 80, whatever plus percent,

and then it starts to slow down. And don't wait until that slowdown happens. You need to really start thinking about different ways that you can attract people to grow so you are not leaving a gap in the market that somebody else can enter and own. As opposed to you playing in every way in where you can interact with your customer. Lenny Rachitsky[00:54:13)]The way I think about this is the S-curves of every growth model and growth lever, right?

Eventually it'll help and then slow down and see you want to find the next S-curve on things that'll grow your business. Elena Verna[00:54:24)]Yes, absolutely. The way that I see it often is that especially when growth teams, they hit a really big result out of some initiative, they just keep trying to focus on that over and over again. And sometimes that focus is warranted. Like I said, our sharing loop at Dropbox has its own growth team against it. Great, but at the same time,

a lot that's not warranted for all of the... Or you need to realize that there's not more choose to squeeze out of this thing and then you need to go and you need to move on.[00:54:57)]Which actually brings me to a little bit of a next thing too, is you need to do it every 18 months. Because a lot of them are going to fail. And every five years or so, you for sure need new channel, new growth loops, new tactics, new engines so to speak, to power your growth engine. Whether it's overlaying sales on top of self-serve, whether you're doing a lot of, let's say virality right now in terms of acquisition and you're going into marketing a lot heavier. But every five years something big has to start taking a big portion of your volume. And for that every 18

years you need to introduce something- Lenny Rachitsky[00:55:39)]18

months. Elena Verna[00:55:40)]Sorry. Yeah. Every 18

months you need to introduce something new in order for it to continue evolving. Lenny Rachitsky[00:55:49)]And was that number eight of the list we're going through or that's like a bonus piece of advice?

Elena Verna[00:55:52)]No,

that's just a bonus piece of advice. Lenny Rachitsky[00:55:55)]Okay, cool. Okay, got it. And so the advice here essentially is you'll find something that is helping you grow, assume that will slow down at some point,

Yeah. Lenny Rachitsky[00:56:10)]Something I've seen, let me know if you agree, is usually there's going to be one lever that has most of your growth for a long, long time, and so all other things are not going to be as big,

but they are still important. Elena Verna[00:56:20)]So the way I think about it is I try to focus 20 to 25% of growth teams time annually. Not every given sprint or not every given quarter, but annually to introduce a new growth loop, or to introduce a new channel, or to introduce something new that can potentially bring us additional umpth to our growth engine. I know that a lot of it is going to fail. None of it is gold on any growth metrics because you cannot goal it immediately, let's say on monetization or immediately acquisition. You're just going to cut it at its knees immediately if you're not going to let it evolve into something that can be monetized, that can be responsible for acquisition. So example on Mirrorverse, which is a user-generated content library of all of the mirror boards that people create, it took us probably 18

months until we started putting metrics expectations on it.[00:57:18)]Before that, it was a thing that we were testing. And it was being used by a lot of people, but we're like, we don't even know exactly quite how this is going to fit all together. And then it started taking off as both engagement engine as well as acquisition engine. But it's important to constantly give your team room to try those new ideas. Otherwise, you're going to find yourself that your growth loops and your growth engine is slowing down and you don't have time to find that second horizon. And that is the worst situation to be in. That's where growth starts to slow down. And to recover out of that is impossible because you need revenue. You need revenue, you need revenue, you need revenue. And these growth loops on average take six months, a year,

a year and a half to start producing even visible revenue. So that's why you need to start layering it very soon into your initiatives. Lenny Rachitsky[00:58:13)]To make this even more concrete for people that are starting to like, oh, shit I got to do this. Can you just give us a list that doesn't have to be exhaustive of potential growth loops, levers, methods, engines for folks to consider? You've mentioned a few, but just give a list of people like, okay,

