Elena Verna: Why rebrands and growth-team hires rarely work

Through years inside Amplitude, Miro, Dropbox, and SurveyMonkey; Verna shows why rebrands, redesigns, and growth-team hires rarely save a weak product.

Elena VernaguestLenny RachitskyhostGuestguest

Jan 19, 20251h 35mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

150 min read · 30,333 words

0:00 – 6:02
Welcome back, Elena!
1. EVElena Verna
  (instrumental music) Growth is a fairly new field. You have a lot of renowned interest in growth hacks, like what is the, like, sure things to get growth? In the age of social media, everybody and anybody tries to share their tips and tricks. Oftentimes, uh, things that are completely out of context or they are very specific to one example and actually do not apply as a pattern.
2. LRLenny Rachitsky
  So we're gonna 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?
3. EVElena Verna
  We live in tech. There's always lots of startups and startups are obviously looking to grow, but 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.
4. LRLenny Rachitsky
  Powerful words. I am loving this list already.
5. EVElena Verna
  So number two, this one's my favorite and it might be a little spicy. Never, ever once have I seen a rebrand or redesign, especially of like your 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 oftentime, it's promised with, "Our acquisition is gonna go up," and it never materializes into anything meaningful.
6. LRLenny Rachitsky
  A lot of contrarian takes here. I love this.
7. EVElena 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.
8. LRLenny Rachitsky
  (instrumental music) 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 future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Elena Verna. This episode is brought to you by Cinch, the customer communications cloud. Here's the thing about digital customer communications. Whether you're sending marketing campaigns, verification codes, or account alerts, you need them to reach users reliably. That's where Cinch comes in. Over 150,000 businesses, including eight of the top 10 largest tech companies globally, use Cinch's API to build messaging, email, and calling into their products. And there's something big happening in messaging that product teams need to know about, Rich Communication Services or RCS. Think of RCS as SMS 2.0. Instead of getting texts from a random number, your users will see your verified company name and logo without needing to download anything new. It's a more secure and branded experience. Plus you get features like interactive carousels and suggestive replies. And here's why this matters. US carriers are starting to adopt RCS. Cinch 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 cinch.com/lenny. That's S-I-N-C-H dot com slash Lenny. This episode is brought to you by Vanta. When it comes to ensuring your company has top-notch security practices, things get complicated fast. Now you can assess risk, secure the trust of your customers, and automate compliance for SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and more with a single platform, Vanta. Vanta's market leading trust management platform helps you continuously monitor compliance, alongside reporting and tracking risks. Plus, you can save hours by completing security questionnaires with Vanta AI. Join thousands of global companies that use Vanta to automate evidence collection, unify risk management, and streamline security reviews. Get $1,000 off Vanta when you go to vanta.com/lenny. That's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash Lenny. Elena, thank you so much for being here. Welcome back to the podcast, our first ever third time repeat guest. What an honor. (laughs) Dancing if you're not watching on video. Well, thank you for being here. I was actually just looking at our first episode, which we recorded almost two year- over two years ago, September of 2022. And someone just today left a comment. Uh, people are still finding and watching it and this comment kind of em- encapsulates why I love having you on this podcast. Uh, 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."
9. EVElena Verna
  Well, 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, uh, with people. So it squarely fits within what I'm optimizing for, so that's great.
10. LRLenny Rachitsky
  (laughs) That needs to be my KPI on this podcast, insights per minute.
11. EVElena Verna
  (laughs) I think you have it. I think, I think your- your insights per minute is pretty high.
12. LRLenny Rachitsky
  That is, I do shoot for that, although I have learned you also need it to feel good and feel s- there's story, you know? There's like an interesting combo of stuff. You can't just be insight, insight, insight, you know? People want to-
13. EVElena Verna
  Well, yeah. It's all about how you present them too.
14. LRLenny Rachitsky
  Storytelling.
15. EVElena Verna
  Storytelling is a big portion of it to actually, to stick.
16. LRLenny Rachitsky
  Yeah. All right. Already insight. That's an insight right there.
6:02 – 8:31
Common mistakes growth teams make
1. LRLenny Rachitsky
  Uh, 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. So we're gonna start with growth tactics that never work. Maybe just frame what we're going to talk about, talk about what this list, uh, and collection of tactics that we're going to talk about is.
2. EVElena Verna
  Yeah. So, uh, growth is a fairly new field compared to marketing or product management, or engineering. So, 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 is much higher than those people that have five, 10 years of experience of doing growth, you have a lot of, um, uh, renowned interest in growth hacks. Like, what is the like sure things to get growth? What is the sure thing to get that metric up? How can I, uh, contribute to success with the company the fastest way possible? So, all of these shortcuts. And obviously in the age of social media where everybody and anybody tries to share their tips and tricks and, uh, this and that, uh, people are grasping for the... O- oftentimes, uh, 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, um, whatsoever. So, there's just a lot of failure happening in growth teams. There's actually, I think growth teams are becoming one of those, um, 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 head of growth or you're a growth PM or you're a growth marketer, you're supposed to drive growth." And when that growth does not happen, um, co- here comes the ax and people off they go, uh, and then recycle and cycle starts all over, um, uh, in order to populate those positions. So, I think that there's just a lot of, um, misinformation, I would say, probably out there in terms of what growth actually is and, uh, how it should be done in the companies. And today, I just want to cover some of the biggest ones that I see as the patterns as I'm advising companies, as I'm operating in companies, because it's just so blatant yet there's very few, um, pieces of information on this for people to learn from.
8:31 – 15:09
1: Hiring for growth roles too soon
1. LRLenny Rachitsky
  Amazing. All right. What's number one?
2. EVElena Verna
