产品驱动销售(product-led sales)的终极指南 | Elena Verna
The ultimate guide to product-led sales | Elena Verna
Introductory Episode Preview
Elena Verna: 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.
Growth Strategies That Never Work
Lenny Rachitsky: 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?
Mistake One: Hiring for Growth
Elena Verna: 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, it’s not something that you can outsource to somebody.
Prerequisites for a Growth Team
Lenny Rachitsky: Powerful words. I’m loving this list already.
Elena Verna: 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.
Growth Leads vs. Sales Reps
Lenny Rachitsky: A lot of contrary intakes here, I love this.
Growth Won’t Save Mature Companies
Elena Verna: 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.
Rebranding Won’t Drive Growth
Lenny Rachitsky: 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.
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.
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”
Same Goes for Product Redesigns
Elena Verna: 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: That needs to be my KPI on this podcast, “Insights per minute.”
Obsessing Over Your Competitors
Elena Verna: I think you have it. I think your insights per minute is pretty high.
Big Companies Don’t Have All Answers
Lenny Rachitsky: 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, insight.
Elena Verna: It’s all about how you present them too. Storytelling is a big portion of it actually to stick.
Mistake Five: Your Problems Aren’t Unique
Lenny Rachitsky: 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: 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.
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.
Recap of the First Five Points
Lenny Rachitsky: Amazing. What’s number one?
Elena Verna: 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.
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.
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.
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.
Mistake Six: Prioritizing SEO and SEM
Lenny Rachitsky: 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.
Earned Channels vs. Owned Growth
Elena Verna: 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: 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?
Diversifying Your Growth Channels
Elena Verna: 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.
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: 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.
The Need to Stack Growth Models
Elena Verna: 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: We talked deeply about that specific topic in our first conversation, just for folks, want to go deeper there. There’s lot there.
Growth Model Update Cadence
Elena Verna: I need to bring it back. This is keeps happening.
Lenny Rachitsky: I love that.
Allocate 20-25% Time for Innovation
Elena Verna: I need to repeat it. You need to repeat it three times right before it sticks to people. Hopefully this is the third time.
Growth Loops and Levers to Consider
Lenny Rachitsky: 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, which gives deep on that one topic.
Mistake Eight: Hiring Consultants
Elena Verna: Amazing.
Lenny Rachitsky: Excellent. Anything else before we move on to number two?
Mistake Nine: Risks of Over-Experimentation
Elena Verna: No, let’s move on to number two.
Lenny Rachitsky: Let’s do it.
Otherwise, Just Go Execute
Elena Verna: 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.
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.
Segment Ten: Rapid Fire Round
Lenny Rachitsky: 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, they will help you grow it
Elena Verna: Exactly.
Favorite Growth Framework
Lenny Rachitsky: If your business is slowing, your product market fit basically might be disappearing and growth isn’t solving that problem.
Growth Frameworks Continued
Elena Verna: 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.
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: 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,
Adjacent User Theory
Elena Verna: 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.
The Dissenting Perspective
Lenny Rachitsky: Awesome. Great one, let’s move on. Number three.
Elena Verna: 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.
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.
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.
Navigating Career Options
Lenny Rachitsky: 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: 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.
Career Paths Aren’t One-Way Streets
Lenny Rachitsky: I’ve experienced this not just with marketing sites, but most redesigns. Redesign of the product.
Elena Verna: 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.
Lightning Q&A Round
Lenny Rachitsky: 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: 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: 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.”
… 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: 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.
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, and off we go to our next project.
Lenny Rachitsky: I love that we’re only at number three. This is amazing. Let’s do number four.
Elena Verna: 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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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: You’re telling me that there’s no shortcuts?
Elena Verna: 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: 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: 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.”
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.
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.”
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: 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: 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: Right, if it’s like a fancy company, assume they’re just so smart and diligent about every little pixel and decision.
Elena Verna: If people only knew of how much craziness is happening in those big companies and how much chaos there is.
Lenny Rachitsky: Oh man, that’s a whole other podcast episode.
Elena Verna: Whole other podcasts, yes.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, number five.
Elena Verna: 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.
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?
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.
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?
Lenny Rachitsky: Let’s make it a word.
Elena Verna: 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: 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: 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?”
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.
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.
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: 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: 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: Okay, so we’ve gone halfway through your list. There’s 10 items on this list, right?
Elena Verna: Yes, yes. There’s 10 items. Next one is a good one.
Lenny Rachitsky: I’m excited to chat with Christina Gilbert, the founder of OneSchema, one of our longtime podcast sponsors. Hi, Christina.
Christina Gilbert: Yes. Thank you for having me on, Lenny.
Lenny Rachitsky: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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.
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.
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.
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: 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: Awesome. Okay, let’s keep going. Number six.
Elena Verna: 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.
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.
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.
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.
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: 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 …
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: 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.
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: 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: 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.
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: 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: 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.
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.
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.
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: 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: 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.
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: 18 months.
Elena Verna: Sorry. Yeah. Every 18 months you need to introduce something new in order for it to continue evolving.
Lenny Rachitsky: And was that number eight of the list we’re going through or that’s like a bonus piece of advice?
Elena Verna: No, that’s just a bonus piece of advice.
Lenny Rachitsky: 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, start thinking about other levers and growth models to layer on top of that.
Elena Verna: Yeah.
Lenny Rachitsky: 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: 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.
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: 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: 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?
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: 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: 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, that’s a gift that just keeps on giving and nobody can take that away from you. But that doesn’t mean that other tactics and other channels should not be explored as well.
Lenny Rachitsky: Amazing. Let’s keep going. So we have three to go. Number eight.
Elena Verna: 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.
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.
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: 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: 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.”
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: 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: 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?
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: 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: 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.
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.
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.
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.
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: 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: 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 2000s tactic. It doesn’t work anymore. We pass that in technology sector.
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…
… 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.
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: 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: 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.
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: 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: No, I think we’ve spent too much time. We’re ready to go.
Lenny Rachitsky: 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: Yep, let’s do that.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay.
Elena Verna: 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.
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.
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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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.
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.
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: 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: 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.
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.”
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: 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, be an advisor before they’ve done anything real and you have nothing to actually base your advice on and that part is very important.
Elena Verna: 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: 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, be a newsletter person. You do that really well.
Elena Verna: 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: 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: No, I think we’ve covered so much. I don’t want to overwhelm.
Lenny Rachitsky: Let’s do it. With that, we’ve reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready?
Elena Verna: Yes, I’m ready.
Lenny Rachitsky: First question, surprise, surprise. What are two or three books you’ve recommended most to other people?
Elena Verna: 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: 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: No, I have not.
Lenny Rachitsky: 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: I’ll download it tonight, it’ll be on my list.
Lenny Rachitsky: It takes a little bit to get into. It’s quite unique, but you just keep going and it’s incredible and AI plays a big role in it actually.
Elena Verna: That’s awesome. I’ll download it.
Lenny Rachitsky: There you go. Okay, question number two. Favorite recent movie or TV show you’ve really enjoyed?
Elena Verna: 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: Or the Last of Us? Or Last One of Us? Last of Us.
Elena Verna: Is it Last of Us?
Lenny Rachitsky: I’m Googling while we talk, Last of Us. I think it’s Last of Us. Yeah, the Last of Us.
Elena Verna: Oh, Last of Us. Okay, Last of Us.
Lenny Rachitsky: You’re saying there’s a third season coming soon. That’s exciting. I didn’t know that.
Elena Verna: Yeah, it’s so good.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, I love it as well. Great pick. Okay. Your favorite product you recently discovered that you really like?
Elena Verna: 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: And are you like charging it, like USB plugin kind of thing?
Elena Verna: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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, any day.
Lenny Rachitsky: Very appropriate for a head of growth person.
Elena Verna: Yes.
Lenny Rachitsky: 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: 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.
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.
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: 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: 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: And what’s the best way for them to do that? Is it like DM me on LinkedIn, any other-
Elena Verna: 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: That’s a really good tip. People don’t know that when you get an email on Substack, if you reply, just goes straight to the author.
Elena Verna: Exactly.
Lenny Rachitsky: Elena, thank you so much for being here.
Elena Verna: Okay, thank you for having me, Lenny.
Lenny Rachitsky: Bye everyone.
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.
Glossary
| English | 中文 |
|---|---|
| A/B testing | A/B 测试 |
| acquisition | 获客 |
| activation | 激活 |
| adjacent user theory | 相邻用户理论 |
| Andrew Chen | 保留原文(增长领域知名从业者、a16z 合伙人) |
| ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) | 年度经常性收入(ARR) |
| benchmarks | 基准数据 |
| Brian Balfour | 保留原文(Reforge 创始人) |
| Casey Winters | 保留原文(增长领域专家) |
| category penetration | 品类渗透率 |
| CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) | 首席营销官(CMO) |
| cognitive load | 认知负荷 |
| community | 社区 |
| corporate ladder | 企业晋升阶梯 |
| demand gen (demand generation) | 需求生成 |
| earned channel | 赢得的渠道 |
| earned channels | 赢得的渠道 |
| Elena Verna | 保留原文(嘉宾,B2B 增长领域专家) |
| flywheel | 飞轮 |
| founder led growth | 创始人驱动增长 |
| fractional engagement | 分时任职 |
| framework | 框架 |
| freemium | 免费增值 |
| global maxima | 全局最大值 |
| go-to-market strategy | 市场进入策略 |
| growth engine | 增长引擎 |
| growth hacks | 增长黑客 |
| growth lever | 增长杠杆 |
| growth loops | 增长循环 |
| growth pod | 增长小组 |
| ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) | 理想客户画像(ICP) |
| ideation | 创意构思 |
| incrementality | 增量 |
| interim engagement | 过渡期任职 |
| J curve | J 曲线 |
| Law of Shitty Clickthroughs | 糟糕点击率定律 |
| Lenny Rachitsky | 保留原文(播客主持人) |
| lightning round | 闪电问答 |
| meme | 表情包/梗图 |
| monetization | 变现 |
| north star metric | 北极星指标 |
| onboarding | 新手引导 |
| option pool | 选择池 |
| optionality | 选择权 |
| owned channels | 自有渠道 |
| paid growth | 付费增长 |
| patternize | 模式化 |
| pre versus post | 前后对比(pre versus post) |
| product-led growth | 产品驱动增长 |
| product-led sales | 产品驱动销售 |
| product-market fit | 产品市场匹配 |
| race car framework | race car 框架(一种增长举措分类框架) |
| referral mechanism | 推荐机制 |
| Reforge | 保留原文(增长领域教育平台) |
| retainer | 长期保留服务 |
| risk averseness | 风险规避 |
| S-curve | S 曲线 |
| Sean Test | Sean Test(衡量产品市场匹配的用户调查方法,询问用户”如果不能再使用这个产品会有什么感受”) |
| self-serve | 自助服务 |
| SEM (Search Engine Marketing) | SEM(搜索引擎营销) |
| SEO (Search Engine Optimization) | SEO(搜索引擎优化) |
| show notes | 节目笔记 |
| social resellers | 社交分销商 |
| Substack | 保留原文(内容订阅平台) |
| top of the funnel | 漏斗顶部 |
| traction | 牵引力 |
| upside | upside(上行空间/潜在收益) |
| user-generated content | 用户生成内容 |
| virality | 病毒式传播 |
| web archives | web archives(网页存档工具) |
| weekly active users | 周活跃用户 |
| word of mouth | 口碑 |
| workshop | workshop(实践研讨/工作坊) |
Reformatted by reformat_english.py
产品驱动销售(product-led sales)的终极指南 | Elena Verna
文字记录
开场预览
**Elena Verna:**增长是一个相当新的领域。很多人对增长黑客(growth hacks)充满兴趣,想知道有什么确定的方法可以获得增长。在社交媒体时代,人人都试图分享自己的技巧和窍门,但这些往往完全脱离了上下文,或者只适用于某个具体案例,实际上并不能作为通用模式来推广。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**我们先来聊聊那些永远无效的增长策略。如果你在路线图上看到这些项目,最好别去做。第一条是什么?