got it. Maybe we'll try one of these. Elena Verna[00:58:29)]I'm really big on creating a growth loop out of user generated content. I think with everything that is happening with AI and SEO at the moment, your biggest claim to fame on content strategy will be harnessing user generated content. Whether it's user generated templates, whether it's user generated case studies, review, whatever it is you need to start investing into it now, creating a library out of it, using it for activation purposes, using it then for acquisition purposes, using community to spark the conversations around it. That can be a really wonderful strategy that everybody should consider of whether there's juice in it within your product. Other ones can be, hey, we're a very, let's say individualistic product, but can we actually create a referral mechanism for it? (00:59:23): For B2C, that's actually very straightforward. A lot of B2C products thrive on referrals. For B2B, It can be more of invitation of other team members into the product to complete other jobs to be done. Hey, I've done this. I need my manager to see it. Can I create a report to share with my manager? And all of a sudden it starts to spread within the company. So creating additional almost product functionality that then creates these loops potentially for you. So it can be a slew of things. Obviously, I would highly recommend just understanding all of the menus of these earned tactics. I should do a blog post on it actually. And then just see what works for you or not. Because at least ideation step a bit has to happen. If especially you're relying on search engines for your acquisition,

start thinking about some of the earned channels as soon as possible. Lenny Rachitsky[01:00:22)]And even though you recommend spend more time on earned channels, owned channels, there's also explore SEO, explore paid growth, right? Sales?

Elena Verna[01:00:33)]Absolutely. I mean, almost everybody that's paid, arguably almost too soon potentially. There's a point to make that shouldn't be. A company should not be doing paid right now, but SEO, social resellers, all of those are wonderful tactics. Obviously, I skew very heavily towards earned channels just because once you stand that up,

Amazing. Let's keep going. So we have three to go. Number eight. Elena Verna[01:01:10)]So number eight, this one's kind of a doozy and I think a lot of people don't do it. I don't know why they don't do it. I think it's such an incredible ability to propel forward. And that is, what doesn't work, as I said in the previous growth tactics, is trying to think that each problem is unique and you need to solve it on your own. Maybe this is not so much does it work, but not hiring advisors is something that I do not recommend for you to do. You can get access to anybody for one hour a week. Yeah, you'll have to pay them. So nobody's going to volunteer their hour. We're all very,

very busy. But hiring advisors is the biggest career amplification and your business amplification can possibly do. Because to create a network of people that have all of these data points and those all of the other patterns that you can do is something that can just propel you so far forward.[01:02:16)]That doesn't mean you have to do everything advisor says. That's not the point. They're not the strategy setter. But they are additional input into your decision-making that you otherwise wouldn't have. You can go and hire somebody from Atlassian. You can go and hire somebody from Airbnb that have been and lived through all of this and they can help you solving your problem. So I think any growth team that does not have an advisor is a growth team that is underperforming. Because even me who I've advised so many companies, I've operated at so many companies, I don't know everything. Every time I take an operator role, I hire advisors for myself. Because that is the fastest way to learn anything, and I often see these teams that just try to figure out everything on their own and not have any advisors on their boards,

so to speak.[01:03:11)]I'm not even talking like an official board. I'm talking not even an advisory board. But you can hire somebody as a contractor that will be your advisor, I think is a huge mistake, especially in this day and age. Because we have a big asymmetry of information. In our field, there's very little available to learn because we're all very cagey because of competition. But at the end of the day, people know a lot of the stuff and how it worked for them internally, and I highly,

highly encourage you to not try to wing it on your own. Lenny Rachitsky[01:03:45)]Along those lines, there's also advice of just like, don't worry about advisors. You never know if they're going to be useful. There's all these hanger-ons that join your startup and want to help, but they're not helpful. If you give one tip for a founder or team that's interviewing advisors, looking for an advisor to vet them to help them find people that are actually great, what would your tip be?