  Uh, number one, I have to start with hiring. There's lots of positions open all the time. Uh, there's, uh, so many, um, uh, from head of growth to growth PM, uh, 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 here, so there's a lot of constant churn and constant rehiring. And when you're 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 like so much fault that is happening here. And, um, I did write, uh, on the, about it on your bl- on your blog of hiring for, uh, growth. So there's a little bit of a reference to that. And one of the biggest blatant issues that I see is, uh, hiring too soon for growth. There's... We live in tech, there's always lots of startups. Um, startups are obviously looking to grow, and there's a huge misconception in the field that in order to get growth going, you need a growth team. It's like absolutely not true. 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, five million, 10 million in ARR. Some of the companies don't even create growth teams until they're 100, 200 million in ARR, because to figure out your product market fit and how to distribute it, uh, 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 bunch of signups coming through and everybody's paying and everybody's retaining. That just doesn't happen. So, 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, uh, learn from and optimize and innovate on. And that first wave of growth has to be, uh, founder led. And there's two specific reasons, uh, 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. So there is a good retention. You can use Chanel 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. So 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.
3. LRLenny Rachitsky
  So 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 a- always, almost always that is not gonna be the solution to your problem until you have strong retention already, have a really high score on the Chanel score if you don't have a ton of data yet, and party advice is just the founders should continue to do this for as long as possible. A million ARR is like one milestone a lot of people recommend.
4. EVElena Verna
  Yes.
5. LRLenny Rachitsky
  To your point, a lot of companies wait a lo- lot longer.
6. EVElena Verna
  Yes. Yes. Um, 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 gonna be growing." And what is the rest of the companies doing? So honestly, the longer you wait, the better.
7. LRLenny Rachitsky
  As you talk about this, sales is-... a part of wh- what you described here, like hiring your first salesperson. And so I guess, how do you think about, like, your first head of growth versus salesperson? Is there any advice there is, like, for B2B SaaS, you probably don't hire head of growth for even longer, right? You hire sales first or what's your advice there?
8. EVElena Verna
  It depends.
9. LRLenny Rachitsky
  Mm.
10. EVElena Verna
  It depends on how you're actually gonna collect the monies. If your money collection is gonna 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, uh, 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. Uh, 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. So for sales led companies, yeah, hire sales, absolutely, uh, unless you're starting to do self-service revenue, so you're trying to have product sell itself, uh, through potentially freemium acquisition, trial acquisition, um, or you actually having product led activation, monetization. That's when you would need a growth person. So if you're starting with self-service monetization growth, hire should be probably first before sales. Uh, your sales, um, are gonna be more opportunistic in nature versus if you're a sales led company, uh, go ahead, hire sales, uh, wait for growth until you are ready to overlay product led growth on top of your sales motion.
11. LRLenny Rachitsky
  Okay. That's an excellent clarification. So basically what I'm hearing the advice is, hire a head of growth only when you have clear product market fit and you're a product led company-
12. EVElena Verna
  Yes.
13. LRLenny Rachitsky
  ... and beyond a million ARR ideally, something like that.
14. EVElena Verna
  Right. And I won't say you're a product led company, you are relying on product led motion to resolve-
15. LRLenny Rachitsky
  That's a good point.
16. EVElena Verna
  ... a lot of the growth levers, uh, within you, because you don't have to be fully product led company. But, uh, so if a product, let's say, acquires people, uh, let's say with the SEO or CM, and then its product is meant to activate them and then sales closes them, sales, uh, would be obviously important as well, but growth would have to be coming a little bit sooner as well. So if you have any product led components where product is responsible for acquisition, activation, monetization or retention, that's where growth comes in.
17. LRLenny Rachitsky
  Okay. That, that... We talked deeply about that specific topic in our first conversation-
18. EVElena Verna
  Yes.
19. LRLenny Rachitsky
  ... so if we just wanna go deeper there, there's a lot there.
20. EVElena Verna
  I needed to bring it back. This is like-
21. LRLenny Rachitsky
  Yeah. I love that.
22. EVElena Verna
  ... it keeps happening. I need, I need to repeat it. What you s- you need t- you need to repeat it three times, right, before it sticks to people? So hopefully this is the third time. (laughs)
23. LRLenny Rachitsky
  Absolutely. I'm only saying that because I, uh, people may be wanting more of what you're describing, and I will point them to our first episode, which goes deep on that one topic.
15:09 – 19:20
2: Hiring a head of growth to fix your problems
1. LRLenny Rachitsky
2. EVElena Verna
  Amazing.
3. LRLenny Rachitsky
  Excellent. Uh, anything else before we move on to number two?
4. EVElena Verna
  No. Let's move on to number two.
5. LRLenny Rachitsky
  Let's do it.
6. EVElena Verna
  Okay. So number two, uh, this is on the other side, on the mature company where I see a trend over and over, um, uh, and it's becoming even more prominent right now of, uh, when companies growth slow down, slows down, which inevitably happens for a lot of businesses. Uh, it happens for a variety of reasons. We're not gonna go into the reasons as to why growth can s- uh, can be slowing down, and then they hire a shiny growth head to fix the problem. So basically saying, "Hey, our business is slowing down. We are on the decline. We're gonna bring this person or we're gonna ha- put this team together and our growth is gonna accelerate." That just does not happen. If you have the pro- 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%. Um, maybe that's enough for you, even that like is on the upper end of what growth team would be able to do, uh, if there is a slowdown 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 are gonna 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.
7. LRLenny Rachitsky
  Wow. That is a... 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 gonna build the product people want.
8. EVElena Verna
  Yes.
9. LRLenny Rachitsky
  They will help you grow it.
10. EVElena Verna
  Exactly.
11. LRLenny Rachitsky
  And if your business is slowing, your product market fit basically might be disappearing and growth isn't solving that problem.
12. EVElena Verna
  Disappearing and maybe degradating and may be, uh, being, uh, eaten by a competitor, um, uh, because, uh, 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, uh, with your core product market fit, growth is gonna be absolutely helpless, uh, to do anything. And it's honestly, it's a huge waste of money, because at those size of the companies, uh, you would need fairly large growth teams in order to tackle every single product flow and interface that would, um, that is already out there and invented. So it's a huge expense, ROI on it, maybe at least one to one. Like what you put into it, you might get that much out of it, but it's not gonna be enough to create a J-curve of the re-acceleration by just relying on growth team. So I think it's just like this is where the name growth team is like plays against it because like, "Oh, we're looking for growth. Do you have a growth team?" No, that's actually, actually, we're... I don't have a better idea, by the way, how to name it.
13. LRLenny Rachitsky
  (laughs) Yeah.
14. EVElena Verna
  But, uh, this is where I think it's, um, misunderstood that there is a... the silver bullet of a perfect head of growth, perfect growth team that can reverse the trajectory of the business.
15. LRLenny Rachitsky
  So then for folks that are thinking about, "Oh, wow, maybe I shouldn't be hiring head of growth." When should you hire head of growth when you're kind of an established company?