**Elena Verna:**我们身处科技行业,总有大量的初创公司,而初创公司显然都渴望增长。这个领域有一个巨大的误解:要想推动增长,就需要一个增长团队。找到产品市场匹配(product-market fit)以及如何分发产品,这不是你能外包给别人去做的事。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**说得太好了,我已经开始喜欢这个清单了。
**Elena Verna:**第二条,这是我最喜欢的,可能有点犀利。我从来没有见过一次品牌重塑或重新设计——尤其是营销网站的重新设计——能带来好的绩效结果。新任 CMO 上任后重新设计网站或品牌,仿佛那是对其个人审美的呈现,通常还会承诺获客量会上升,但实际上从未转化为任何有意义的成果。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**好多反直觉的观点,我很喜欢。
**Elena Verna:**第三条,如果你所做的每一个增长举措都是一次实验,那就是个问题。这几乎像一种疾病,一种让人瘫痪的疾病。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**今天的嘉宾是 Elena Verna,我节目有史以来第一位三次返场的嘉宾。Elena 是我认识的人中最精通 B2B 增长的,她也非常幽默。她曾在 Miro、Amplitude、Dropbox 和 SurveyMonkey 等公司领导增长工作。她还为数十家公司提供增长方面的顾问服务,包括 Superhuman、MongoDB、Netlify、Similarweb、Sanity、Maze 等等。在本次对话中,Elena 分享了 10 条人们和公司不断投入大量资源却永远无效的增长策略与战术。她还介绍了她最喜欢的三个增长框架,帮助你理清如何思考增长,并且简要探讨了我们俩都经历过的非传统职业路径。如果你在产品增长方面有任何投入,或者领导、与从事增长工作的人共事,这期节目就是为你准备的。如果你喜欢这个播客,别忘了在你喜欢的播客应用或 YouTube 上订阅和关注,这是避免错过未来节目的最佳方式,也对播客帮助极大。下面,有请 Elena Verna。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**Elena,非常感谢你能来。欢迎回到播客,我们第一位三次返场的嘉宾。太荣幸了——如果你没在看视频的话,她正在跳舞。谢谢你来到这里。我刚才还在翻看我们的第一期节目,那是将近两年前,2022 年 9 月录制的,有人今天刚刚留了一条评论,人们仍然在发现和观看那期节目。这条评论恰好概括了我为什么喜欢邀请你来这个播客,这个人说:“哇,Elena 说的每一句话都凝聚了多年的知识。这期值得慢慢消化、反复回看。感谢你与全世界分享你的经验。”
**Elena Verna:**谢谢你的邀请。我的北极星指标(north star metric)是每分钟洞察数。每次与人进行直播交流时,我都以此为优化目标,所以这恰好与我追求的方向一致。太好了。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**这应该成为我这个播客的 KPI——“每分钟洞察数”。
**Elena Verna:**我觉得你已经做到了。你的每分钟洞察数相当高。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**确实如此。我也确实在追求这一点,不过我也学到了,还需要让人感觉舒适,感受到他们的故事。这里有一个有趣的平衡,你不能只是洞察、洞察、再洞察。
**Elena Verna:**关键还在于你如何呈现这些洞察。讲故事在其中占了很大比重,这样才能真正让人记住。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**又一个洞察。这本身就是一条洞察。
永远无效的增长策略
**Lenny Rachitsky:**有两个领域我想和你深入探讨,这些都是我知道你一直在思考的问题。一是那些永远无效的增长策略——人们不断投入时间却白白浪费的做法。我知道你有一份很好的清单,列出了那些你见过但人们仍在尝试的东西。二是增长框架——你最喜欢的增长框架,帮助人们理清如何思考增长、如何推动产品增长。
我们先从永远无效的增长策略开始。也许你可以先做个框架说明,讲讲我们即将讨论的这份策略清单是什么。
**Elena Verna:**与市场营销、产品管理或工程相比,增长是一个相当新的领域。现在虽然积累了一批拥有十年左右经验的人,但更多是新手,而且新手比例远远高于那些有五到十年增长实战经验的人。因此很多人对增长黑客充满兴趣——什么是获得增长的确定方法?什么是拉升那个指标的确定方法?怎样才能以最快的方式为公司的成功做出贡献?人们都在寻找各种捷径。显然,在社交媒体时代,人人都试图分享自己的技巧和窍门之类的,人们抓住的往往是一些完全脱离上下文的东西,或者只适用于某个具体案例,实际上并不能作为通用模式,甚至根本不适用于他们的业务类型。
增长团队中有太多失败了。实际上,我认为增长团队正在成为那些负责人更替率比首席营销官(CMO)还高的部门之一,因为人们入职时带着一堆期望——“你是增长负责人,你是增长产品经理,你是增长营销人员,你应该推动增长。“而增长没有实现时,大刀就砍下来了,人员离开,循环重新开始,继续填补这些职位。我认为关于增长到底是什么、在公司中应该如何运作,市面上存在大量错误信息。今天我想覆盖一些我作为公司顾问和实际运营者看到的最普遍的模式,因为这些问题太明显了,但供人们学习的资料却非常少。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**好的。第一条是什么?
第一条:增长岗位招聘中的问题
**Elena Verna:**第一条,我必须从招聘说起。增长岗位的空缺一直很多,从增长负责人到增长产品经理应有尽有,正如我所说,这个领域的轮转非常频繁。很少有增长从业者能在同一个岗位待超过一年或两年,不断有人流失,不断重新招聘。在招聘过程中会出现很多错误,我想从清单上先谈这个。它不算路线图上的条目,但天哪,这里出的问题太多了。我之前也在你的博客上写过关于增长招聘的文章,算是有点参考。而我看到最大的隐患之一,就是过早招聘增长人员。
我们身处科技行业,初创公司总是很多。初创公司显然都想增长,但业内存在一个巨大的误解,认为要让增长启动起来,就需要一个增长团队——这完全不对。要让公司的增长启动起来,创始人和创始团队必须自己搞清楚如何增长到第一个一百万、五百万、一千万 ARR。有些公司甚至到了一亿、两亿 ARR 都没有创建增长团队,因为搞清楚你的产品市场匹配以及如何分销,不是你能外包给别人去做的事。不是一个拥有漂亮简历的人走进来,突然挥舞一根魔杖,你就有了病毒式传播活动和大量注册用户,然后所有人都付费、都留存——这根本不会发生。
我看到这个错误反复出现。我真心认为,创始人驱动增长的理念还没有被充分推广——在你真正能够对用户群体开始做实验之前,你根本不需要增长团队,这意味着你必须有一定规模的用户量,可以从中学习、优化和创新,而这第一波增长必须由创始人来推动。
增长团队成立的前提条件
我特别想强调两个原因。在考虑增长团队之前,首先你需要有扎实的 PMF,即产品市场匹配,意味着你有一个针对某个问题的解决方案,而且客户不仅在使用你的方案解决那个问题,他们还在留存、在持续使用你。留存是好的。你也可以用 Sean Test(“有多少人会说他们离不开你的产品”)来衡量,总之要有某种程度的 PMF。第二,你要有数据。增长离开数据无法运转。如果你只有十个用户或十个客户,那不叫数据,那只是一个记录客户信息的 Google 表格,你不需要增长团队来处理那个。直到你拥有可以真正进行分析、提出假设并开始做实验的数据量之前,都不要考虑增长团队。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**帮你总结一下刚才说的几点,方便大家理解——你基本上看到过很多初创公司去找一个增长负责人进来解决他们的增长问题,而你的洞察是,这几乎从来都不是问题的解决方案,除非你已经有了很强的留存、在 Sean Test 上得分很高、拥有大量数据,你的建议是创始人应该尽可能长时间地亲自做这件事。一百万 ARR 是很多人推荐的一个里程碑。正如你所说,很多公司等的时间长得多。
**Elena Verna:**是的。坦白说,你等得越久越好,因为这样你的整个公司都会被训练成对增长负责,而不是弄出一个孤立的增长团队然后说”他们负责增长”,然后公司其他人在做什么?说真的,等得越久越好。
增长负责人 vs. 销售人员
**Lenny Rachitsky:**说到这个,销售也是你所描述的一部分,比如招聘第一个销售人员。你如何看待第一个增长负责人和第一个销售人员之间的关系?对此有什么建议吗?比如对于 B2B SaaS,你可能更长时间都不招增长负责人,而是先招销售,还是怎样?
**Elena Verna:**这取决于你实际上打算通过什么方式收钱。如果你的钱主要通过销售团队来收,那你绝对应该先招销售。事实上,在销售主导的公司中,增长团队甚至不一定那么需要。你可能会有一个增长营销团队,但那其实就是一个重新包装成”增长营销”的需求生成(demand gen)团队,这样他们就能在薪资上多要 20% 到 30%,但归根结底是销售在做你的商业化,他们在做激活、做留存和客户成功。对于销售主导型公司,是的,先招销售,绝对如此。除非你开始做自助服务(self-serve)收入。
如果你尝试让产品自己卖自己——可能通过免费增值(freemium)获客、试用获客——或者你实际上在用产品驱动的方式做激活和商业化,那时候你才需要一个增长人员。如果你从自助服务商业化起步,增长人员的招聘其实应该排在销售之前。你的销售更多是机会主义性质的。反之,如果你是销售主导型公司,那就先招销售,等你准备好在销售模式之上叠加产品驱动增长(product-led growth)时再考虑增长。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**这是一个非常好的澄清。我听下来,建议基本上是:只在你们已经有了明确的产品市场匹配、而且是一家产品主导型公司、ARR 超过一百万的时候才招增长负责人,大概是这样。
**Elena Verna:**对。不过我不会说你必须是产品主导型公司。更准确的说法是,你在依靠产品驱动的方式来解决内部的很多增长杠杆,因为你不必是一家完全产品主导的公司。但比如说,如果产品通过 SEO 或 SEM 获得用户,然后产品本身负责激活他们,再由销售来成交,那销售显然也很重要,但增长团队也需要稍早一点介入。只要你存在任何产品驱动的环节——产品在负责获客、激活、商业化或留存——增长就该介入了。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**我们在第一次对话中深入讨论过这个具体话题,大家如果想深入了解可以去听,那里内容很多。
**Elena Verna:**我得把它带回来。这种情况一直在发生。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**我喜欢这个。
**Elena Verna:**我需要重复。你得重复三遍才能让人记住。希望这次是第三遍了。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**完全同意。我之所以提到这一点,是因为大家可能想更深入了解你所描述的内容,我会推荐他们去听我们第一期节目,那一期对这个话题做了深入探讨。