Elena Verna[01:04:07)]I have actually a good one. Many advisors might not like it though. I think that you should not hire an advisor until you do some sort of workshop with them on the problem that you're experiencing. See them in action. See what kind of information they can provide to you, because any advisor that is cagey about what they know is not the type of advisor that you're going to want to have on your team. You want to have somebody that has lived through it that can talk to you, to your face about it, that is able to have hard conversations. That is able to provide you necessary examples. That is able to give you and connect dots for you for necessary patterns. So instead of just saying, "Oh, this person looks good, let me hire them as an advisor." Say, "Hey, let's have a workshop first. I have this problem. I think that you can help me fix it." (01:04:57): Pay them for it, whatever their rate is for that workshop, for sure. See how they actually interact with your team and then hire them on ongoing retainer bases. Because that creates an interview loop that is very practical, that is very quick to understand whether you can work with them, they can work with you, and whether they have anything to contribute to you. And then every single month evaluate whether that advisor should stay with you. Some advisors, they only need to be with the company for three months and off they go, that's fine. Some of them might stick with you for four or five years, but every single month you should go and say, did they add any value? I'm not saying that advisors should have any monetary expectations like revenue attribution, so to speak to them. But did you find value in having conversations with them? Did they offer anything valuable to you?

Lenny Rachitsky[01:05:49)]That was an awesome tip. And I could see why people would be like, "God damn. Elena, don't say that."

It makes so much sense. Here we go. Number nine. Here we go. Elena Verna[01:05:59)]My last one is also that I see something way too often nowadays on growth teams specifically. This is very, very gross problem. And that is too much risk averseness on growth, where you're starting to test everything. If every single one of your initiatives that you're doing on growth is an experiment, that's a problem and that is something that you should take a look at and say, what am I doing and why do I need a precise scientific measurement for every single thing that I touch in order for it to go to production or to hit the market? (01:06:47): It's almost like a disease, like a paralyzing disease, that slows down progress, that slows down velocity, that slows down learnings, that creates very terrible consequences to the output that growth teams produce. And it's a little bit counterintuitive, because experimentation is a way to do growth for growth teams and it's their process. Growth teams are meant to experiment, but I also think that experimenting on everything is something that is quite terrible once the team starts to get locked into that state,

and it's really hard to get out of because they're then afraid to do any change until or unless that they test. Lenny Rachitsky[01:07:39)]So where do you find that balance? I imagine people hearing this are like, oh, yes, this makes sense to me, and then they continue to test basically everything. What's kind of some heuristics you'd recommend for knowing, okay,

just don't test that. Don't worry about it. You don't need credit for that win. Elena Verna[01:07:52)]First of all, I think that people should trust their intuition a little bit more. Data is good, but data is only good if you have enough of it. So if you have low volume real estate, that is going to take you eight months to reach some sort of answer. Do you really want to test it for eight months? What's the point of it? My rule of thumb, if we cannot collect the sample size in the month, we shouldn't test it,

period. Because it's just then it's not fast enough. We should just go and do pre versus post. Pre versus post is pretty powerful. It's also a way to assess your impact and you can still roll back if it doesn't work. But don't think that everything needs a scientific explanation to whether it needs to be moved forward or not.[01:08:36)]Also, experimentation cannot be the way that people make decisions in the company. There's still so much about knowing your user, understanding the market for your brain to connect all of those dots and to know what needs to be an experience that your customers are going to want. That if scientific data, like a very tight determination of the probability that this is a success, it's important, absolutely do it because it might be a really big strategical pivot that you're planning to do. So it's a data point to validate that all of this extra work will be needed. It might be a very high traffic real estate that even 0.1%

difference will mean millions of dollars for you.[01:09:17)]But other than that, it should be just go, go, go. Do pre versus post. By the way, I'm not saying just release and move on. Release, do seven day, 24 hour readout, seven day readout, 28 day readout,

even come back to it a year later and measure some of the retention or extension data that is associated with it.[01:09:38)]But to test everything is debilitating to growth teams and app paralyzes them in its place. So kind of look at your initiatives and say, where do I need precision? And it's important and I can get it best in that versus where we should just go for it. And yeah, we will fail there too,

and that's okay. And we can roll back and we can figure out how to make it better. But failure is going to happen regardless.[01:10:08)]In statistics, six is tricky. Many people take it for face value versus it's just like a directional data point to say there's likely new distribution that has maybe a different mean, and 5% of the chances. If you measure in 95% statistical significance, you might not even be there, and yet really take it for so granted. Oh, it's going to drive this much lift. So I just think that people stop in this age of data,

