Lenny Rachitsky recently launched Lenny’s Podcast, and I was happy to be a guest. We talk about how to communicate upward, different product design strategies for complex products, what it means to be a product leader, and much more. I’ll expand on some of these in upcoming posts. You can listen to the podcast here or on Spotify below.
Currently listening to my Downtempo House playlist.
Harry Stebbings of 20VC fame is launching a new podcast series focused on growth. I was happy to be his first guest. We talk about growth inside startups, how to hire for growth, and many other topics. You can listen to the podcast here or on Spotify below.
Currently listening to Mana Pool by VAPERROR.
I’m excited to announce that public applications are open for the Spring 2021 cohort of Reforge. I’ll be participating along side leaders from Tinder, Facebook, HubSpot, SurveyMonkey, Instagram, and more.
Reforge Membership includes participation in a cohort-based program and ongoing access to content from all programs, weekly releases, deep-dive sessions, and a community of vetted peers to help you execute what you learn.
I’ve worked closely with Brian Balfour (CEO at Reforge) and the Reforge team for the past 3 years to develop and host three different programs. Onboarding for the Spring 21 cohort begins March 22nd, the first week of content is March 28th, the first week of live cases is the week of April 5th, and the last week of live cases is the week of May 10th.
Build, communicate, and execute a cohesive product strategy across feature, growth, scaling and innovation product work.
With Fareed Mosavat (GP at Reforge, Ex Slack, Instacart, Zynga) and Ravi Mehta (Ex CPO at Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor)
A step-by-step system to create, analyze, and communicate a growth strategy of compounding growth loops.
With Kevin Kwok (Ex Greylock Partners), and Fareed Mosavat (GP at Reforge, Ex Slack, Instacart, Zynga)
A deep dive on how to understand, measure, and improve retention through activation, engagement, and resurrection.
With Shaun Clowes (SVP Product at Mulesoft, Ex Metromile, Atlassian) and Adam Grenier (Ex Lambda School, Uber)
In the Spring cohort there will be 10 total programs across Product, Growth, and Marketing all built and led by experienced executives. Here is the full slate:
Reforge membership combines cohort-based programs, with a year round experience to help you learn, execute, and scale yourself and your company.
You’ll be joining other top operators from companies like Airbnb, Spotify, Stripe, Dropbox, Zoom, HubSpot, Reddit, and LinkedIn who consider Reforge one of the best professional investments they’ve made.
In addition to the experienced executives that build and lead our programs, you’ll hear examples from the industry’s best. Past featured guests have included:
To join the Spring cohort, you must apply before February 19th. Once accepted, seats are first come, first serve. If you have questions, contact [email protected]. I hope to see you in the Reforge community!
For those of you who’ve read my blog for a while, you know that I mainly discuss product management and growth in the tech industry. My goal is to surface the bottlenecks that prevent companies from growing faster. But a blog post is just the tip of the iceberg; it’s a starting point for a greater exploration. You can go so much deeper on a topic than a blog post allows. That’s why I’ve teamed up with Reforge to develop 6-week intensive programs that string together the best systems and frameworks to help you approach growth problems from different angles. Here are three programs that I’ve personally helped create:
Product Strategy teaches frameworks for building, communicating, and executing a product strategy spanning multiple types of product work. Increase your influence, solve strategic problems, and gain confidence as a product leader. Recommended for Senior PMs and above.
Retention + Engagement Deep Dive. Better retention improves monetization, lowers acquisition costs, increases LTV, and gives you a competitive edge. In Retention and Engagement Deep Dive, you will learn proven frameworks that you can use throughout your career to retain, activate, engage, and resurrect users.
Advanced Growth Strategy explores many growth strategies and teaches a system for creating compounding growth. You’ll break down your company’s current growth loops, identify their constraints, and select methods to unlock new growth. It’s recommended for emerging leaders on a Director or VP career track.
If you are more interested in Marketing, Experimentation, or Monetization, Reforge offers 4 other excellent programs.