**Elena Verna:**太好了。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**非常好。在我们进入第二条之前,还有什么要补充的吗?
**Elena Verna:**没有了,进入第二条吧。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**来吧。
成熟企业不应寄望于增长团队扭转颓势
**Elena Verna:**第二条,这转到另一端——成熟企业这边。我反复看到一个趋势,而且现在变得越来越突出:当企业增长放缓时——这对很多企业来说是不可避免的,原因多种多样——我们不去讨论增长为什么会放缓。然后他们聘请一位光鲜的增长负责人来解决问题,基本上就是说:“我们的业务在放缓,在走下坡路,我们把这个人招来,或者组建这个团队,增长就会加速。“但这根本不会发生。如果你的整体业务在放缓,你的增长负责人注定会失败,因为业务放缓的原因远比”没有一个增长团队”要深层得多。
增长团队能做优化,增长也许能带来 10%、15% 的提升。也许对你来说这就够了。即便如此,这还是在业务处于下行趋势时增长团队能做到的上限。但重要的是,如果你的核心产品和核心营销出了问题,增长团队无法替你修复。你必须直面那个房间里的大象——业务一开始为什么会放缓——而不是简单地把一个增长团队扔到问题上面,指望他们创造奇迹,而业务的其他部分继续沿着最初导致放缓的轨迹前行。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**哇,我以前从没听过这个观点,这太重要了,而且和你的第一条非常相关。增长团队不会帮你做出人们想要的产品,他们只是帮你把它做大。
**Elena Verna:**没错。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**如果你的业务在放缓,你的产品市场匹配可能正在消失,而增长团队解决不了这个问题。
**Elena Verna:**消失,可能在退化,也可能正在被竞争对手蚕食,因为有人在侵占你的领地。关键在于,增长可以放大已有的良好产品市场匹配,增长可以在你已经增长的基础上帮你增长得更快。但如果你在放缓,你的市场进入策略或核心产品策略、核心产品市场匹配出了问题,增长团队将完全无能为力。坦白说,这也是巨大的资金浪费,因为在那种规模的公司里,你会组建相当大的增长团队,去覆盖每一个已有的产品流程和界面。这是一笔巨大的开支。投资回报率,顶多一比一——你投进去多少,也许能拿回多少,但仅靠增长团队,不可能创造出重新加速的 J 曲线。我觉得问题就在于”增长团队”这个名字反而对它不利——“我们需要增长,你有增长团队吗?“没有。顺便说一句,我也没想出更好的命名方式,但这里恰恰是人们误解最深的地方:以为有一颗银弹——一个完美的增长负责人、一个完美的增长团队——能扭转业务的走向。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**那对于那些正在想”也许我该招一位增长负责人”的人来说,什么时候应该招?作为一家成熟企业——
**Elena Verna:**如果你的收入增长或其他任何你关注的指标——周活跃用户或诸如此类——在下降,至少要确保你能让它企稳,止住下滑。至少要看到一条可见的轨迹,证明你的核心产品和核心营销团队能够逆转指标的退化。理想情况下,你甚至会开始看到一些初步的生机——业务中的某些局部展现出潜力——然后你再把增长投入进去,把它真正放大到极致。但如果你还在下滑,就别这么做,因为在大约一年的时间内,结果会非常令人失望。
品牌重塑与首页改版不会驱动增长
**Lenny Rachitsky:**太棒了。这一条很好,继续。第三条。
**Elena Verna:**第三条,这是我最喜欢的,可能还有点辛辣,因为如果这里有营销人员在听的话——做品牌重塑,更具体地说,通过首页改版来驱动增长。这让我非常心痛,我经历过太多次这样的事情,而且从未——一次都没有——见过品牌重塑或改版,尤其是营销网站的改版,带来良好的业绩结果。做品牌重塑有很多正当理由,做营销网站改版也有正当理由——比如你想进入一个新市场、新品类,你的产品已经进化了,需要做一次全面更新。但这些更像是滞后指标——说明某些东西需要改变,你正在改变它,然后你知道你将不得不拼命优化,才能让它恢复到之前的业绩水平。这就像退了一步,但上方的空间可能更大,不过你必须付出努力才能到达那个更高的位置。然而那么多公司里,总在上演同一个故事。我招了一位新 CMO,新 CMO 上任后看了一圈:“我这间屋子里的东西不太合我意,让我重新刷一下墙壁,我想要这种蓝色,把沙发挪到这里。“他们开始把网站设计或品牌设计当成个人品味的体现。而且通常会承诺说我们的获客量会上升,品类渗透率会上升,认知度或知名度会上升。但这些承诺从来不会转化为任何有意义的成果,因为再次强调,如果你把它当作通向新全局最大值的一步,没问题,我完全支持。去做吧。但要清楚,为了真正实现那个全局最大值,你前面有大量的工作要做。但如果承诺通过首页改版或营销网站改版来驱动更多获客,那注定是一个无法兑现的承诺——接下来会是大量砸给代理商的钱,通常超过一百万美元,大量关于品牌色该选哪种蓝色的争论,至少八到十个月的开发周期,以及之后非常平淡的结果。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**天哪,我已经爱上这个清单了,太棒了。补充一下你的观点——如果你心里清楚这不会驱动增长,但我们要为未来打造一个世界级的品牌奠定基础,而且我们清楚现在的品牌很差、首页需要更新,那也许仍然值得做。如果你有这个认知——它不会驱动增长——那可能没问题。
**Elena Verna:**我见过的每一次营销网站品牌重塑,至少在业绩上都是退了一步,然后被当作紧急事件去修复。如果你指望立竿见影的效果,就别做;或者至少要让团队了解,要花多长时间才能到达你认为会有 upside 的那个点。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**我在这方面的经历不仅限于营销网站,大部分改版都是如此。产品的改版也是。
产品改版同样如此
**Elena Verna:**产品改版也是。光是把产品里的 logo 或颜色换一下,要投入多少产品和工程工作量?简直离谱。而且从来没有任何效果,没有任何结果。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**而且就像你说的那种情况——“我们花了六个月重新做引导流程,我们所有的构建都基于新设计和新体验,不可能不上线。每个团队都在这个新世界里工作了,我们就直接上线,然后再慢慢追回来,想办法恢复。“事情就是这样发展的。
**Elena Verna:**那是一个新的起点,而这个起点会比你当前已经优化的体验低得多。不管当前的体验优化得好不好,都不重要——它至少经过了某种程度的优化,而重新改版则始终是在黑暗中射击。也许会更好看,当然,但更好看不意味着表现会更好。显然凡事无绝对。有时候可能真的有效果,如果对你来说确实有效,我真为你高兴。但那是特例,不要把它当作规律。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**我正想说,每个正在做这类事情、听到这段话的人,大概都在想:“不,我觉得我们这次很有把握。我们确实深思熟虑过了,说不定效果会非常好。“根据你的经验,听起来你偶尔见过它奏效的情况,还是说从来就没有过?
**Elena Verna:**我见过最好的情况,也就是结果净持平,同时让我们获得了向更大目标优化的更好基础。这是最好的情形。所以如果你正在做这件事,我最大的建议不是让你停下来。而是要理解,这里的目标不是在上线时、上线后七天的数据读数中,看到某些性能提升。
目标应该是:我们会上线,我们很可能会看到一次下滑,要提前把这次下滑建模并预测出来,然后给自己至少两到三个月的时间,理想情况下更接近六个月,真正把它优化回到一个良好的状态,才有潜力超越之前的表现。但你需要把上线后三到六个月的工作量提前规划进去,而这正是很多公司和团队忘记做的事情,因为他们直接转向下一件事了。因为这种事就是——大项目,大发布,然后我们就奔向下一个项目了。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**我太喜欢了,我们才讲到第三点。太棒了。来聊第四个吧。
执迷于竞争对手
**Elena Verna:**好的。第四个错误是执迷于竞争对手。不过这里有一点需要注意。我自己经常拆解分析各种公司,我有几千个 Gmail 账号,用来注册任何能找到的产品。我会走完它们的整个体验流程,看它们的变现策略,看它们的激活流程。我也会分析我所在公司的直接竞争对手。我需要知道自己在和什么竞争。
所以了解竞争对手在做什么极其重要。从竞争对手体验中的某些方面获得灵感,是一个非常好的创意起点,也可能值得尝试引入你自己的产品中。但如果是公然地说:“嘿,我们要把这些最佳策略全部抄过来,或者把这些流程全部抄过来,因为他们做得比我们好,我们直接照搬就好。为什么我们的引导流程不能跟这家公司一样?这家公司那么成功。“——问题就出在这里。
因为每一个体验都是与它们自己的客户、自己的渠道深度绑定的。你甚至不知道你看到的是不是它们的真实体验——你用的是测试账号,或者你看到的是根据你的注册来源、你声称的身份而个性化定制的内容。所以大多数时候你根本不知道那个完整的体验到底是什么样子,把它放进你的产品里,只会带来非常平庸的结果。而且很多人有一种冲动,把它当作捷径——“好吧,我们不想去做那些创意构思或用户研究,不想做用户访谈,也不想做 A/B 测试。它对他们有效,对我们一定也有效,直接照做吧。“而这种情况 95% 都会失败。
当然,有些东西我确实会推荐借鉴。我刚才说了灵感启发,我一直在用它来获取灵感。我会想:“好,有什么酷的?大家都在做什么?“因为我想始终保持对其他人在实现什么功能的了解,而且如果在可控体验中它确实有效、效果更好,那就更好了。我也大量使用 web archives 来查看被锁定的页面。我会想,好,去年它长什么样?为什么他们整个页面是这个样子,或者定价页面是这个样子?我会分析这些,并尝试推断出一些结论。
我还认为,当你开始拆解分析所有这些公司时,你会注意到很多模式。你会想:“哦,这些元素总是一样的。“这意味着所有这些公司都殊途同归地到达了这些设计,而它们似乎是制胜元素。你可以把这些元素拿来放进你的产品里,但你永远不能跳过创意构思、设计、用户研究、客户访谈、实验验证这些步骤。
而且你始终需要将其与在自身产品中真正进行创新相平衡。因为抄袭竞争对手是走向平庸最快的方式——如果你抄袭了别人,你永远不可能成为领导者。领导者从定义上来说,就是能够在某个方面从群体中脱颖而出的人。如果你只是想成为——我也不知道有谁想要成为平庸的中游选手——但也许作为起点还可以,但绝不应是最终目标。
在我结束这个话题之前还想说的最后一点是关于基准数据(benchmarks)。在这里使用基准数据也非常危险,因为基准数据通常是对所有竞争对手、所有软件产品的汇总。而各家公司定义数字的方式千差万别。即使你看一些看似简单的东西,比如注册量。好吧,你平均应该获得多少注册?或者从潜在访客到注册的转化率?或者从注册到激活用户的转化率?这完全取决于你如何定义”潜在访客”。有些公司将其定义为全部流量,有些定义为新流量,有些定义为新的 IP 地址、新的持久化 ID。Google Analytics 怎么定义,Amplitude 怎么定义。
所以所有这些定义都如此不同。所以拿任何从竞争对手衍生出来的基准数据,然后说”这就是我们应该达到的水平”,也同样非常危险,因为根据你定义指标的方式,它可能根本就不适用。而所有那些基准数据的一个缺陷,就是没有去仔细审视具体的定义。这不是说基准数据不是决策中极其有价值的数据点——它是你应该利用的输入,用来判断什么是可能的。但如果盲目地采用它并以此设定目标,那只会确保你的所有举措和努力都走向失败。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**你是告诉我没有捷径可走?