16. EVElena Verna
  If you're declining-... in, 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. So 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 im- immediate, um, signs of life that there's, uh, potential in the business in the pockets, and then you can put growth, uh, into it to really blow it up to, uh, to the full extent. Uh, but if you are on a decline, just, just, just, just, just don't do it, because, uh, there's gonna be very disappointing results in a year or so.
17. LRLenny Rachitsky
  Awesome. Okay. Great one.
19:20 – 25:11
3: Doing a rebrand to drive growth
1. LRLenny Rachitsky
  Let's move on. Number three.
2. EVElena Verna
  Okay. Number three. Uh, so this is my favorite, and it might be a little spicy, because, um, if there's any marketers listening out here, but doing rebrand, and more specifically homepage redesign to drive growth. Oh, this one 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 of your key marketing site, produce good performance results. Now, there's many reasons as to why you might want to do a rebrand, why you might wanna redesign 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 updates, but those are almost like is, uh, is a lagging indicator that something is to change and you're changing it and then you know that you're gonna have to optimize the hell out of it in order to actually bring it even to the previous performance results. So it's like a stepping stone back, but there is a much bigger room for, uh, upside that you can get to, but you're gonna have to work to get to that upside. But yet so many companies, um... This is a story that happens all the time. I hire a new CMO. New CMO comes in. They're like, "Okay. What's inside my house here? My house is not designed to my liking. Let me repaint these walls. Uh, I want this shade of blue. Let me put the couches over here." And they start, uh, almost like designing their website or designing the brand as if it was reflection of their personal taste, and oftentime it's promised with, "Our acquisition is gonna go up. Our category penetration is gonna go up. Our, um, uh, our education or like awareness is gonna go up." And, uh, it never, 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 gonna be led by lots of agency money spending, uh, often of million dollars plus, lots of arguing about which shade of blue your, uh, brand color is gonna be, and, um, eight to 10 months at the minimum of development and, uh, very lackluster results afterwards.
3. LRLenny Rachitsky
  Oh, man. I'm loving this list already. This is great. Uh, to your point, it may still be worth doing if you're coming into it eyes wide open, "This isn't gonna drive growth."
4. EVElena Verna
  Absolutely.
5. LRLenny Rachitsky
  "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." We're just, if you're aware it's not gonna drive growth, it might be okay.
6. EVElena Verna
  I mean, 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. Don't, don't, just don't do it. Uh, if, if you expect like immediate results out of it, or at least educate the team on how long it's gonna take to get to the point, uh, where you think that there's gonna be upside from your, uh, away from your original brand.
7. LRLenny Rachitsky
  So I've experienced this not just with marketing sites, but like most redesigns, redesign of the product-
8. EVElena Verna
  Oh, my god. Product redesign.
9. LRLenny Rachitsky
  ... redesign of onboarding. Yeah.
10. EVElena Verna
  How much, how much product and engineering work goes into like just changing a logo in your, in your product or changing colors? It's insane, with no results ever. There's no results.
11. LRLenny Rachitsky
  And to your point, it's like, okay, well, we've spent six months redoing onboarding. Everything we've built now builds on this new design and experience, so we can't not launch it 'cause it's, every team-
12. EVElena Verna
  Yeah.
13. LRLenny Rachitsky
  ... is working on this new world. So we're just gonna launch it and then we're gonna claw back. We're gonna figure out how to get it back. Right? And that's how it goes.
14. EVElena Verna
  Yeah. Uh, it's, it's, it's a, it's a new starting point, and that starting point is gonna 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 bo- gone through some level of optimization versus rebrand is always a shot in the dark. It might be prettier, sure, uh, but that doesn't mean it's gonna perform well. So, uh, 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.
15. LRLenny Rachitsky
  Yeah. And I was just gonna 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. It's, we've really thought deeply about this and it might actually be really positive." In your experience, like, it sounds like you've seen it work like in, uh, like occasionally or is it just never?
16. EVElena Verna
  The best I've ever seen is that it produced net neutral results-
17. LRLenny Rachitsky
  Mm-hmm.
18. EVElena Verna
  ... and it produced this better abo- 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. Uh, just understand that the goal here is not to drive at launch in the seven-day readout after launch some increased, uh, 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 a 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.
19. LRLenny Rachitsky
  I love that we're only at number three. This is amazing.
25:11 – 34:00
4: Obsessing over your competition
1. LRLenny Rachitsky
  Let's do number four.
2. EVElena Verna
  Okay. Uh, number four, uh, is, uh, obsessing over your competition. Okay, so there's a li- little bit of, um, um, got you 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, um, I do it across direct competition, uh, of the company that I'm working with as well. I know... I wanna know what I'm playing against. So, uh, knowing what your competition is doing is extremely important. Being inspired by some, uh, aspects of what your competition is, um, doing in their experience is a wonderful place to originate an ideation or potentially try to implement, um, into your product as well. But blatantly saying, "Hey, we're gonna 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, uh, do exactly the same. Why is, why is... 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're doing some test or sell, or you're getting some personalized thing based on what you... where you signed up from, or who you said that you are, so you don't even know what actually the, like, overall thing, uh, looks like most of the time. And, uh, putting that into your product just leads to very subpar results. And, uh, there's a lot of drive, especially, like, to have it as a shortcut. "Okay, we don't want to go through this whole ideation or user research, we don't want to do user interviews, why do we... we don't want to do AB testing. It works for them, it must work for us. Let's just, like, go and do it." And, um, it fails 95% of the time. Now, there are certain pieces that I would rightly recommend. I already said inspiration. Like, I use it for inspiration all the time. I'm like, "Okay, w- what's cool? What is everybody doing?" Uh, so because I want to just stay in the know, on, uh, what other people are implementing and if, hopefully, if it's in the control experience, it works, uh, and it worked better. I use web archives a ton for logged out pages too. I'm like, "Okay, how did it look last year? Why does their homepage look this way, uh, this way or the pricing page?" And I analyze that and I try to extrapolate some, uh, 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, uh, 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 mediocracy 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, like, the mediocre middle of the pack, but, uh, maybe it's a good starting point, but never, never, never the end goal. The only other thing that I'll say before I- I stop talking is benchmarks. Benchmarks are also very dangerous here to use because benchmarks are usually done on all of the competition and all of the softwares out there, and the way people define numbers is so different from company to company. Like, even if you look at, like, something as simple as sign-ups. Okay, how many sign-ups, uh, should you be, on average, getting... or, like, your conversion from prospecting visitor to a sign-up, or from a sign-up to activated user? It 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 I- uh, IP address, new persistent ID, how Google Analytics defines it, how Amplitude defines it. Then, you... So, like, 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 defined the metric. And one of the things that all of those benchmarks, uh, benchmarking data fails is, like, 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 bling- blindly take it and set it is, um, just a sure way to fail any of your initiatives and efforts.