Apply to Reforge (Takes ~5 minutes)
Best of all, you’ll be learning directly from some tech industry’s top experts. You’ll get to learn from people like…
Elena Verna: ex-SVP Growth @ SurveyMonkey
Fareed Mosavat: ex-Director of Product @ Slack
Bangaly Kaba: ex-Head of Growth @ Instagram
Brittany Bingham: VP of Marketing @ Guru
Shauwn Clowes: SVP Product @ Mulesoft
Dan Hockenmaier: Ex-Growth @ Thumbtack
Adam Grenier: Ex-Head of Growth Marketing @ Uber
Brian Balfour: Ex-VP of Growth @ Hubspot
And many more.
We hope to see you this fall.
I caught up recently with Mada Seghete, co-founder of Branch Metrics on her new podcast “How I Grew This”. In the podcast, I talk about my career in growth including some of my early experiments before I even had a real job. You can listen here:
I thought I’d go into a little bit more detail in this post despite how embarrassing it is.
When people ask about how I got into working on growth, I usually respond by talking about my job at Apartments.com, and how I had to measure everything the marketing team was doing to grow the business. It turns out measuring everything and its impact on growth gives you a pretty good understanding of the growth channels. And for me, one of the biggest lessons was that it was none of the things you learned about in marketing classes at school. It was things like SEO, affiliate marketing, paid search, distribution partnerships, et al. As I automated more of the tracking, it gave me more time to actually work on optimizing those channels. This is all true, but it’s not actually the start. So I’m going to talk about the start in hopes it helps other people figure out how to find opportunities to develop skills and learn. This is going to be a somewhat autobiographical post, and it may not be useful, but multiple people have said I should write in more detail about it, so I am.
My High School Passion: User Generated Content
I was pretty early to the user generated content trend. In high school. I spent a lot of time on AskMe.com, which was basically a pre-bubble Quora, answering questions about a range of topics including music, video games, and history. I answered over a couple thousand questions there. I also hung around the IGN message boards, which was the 3rd largest forum on the internet at the time. I became a moderator on IGN eventually for some of the music and video game boards. This is pre-Facebook, pre-reddit, pre-most things you spend time on the internet with. One interesting thing is how all of those multi-billion dollar companies existed in some form back then; they just didn’t become the valuable companies:
My College Obsession: Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater
In college, I started playing a lot of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 on the GameCube. I got pretty good at it. When I went online, I eventually found a community of the early online players playing on the Playstation. They were a lot better than me, and posted videos for download of them reaching new high scores. This was pre-Youtube, so they used various archaic methods of recording (I, for example, used a capture card and a VCR to record the play), uploaded them to a server, and you had to download them to play the videos locally on your computer.
I watched all of the new videos. Not only were they entertaining, but they helped me learn how to get better myself. All of the best players used loops of the level to repeatedly hit parts of the level that allowed them to do valuable tricks. Many people started to post tutorials of their loops. You can see one of the loops I used for a good score here (sorry for the quality. All of this was recorded before Youtube existed, and when we finally did upload things to YouTube, they didn’t support high quality yet):
When Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 came out, it became super easy for these players to score billions of points in one combo using these loops, so the quest for higher and higher scores lost its luster. Instead, the best players switched to showcasing themselves doing stylish combos without ever touching the ground. They called these videos “no manuals” or “nm’s” as the manual was a trick introduced in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 to link combos on the ground. Essentially, these players challenged themselves to play Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 as if it were the first Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. The entire community shifted from a score based system to a style based system.
When Tony Hawk’s Underground came out, the community didn’t love many of the changes. You could now walk to link combos, which made something that was too easy for the best players even easier, and people stopped posting videos. I was dismayed as well, because the volume of content coming from the community dropped precipitously.