almost rely enough on their element intuition. Lenny Rachitsky[01:10:42)]A lot of contrary intakes here. I love this. Elena, we've reached number 10. And I know number 10

is like a special one where it's more than one. Quick. Fire. Elena Verna[01:10:53)]So number 10 is going to be my little fire round. My fire round on little things that I just see people spending way too much time on it. It hurts my heart, because it's not going to drive any results on them. So number one. Color optimizations. Because the love of God, a blue is a blue is a blue. As long as it's accessible and as long as it's bright enough, off you go. You do not need to test the shades of blue or test it against green or so on. Pick a color, move on, please don't spend time on it. That's an early 2000

s tactic. It doesn't work anymore. We pass that in technology sector.[01:11:26)]Number two. Third party signups. A lot of times we think, oh, we're going to get so much more acquisition if we add Google Auth or if we add Facebook Auth or Slack Auth or Microsoft Auth, whichever auth you want to add to it. In some cases, it's very important to have third party auth. So for example, if you are a developer product, please have a GitHub auth. It's kind of unnecessary. The developers already have the account there, have them connect with it as opposed to create a new one. However, if you're a productivity product, email is fine for the longest time. Gmail is nice. It's not going to drive more acquisition for you. You're just going to do a makeshift,

and two more people... Elena Verna[01:12:00)]... more acquisition for you. You're just going to do a makeshift and two more people using it. It's not going to create incrementality, it's not going to improve your activation, it's not going to improve your retention. It's not a growth tactic. It's part of you just customer experience that you want to invest into. Number three, on the fire round, one email wonders. We stress too much about this one email that we're going to send to this one customer group. And we're like, oh gosh, how much lift is it going to cost? It'll never cause any lift. You will never work as a one-off email. Too few people open it on average, 25% open rate. At best you'll get 40 to 50% open rate. Too few people click it. One email will never do anything. If you're going to go into email, please think about it as a series about communication,

about how it interacts with product communication.[01:12:48)]It's a whole strategy. It's a whole thing. Please don't stress about one-off email. Never test a change in one email. It'll never work. You're going to have to do the whole god damn thing and see how it's going to do. Not just one email,

just never going to work. Lenny Rachitsky[01:13:03)]I'm definitely guilty of this one. That is a really good one for sure. And it's so obvious in hindsight,

so I love that you share that. Elena Verna[01:13:09)]Yes. And then the last one, growth teams are often too obsessed about removing friction. Because if we remove the steps, then more people are going to get to the destination. And to an extent, if you cause horrible friction in your product where it's just confusing about what the next step is, I agree, go fix the friction of the cognitive load that it takes to complete a step. That is the friction that you should be working on. However, just removing steps or yanking or simplifying things to an oblivion where you lose an identity of what you even do or what you're capable of doing is a completely failed growth tactic. So simplifying may be an initiative of a different problem that you're solving, but if you ever have a line item on your roadmap that says simplified onboarding,

please cross it out. It's not going to work because simplifying onboarding is an action.[01:14:08)]What is the problem that you're solving? You're never trying to solve a problem of simplifying. You always have a problem of people are confused in it, but people don't know where to go or they get lost in it or they're not educated enough. That is the problem. And simplifying might be a solution, but it can never be a problem on its own. And too many growth teams are just obsessed with this notion that came out I think in early 2000s, like, oh,

simplifying is the biggest growth hack that you can do. Do it. It's only a solution to a very specific problem set of too much complexity. Lenny Rachitsky[01:14:48)]Wow, that was a big one to end on. That I think will help a lot of people avoid wasting time. Again, a whole other podcast conversation probably focus just on onboarding advice that you probably have, that I know you have. We've reached the last item. Is there anything else you want to share about this list before we move on?