3. LRLenny Rachitsky
  You're telling me that there's no shortcuts...
4. EVElena Verna
  Uh, 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.
5. LRLenny 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 just like, "Oh, that failed. That was a bad idea."
6. EVElena Verna
  I use competition to understand the general framework of how people collect some information or resolve certain steps. So, for example, uh, sharing model. So many products, like, "Hey, can you share this with somebody?"Well, you can s- go and spend so much time of like figuring out how we should look. Or you can go to Slack, you can go to Figma, you can go to Miro, you can go to Notion. Like, okay, Google, and like how are they doing sharing model? You can look at all of that and say, "Okay, here's all of that. Here's all the common elements that all of them have. Here's the pieces that I think will apply to my product. Here's the 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. Uh, if that, if, if that makes sense. Because it's very helpful to not start from scratch. The empty, empty start problem, problem is real, and competition is a wonderful way to not have that and to have an input into it. But, uh, never to just say, "Oh, we, we can skip the design cycle. Off we go," or just like slap our collars on it, uh, "If it works for them, it's gonna work for us." So I have extensive Miro boards with everybody's onboarding flows, with everybody's pricing pages. Their sharing model, their invite colleagues mo- models that I reference all the time. But there've never been the, the, like 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 pro- uh, 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 like my own almost prototypes, like skeletons of here's the elements that you should do in these flows. Like I have one for pricing page, I have one for homepage, but you need to put in your own oomph into it in order for it to actually work.
7. LRLenny 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, this is... They've got it all figured out. We're just gonna copy what they've done 'cause they're 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 is like, what are you guys even thinking?
8. EVElena Verna
  Oh my god, I actually had that happen to me, um, at Dropbox not so long ago. Somebody reached out and they're like, "Oh," I'm look- like, it was like some page in activation flow and they're like, "Oh, I love this page. This is so cool. I love what you've done here and like I'm gonna go take it to my company." I'm like, "I, I, I ha- we haven't touched it in 10 years." Like th- this, this page is like only visible for like small cohort of people. Like please don't do it. Like please don't copy it. I, like, it performs like shit. I know it's out there but it's not meant to be out there. Nobody like thoughtfully put it out there. So like that's definitely a huge, uh, a huge, uh, failure point that you can run into.
9. LRLenny Rachitsky
  Right. If it's like a fancy company, you assume they're just so smart and diligent about every little pixel and decision.
10. EVElena Verna
  Ooh. If people only knew of how much craziness is happening in those big companies and how much chaos there is. (laughs)
11. LRLenny Rachitsky
  Oh man, that's a whole other podcast episode.
12. EVElena Verna
  Whole other podcast, yes.
34:00 – 42:32
5: Believing that your problems are unique
1. EVElena Verna
2. LRLenny Rachitsky
  Okay, number five.
3. EVElena Verna
  Okay, I have this one. It's a little bit meta, but I see it, um, happening all the time. We love to think that our problems are unique. Like I'm working in this company and like we have this growth problem and we need to go and figure out the solution from the grounds up. Maybe this is like a little bit, uh, 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. Um, and you trying to re-engineer solution is time lost to market and opp- has huge opportunity cost. So I th- my biggest like thing that I try to get people is like, don't create... Uh, don't think that you have unique problems. You don't. I know we love to, like it, it'd be fun to have something unique to learn, but with so many startups, with so many people in our industry, uh, 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, do not start from scratch. Ever. Do not start from scratch. It's like the, the worst thing that you can do because you're gonna waste so many cycles on trying to do something that probably has already been solved. So which means like how, how do you, how do you approach this, um, as a result? Well, you can look at competition and how they're solving the problem. That's one input for sure. Uh, 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?" Uh, obviously not all the time everybody's gonna respond, but we have LinkedIn, we have X. Go out there, um, find the people that you think or ask around in your network of who you think might have, uh, similar solutions and just go talk to people. It would be incredible shortcut. Like if you're talking about an actual hack, that is a hack, uh, to get to, uh, an optimal solution. And then the last thing, uh, 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?
4. LRLenny Rachitsky
  Let's make it a word.
5. EVElena Verna
  Make patterns, (laughs) make patterns out of your solutions. So more you can stop looking at, 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 wanna do. But to go from 0 to 60 manually as a one-off, we do not have time in the industry right now to do it unless you wanna be left behind.
6. LRLenny Rachitsky
  Bam.... powerful words. Is there, is there an example that comes to mind of you doing this either the wrong way, of just, like, thinking this was unique and realizing I should've talked to people? Or where you actually realized something was not unique and...
7. EVElena Verna
  I'll give you, actually, an example, uh, that I had when I was at Miro. Uh, at Miro, we were first, uh, trying to stand up community. And, um, I was tasked to do it, and I've never done it before. Uh, so I'm like... I was banging my head around, uh, the w- like, against the wall and I'm like, "Okay, how do I do it? Like, like what software do we use? Where do we acquire users? Like what kind of content is gonna go in there?" So I was, like, approaching it almost like a finding, like, product market fit, and then, like, I, I have... I, I will fail so much doing it and I honestly only have a year to get to some sort of traction before this is gonna get shut down. Because company's impatient, company's moving fast, so if this is gonna be a failure point, it's either gonna be taken away from me, which is fair, or we're just gonna 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 Kara Liu, uh, from Atlassian, uh, who has stood, stood up, um, a community. I actually hired her as an advisor afterwards and, um, and she's like, "Well, are you talking about a user comm- community, or an agency community, or a partner community?" And I'm like, my mind was blown. I'm like, I, like, I wasn't 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 a user community. If you want some results out of it, go to agency or partner communities first." And she would outline it to me in like, in, in a structural way for me to, like, grasp my head around it and, and, 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, I think it's, it, it, 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 a interim CMO at Miro, and I'm like, "I don't know how to do this." And, uh, 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, uh, you need to really put your ego aside and get some help, uh, faster, uh, than trying to hit every single failure point along the way.