**Elena Verna:**我希望有。我做这一行已经超过十五年了,如果有什么捷径,我早就扑上去了。确实存在模式和框架,但没有捷径。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**听到这里,大家可能会想,“好吧,不要照搬竞品,而是用它来获取灵感。“但这两者之间的界限确实有点模糊。你能想到什么例子吗?比如你从别人那里获得了很有启发的灵感,然后用在了你合作的公司里并且奏效了?或者你照搬了别人,结果发现”哦,失败了,这是个坏主意”?
**Elena Verna:**我用竞品来理解人们收集信息或完成某些步骤的通用框架。比如,分享模型——很多产品都有”嘿,你能把这个分享给别人吗?“的功能。你可以花大量时间去研究它应该长什么样。或者你可以去看 Slack、Figma、Miro、Notion,去看 Google 怎么做分享模型。你可以看所有这些,然后说,“好,这是它们共有的元素,这是我认为适用于我产品的部分,这是不适用的,这是我可以从中推导出来的。”
我把它作为创意构思的输入,但从不把它当作最终结果的目标,如果能理解的话。因为不从零开始确实很有帮助。空白起步的问题是真实存在的,而竞品是一个很好的方式来避免这个问题,为你的工作提供输入。但绝不要说”哦,我们可以跳过设计流程直接开干”,或者”把我们的配色贴上去就行,如果对他们有效,对我们也会有效”。我有大量的 Miro 看板,记录了所有人的新手引导流程、定价页面、分享模型、邀请同事的模型,我一直在参考这些。
但它们从来不会是我用在任何公司的精确方案。我会说,“嘿,我觉得这对你来说是一个很好的起点。以下是我认为对你的公司和产品会非常有效的元素,把这些拿去用。剩下的你们需要自己去完成,但至少有了一个起点。”
这也是为什么我也开始做更多自己的原型,更准确说是骨架——这些流程中你应该做的元素。我有一个定价页的骨架,有一个首页的骨架,但你需要把自己的东西填进去,它才能真正奏效。
别以为大公司什么都想清楚了
**Lenny Rachitsky:**让我当年意识到这一点的,是在 Airbnb 的时候,特别是想到有人在研究我们的流程,觉得”他们把一切都想清楚了,我们直接照搬他们做的就好,他们想得那么周到,所有东西都测试过了”。而实际上我们并没有做到那一步,很多东西都是拍脑袋决定的,我们对其中很多部分都非常不满意。一想到有人试图照搬我们,还以为我们知道自己在做什么,就觉得——“你们到底在想什么?”
**Elena Verna:**天哪,这种事真发生在我身上过。不久前在 Dropbox,有人联系我说,“哦,我看了……”好像是某个激活流程的页面,他们说,“哦,我喜欢这个页面,太酷了,你们做的太好了,我要把它带到我们公司去。“我说,“我们十年没碰过这个页面了。这个页面只有一小部分用户能看到。求你别,别照搬它。它的效果烂透了。我知道它还在那里,但它本来不应该在那里。没有人精心设计过那个页面。“所以这绝对是一个你可能踩的大坑。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**没错,看到一个光鲜的大公司,就以为他们对每一个像素、每一个决策都那么聪明、那么严谨。
**Elena Verna:**要是人们知道那些大公司内部有多少乱象、多少混乱就好了。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**哎,这可以单独做一期播客了。
**Elena Verna:**完全可以,是的。
错误五:认为自己的问题是独一无二的
**Lenny Rachitsky:**好,第五条。
**Elena Verna:**好,这条我来。它有点元,但我看到这种情况一直在发生。我们喜欢认为自己的问题是独一无二的。我在这个公司工作,我们遇到了这个增长问题,我们需要从头开始去找到解决方案。这也许跟刚才竞品那点有点关联,但我很抱歉要打破大家的幻想——你的问题并不独特。我有 99% 的把握这么说。你的问题已经被其他人在某个地方感受到了,很可能在很多很多地方。你试图重新从零设计方案,这是在浪费时间,而且有巨大的机会成本。
所以我最想让大家明白的是,不要以为你有独特的问题。你没有。我知道我们都希望如此——拥有某个独特的东西去学习会很有趣——但在这么多初创公司、这么多业内人士、你所处的行业里有这么多人的情况下,你的问题已经有人解决过了。或者至少在解决这个问题的过程中有大量的失败案例值得你学习。最重要的一点是,每当你要启动一个项目,或者每当你要推动一个指标,永远不要从零开始。不要从零开始。这是你能做的最糟糕的事情,因为你会在尝试做那些很可能已经被解决的事情上浪费大量周期。那么你该怎么做呢?
你可以看看竞品是怎么解决这个问题的。这当然是一个输入来源。你应该去找那些已经解决了这个问题的人,因为这些人就在那里,而且人们很喜欢谈论自己做的事情。利用这种人类心理,去找那些人,直接问他们,“你们怎么做的?做了什么?结果怎样?“显然,不是每个人每次都会回复你,但我们有 LinkedIn,有 X。去外面找那些你认为可能解决过类似问题的人,或者在你的关系网里打听打听,找到可能有类似方案的人,然后直接去跟他们聊。这会是一个不可思议的捷径——如果你要说有什么真正的”黑客”技巧的话,这就是一个帮你快速到达最优解的黑客技巧。
最后我还想说的一点是,把每一个问题都当作独特问题来解决是非常低效的。我们这个市场发展得太快了,你需要能够把你的解决方案模式化。模式化——这个词存在吗?
**Lenny Rachitsky:**我们就让它成为一个词吧。
**Elena Verna:**建立模式。把你的解决方案变成模式。你越能不再把每个问题当作独特的数据点或独特的问题,而是去想”我需要把它归入已有的模式”或者”我需要找到解决这个问题的框架,而不仅仅是这一个问题的框架”,你就能越快地至少达到解决方案的 60%。然后你可以做你想要的高度定制化的实现。但是从零手动做到 60%,当作一次性的项目来做——我们现在这个行业已经没有时间这样做了,除非你想被甩在后面。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**说得漂亮。很有力量的话。你有没有想到什么例子?不管是反面的——曾经以为问题是独特的,后来意识到应该去跟人聊聊;还是正面的——实际意识到某个问题并不独特?
**Elena Verna:**我给你一个我在 Miro 时的例子。在 Miro,我们最初尝试建立社区,这个任务交给了我,而我之前从来没做过。我对着墙撞脑袋,想”好吧,我该怎么做?用什么软件?从哪里获取用户?里面放什么类型的内容?”
**Elena Verna:**所以我当时几乎是在用找产品市场匹配的方式来做这件事,结果屡屡碰壁。说实话,我只有一年的时间来取得某种程度的牵引力,否则这个项目就会被关掉,因为公司没有耐心,公司发展很快。如果这是一个失败点,要么这个项目会被从我手里拿走——这很公平——要么公司会彻底关掉它,那无论对我个人还是对公司整体,都是巨大的失败。
于是我走出去,开始跟一群做过社区的人聊。我记得跟 Atlassian 的 Caroline 聊过,她搭建过社区。后来我实际上请她做了顾问。她问我:“你说的是用户社区,还是代理商社区,还是合作伙伴社区?“我当时简直脑子被炸开了。我说:“我根本没考虑过这些角度,因为我当时脑子里只有用户。“她说:“你不一定要从用户社区开始。如果你想从中获得一些成果,先做代理商或合作伙伴社区。“她用一种结构化的方式帮我理清了思路,然后我据此做出的成果比我独自摸索要好得多——如果没跟她聊,我可能要六八个月后才能走到那一步。
所以我觉得,这首先需要一种心态——承认自己并非无所不知,有勇气说”我需要帮助”,哪怕你已经有了一个很光鲜的头衔。那个时候,我在 Miro 担任临时首席营销官(CMO),我说”我不知道怎么做这个。“实际上,这反而会赢得比你想象中多得多的认可。很多人害怕承认自己不知道如何解决某个问题,所以才从零开始。但你需要真正放下自尊,尽快去寻求帮助,而不是一步一步撞遍每一个失败的坑。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**而真正伤害你自尊的,恰恰是失败。所以通过跟人交流、做研究来避免失败、让项目成功,你能做的越多越好。
**Elena Verna:**公平地说,失败是不可避免的。如果你谈论增长,增长就是关于失败的。我的一句人生格言是:你必须通过失败来学习,不能只是一味地成功。成功是大量失败的产物。但问题在于,你有多少时间去失败?很多时候我们没意识到在获得一次成功之前要经历多少轮失败周期,而公司,甚至整个市场,没有那么多时间等你。所以仍然要做好失败的准备,当然,但失败的时间线会被大幅缩短。