Elena Verna[01:15:07)]No,

I think we've spent too much time. We're ready to go. Lenny Rachitsky[01:15:09)]Not too much. Just enough time. And kind of on a note, I want to call an audible,

and so we were going to talk through all of your favorite frameworks. I like the way this conversation has gone. I don't want people to get overwhelmed with information. So one idea is just list maybe your favorite growth frameworks just for folks to go check these out and not spend too much time on each one. Elena Verna[01:15:30)]Yep,

Okay. Elena Verna[01:15:32)]Great. So the list of my favorite growth frameworks. And to me framework by the way, it's not a solution, it's a pattern. It's a pattern that exists across almost every single company out there and it's a starting point for your ideation and to figure out how you can almost shortcut to possible list of solutions as opposed to trying to figure out too hard of how to even define a problem on its own. So number one, it's probably expected if anybody has read anything or listened to me talk is growth loops. I think anybody who thinks about growth and anybody who thinks about growth in the funnel fashion versus understanding what the growth loops are is missing out on the ability to create sustainable growth engine. So it's very important to think about action, reaction that generates another action and it's a self-contained flywheel they can spin. A lot of resources on it at Reforge,

Brian Balfour and Casey Winters and Andrew Chen wrote a lot about this.[01:16:33)]Highly recommend anybody looking into. My next favorite growth framework's actually written by you, Lenny, and Dan, which is a race car framework. Everybody has a really hard time often thinking about what are all of them parts of growth initiatives and which are long-term, short-term, how much are they going to actually produce in results? And race car framework is wonderful because it separates different initiatives into, hey, there's some engines, loops that are just going to keep on spinning. There's some fuel that you're going to need to add into it, potentially like paid marketing dollars. There are some turbo boosts that you may have in your race car that are going to be, let's say big user conferences that you're going to hold as a product or there's [inaudible 01:17:22]

and optimizations that you're going to need to do pouring oil into that engine so that actually performs correctly. It's beautiful. I talk about it all the time with everybody.[01:17:31)]The next favorite growth framework for me comes from Bengali and that's adjacent to user theory. I think that was very powerful in terms of thinking about growth evolution. And as we talked about adding different growth models to your growth ecosystem, different growth loops, but also adjacent users which are outside of your ideal customer profiles or ICP,

outside of your core user and how growth team can really bring them in and add additional oomph to your product without even expansion of product market fit by just optimizing their experiences. I'm going to stop at these three because I think those are the most powerful ones. Lenny Rachitsky[01:18:09)]Cool. On that last one, [inaudible 01:18:11]

Bengali was on the podcast. We'll link to that episode if you want to go deeper on the adjacent using user theory. I love how that was a few minutes on things that could change people's life if they adopt one of these frameworks and learn how to think about growth in this way. It's such a powerful mental model for thinking about all this stuff you've been talking about this entire conversation. Elena Verna[01:18:30)]Yes, those frameworks are like my church in my mind of my system of beliefs of how I think about growth and how I think about it on a strategic level of owning it as a strategy,

not just like a tactic or an initiative. Lenny Rachitsky[01:18:47)]The church of Elena Verna. Amazing. Okay, so before we wrap up, I want to bring us over to Contrarian Corner, recurring segment on this podcast where I like to ask the guest if there's something they believe that most other people don't believe. Contrarian opinion you might say. Is there anything that comes to mind?

Elena Verna[01:19:08)]I do have a very contrarian opinion, although it's not so much related to growth as opposed to maybe your personal growth and my contrarian opinion is that full-time jobs are not the best way to monetize the skill that you have. It's one of the packages that everybody should evaluate and take advantage of, but too many people blindly default to that package and don't explore other options that are both available on the market as well as best suited for their personalities, for their interests,

and for their skill set. It's like a default plan that everybody subscribes to that is faulty in itself. Lenny Rachitsky[01:19:57)]Wow. Okay. Wait, we got to hear more. So what are some other packages? I think we're buying some of these packages, these other options, but I guess what should people be thinking about when you say this in terms of what can they actually do and explore?