8. LRLenny Rachitsky
  (laughs) Yeah. And, uh, the thing that'll really hurt your ego is failing. And so the more you can do to avoid failing and being successful with this initiative by-
9. EVElena Verna
  Yeah.
10. LRLenny Rachitsky
  ... talking to people, doing research, uh...
11. EVElena Verna
  And, and to be fair, failure is gonna be unavoidable. If you talk about growth, growth is about failure. Uh, my big motto, uh, like life, uh, motto in 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 times do you have to fail? And a lot of times we don't realize how many failure cycles we're gonna have to go through before we get a success, and the company or even market has no time for that. And, uh, so still expect to fail, sure, but the timeline for failures is gonna be shortened quite a bit.
12. LRLenny Rachitsky
  Mm-hmm. Okay. So we've gone halfway through your list. There's 10 items on this list, right?
13. EVElena Verna
  Yes, yes. There's 10 items.
14. LRLenny Rachitsky
  Okay, cool. So-
15. EVElena Verna
  Next one is a good one.
16. LRLenny Rachitsky
  I'm excited to chat with Christina Gilbert, the founder of OneSchema, one of our longtime podcast sponsors. Hi, Christina.
17. GUGuest
  Yes, thank you for having me on, Lenny.
18. LRLenny Rachitsky
  What is the latest with OneSchema? I know you now work with some of my favorite companies, like Ramp, Vanta, Skale, and Watershed. I heard that you just launched a new product to help product teams import CSVs from especially tricky systems like ERPs.
19. GUGuest
  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.
20. LRLenny Rachitsky
  I can tell you that if my 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?
21. GUGuest
  Absolutely, Lenny. We've heard so many horror stories of multi-day outages from even just a handful of bad records. We are laser focused on integration reliability to help teams end all 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.
22. LRLenny 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.
42:32 – 50:55
6: Prioritizing other growth channels above earned channels
1. LRLenny Rachitsky
  Let me, uh, 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 their product market fit, maybe 1 million ARR, especially if you're self-serve oriented. Number two is if your pla- 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. Uh, rebranding is not only not gonna help you grow, it's gonna probably hurt growth and slow things down. And so just go into that wi- 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 gonna work for you. Use it as inspiration. Uh, on the other hand, look at ins- get inspiration from experts, competition, trends, things like that too, uh...... 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.
2. EVElena Verna
  Yes. Especially in growth. I mean, I know this can apply to a lot of, uh, product management and to marketing as well, but in growth when you're talking about, "How do I lift activation?" Or, "I have a really big drop-off between activation and monetization," these things, uh, are a lot more patternized, uh, than you would expect them to be, so go and find those patterns as opposed to trying to re-engineer it.
3. LRLenny Rachitsky
  Awesome. Okay, let's keep going. Number six.
4. EVElena Verna
  All right. So next one. Next one is, um, a little spicy one too, and, uh, that is, um, as part of growth, you owning some channels. A lot of growth teams own acquisition. So, uh, owning channels and growth prioritizing, uh, SEO, SEM, social, um, 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, uh, SEM, so, uh, organic search or paid search. I'm not, I'm not saying that. However, as a growth team, your number one priority is to create your owned or your earned channel, uh, 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 rich- 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- paid advertising in Instagram, that's great, but all of that works on algorithm, and 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, the... on the other side, there can be your own earned channel. What is an earned channel? This really goes into the concept of product led growth acquisition, which means you're relying on virality, on word of mouth, on, uh, 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 and your own community, nobody else can compete with you in that. That is yours. Your competitors cannot buy their eyeballs. Their people are gonna be attracting other people. Referrals from people to people are everything. So let me... 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 gonna be in some really big trouble over the next year to two years, because your cost of acquisition is only gonna go up, your competition in those channel is only gonna go up. You're constantly gonna be praying to lo- uh, algorithm gods to giveth your way, but they... again, they can take it at any point. And, um, 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.
5. LRLenny Rachitsky
  Wow. Okay. This is incredible. Th- like, th- this is its own podcast episode, in theory, that we could do of how to actually do this. We're not gonna cover the strategy. Also, this may not necessarily work for every company. Your point is that's... you can go other ways, but this is by far the most powerful, most effective, cheapest, most likely to succeed if you can figure this out.
6. EVElena Verna
  It's not cheapest. It's actually cost a lot of product and engineering and even marketing resources to stand up.
7. LRLenny Rachitsky
  Mm-hmm.
8. EVElena Verna
  So it's just... 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... No, 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, um, of it, but if you're not exploring it and if you're 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 no control over.
9. LRLenny Rachitsky
  So the advice here is your growth team, it's okay if they work on SEM, paid growth basically, and SEO, but most of your effort and investment should be in-... earned channeled, owned channels, ex- specifically virality user-generated content.
10. EVElena 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, uh, at Dropbox, over 50% of acquisition comes through sharing. So, I load something into my Dropbox, maybe I need to send it off for signature, maybe I need to just share this file to transfer it to somebody, maybe I just need to share this file, um, as a final delivery to my client that I was working with. Well, that recipient then is now aware of Dropbox, so it's solved the brand awareness. Uh, 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 what not. 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, 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 loop and growth engine, uh, that, uh, driven the company. And, uh, every, every business should have an attempt at one of these.
11. LRLenny Rachitsky
  I think this is gonna be a really good push for a lot of growth teams to think about, "What could we do here?"
50:55 – 1:01:06
7: Failing to evolve your growth model
1. LRLenny Rachitsky
  Okay, number seven. Four to go.
2. EVElena Verna