前五条要点回顾
**Lenny Rachitsky:**好,我们刚过了一半。清单上一共十条,对吧?
**Elena Verna:**对,对,十条。下一条很不错。
[广告段落已跳过]
**Lenny Rachitsky:**让我快速总结一下前五条,然后我们继续。第一条:在招聘增长负责人之前,比你想象中再等久一点。等到你有了产品市场匹配再说,也许等到年收入达到一百万美元,特别是如果你的模式是自助服务导向的。
第二条:如果你的增长在下滑,招一个增长负责人不会解决这个问题。先把下滑止住再说。第三条:重新设计首页、营销页面、品牌重塑,不仅不会帮你增长,反而很可能伤害增长、拖慢进度。所以做之前要睁大眼睛想清楚。
第四条:不要简单地照搬竞争对手,假设他们知道自己在做什么,或者假设他们的做法对你也适用。把它当作灵感来源。另一方面,从专家、竞争对手、趋势中获取灵感来解决你认为”没有人解决过”的问题。事实证明,你正在解决的每一个问题,很可能都有人以某种方式解决过。
**Elena Verna:**是的,尤其是在增长领域。我知道这同样适用于很多产品管理和营销工作,但在增长领域,当你讨论”如何提升激活率”或”激活和变现之间的流失非常严重”这类问题时,这些事情的模式化程度比你想象的要高得多。所以去找到那些模式,而不是试图重新发明轮子。
第六条:增长团队不应以 SEO/SEM/社交渠道为优先
**Lenny Rachitsky:**很好。好,我们继续。第六条。
**Elena Verna:**下一条。这条也有点辣。那就是增长团队拥有某些渠道——很多增长团队拥有获客。增长团队以 SEO、SEM、社交媒体为优先,我认为这是增长团队能犯的最大错误之一。显然,我不是说不要做 SEO,或者不要做 SEM——即有机搜索或付费搜索。我不是这个意思。然而,作为增长团队,你的第一优先级应该是创建你自己的、或者说你赢得的渠道——一个你赢得的、其他任何人都无法与你竞争的渠道。
什么意思呢?当你在做有机搜索或付费搜索时,你是在让 Google 更有钱。对 Google 来说很好,Google 是一家了不起的公司。但是把大量资金投入付费营销,你是在付钱给他们,在为他们的分发渠道买单。如果你也在做社交媒体——比如说 Instagram 或其他平台的付费广告——那也不错,但所有这些都建立在算法之上。算法可以给予,算法也可以随时收回。你没有任何控制权,因为你并不拥有这些渠道。你在别人的渠道里,跟其他玩家竞争。
赢得的渠道与自有增长
**Elena Verna:**那么另一方面,可以有你自己赢得的渠道。什么是赢得的渠道?这其实涉及到产品驱动增长获客的概念,也就是说你依靠病毒式传播、口碑、用户生成内容来吸引新用户进入漏斗顶部。那为什么这是”赢得的”,为什么我把它排在——比如说有机搜索(即 SEO,显然 SEO 非常好)——之上?因为搜索终究还是流向 Google。那对 Google 很好。但如果你在自己的社区里建立自己的用户生成内容,没有其他人能在这个渠道上与你竞争。那是你的。你的竞争对手花钱也买不到这些眼球。你的人在吸引其他的人。
人与人之间的推荐就是一切。所以 Lenny,如果我——比如我注册了 Superhuman,然后邀请你加入——这比你自己在付费营销广告上搜索并发现 Superhuman 要强得多的获客策略。尤其是在我们当今这个时代,搜索作为一种界面正在向 AI 界面转变,而 AI 界面对所有内容的归因要少得多。内容几乎正在变成一个数据库,而一个新的 UI 正在此基础上被开发出来。以前 Google 是 UI,现在 AI 正带着一个新的 UI 进入,而你对这个正在开发的新 UI 并没有那么多的控制权。
专注于这些你拥有的赢得的渠道,成为最高优先级。如果你的增长路线图上没有这些,未来一到两年内你会遇到很大的麻烦,因为你的获客成本只会不断上升。你在这些渠道上的竞争也只会不断加剧。你将不断向算法之神祈祷赐予你流量,但同样地,他们随时可以收回。如果增长团队没有花足够的时间在病毒式传播和用户生成内容上,来创建自己的赢得的获客渠道,这真的是增长团队最根本的失败点之一。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**哇,好的。这太精彩了。理论上这完全可以单独做成一期播客节目,专门讲如何实际操作。我们这里不会展开策略。而且这也不一定适用于每家公司。你的观点是,你可以通过其他方式增长,但这到目前为止是……
你的观点是你可以通过其他方式增长,但这到目前为止是最强大、最有效、成本最低、最有可能成功的方式。如果你能想出办法的话。
**Elena Verna:**不是成本最低。它实际上需要大量的产品和工程资源,甚至营销资源来搭建。所以不是预算的成本,而是人员的成本——你需要投入人力来创建自己的获客渠道,可以这么说。你说得对,也许这不是适合所有人的方案,但它实际上适用于比人们意识到的那样更多的产品。因为每一个产品都有某种团队功能,某种角色分工。每个产品都可以驱动口碑循环……好吧,实际上这不对,不是每个产品都能驱动口碑循环,但它们可以驱动推荐,可以创建用户生成内容。
这些策略中通常至少有一种适用于至少一个产品。所以存在创建某种赢得的渠道的机会,即使一开始可能感觉不太自然,取决于你如何达到产品市场匹配以及你在最初几个阶段是如何扩张的。但如果你不去探索它,如果你不投资它,或者至少在其中尝试和失败,我认为你真的把太多增长的未来交到了你几乎没有控制权的别人手里。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**所以这里的建议是,你的增长团队——如果他们做 SEM、付费增长和 SEO,这没问题,但你的大部分精力和投资应该放在赢得的渠道、自有渠道上,特别是病毒式传播和用户生成内容?
多元化增长渠道
**Elena Verna:**多元化。就是让你的策略多元化。不要把所有的赌注都押在别人给你分发渠道上。举个例子,Dropbox 超过 50% 的获客来自分享。我把东西放进 Dropbox,也许我需要把它发出去让对方签名。也许我只是需要分享这个文件来传给某人。也许我需要把这个文件作为最终成果分享给我的客户。那么那个接收者就知道了 Dropbox,所以品牌认知的问题就解决了。
通过分享这个动作,你实际上几乎也激活了那个接收者,所以你不再需要教育他们产品怎么用之类的。而那些接收者中注册成为 Dropbox 用户的比例,占了总获客的 50%。这是一个稳定的赢得的渠道,没有其他人能与你竞争,可以说只有 Dropbox 自己才能把它搞砸。我们实际上有一个专门的 growth pod 负责这件事。因为要同时优化发送方和接收方的体验——它是一个如此强大的增长引擎,驱动了整个公司——每个企业都应该尝试建立这样一个东西。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**我觉得这对很多增长团队来说会是一个很好的推动,去思考我们在这里能做什么?第七条。还剩四条。
叠加增长模型的必要性
**Elena Verna:**第七条。这个我们在上一期播客里至少也聊过一点。但我看到这个问题一直被提起,而且人们害怕在它上面投资,这是一个错误。每一家公司在开始增长努力时,要么专注于产品驱动增长——我要把所有东西都做成自助服务的——要么专注于销售和营销——我要有销售团队,然后有营销团队,他们来做所有的工作,我的产品只需要开发功能就行了。这在一段时间内是好的,取决于那段时间有多长。但如果不把通过产品、营销和销售可以实现增长的每一种方式作为一个演进过程叠加起来,这是很多增长团队未能迭代和创新的重大错误。
我最好的类比方式是:如果产品已经有了产品市场匹配,这很好,但那个产品市场匹配不会永远服务于那个产品。他们总是需要有第二阶段,总是需要产品市场匹配的扩展努力,以便继续抓住尽可能多的人,解决尽可能多的人的问题,并扩大他们的团队。增长也是如此。如果你有一个对你有效的增长模型,那很好,恭喜你。优化它,增长它,规模化它,创建一个团队来培育它、放大它,但你迟早需要演进它,而这个演进需要通过在上面叠加其他增长模型来实现。这样做的目的之一,是让你从单一增长模型的失败中多元化出来,因为很多时候你会陷入一种规律的困境。
我非常喜欢 Andrew Chen 在这方面的一篇文章,叫做”糟糕点击率定律”(Law of Shitty Clickthroughs)。如果你反复过度优化同一件事,回报会越来越小,而且有些增长模型的生命周期非常有限。有些模型很大,有些可以长期增长——Dropbox 的分享循环已经运转了 17 年,现在还在发挥作用。那太好了,非常了不起。但那是非常特殊的情况。大多数增长循环在最初的五到七年里就会耗尽产生有意义成果的能力。
**Elena Verna:**所以持续叠加这些不同的增长模型——我具体说的是产品驱动增长、营销驱动增长和销售驱动增长——并不断将其引入到生态系统中,这才是真正区分那些能够长期持续增长的公司与那些可能看到一个很大的爆发、甚至达到独角兽级别的 70%、80% 甚至更高增长率但随后开始放缓的公司之间的关键。不要等到放缓发生了才行动。你需要真正开始思考吸引人们来增长的不同方式,这样你就不会在市场上留下让别人进入和占据的空白。而应该以你能与客户互动的每一种方式参与其中。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**我的理解是,每个增长模型和增长杠杆都有自己的 S 曲线,对吧?最终它会发挥作用然后放缓,所以你要找到推动业务增长的下一个 S 曲线。
**Elena Verna:**完全同意。我经常看到的情况是,尤其是当增长团队从某个项目中取得了非常大的成果时,他们就会一直反复专注于那件事。有时候这种专注是合理的。就像我说的,Dropbox 的分享循环有专门的增长团队在负责,这很好。但与此同时,很多情况下这并不适用于所有……或者你需要意识到这个东西已经没有更多可以挤出来的了,然后你需要继续前进,转向其他方向。
增长模型的更新节奏
**Elena Verna:**这其实也引出了我想说的下一点——你需要每 18 个月做一次这件事。因为其中很多会失败。大约每五年,你肯定需要新的渠道、新的增长循环、新的策略、新的引擎,来为你的增长引擎提供动力。无论是在自助服务之上叠加销售,还是你现在在获客方面大量依赖病毒式传播,然后转向更重的营销。但每五年必须有某个大的东西开始占据你业务量的很大比例。为此,你需要每 18 年引入一些——
**Lenny Rachitsky:**18 个月。
**Elena Verna:**抱歉,对。每 18 个月你需要引入一些新的东西,以便让它持续演进。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**这是我们要过完的列表里的第八条吗,还是额外的一条建议?
**Elena Verna:**不是,这只是一条额外建议。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**好的,明白了。那么这里的建议本质上是,你会找到一个帮助你增长的东西,假设它在某个时候会放缓,然后开始考虑叠加其他杠杆和增长模型。
**Elena Verna:**是的。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**我观察到的一个现象——不知道你是否同意——通常是会有一个杠杆在很长一段时间里贡献了你大部分的增长,所以其他所有东西都不会那么大,但它们仍然很重要。
为创新预留 20-25% 的增长团队时间
**Elena Verna:**我的做法是,我会尝试把增长团队每年 20% 到 25% 的时间——不是每个冲刺或每个季度,而是按年度算——用于引入新的增长循环,或引入新的渠道,或引入一些可能为我们的增长引擎带来额外动力的新东西。我知道其中很多会失败。这些在初期不能对任何增长指标设定目标,因为你不能立刻给它设定变现或获客的目标。如果你不让它演变成可以被变现、可以承担获客责任的东西,你就是在它还没站起来的时候就把它的腿打断了。举个例子,在 Mirrorverse 上——这是所有人创建的 Miro 看板的用户生成内容库——我们大概花了 18 个月才开始对它设定指标预期。
在那之前,它只是我们在测试的一个东西。它被很多人使用,但我们就像,我们甚至不太清楚这最终怎么整合在一起。然后它开始作为参与度引擎和获客引擎同时起飞。但重要的是持续给团队留出空间去尝试这些新想法。否则你会发现增长循环和增长引擎在放缓,而你却没有时间去找到第二个增长方向。这是最糟糕的处境。增长就是在那个时候开始放缓的。而要从那个状态中恢复几乎不可能,因为你需要收入、需要收入、需要收入。而这些增长循环平均需要六个月、一年、一年半的时间才能开始产生甚至肉眼可见的收入。这就是为什么你需要尽早开始在项目中叠加它们。
可供考虑的增长循环和杠杆
**Lenny Rachitsky:**为了让听众更具体地理解——那些开始觉得”糟了,我得做这件事”的人——你能不能给我们列一个不需要很详尽的潜在增长循环、杠杆、方法、引擎的清单?你已经提到了几个,但给大家列一个清单,让人可以对照说,好的,明白了,也许我们可以试试其中一个。
**Elena Verna:**我非常推崇从用户生成内容中创建增长循环。我认为鉴于目前 AI 和 SEO 领域发生的一切,你在内容策略上最大的机会就是利用用户生成内容。无论是用户生成的模板,还是用户生成的案例研究、评论,无论是什么,你都需要现在就开始投入,把它建成一个内容库,用于激活目的,然后用于获客目的,利用社区来激发围绕它的讨论。这可以是一个非常出色的策略,每个人都应该考虑一下自己的产品中是否有这个潜力。其他可能性比如,我们是一个非常个人化的产品,但能不能为它创建一个推荐机制?