My First Growth Loop: The Get There Challenges
Worried that this community I loved was dying, I tried to think of ways to revive the community. I essentially needed a way to prompt people to post stylish videos. I came up with an idea. I would post a screenshot of a piece of a level in one of the Tony Hawk games to start. I’d post another screenshot of a place you had to get to in the same combo. And you had to do all of this without touching the ground (no manuals, walking, or reverts). The first to complete it got to post the next challenge. I posted two of them to make sure someone would bite, called them the “Get There Challenges”, and a player named Milky posted of a video of himself completing the second. I awarded him the win and challenged him to post the next challenge. He did, and the Get There Challenges were born. Within a day, someone had beaten Milky’s challenge. The loop had officially begun.
By the eighth challenge, the community started adding variations, such as shortest to complete, coolest version to complete, and sub-challenges. Eventually, some even allowed manuals. A website was built (not by me) to host them officially, and a bunch of copycat websites tried to start their own. GT’s (as they had become known) became a pillar of the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater online community. Over 300 challenges were consecutively posted and completed over the course of the next three years.
Most of these videos are lost to time. Mike, one of the best players in the community, did create a video commemorating 100 challenges, which is probably the best introduction to the concept. Apologies for the video quality, the out of context teenage jokes, and most importantly, the music choices used in the video.
Now, I am probably an idiot for not using this concept to build a billion dollar business ten years before esports and three years before Youtube became a thing. But the framework of the Get There challenges continues to serve me in my career in other ways. I have come to call these loops content loops and not viral loops as what they do is generate content that attracts people instead of invites. I have built a course on them and talked about them. The Get There challenges have a similar dynamic to how Eventbrite (event listings), GrubHub (menus), and Pinterest (boards) have grown. People mistake this as an SEO strategy, but it’s not. As long as you have a place for the content to be discoverable, it can be a loop if enough people interact with it.
There is much more of an opportunity today to leverage your hobbies for learning opportunities than there were when I was a teenager, whether it’s new creation tools available or all of these new online communities. You may be surprised what you learn from them and how they can inform your eventual career.
Bonus content with much better music:
Currently listening to Ritorno by Andrea.
Over the last few years, I’ve worked with Brian Balfour (CEO Reforge, formerly VP Growth @ HubSpot) as a Growth mentor and contributor to the Reforge programs. These are part-time programs (no need to take time off work) specifically designed for experienced Product Managers, Marketers, Engineers, and UX/Designers in both B2B and B2C companies.
Today, Reforge announced their three upcoming programs this fall:
1) The Retention + Engagement Deep Dive program. I worked closely with Brian developing this program, which looks at every aspect of retention including activation, engagement, resurrection, and churn.
2) The Growth Models Deep Dive program. This is a new, detailed examination of a key growth topic Brian and I developed this year with Kevin Kwok.
3) The Growth Series program. This is Reforge’s flagship program that provides an overview of the key topics in growth that’s been 100% revamped to reflect today’s growth challenges.
Apply to Reforge (Takes ~5 minutes)
Each Reforge program runs from September 24th through November 16th. Seats always fill up fast, and I’m excited to be involved. I’ll also be doing some speaking and Q&A during the events.
Besides Brian, Kevin and myself, other hosts include Andrew Chen (General Partner @ Andreessen Horowitz), Shaun Clowes (VP Growth @ Metromile, former Head of Growth @ Atlassian), Dan Hockenmaier (former Director of Growth @ Thumbtack), Heidi Gibson (Sr. Director of Product Management @ GoDaddy), and Yuriy Timen (Head of Growth @ Grammarly).
About the Reforge Programs
These are all invite-only, part-time programs that last 8 weeks. Each program requires a time commitment of 4 – 8 hours per week. They’re designed for Product Managers, Marketers, Engineers, and UX/Designers in both B2B and B2C companies looking to accelerate growth in their companies and in their careers by developing a systematic approach to thinking about, acting on, and solving growth problems.