  Okay. Number seven. Uh, we've talked about this at least a little bit, um, in our last podcast too, but, um, I see this as a question that comes up all the time, and something that people are afraid of, uh, to in- uh, to invest which is a mistake. Every single company, uh, starts with their growth efforts focused either on product-led growth, "Hey, I'm gonna have everything being done self-serve," or on sales, um, in marketing, "I'm gonna have a sales team and then I'm gonna have a marketing team and they're gonna do all of the work and my product is just gonna 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, uh, a lot of growth teams fail to iterate on and innovate on. The way that I'd best be comparing it is if product has a product market fit, which is great, that product market fit is not gonna last that product forever. They're always gonna have to have a second horizon. They're always gonna have to have a product market fit expansion efforts in order to continue to, uh, grab as many people and solve as many people's problems as possible and increasing their TAM. 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 gonna need to evolve it, and that evolution, uh, needs to come through overlaying other growth models on top of it so A, you are diversified away from just one growth model, uh, failing, because a lot of times you're gonna get into a situation of, um, law... Uh, I love Andrew Chen's article here. It's called A Law of Shitty Click-Throughs, where you just... If you over-optimize the same thing over and over again, it's just, it has minimal returns. And some growth models have very limited time span. Some of them are huge. Some can grow for... Like, sharing loop at Dropbox, it's 17 years in the making and it's still firing. Good for it. Like, that's amazing. But that's very much an anomaly. Most of growth loops spin out of, uh, 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, uh, 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, 100, whatever plus percent, and then it starts to slow down. And don't wait til that slow down 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, um, uh, interact with your customer.
3. LRLenny Rachitsky
  The way, the way I think about this is, like, the S-curves of every growth model-
4. EVElena Verna
  Yes.
5. LRLenny Rachitsky
  ... and growth lever, right? Eventually it'll, it'll help and then slow down and so you wanna find the next S-c- S-curve on things that'll grow your business.
6. EVElena Verna
  Yes, absolutely. The, the, the way that I see it often is that, uh, especially when growth teams, they hit a really big result out of some initiative, they just, like, keep trying to focus on it over and over again, and sometimes that focus is warranted. Like I said, our sharing loop at Dropbox has its own, uh, growth team against it. Great. But, at the same time, a lot of that's not warranted for all of the growth, or you need to realize that there's no more juice to squeeze out of this thing, and then you need to go and you need to move on, which actually brings me to my, uh, like a little bit of a next thing too, is you need to do it every 18 months. Because a lot of them are gonna fail, and every five years or so, you for sure need a new channel, new growth loops, new tactics, uh, new engines, so to speak, to power your growth engine, uh, 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 new.
7. LRLenny Rachitsky
  18 months.
8. EVElena Verna
  Sorry. (laughs) Yeah, 18-
9. LRLenny Rachitsky
  (laughs)
10. EVElena Verna
  For every 18 months, you need to introduce something new in order for it to, uh, continue evolving.
11. LRLenny Rachitsky
  And it was that number eight of the list we're going through? That's like a bonus piece of advice.
12. EVElena Verna
  Uh, no, that's just a bonus piece of advice.
13. LRLenny Rachitsky
  Okay, cool. Uh, okay, got it. And so the advice here essentially is you'll find something that is helping you grow. Make... Assume that will slow down at some point. Start thinking about other levers and growth models to layer on top of that.
14. EVElena Verna
  Yeah.
15. LRLenny Rachitsky
  Something I've seen, let me know if you agree, is usually there's gonna be like one lever that is most of your growth for a long, long time, and so all other things are not gonna be as big, but they are still important.
16. EVElena Verna
  Yeah. So the way I think about it is, um, I try to focus 20%, 20 to 25% of growth team's 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, uh, umph to our, our growth engine. I know that a lot of it is gonna fail. None of it is gold on any growth metrics, because you cannot goal it immediately, let's say, on monetization or immediately on acquisition. You're just gonna cut it at its, at its knees immediately if you, if you're not gonna let it evolve into something that can be monetized, that can be responsible for acquisition. So like example on Miroverse, which is a user-generated content library of all of the Miro 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 gonna 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 gonna 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, um, very soon into your initiatives.
17. LRLenny Rachitsky
  To make this even more concrete for people that are starting to like, "Oh, shit. I gotta do, do this," uh, 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 so people like, "Okay, got it. Maybe we'll try one of these."
18. EVElena Verna
  I'm really big on creating a growth loop out of user-generated content. I think, uh, 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, uh, 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, um, using community to, uh, spark them, uh, conversations around it. Uh, like that can be a really wonderful, uh, strategy that everybody should consider of whether there's juice in it within your product. Uh, other ones, uh, can be, hey, we're a very, let's say, individualistic product, but can we actually create a referrer mechanism for it? For B2C, that's actually very straightforward. A lot of B2C products, uh, 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, uh, within the company. So, creating additional almost product functionality that then creates these loops potentially, uh, for you. So, it can be a, a slew of things. Uh, obviously I would highly recommend, uh, just understanding all of the menus of these earned tactics. I should do a blog post on that actually. Uh, and then, uh, just see what, what, what works for you or not, because, uh, at least ideation step of it 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.
19. LRLenny Rachitsky
  And even though you recommend spend more time on earned channels, owned channels, there's also explore SEO, explore paid growth, right?
20. EVElena Verna
  Absolutely.
21. LRLenny Rachitsky
  Sales potentially.
22. EVElena Verna
  I mean, almost everybody does paid.
23. LRLenny Rachitsky
  Yeah.
24. EVElena Verna
  Arguably almost too soon potentially. Um-
25. LRLenny Rachitsky
  Mm-hmm.
26. EVElena Verna
  ... there is a point to make that shouldn't be.
27. LRLenny Rachitsky
  Mm-hmm.
28. EVElena Verna
  Companies should not be doing paid right now, but SEO, social, um, uh, resellers, um, all, all of those are wonderful, uh, tactics. Um, 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, uh, that doesn't mean that other tactics and other channels should not be explored as well.
1:01:06 – 1:05:55
8: Not hiring advisors
1. LRLenny Rachitsky
  Amazing. Let's keep going. We have-
2. EVElena Verna
  Okay.
3. LRLenny Rachitsky
  ... three to go. Number eight.
4. EVElena Verna
  All right. So number eight, um, this one's kind of a doozy, and I think a lot of people are... don't do it. I don't know why they don't do it. Um, I think it's a such a, uh, incredible ability to propel forward, and that is, um, what doesn't work, as I said in the previous, uh, 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 doesn't 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 gonna 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 it throu- uh, 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 like 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 like try to figure out everything on their own and not have any advisory, like advisors on their boards, so to speak. And not even, I'm not even talking like an official board, I'm talking ab- uh, and not even an advisory board, but you can hire somebody like 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, uh, because we're all very cagey because competition, but, um, 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.