对于 B2C 来说,这其实非常直接。很多 B2C 产品靠推荐蓬勃发展。对于 B2B,它可能更多是邀请其他团队成员进入产品来完成其他待办任务。比如,我做完这个了,我需要我的经理看到它。我能不能创建一个报告来分享给我的经理?然后它突然就开始在公司内部传播了。所以可以创建额外的、几乎是产品功能性的东西,然后这些东西就可能为你创造这些循环。所以它可以是一系列的事情。显然,我强烈建议先了解所有这些赢得的策略的全景。我其实应该写一篇关于这个的博客文章。然后看看哪些适合你。因为至少创意构思这一步是必须发生的。尤其是如果你依赖搜索引擎做获客,尽快开始考虑一些赢得的渠道。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**虽然你推荐花更多时间在赢得的渠道和自有渠道上,但也可以探索 SEO、探索付费增长,对吧?销售?
**Elena Verna:**当然。我的意思是,几乎所有人都在做付费,可以说可能太早了。可以论证的是有些公司现在不应该做付费。但 SEO、社交分销商,所有这些也是很棒的策略。显然,我非常倾向于赢得的渠道,因为一旦你把它建立起来,那就是一份持续给予的礼物,没有人能从你手中拿走。但这并不意味着其他策略和其他渠道不应该被探索。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**太好了。我们继续吧。还有三条。第八条。
第八条:聘请顾问
**Elena Verna:**第八条,这条有点猛,我觉得很多人没有这样做。我不知道他们为什么不做。我认为这是一种不可思议的推动力。那就是——正如我在之前的增长策略中所说,不奏效的做法是认为每个问题都是独特的、需要自己来解决。也许这不完全是”是否奏效”的问题,但不聘请顾问是我非常不推荐的做法。你可以每周请任何人给你一个小时。是的,你得付钱。没有人会义务奉献自己的时间,我们都非常非常忙。但聘请顾问是你能做的最大的职业放大器和业务放大器。因为建立一个由拥有所有这些数据点和模式经验的人组成的网络,能把你推到很远的地方。
这并不意味着你要照搬顾问说的一切。这不是重点。他们不是策略制定者。但他们是你在决策中额外获得的输入,否则你不会有这些输入。你可以去请一位来自 Atlassian 的人,你可以去请一位来自 Airbnb 的人,他们亲身经历过所有这一切,可以帮助你解决问题。所以我认为,任何没有顾问的增长团队都是一个表现欠佳的增长团队。因为即使是像我这样,我给那么多公司做过顾问,在那么多公司做过运营,我也不知道一切。每次我担任运营角色时,我都会为自己聘请顾问。因为这是学习任何东西最快的方式。而我经常看到这些团队就是试图自己搞定一切,没有任何顾问——可以说,顾问都没有。
我甚至不是在说正式的董事会。我说的甚至不是顾问委员会。你可以以承包商的身份雇一个人做你的顾问,不这样做我认为是一个巨大的错误,尤其是在当今时代。因为我们的领域存在巨大的信息不对称。在我们这个领域,可供学习的内容非常少,因为出于竞争考虑,我们都很保守。但归根结底,人们内心知道很多东西,知道那些东西对他们内部是如何运作的。我强烈、强烈建议你不要试图自己摸索。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**顺着这个话题,还有一种建议是说,别担心顾问,你永远不知道他们是否有用。会有各种各样的人挂在你创业公司名下说想帮忙,但其实帮不上忙。如果你给创始人或团队一个建议——他们正在面试顾问、寻找顾问、筛选他们以找到真正优秀的人——你会给什么建议?
**Elena Verna:**我确实有一个好建议。不过很多顾问可能不喜欢。我认为你不应该在没有跟他们就你正在遇到的问题做某种形式的 workshop 之前就聘请他们。看他们在实际操作中的表现。看他们能提供什么样的信息,因为任何对自己所知遮遮掩掩的顾问,都不是你想招进团队的那种顾问。你要找的是一个亲身经历过这些、能当面对你讲、能够进行艰难对话的人。能够为你提供必要的案例。能够帮你连线搭桥、把必要的模式串联起来。所以不要只是说,“哦,这个人看起来不错,让我聘他当顾问吧。“而要说,“嘿,我们先做一个 workshop。我有这个问题,我觉得你能帮我解决。”
按他们的费率支付这个 workshop 的费用,这是肯定的。看他们实际上如何与你的团队互动,然后再以长期保留服务的方式聘请他们。因为这创造了一个非常实用的面试流程,能很快判断你能否与他们合作、他们能否与你合作,以及他们是否有任何能贡献给你的东西。然后每个月评估一次那位顾问是否应该继续留在你身边。有些顾问只需要在公司待三个月就可以离开了,这完全没问题。有些可能会跟你待上四五年。但每个月你都应该问一下,他们有没有增加任何价值?我不是说顾问应该有任何像收入归因那样的金钱预期。而是你是否觉得与他们对话有价值?他们是否向你提供了任何有价值的东西?
**Lenny Rachitsky:**这个建议太棒了。我能理解为什么有人会说,“天哪,Elena,别说出来。“但这确实非常有道理。好,第九条。来吧。
第九条:过度实验的风险
**Elena Verna:**我最后一条也是我在增长团队中如今经常看到的问题。这是一个非常非常严重的问题。那就是增长团队过于规避风险,开始对所有东西进行测试。如果你的增长团队正在做的每一个举措都是一项实验,那就是一个问题,你应该停下来看一看,问问自己——我在做什么,为什么我需要对我经手的每件事都有一个精确的科学测量,才能让它上线或推向市场?
这几乎像一种疾病,一种让人瘫痪的疾病,它会拖慢进展、拖慢速度、拖慢学习,对增长团队的产出造成非常糟糕的后果。这有点反直觉,因为实验确实是增长团队做增长的方式,也是他们的流程。增长团队就是要做实验的,但我也认为,当团队开始陷入对一切都要做实验的状态时,这是非常糟糕的事情,而且真的很难走出来,因为他们之后就不敢做任何改动,除非先测试。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**那你觉得平衡点在哪里?我能想象听到这里的人会觉得,哦,这很有道理,然后他们继续把一切都拿去测试。你有没有什么经验法则可以推荐,让人知道——好吧,这个不用测,不用担心,你不需要为那个胜利去争功。
**Elena Verna:**首先,我认为人们应该更多地信任自己的直觉。数据是好东西,但只有在数据量足够的情况下才好。所以如果你面对的是一个低流量的位置,需要八个月才能得出某种答案,你真的要为它测试八个月吗?有什么意义?我的经验法则是,如果我们无法在一个月内收集到足够的样本量,我们就不应该测试它,就这么简单。因为那就不够快。我们应该直接做前后对比。前后对比(pre versus post)其实非常有效。这也是一种评估你影响的方式,而且如果效果不好你仍然可以回滚。但不要认为每件事都需要一个科学论证才能决定是否推进。
另外,实验不应该成为公司决策的唯一方式。了解你的用户、理解市场,让你的大脑把所有这些线索串联起来,判断你的客户会想要什么样的体验——这些仍然非常重要。如果说科学数据——比如对一个成功概率的非常精确的判定——确实重要,那当然去做,因为你可能正在计划一个重大的战略转型。所以这是一个验证点,用来确认所有这些额外的工作是否值得。又或者你面对的是一个非常高流量的位置,哪怕 0.1% 的差异对你来说也意味着数百万美元。
除此之外,放手去做就是了
**Elena Verna:**除此之外,就应该放手去做、去做、去做。做前后对比(pre versus post)。顺便说一句,我不是说发布完就不管了。发布之后,做 24 小时复盘、7 天复盘、28 天复盘,甚至一年后再回来看它相关的留存或延展数据。
把所有东西都拿去测试,会让增长团队筋疲力尽,让他们陷入瘫痪。所以要审视你的各项举措,问问自己:我在哪里需要精确度?这个位置是否重要?我能否在合理时间内获得可靠的精确结果?——而哪些地方我们应该直接上。是的,那些地方我们也会失败,没关系。我们可以回滚,可以想办法改进。但无论如何,失败总会发生的。
统计显著性这个东西很微妙。很多人把它当成表面数值来对待,而实际上它只是一个方向性的数据点,告诉你可能存在一个新的分布,均值可能不同,而且有 5% 的概率——如果你按 95% 的统计显著性来衡量,你甚至可能根本达不到那个阈值,却仍然把它当成理所当然。哦,它会带来这么大的提升。我只是觉得,在这个数据时代,人们几乎不再足够依赖自己的直觉了。
第十条:快速开火环节
**Lenny Rachitsky:**很多反直觉的观点,我很喜欢。Elena,我们到了第 10 条。我知道第 10 条比较特殊,不止一条。快速开火。
**Elena Verna:**第 10 条是我的小快速开火环节。我列了一些我看到人们在上面花太多时间的小事情。这让我很心疼,因为它们不会带来任何成果。
第一,颜色优化。看在上帝的份上,蓝色就是蓝色就是蓝色。只要它是无障碍可访问的,只要亮度够,就行了。你不需要测试蓝色的不同色调,也不需要拿它和绿色对比测试。选一个颜色,继续前进,请不要在这上面花时间。那是 2000 年代初的策略。现在已经不管用了。我们在科技行业早就过了那个阶段了。
第二,第三方登录。很多时候我们会想,哦,如果我们加上 Google 登录、Facebook 登录、Slack 登录或者 Microsoft 登录,不管你想加哪种认证方式,我们的获客量一定会大幅提升。在某些情况下,第三方登录确实很重要。比如说,如果你的产品面向开发者,请务必提供 GitHub 登录。这几乎是必需的——开发者已经有了那里的账号,让他们直接连接而不是创建一个新账号。但是,如果你是一个生产力产品,邮箱登录就够了。Gmail 登录挺好的。它不会给你带来更多获客。你只是做了一个临时方案,多两个人使用而已。它不会带来增量,不会改善你的激活,也不会改善你的留存。它不是一个增长策略。它只是你想要投入的客户体验的一部分。
第三,快速开火环节,一封邮件的奇迹。我们对某一封要发给某一客户群体的邮件过于焦虑。我们想,天哪,它能带来多大的提升呢?它永远不会带来任何提升。单独一封邮件永远不会起作用。打开的人太少了——平均 25% 的打开率,最好的情况下你能拿到 40% 到 50%。点击的人更少。一封邮件永远不会有什么效果。如果你要做邮件,请把它当作一个系列来思考——关于沟通,关于它如何与产品内沟通互动。
这是一整套策略。这是一整个体系。请不要为单独一封邮件焦虑。永远不要去测试一封邮件里的改动。这行不通。你得把整套该死的东西都做出来,看整体效果如何。不是单独一封邮件——永远行不通。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**我在这方面绝对有罪。这一条真的很好。事后看非常明显,所以我很高兴你分享了这一点。
**Elena Verna:**是的。最后一条,增长团队经常过度执迷于消除摩擦。因为如果我们减少了步骤,那么就会有更多人到达终点。在某种程度上,如果你的产品确实造成了严重的摩擦——比如用户完全搞不清下一步该做什么——我同意,去修复那种完成一个步骤所需的认知负荷带来的摩擦。那才是你应该着力解决的摩擦。然而,仅仅是删除步骤,或者生硬地砍掉功能,或者把一切简化到失去自我身份——用户甚至不知道你是做什么的、你能做什么——这完全是失败的增长策略。所以,简化可能是你解决某个问题时的一项举措,但如果你路线图上有一行写着”简化新手引导”,请把它划掉。这不会奏效,因为”简化新手引导”是一个动作。
你到底在解决什么问题?你永远不是在解决一个”简化”的问题。你的问题永远是:人们在里面感到困惑,人们不知道该往哪走,或者人们迷失了,或者人们没有得到足够的教育。那才是问题。简化可能是一个解决方案,但它本身永远不能成为一个问题。太多增长团队执迷于这个大概是 2000 年代初出来的观念——哦,简化是你能做的最大的增长黑客。去做吧。它只是针对一个非常特定的问题集——过度复杂——的解决方案而已。
最喜欢的增长框架
**Lenny Rachitsky:**哇,以这个收尾份量很重。我想这会帮助很多人避免浪费时间。这完全可以再做一期播客,专门聊你对新手引导的建议——我知道你有很多心得。我们到了最后一个话题了。在我们继续之前,关于这个列表你还有什么想分享的吗?