In addition to the course material, we’ll also hear from leaders in the industry through interviews, live talks, and workshops, including:
Fareed Mosavat, Growth @ Slack
Ken Rudin, Head of Growth, Search @ Google
Brian Rothenberg, VP Growth and Marketing @ Eventbrite
Ravi Mehta, Product Director @ Facebook
Mike Duboe, Head of Growth @ Stitch Fix
Josh Lu, Sr. Director, PM @ Zynga
Guillaume Cabane, VP Growth @ Drift
Matt Plotke, Head of Growth @ Stripe
Joanna Lord, CMO @ ClassPass
Gina Gotthilf, ex-Growth Lead @ Duolingo
Elena Verna, SVP Growth @ MalwareBytes
Kieran Flanagan, VP Growth/Marketing @ HubSpot
Naomi Pilosof Ionita, Partner @ Menlo Ventures
Nick Soman, ex-Growth Product Lead @ Gusto
Nate Moch, VP Growth @ Zillow
Simon Tisminezky, Head of Growth @ Ipsy
Steve Dupree, Former VP Marketing @ SoFi
See the full list here
Here’s some more detail about each program below:
About the Retention + Engagement Deep Dive
Retention + Engagement Deep Dive zooms in on one of the most important sub-topics of growth.
Retention and engagement separates those companies in the top 1% of their category. Every improvement in retention improves acquisition, monetization, and virality. But moving the needle on retention is hard.
This program takes a microscope to every aspect of retention, including:
The Retention + Engagement Deep Dive is designed for growth professionals who are looking to zoom in on retention, either because their job is focused on retention, or because they already have an advanced working understanding of the quant and qual fundamentals of growth and are looking to build additional competency in retention and engagement.
Apply for the Retention + Engagement Deep Dive
About the Growth Models Deep Dive
The new Growth Models Deep Dive addresses an essential new skill and topic that every growth practitioner needs to understand. Your growth model is the essential tool that drives alignment, prioritization, strategic investments, metrics, and ultimately, growth. Without it, your team ends up setting faulty goals, focusing on sub-optimal initiatives, and running in opposite directions.
This program goes deep into growth models across companies. You will:
The Growth Models Deep Dive is designed for growth professionals looking to focus on growth modeling, either because their job requires modeling their company or product’s growth or because they’re in a leadership role. It’s especially useful for growth leaders looking to influence leadership, set a team’s direction, and rally colleagues using growth models.
Apply for the Growth Models Deep Dive
About the Growth Series
The Growth Series is a comprehensive overview of the key topics in growth. The program is designed to help you accelerate growth of your product, company and your career by creating a prioritized list of retention strategies, building your quantitative growth model, and much more. Plus, the Reforge team spent +100 hours collecting feedback, investigating new growth concepts with experts, and analyzing the latest strategies coming out of top companies to completely overhaul the content with new topics, frameworks, and relevant examples.
During the Growth Series, you’ll learn:
The Growth Series is designed for practitioners who already know the basics of growth and are figuring out how to take the next step. Participants are assumed to have knowledge about A/B testing, ad buying, and other fundamental tactics, and are ready to take on the bigger challenge of thinking about the entire picture of growth and forming a coherent and compelling strategy.
Andrew Chen recently wrote a blog post about how growth is getting harder. I invited Andrew to the Greymatter podcast to chat more about why growth is getting harder, and more importantly, what to do about it.
We talk about how viral growth is on the decline in consumer, but not in B2B, and how to leverage paid referrals effectively. We also walk through trends in paid acquisition, how to find your first channel of growth, and much more.
The iTunes link is here, and here is the Soundcloud link for email readers.
I sat down with the folks at Intercom to discuss building a growth team, onboarding, and increasing retention.
Here is the Soundcloud link for email readers.
Naomi Ionita, VP of Growth at Invoice2go and formerly Director of Growth at Evernote, joins me to discuss the growth B2B startups that grow more like consumer businesses. We discuss topics like how to monetize your product in general, converting new customers to paying customers, and preventing churn.
The iTunes link is here, and here is the Soundcloud link for email readers.
Julie Zhou, former director of growth at Yik Yak, and I spent some time discussing Snapchat’s declining user growth now that it is public, what its causes might be, and what we’d tried to do if we were in charging of improving it. You can check it out below or read the summary here.
The iTunes link is here, and here is the Soundcloud link for email readers.
Currently listening to Chnoiseries Pt. 3 by Onra.