5. LRLenny Rachitsky
  Along those lines, there's also an advice of just like, "Don't worry about advisors, there's ... you never know if they're gonna be useful. There's all these hanger-ons that join your startup and wanna 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 s- them to help them find people that are actually great, what would your tip be?
6. EVElena Verna
  Uh, I have actually a good one. Many advisors might not hop- 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 the what they know is not the type of advisor that you're gonna want to have on your team. Uh, 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. But 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, um, uh, 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. Uh, some advisors, they only need to be with a 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?" And 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?
7. LRLenny Rachitsky
  That is an awesome tip, and I could see why people would be like, "Goddamn, Alina, don't say that." (laughs) Makes so much sense.
1:05:55 – 1:10:44
9: Over experimenting
1. LRLenny Rachitsky
  Um, okay.
2. EVElena Verna
  All right.
3. LRLenny Rachitsky
  Two to go. Number nine, here we go.
4. EVElena Verna
  My, my, my last one is also that I see something, um, way too often, uh, nowadays on growth teams specifically, this is very, very growth problem and that is, um, 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, uh, that's a problem. And, uh, 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 like to, to, to hit the market?" Uh, it's almost like a disease, like a paralyzing disease that slows down progress, that slows down velocity, that slows down learnings, that, um, creates very much deter- like m- very, uh, terrible consequences to the output that growth teams, uh, produce. And it's a little bit counterintuitive because experimentation is a way to do growth for growth teams and it's, um, it's their, it's their process, like growth teams are meant to experiment. But I also think that experimenting on everything is something that is quite terrible, uh, once the team starts to get locked into that state and it's really hard to get out of, because they are then afraid to do any change until or unless that they test.
5. LRLenny Rachitsky
  So where do you find that balance? I imagine people hearing this are like, "Oh yes, I, 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.
6. EVElena 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. Uh, so if you have low volume real estate that is gonna take you eight months to reach some sort of answer, do you really wanna test it for eight months? Like, it's-
7. LRLenny Rachitsky
  (laughs)
8. EVElena Verna
  ... what's the point of it? It's my rule of thumb, if we cannot collect the sample size in a month, we shouldn't test it, period. Because just, it's just then it's not fast enough. We should just go and do pre versus post. Pre versus post is pretty powerful. Uh, it's also a way to assess your impact, and you can still roll back if, if it doesn't work, but don't think that everything needs a scientific explanation, uh, to whether it needs to be moved forward or not. I- it- you also, experimentation cannot be the way that people make decisions in a 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 gonna want. That, yeah, if scientific data, like, a very tight determination of the probability that this is a success is 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 e- extra work will be, uh, will be needed. It might be a very high trafficked real estate that even, like, .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, like, I'm not saying just, like, release and, release and move on. Uh, 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, um, or expansion data that is associated with it. But to test everything is delib- uh, debilitating to growth teams, and it paralyzes them in its, uh, 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 fast enough? 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, um, how to make it, how to make it better." But failure's gonna happen regardless. And statistics 66 is tricky. Like, too p- many people take it for face value versus it's just, like, a directional data point to say there's likely a new distribution. It has maybe a different mean, and 5% of the chances, if you're measuring 95% statistical significance, you might not even be there. And yet we'll, like, take it for so granted, "Oh, it's gonna drive this mi- this much lift." So, I, I just think that people stop, like, in this age of data. Don't almost rely enough on their own intuition.
9. LRLenny Rachitsky
  A lot of contrarian takes here.
1:10:44 – 1:15:00
10: Color optimizations, third-party signups, one email wonders, and removing friction
1. LRLenny Rachitsky
  I love this. Elena, we've reached number 10.
2. EVElena Verna
  Okay.
3. LRLenny Rachitsky
  And I know number 10's, like, a special one where it's more than one quick fire.
4. EVElena Verna
  Yeah, so number 10 is gonna be my little fire round. Uh-
5. LRLenny Rachitsky
  Okay.
6. EVElena Verna
  ... my fire round on, like, little things that I just see people spending way too much time on, and, like, it hurts my heart, uh, because not gonna drive any, um, any results on them. So, um, number one, color optimizations. For 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 sh- uh, 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 a 2000, early 2000s tactic, it doesn't work anymore. We passed that in technology sector. Number two, third party sign-ups. Um, a lot of times we think, "Oh, we're gonna get so much more acquisition if we add Google Auth," or, "If we add Facebook Auth or Slack Auth or Microsoft Auth," uh, whichever auth you wanna add to it. In some cases, it's very important to have third party auth. Uh, so for example, if you're a developer product, please have a GitHub Auth. Like, it's, it's kind of unnecessary. The developers already have their account there, have them con- uh, 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 gonna drive more acquisition for you. You're just gonna do a mix shift into more people using it. It's not gonna create incrementality. It's not gonna improve your activation. It's not gonna improve your retention. It's not a growth tactic, it's part of your just customer experience that you wanna invest into. Number three, on the fire round. Uh, one email wonders. We stress too much about this one email-
7. LRLenny Rachitsky
  Yeah.
8. EVElena Verna
  ... that we're gonna send to this one customer group, and we're like, "Oh my gosh, how much lift is it gonna cost?" It will never cause any lift. It will never work as a one-off email. Too few people open it. On average, 25% open rate. Um, at best, you'll get 40 to 50% open rate. Too few people click it. Uh, one email will never do anything. If you're gonna 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 gonna have to do the whole goddamn thing and see how it's gonna do, not just one email. Just never, uh, gonna work.
9. LRLenny Rachitsky
  I'm definitely guilty of this one. That is a really good one for sure. (laughs)
10. EVElena Verna
  (laughs) And-
11. LRLenny Rachitsky
  And it's so obvious in hindsight, so I love that you share that.
12. EVElena Verna