**Elena Verna:**没有了,我觉得我们已经花了足够多的时间,可以继续了。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**不是太多,刚刚好。顺着这个节奏,我想临时调整一下计划——我们本来要逐一讲你最喜欢的所有框架的。我很喜欢这段对话的走向,不想让大家被信息淹没。所以一个想法是:只是列出你最喜欢的增长框架,让大家自己去了解,每个不花太多时间。
**Elena Verna:**好,就这么办。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**好。
**Elena Verna:**好,那来列一下我最喜欢的增长框架。顺便说一下,对我来说,框架不是一个解决方案,而是一种模式。一种几乎在每一家公司都存在的模式,它是你创意构思的起点,帮助你几乎走捷径找到可能的解决方案列表,而不是费力地去定义问题本身应该是什么。
第一,可能大家都能猜到——如果有人读过我的任何文章或听过我演讲的话——增长循环。我认为,任何思考增长的人,如果还在用漏斗的思维来思考,而不是理解增长循环是什么,那他们就错失了构建可持续增长引擎的能力。所以,去思考”行动、反应、再引发下一个行动”非常重要——这是一个可以自行运转的自包含飞轮。Reforge 上有大量相关资源,Brian Balfour、Casey Winters 和 Andrew Chen 写了很多关于这个的内容。
增长框架(续)
**Elena Verna:**强烈建议大家去了解。我第二喜欢的增长框架其实是你和 Dan 写的,就是 race car 框架。大家在思考增长举措到底包含哪些部分、哪些是长期的、哪些是短期的、它们实际能产出多少成果时,经常会非常困惑。而 race car 框架非常出色,因为它把不同的举措做了区分:有些是引擎,也就是那些会持续运转的增长循环;有些是燃料,你需要往里加的,比如付费营销预算;有些是涡轮增压,可能是你作为产品举办的大型用户大会之类的;还有一些是润滑和优化,就像往引擎里倒机油,让它真正正常运转。这个框架非常精妙,我一直在跟所有人推荐。
相邻用户理论
**Elena Verna:**我第三喜欢的增长框架来自 Bengali,也就是相邻用户理论。我认为这个框架在思考增长演变方面非常强大。正如我们谈到的,往你的增长生态系统中加入不同的增长模型、不同的增长循环,同时还有那些处于你的理想客户画像(ICP)之外的、核心用户之外的相邻用户——增长团队如何真正把他们引进来,在不扩展产品市场匹配的前提下,仅仅通过优化他们的体验,就能为产品增添额外的动力。我就讲这三个,因为我认为它们是最强大的。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**好。关于最后一个,Bengali 上过我们的播客,如果你想深入了解相邻用户理论,我们会附上那期节目的链接。我很喜欢刚才这几分钟,因为如果有人采用了这些框架中的一个,学会用这种方式来思考增长,可能会改变他们的职业轨迹。这是思考我们整场对话中讨论的所有内容的一种非常强大的心智模型。
**Elena Verna:**是的,这些框架就像我心中的教堂,是我关于如何思考增长的一整套信仰体系——把增长作为一种战略来驾驭,而不仅仅是一个战术或一个举措。
异见角
**Lenny Rachitsky:**Elena Verna 的教堂,太棒了。好,在结束之前,我想进入”异见角”环节,这是本播客的固定环节,我喜欢问嘉宾:你有没有什么大多数人并不认同的观点?也就是所谓的反向观点。有什么想说的吗?
**Elena Verna:**我确实有一个非常反主流的观点,不过它跟增长的关系不大,更多是关于个人成长的。我的观点是:全职工作并不是变现你所掌握技能的最佳方式。它是每个人都应该去评估和利用的选项之一,但太多人盲目地默认了这个选项,而不去探索市场上其他可用的、同时更适合自己的性格、兴趣和技能组合的选择。这就像一个所有人都默认订阅的方案,但它本身是有缺陷的。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**哇。好。等等,我们得听你多说说。那还有哪些其他的选项?我想我们已经在尝试其中一些了——这些其他的选择——但你觉得人们应该怎么思考这件事,具体可以做些什么、探索些什么?
**Elena Verna:**我先声明一下,我不想泼全职工作的冷水。全职工作在可预测性、学习和积累专业能力方面都非常出色,而且取决于你处于职业生涯的哪个阶段,全职工作可能是你迈向下一阶段的绝对必经之路。然而,全职工作把你限制在一家公司里,而那家公司可能在文化上、技能匹配上、抱负上、兴趣上并不适合你。人生太短了。你应该像为企业寻找最佳变现模式那样,为自己寻找最佳变现模式,而不是想当然地认为全职是唯一的选择。
那还有哪些其他选项呢?选择其实很多,有一些大家比较熟悉的:自由职业,你可以做独立承包人。我自己做了大量的顾问和咨询工作,因为我的思维方式、我喜欢解谜和模式匹配的特点,让我更适合横向地跨越多家公司工作,而不是纵向地深入一家公司。但这不意味着我不会接受那些纵向深入的项目来深化自己在某个特定领域的认知。但总体来说,跨多家公司进行模式匹配并帮助它们增长,对我来说比只专注于一家要有趣得多。
还有过渡期任职,就是你的协议有一个预定的结束日期。还有分时任职,你以兼职的方式参与某项工作,而不是全身心投入。你还可以创建课程,也可以创建 Newsletter 并从中变现,就像你做得那么出色一样。选择真的很多,但人们有时会因为恐惧不稳定而陷入瘫痪——当你开始探索其他选项时会带来的那种不稳定,因为你不再有和那一家公司签的合同、不再有每两周一次的工资可以依赖。但与此同时,你可以为自己的职业生涯创造多元化,由你自己决定什么时候该扣动扳机、什么时候是探索的合适时机。但如果整个职业生涯都只认定全职是唯一的路,我认为这是很多人正在犯的一个重大错误。
职业选择权
**Lenny Rachitsky:**你有一篇相关的文章是我最喜欢的,主题是关于增加……你真正想做的是增加选择权,能展开讲讲吗?因为我觉得这是一个非常有价值的建议。
**Elena Verna:**关于职业选择权应该是每个人职业旅程中终极北极星这个建议,我非常坚定。因为很多人的目标是,比如说,我想当 VP,或者我想当 CEO,或者我想做管理者、管理团队。这就成了他们的北极星,他们朝着这个方向努力。但很多人在达到他们心中的企业晋升阶梯的北极星之后,发现自己极度不满,甚至沮丧于那份工作有多糟糕。管理人的工作?如果不是真心喜欢的话,我都不会把它推荐给我最不喜欢的人,因为那是一份非常糟糕的工作——而在你真正做之前,你根本不知道自己会不会喜欢。
所以我认为把一个头衔设定为目标——我们中太多人把头衔当成目标——是非常错误的思路。相反,你应该说:“我的职业目标其实是拥有选择权,这样我可以选择自己想做的事情,可以选择适合我当下生活阶段的,可以选择适合我的技能和性格的、能让我快乐的事情。”
**Elena Verna:**如果把选择权作为目标,你对职业发展的思考方式就会截然不同。你不再考虑”什么能帮我拿到下一个头衔”,而是开始思考”明年我能做什么来扩大我的选择池?“这和单纯追求更高的头衔完全不同。如果你开始用这样的视角来评估机会——我在这家公司再待一年,是增加了我的选择权,还是保持不变,甚至可能减少?——那才是找到你最终的幸福位置和理想工作的正确方式,那份能给你带来能量、带来快乐的工作,而不是追求一个头衔,然后对它带来的东西深感失望。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**非常棒的建议。我想补充一点,也是我觉得很多人在这里可能需要平衡的一个感受——就是”哦,我就去各大知名公司跳一圈,打造一份华丽简历”。我觉得你同时也需要积累深度和真正的经验,这样你做其他事情时才有东西可以依托。比如说,很多人什么都还没做出成绩呢,就想跳去做 newsletter、做播客、做顾问——但你根本没有实际经验来支撑你的建议,这一点非常重要。
**Elena Verna:**你必须先赢得解锁选择权的资格,而赢得这个资格通常确实要在全职工作中完成。这是一个普遍规律。但到了某个阶段,你不应该再把全职工作看作唯一的选项。你应该开始思考什么时候可以开始解锁新的选项,并在市场上测试它们。
职业路径不是单行道
**Lenny Rachitsky:**还有一点,你自己就是一个很好的例子——这不是一条单行道。你可以做全职工作,然后转向别的事情,再回到全职工作,做顾问,做 interim,做 newsletter。你把这些切换得非常好。
**Elena Verna:**你应该什么都去尝试。这一切都是一张菜单上的选项,你在生命的每个阶段挑选最适合自己的那一道。永远不要说”绝不”,永远不要对任何可能性关上大门。绝对是这样的。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**天哪,Elena,这次访谈太精彩了。在我们进入非常令人期待的闪电问答之前,你还有什么想分享或留给听众的吗?最后一个小金句或想法——或者没有也行,我们已经聊了很多了。
**Elena Verna:**没有了,我觉得我们已经覆盖了太多内容,我不想让大家应接不暇。
闪电问答
**Lenny Rachitsky:**那我们开始吧。接下来就是我们非常令人期待的闪电问答环节。准备好了吗?
**Elena Verna:**准备好了。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**第一个问题,意料之中——你最常向别人推荐的两三本书是什么?
**Elena Verna:**好,我刚读完一本非常喜欢的书,这不是专业书籍,而是 Andy Weir 的《Project Hail Mary》。他就是写《火星救援》的那个作者,《火星救援》也被改编成了电影。太好看了,根本停不下来。我记得我大概连续两天就读完了,强烈推荐。另外一本我刚开始读的是《Body Burst》,也非常棒。它涉及了 AI 的元素——我们如何将意识上传到 AI 中,以及由此可能发生的事情。这本书我觉得实际上比我们想象的更接近未来可能的现实。不过我是个十足的科幻迷,所以主要读科幻书。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**我有一个科幻推荐给你,来自 Noah Smith。我很喜欢他的 newsletter,叫 Noah Opinion,他列了一个自己最喜欢的科幻书单,我正在按着读。有一本你也许读过,Werner Vogel 写的《Fire Upon The Deep》。你听说过吗?