Elena Verna[01:20:08)]I'll premise it to saying I don't want to rain parade on full-time roles. They're wonderful on video ability, to learn to get the expertise and depending on which career stage you are at full-time roles might be the absolute necessity for you to move on to and unlock the next level. However, full-time roles boxes into one company that may not be a great fit for us culturally, for our skills, for our ambitions, for our interests. Life is too short for that and ability to really go and figure out your own best monetization model, just like you work on that for your business,

you should work for that on yourself without an assumption oftentimes is the only option that you should have.[01:20:56)]So what are the other options? There's so many, obviously the couple known ones. Freelancing, you can be a contractor. I do a lot of advising and consulting because for my brain of how I work and how I like to puzzle solve and pattern match,

it works much better to be horizontal across many companies versus vertical on one specific one. But that doesn't mean I still don't take those vertical engagements to deepen my knowledge into any specific topic. But overall it's a lot more interesting for me to pattern match across multiple companies and help them grow as opposed to just focusing on one.[01:21:34)]There's interim engagements where there's a predetermined end date to your agreement. There's fractional engagements where you're working part-time on something as opposed to engulfing yourself completely. There's other ways to create courses, there's a way to create newsletters and monetize them like you're doing such a fantastic job. So there's just so many options and people are sometimes paralyzed by fear of instability,

that it creates when you start to explore other options because you don't have that contract with that one company that provides you that paycheck every two weeks to rely on. But at the same time you can create diversification for your career and you depend on when you need to pull that trigger and when is the right time for you to explore. But to spend your entire career only assuming full-time is the only way I think is a complete mistake that a lot of people are doing. Lenny Rachitsky[01:22:33)]One of my favorite posts of yours along these lines,

which is around increasing... What you want to do is increase optionality and I guess talk about that because I think it's a really powerful piece of advice. Elena Verna[01:22:46)]So this advice of career optionality, being the ultimate north star for anybody in their professional journey is something that I'm very strong on because a lot of people have the goal of, I don't know, maybe I want to be a VP or I want to become a CEO. Or I don't know, I want to be a manager and I want to people manage. And this becomes their north star and they start working towards it. But a lot of people when they get to their perceived corporate ladder north stars find themselves extremely dissatisfied, depressed even by how terrible that job is. Could people manage your job?

I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy because it's a terrible job if you don't enjoy it and you don't know if you're going to like it until you actually do it.[01:23:33)]So I think setting a title as your goal, which so many of us have titles as goals, is very wrong way to think about it as opposed to saying, "Hey, my goal professional is actually to have options so I can choose what I want to do. So I can choose what fits my life right now that I can choose what fits my skills and that fits my personality and that makes me happy." (01:23:54): And to get career optionality, if that's your goal, you start thinking about your progression a lot differently. You're not starting to think about it of what will get me to the next title. You start thinking about what will can I do next year that will increase my option pool? And that's very different than just getting to a higher title. And if you start thinking about evaluating opportunities or whether you should stay at the company, whether you should move at the company from the lens of does it increase my options if I stay at this company for one more year or does it keep it the same or does it actually potentially decrease? That is the right way to find your ultimate happy place and happy job that brings you energy,

that brings you happiness versus just going for a title and then being very disappointed with what that brings along with it. Lenny Rachitsky[01:24:48)]Amazing advice. So important and something I'll add that I think is a balance to what people may be feeling here is like, oh, I'll just bounce around all the best logo companies and create this killer resume. I think you also need to build depth and actual experience that you can tap into if you do any of these things. For example, a lot of people want to jump to like I'm going to be a newsletter person, I'm going to start a podcast,

You have to earn your right to unlock optionality and earning that right does usually lie within full-time jobs. That is a universal truth. But then at some point you should start not just looking at full- time jobs as the only option that you have. You should start to think about when can you start unlocking new ones and testing the market on it. Lenny Rachitsky[01:25:39)]The other point is that you've been a great example of is it's not a one-way door. You can have full-time job, go to something else, go back to full-time job, be an advisor, be an intern person,

You should have to do it all. It's all a menu of options and you pick a menu item that fits your best in any given point of your life. It's never say never and never shut the door on anything. Absolutely. Lenny Rachitsky[01:26:03)]Oh my god, Elena, this was incredible. Before we get to our very exciting lighting round, is there anything else you want to share or leave listeners with,

maybe a last nugget or thought or not because covered a lot already. Elena Verna[01:26:13)]No,

I think we've covered so much. I don't want to overwhelm. Lenny Rachitsky[01:26:16)]Let's do it. With that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready?