  Yes. And then the last one, um, growth teams are often too obsessed about removing friction. Because if we remove the steps, then more people are gonna get to the destination. And, um, to an extent, if you have horrible friction in your product where it's just, like, 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, uh, 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, uh, roadmap that says, "Simplify onboarding,"... please (sighs) please cross it out. It's not gonna work, because simplifying onboarding is an action. What is the problem that you're solving? You're never trying to solve a problem of simple- simplifying. You always have a problem of people are confused in it, or people don't know where to go, or they get lost in it, or, uh, they're not educated enough. That is the problem. And simplifying might be a solution, but it can never become... be, uh, a problem on its own. And too many growth teams are just obsessed with this notion that came out, I think, in early 2000s. They're like, "Oh, simplifying is, like, the biggest growth hack that you can do." Um, please don't do it. It's only a solution to a very specific problem set of, um, too much complexity.
13. LRLenny Rachitsky
  Wow, that was a big one to end on that I think will help a lot of people avoid wasting time. Uh, again, a whole other podcast conversation could probably focus just on onboarding advice that you probably have, that I know you
1:15:00 – 1:18:50
Elena’s favorite growth frameworks
1. LRLenny Rachitsky
  have. Um, we've reached the last item. Is there anything else you wanna share about this list before we move on?
2. EVElena Verna
  No. I think we spent too much time on the list. We're ready to go.
3. LRLenny Rachitsky
  Okay (laughs) . We did. Not too much. Just enough time. And kind of on that note, I wanna call an audible. And so we were gonna talk through all of your fra- 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... would you just list maybe your favorite growth frameworks just for folks to go check these out and not spend too much time on each one?
4. EVElena Verna
  Yep, let's do that.
5. LRLenny Rachitsky
  Okay.
6. EVElena Verna
  Great. So the list of my favorite, uh, 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, uh, you can almost shortcut to a possible list of solutions, as opposed to trying to figure out too hard of how to even define a problem, um, on its own. So number one, um, 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, uh, is missing out on the ability to create sustainable growth engine. Uh, so it's very important to think about action, reaction, that generates another action, and it's a self-contained flywheel that can spin. A lot of resources on it at Reforge, Brian Balfour and Casey Winters and Andrew Chen wrote a lot about this, um, highly recommend anybody looking into. My next favorite grave- uh, growth framework's actually written by you, Lenny, I... and Dan, which is a race car framework. Everybody has a really hard time often thinking about what are all of the parts of growth initiatives, and which are long-term? What are short-term? How much are they gonna actually, uh, produce in results? And a race car framework is wonderful, uh, because it separates different initiatives into, "Hey, there's some engines, loops, that are just gonna keep on spinning." There's some fuel that you're gonna need to add into it, potentially like paid marketing dollars. There's some turbo boosts that you may have in your race car that are gonna be, uh, let's say, uh, big user conferences that you're gonna hold, um, as, um, as a product. Or there's lubrications and optimizations that you're gonna need to do of pouring oil into that engine so it actually performs correctly. It's beautiful. I talk about it all the time with everybody. The next, uh, favorite growth, uh, framework for me comes from Bengali, and that's adjacent user theory. Uh, I think that one's very powerful in terms of thinking about growth evolution and, um, as we talked about adding different growth models to your, uh, growth ecosystem, different growth loops. But also adjacent users, which are outside of your ideal customer profile, 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 gonna stop at these three, because I think those are the most powerful ones.
7. LRLenny Rachitsky
  Cool. On that last one, we... Bengali was on the ep- on the podcast. We'll link to that episode if you wanna go deeper on the adjacent using- user theory. I love how, like, that was, like, a few minutes on things that could change people's life if they adopt one of these frameworks-
8. EVElena Verna
  Yes.
9. LRLenny Rachitsky
  ... and learn how to think about growth in this way. It's, like, such a powerful, uh, mo- mental model for thinking about all the stuff you've been talking about this entire conversation.
10. EVElena Verna
  Yes. I... Th- those frameworks are like my church in my mind of, like, how... my system of beliefs, of how I beli- uh, 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.
11. LRLenny Rachitsky
  The Church of Elena Verna.
12. EVElena Verna
  (laughs)
1:18:50 – 1:26:05
Contrarian corner: full-time jobs
1. EVElena Verna
2. LRLenny Rachitsky
  Amazing. Okay. So before we wrap up, I wanna bring us over to a 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, a contrarian opinion, you might say. Is there anything that comes to mind?
3. EVElena Verna
  Uh, I do have a very contrarian opinion. Uh, although, uh, it's not so much related to growth, as opposed to maybe your personal, uh, 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, um, uh, both available on the market, as well as best suited for their personalities, for their interests, and for their skillsets. Uh, it's like a... it's, uh, like a default plan that everybody subscribes to that is faulty in itself.
4. LRLenny Rachitsky
  Wow. Okay. Wait, we gotta hear more. So what are some other packages? I think we're, like, 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?
5. EVElena Verna
  I'll, I'll premise it to saying I don't want to rain parade on full-time roles. They're wonderful on, uh, a bit your ability to learn, to get expertise, um, and, uh, depending on which, uh, career stage you are at, full-time roles might be the absolute necessity for you to move on to the... and unlock the next level. However, full-time roles, uh, box us into one company that may not be a great fit for... as far as culturally, for our skills, uh, for our ambitions, for our interests. Life is too short for that, and ability to really go and, um, 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 that full-time is the only option that you should have. So, what are the other options? Uh, there's so many. Obviously, uh, the couple known ones, freelancing. Uh, you can be a contractor. I do a lot of advising and consulting because, uh, 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, uh, 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, um, engagements where you're working part-time, um, on something as opposed to engulfing yourself completely full-time. There's other ways to create courses, there's a way to create newsletters and monetize them like you're doing, Lenny. 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, um, every two weeks to, uh, rely on. But at the same time, uh, you can create diversification for your career and you can create stability. It just depends 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.

Episode duration: 1:35:09

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Welcome back, Elena!

Common mistakes growth teams make

1: Hiring for growth roles too soon

2: Hiring a head of growth to fix your problems

3: Doing a rebrand to drive growth

4: Obsessing over your competition

5: Believing that your problems are unique

6: Prioritizing other growth channels above earned channels

7: Failing to evolve your growth model

8: Not hiring advisors

9: Over experimenting

10: Color optimizations, third-party signups, one email wonders, and removing friction

Elena’s favorite growth frameworks

Contrarian corner: full-time jobs

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