10 growth tactics that never work | Elena Verna (Amplitude, Miro, Dropbox, SurveyMonkey)

(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.

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?

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.

Powerful words. I am loving this list already.

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.

A lot of contrarian takes here. I love this.

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.

(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."