Elena Verna[01:26:21)]Yes,

I'm ready. Lenny Rachitsky[01:26:22)]First question, surprise, surprise. What are two or three books you've recommended most to other people?

Elena Verna[01:26:27)]Okay, so I just finished this book that I love so much, it's not a professional book, but it's Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. It's the same author that wrote Martian. Martian also was made into a movie. So good, so good. Can't put it down. I think I read it like two days straight. So highly recommend that. And the next one that I also started reading right now is Body Burst. Body Burst is so good. It's actually takes into account AI and how we can upload our consciousness in AI and what can happen with that. So highly recommend that, I think it's actually closer to what potentially can be in the truth for us in the future than not. But I'm a big sci-fi geek,

so I read mostly sci-fi books. Lenny Rachitsky[01:27:14)]I have a sci-fi recommendation for you that comes from Noah Smith. I love his newsletters called Noah Opinion and he has a list of his favorite sci-fi books that I've been working my way through. It's called, you may have read it by Werner Vogel, Fire Upon The Deep. Have you heard of this?

Elena Verna[01:27:14)]No,

I have not. Lenny Rachitsky[01:27:29)]Okay. It's described as not a sci-fi but space, like a space opera where it's epic,

the most epic scale of universe story. Elena Verna[01:27:38)]I'll download it tonight,

it'll be on my list. Lenny Rachitsky[01:27:41)]It takes a little bit to get into. It's quite unique,

That's awesome. I'll download it. Lenny Rachitsky[01:27:49)]There you go. Okay, question number two. Favorite recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed?

Elena Verna[01:27:55)]Yes. I just got to watching Beef on Netflix. It's so good. I'm not going to spoil it for anybody, Beef. You should watch it. It's a limited series. It's so good. It will run through. I love Veep on HBO. So funny. I've probably watched it two times already the entire series and I'll probably watch it more because it just cracks me up every time. I think this is actually how our government works, so I'm very intrigued by that. And then the last one that I really liked that is coming up with the season two now. So you should catch up with season one is Last One of Us. If you don't like zombie movies or zombie shows, don't watch it. But if zombie and apocalypse is your cup of tea,

Last One of Us is so good. Lenny Rachitsky[01:28:44)]Or the Last of Us? Or Last One of Us?

Last of Us. Elena Verna[01:28:44)]Is it Last of Us?

Lenny Rachitsky[01:28:48)]I'm Googling while we talk, Last of Us. I think it's Last of Us. Yeah,

the Last of Us. Elena Verna[01:28:53)]Oh, Last of Us. Okay,

You're saying there's a third season coming soon. That's exciting. I didn't know that. Elena Verna[01:28:58)]Yeah,

it's so good. Lenny Rachitsky[01:29:00)]Okay, I love it as well. Great pick. Okay. Your favorite product you recently discovered that you really like?

I recently discovered that they make heated shoes and that changed my life. My feet are always cold and they are boots that actually have heated wires through them and I'm obsessed. Lenny Rachitsky[01:29:22)]And are you like charging it, like USB plugin kind of thing?

Elena Verna[01:29:25)]Yeah, I just come in, I plug them in and then I go outside and I'm warm and I think it's magical. I have a jacket, also heated jacket,

now I have shoes. I just need my gloves and I'll be all set. Lenny Rachitsky[01:29:40)]I love the USB powered clothing. And we should know you live not in Silicon Valley, you live on the East Coast sort of?