**Elena Verna:**没,没听说过。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**它被描述为不是普通科幻,而是一部太空歌剧——史诗级的、宇宙尺度最大的那种故事。
**Elena Verna:**我今晚就下载,加入我的书单。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**一开始需要一点时间才能进入状态,风格很独特,但只要坚持读下去就非常精彩,而且 AI 在其中扮演了重要角色。
**Elena Verna:**太好了,我这就下载。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**好,第二个问题。最近最喜欢的电影或电视剧?
**Elena Verna:**有的。我最近刚看了 Netflix 的《Beef》(《怒呛人生》),太好看了。我不剧透,《Beef》,大家应该去看。是一部限定剧集,非常好。还有我很喜欢 HBO 的《Veep》(《副总统》),太搞笑了。整部剧我大概已经看了两遍了,可能还会再看,因为每次都让我笑到不行。我觉得我们的政府实际上就是这么运作的,所以我特别着迷。还有一部我很喜欢、马上要出第二季了,大家可以把第一季补上——是《The Last of Us》(《最后生还者》)。如果你不喜欢丧尸题材的影视,就别看了。但如果丧尸和末日题材是你的菜,《The Last of Us》非常棒。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**是 “the Last of Us” 对吧?
**Elena Verna:**是 “Last of Us” 吗?
**Lenny Rachitsky:**我一边聊一边在查——是《The Last of Us》,应该是 “The Last of Us”。对,《The Last of Us》。
**Elena Verna:**哦,《The Last of Us》。好,《The Last of Us》。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**你说第三季马上要出了?太令人兴奋了,我都不知道。
**Elena Verna:**对,太好看了。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**好,我也很喜欢。非常好的选择。好,你最近发现的、非常喜欢的某个产品?
**Elena Verna:**我最近发现有加热鞋这种东西,改变了我的人生。我的脚总是冷的,有一种靴子里面真的内置了加热线,我现在简直爱不释手。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**是要充电吗?USB 插线那种?
**Elena Verna:**对,我回家就插上充电,然后出门就很暖和,我觉得太神奇了。我有一件加热外套,现在又有了加热鞋,就差手套了,配齐就完美了。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**USB 供电的衣物,真是不错。顺便说一下,你不住在硅谷,你住在东海岸那边对吧?
**Elena Verna:**中部。住在中部。这里最冷也就三十多华氏度(约零上一两度),但我总是觉得冷,所以加热的东西就是我的爱的语言——能坐上去加热的那种。我就是那种整天蹲在灯下取暖的猫。然后我刚入手了 AirPod Max 耳机。连不上电脑,还有技术问题没解决,但我很喜欢。音质太棒了。这是我目前最痴迷的新玩具。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**加热鞋加 AirPods,这个组合真酷。还有两个问题。你有没有一句最喜欢的人生座右铭,经常回到的、在工作生活中都觉得有用的?
**Elena Verna:**有的,就是一条——“进步优先于完美”。我觉得你需要……信息的速度远比我认为的”完美”更重要。完美是一个你最终到达的结果,但进步优先于完美,永远如此,无论何时。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**对于一位增长负责人来说,非常贴切。
**Elena Verna:**是的。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**最后一个问题。你不仅是我见过的增长领域最聪明的人之一,也是社交媒体上,尤其是在 LinkedIn 上最有趣的人之一。如果大家还没关注你,真的应该去关注。不仅能学到东西,还非常娱乐。有没有一张你创作的、自己特别引以为豪的表情包,可以描述一下?我们也许可以在节目笔记里附上链接。
**Elena Verna:**有的。不过我也想说,很多人因为我发了太多表情包而讨厌我,他们觉得这样不够严肃。其实我想快速反驳一下这一点,因为我认为幽默是解除人们防备的最好方式,可以指出我们每天都在面对的那些令人痛苦的处境或两难困境,而不会让任何人处于防御状态。因为我们都可以嘲笑自己日常生活中的荒谬之处。而且一图胜千言,有时候表情包就是沟通我们在企业世界里面临的最复杂局面的最佳方式。它们帮助我们认识到这些处境有多么普遍。我们并不独特。你不会因为对发生的事情感到沮丧而觉得孤立无援——每个人都在经历同样的事情。所以我喜欢表情包,因为它们能帮助双方的人产生共鸣。
哪怕你在调侃某一方,他们也会说:“是啊,确实如此,这太搞笑了。“所以我非常提倡这种做法,因为我认为这实际上是一种更好的方式——既能团结大家,又能讨论那些如果写成文字可能根本没人愿意读的难题。
不过我最喜欢的表情包,其实是我最早创作的那批之一。我觉得是《恶搞之家》里的一个画面,一头大象和一只企鹅站在一起,然后摩西还是某个圣经人物看着它们说:“这到底是什么鬼?“看着那头大象和那只企鹅。它们结合的产物是一个拥有企鹅身体和大象脑袋的幼崽。如果你把大象想象成产品,企鹅想象成营销,“这到底是什么鬼”就很恶心了。这是一个奇怪的、非常奇怪的副产品——产品和营销强行合在一起,既不属于任何一方,却又自成一个独立的存在。我也不知道怎么解释,但我觉得这是向人们描述这种情况最好的方式了。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**太贴切了。而且用语言描述表情包还能让人觉得好笑,这挺难的。做得好,谢谢你。我们会在节目笔记里附上这张表情包。Elena,这次太棒了。再次感谢你。谢谢你成为我们节目史上第一位三次回归的嘉宾。希望未来还会有更多 Elena Verna 的节目。最后两个问题。大家如果想联系你、了解更多,在网上哪里可以找到你?听众怎样能帮到你?
**Elena Verna:**可以在 LinkedIn 或我的 Substack 上找到我。Lenny,我不是在和你竞争,但我会在自己的 Substack 上分享很多我的想法和我学到的一切。地址就是 elenaverna.com。LinkedIn 是我的表情包大本营,想笑就去那里;但如果你想从我正在学习的东西中学到些什么,就去我的 Substack。至于怎么帮到我?告诉我你现在面临的问题。别告诉我”增长在放缓,我该怎么办”——我帮不了你,太宽泛了。但如果你有一个具体的处境,对我来说往往是很好的素材,我可以就此去写文章或做更多研究。所以我很乐意了解大家在想什么,这样我既能帮助他们理清思路,自己也能从中学习。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**他们最好通过什么方式联系你?是在 LinkedIn 上私信你,还是有其他——
**Elena Verna:**在 LinkedIn 上私信我,或者直接回复我的 Substack 邮件。邮件会直接进入我的个人邮箱,所以每一封我都会读。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**这是一个很好的小窍门。很多人不知道,当你在 Substack 上收到一封邮件时,如果你直接回复,会直接发到作者那里。
**Elena Verna:**没错。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**Elena,非常感谢你来参加节目。
**Elena Verna:**好的,谢谢你邀请我,Lenny。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**大家再见。
感谢大家的收听。如果你觉得这期节目有价值,可以在 Apple Podcasts、Spotify 或你喜欢的播客应用上订阅。也请考虑给我们评分或留下评价,这真的能帮助其他听众发现这个播客。你可以在 LennysPodcast.com 找到所有往期节目或了解更多关于这个节目的信息。下期再见。
术语表
| 原文 | 中文 |
|---|---|
| A/B testing | A/B 测试 |
| acquisition | 获客 |
| activation | 激活 |
| adjacent user theory | 相邻用户理论 |
| Andrew Chen | 保留原文(增长领域知名从业者、a16z 合伙人) |
| ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) | 年度经常性收入(ARR) |
| benchmarks | 基准数据 |
| Brian Balfour | 保留原文(Reforge 创始人) |
| Casey Winters | 保留原文(增长领域专家) |
| category penetration | 品类渗透率 |
| CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) | 首席营销官(CMO) |
| cognitive load | 认知负荷 |
| community | 社区 |
| corporate ladder | 企业晋升阶梯 |
| demand gen (demand generation) | 需求生成 |
| earned channel | 赢得的渠道 |
| earned channels | 赢得的渠道 |
| Elena Verna | 保留原文(嘉宾,B2B 增长领域专家) |
| flywheel | 飞轮 |
| founder led growth | 创始人驱动增长 |
| fractional engagement | 分时任职 |
| framework | 框架 |
| freemium | 免费增值 |
| global maxima | 全局最大值 |
| go-to-market strategy | 市场进入策略 |
| growth engine | 增长引擎 |
| growth hacks | 增长黑客 |
| growth lever | 增长杠杆 |
| growth loops | 增长循环 |
| growth pod | 增长小组 |
| ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) | 理想客户画像(ICP) |
| ideation | 创意构思 |
| incrementality | 增量 |
| interim engagement | 过渡期任职 |
| J curve | J 曲线 |
| Law of Shitty Clickthroughs | 糟糕点击率定律 |
| Lenny Rachitsky | 保留原文(播客主持人) |
| lightning round | 闪电问答 |
| meme | 表情包/梗图 |
| monetization | 变现 |
| north star metric | 北极星指标 |
| onboarding | 新手引导 |
| option pool | 选择池 |
| optionality | 选择权 |
| owned channels | 自有渠道 |
| paid growth | 付费增长 |
| patternize | 模式化 |
| pre versus post | 前后对比(pre versus post) |
| product-led growth | 产品驱动增长 |
| product-led sales | 产品驱动销售 |
| product-market fit | 产品市场匹配 |
| race car framework | race car 框架(一种增长举措分类框架) |
| referral mechanism | 推荐机制 |
| Reforge | 保留原文(增长领域教育平台) |
| retainer | 长期保留服务 |
| risk averseness | 风险规避 |
| S-curve | S 曲线 |
| Sean Test | Sean Test(衡量产品市场匹配的用户调查方法,询问用户”如果不能再使用这个产品会有什么感受”) |
| self-serve | 自助服务 |
| SEM (Search Engine Marketing) | SEM(搜索引擎营销) |
| SEO (Search Engine Optimization) | SEO(搜索引擎优化) |
| show notes | 节目笔记 |
| social resellers | 社交分销商 |
| Substack | 保留原文(内容订阅平台) |
| top of the funnel | 漏斗顶部 |
| traction | 牵引力 |
| upside | upside(上行空间/潜在收益) |
| user-generated content | 用户生成内容 |
| virality | 病毒式传播 |
| web archives | web archives(网页存档工具) |
| weekly active users | 周活跃用户 |
| word of mouth | 口碑 |
| workshop | workshop(实践研讨/工作坊) |
此文档由 AI 分片翻译(translate_long_document)