Daily Feed — Growth

I spend some time listening to podcasts and write down notes

VC20–2/16/2022

Retention & Engagement > Acquisition

• Growth should focus these more than acquisition.That’s what FB and most other companies now do.

Uber key take-aways

• Important to focus on needle-movers — add more drivers to solve the bottleneck for a two-sided marketplace like Uber, instead of leaning on only running A/B tests to improve apps.
• Add a button on Uber’s rider app that says: become a driver. That leads to huge influx of drivers from the rider base, as previously the driver base only came from 1. paid marketing 2. driver referral program 3. organic sign-ups. This change led to more drivers signing up than all of their paid-marketing efforts combined.
• In India, a lot of users do not have credit cards so they couldn’t use Uber at first. They decided to run a test that accept cash, which doubled conversion rate.

North-star metric

• FB North-star is MAU. Entire growth team looks at it every single day. Every week they have a team meeting to look at MAU this week vs. last week, and why. If anybody who’s on the growth team is not working on stuff that’s effectively improving the north star metric, then he/she might not be working on the most important thing.
• Uber North-star is weekly trips because it is a two-sided market — the team wants to have a single metric that captures both side instead of just one side (riders, for example)
• It helps a lot with prioritization for growth team leaders

Growth is cross-functional, as it not only falls under product.

• Marketing is a big component of growth
• Product
• Operations (for example, Uber onboarding drivers require teams to inspect vehicles, perform background checks, etc.)

Don’t focus on Growth too early

• Product-market fit should always come before forming a growth team. You might want to have good retention numbers from existing users in the first place.

How to structure a growth team

• 5 key functions: product, design, engineering, marketing, analytics

Frictions and overlaps between growth team and product team

• When growth team and product team are structured separately, there will be a lot of frictions and politics involve. Therefore, growth and product teams shouldn’t exist simultaneously.

Growth leaders attributes

• creative & analytical at the same time
• AB test is important

AB Test

• Most experiments do not move the needle/result in worse outcomes

Core elements of Growth that stayed around permanently

• K-factor
• Viral Loop

Elements of Growth that died

• Emails used to work a lot better but not so much today