Elena Verna[01:29:46)]Central. In Central. The coldest it gets is 30s here, but I'm always cold, so this is just my love language is something heated that I can sit on. I'm that cat sits underneath the light all the time. And then I also just got AirPod Max, my headphones. I couldn't connect it to my computer. Still technical issues on that,

but I love them. The sound is amazing. That's my new favorite gadget that I'm obsessed about. Lenny Rachitsky[01:30:14)]What a cool combination, heated shoes and AirPods. Two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to that you find useful in work and life?

Elena Verna[01:30:25)]Yeah, it's really one, progress over perfection. I think that you just need to... The velocity of information is far more important than something that I think is perfect and perfection is an outcome that you get to. But progress over perfection all day,

Yes. Lenny Rachitsky[01:30:51)]Final question. You're not only one of the smartest people I've met on growth, you're also one of the funniest people on social media, especially on LinkedIn. If people aren't following you, they should. They will not only learn, they'll also be highly entertained. Is there a favorite meme that you created that you are very proud of that you can describe that we might want to link to?

Elena Verna[01:31:13)]Yeah, so I also want to say a lot of people hate me for doing so much memes as well because they think it's not serious. And I actually,

I want to rebuttal that really quickly because I think humor is the best way to disarm people and to point out very painful situations that we're facing with every single day or conundrums without putting anybody on defense. Because we can all laugh at the absurdity of the lives that we live in every single day. And a picture's worth a thousand words. And sometimes memes are just the best way to communicate the most complex situations that we are facing within our corporate world. And they help us understand how common all of those situations are. We're not unique. You're not feeling alone by feeling down about what happened. Everybody's going through the same thing. So that's why I love memes because they help connect people on both sides.[01:32:05)]Even if you're making fun of one side because they're like, yeah,

that is true and this is so funny. So I'm a big proponent of that just because I think it's actually a better way to both unite people and just talk about hard problems that otherwise would be not read if you put it in words.[01:32:26)]But my favorite meme is actually one of the first ones that I've created and I think it's from Family Guy where they have an elephant and the penguin standing and then there's Moses I think, or some biblical character saying, "What the hell is this?" Looking at the elephant and the penguin. And the result of it is a child that has a penguin body and an elephant head. And if you think about elephant as product and penguin as marketing, what the hell is this is gross. Which is a byproduct, a weird, weird byproduct, product and marketing merged together that doesn't really fit with either, yet it's its own entity. I don't know. I think that that's the best to describe to people what [inaudible 01:33:14]

is. Lenny Rachitsky[01:33:14)]So appropriate. Also, it's hard to describe a meme and make it feel funny. So good job. Thank you for doing that. We'll link to this meme in our show notes. Elena, this was incredible. Thank you again. Thank you for being our first ever third return guest. Hopefully there will be many more episodes of Elena Verna. Two final questions. Where can folks find you online if they want to reach out and learn more and how can listeners be useful to you?

Elena Verna[01:33:37)]Find me on LinkedIn or my Substack. I'm not competing with you Lenny, but I share a lot of my thoughts and everything that I learned on my own Substack. It's just elenaverna.com. LinkedIn is for all of my memes, so go there if you want to laugh, but if you want to learn from what I'm learning, go to my Substack. And how you can be useful? Tell me what problems you're facing now. Don't tell me, oh, how growth is slowing down, what should I do? I can't help you with that, too broad, but if you're having a situation, there's often really good [inaudible 01:34:09] for me to go and write about it or to do more research about it. So I just love to hear what some people's minds,

so I can both help them connect their dots as well as learn about it myself. Lenny Rachitsky[01:34:20)]And what's the best way for them to do that? Is it like DM me on LinkedIn,

any other- Elena Verna[01:34:24)]DM me on LinkedIn or just reply to my Substack newsletter email. It goes directly into my personal inbox,

so I read every single one of them. Lenny Rachitsky[01:34:32)]That's a really good tip. People don't know that when you get an email on Substack, if you reply,

Exactly. Lenny Rachitsky[01:34:38)]Elena,

thank you so much for being here. Elena Verna[01:34:41)]Okay, thank you for having me,

Bye everyone.[01:34:45)]Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at LennysPodcast.com. See you in the next episode.