The evolution of product-led growth: we’re entering the “choose your own adventure” era I’ve spent the last 15 years working in B2B SaaS. I was one of the first 200 employees at HubSpot, and saw first hand what high-growth felt like from the inside. Then I joined Wistia, where I started and scaled the growth team and helped the company acquire hundreds of thousands of users. Later, I worked in the trenches at Postscript as their 10th hire and head of growth, where we grew revenue by 5x in 16 months! I’m addicted to the action and energy of working at these early-stage companies. The ..read more

How long does the average head of growth stay in the same role? Two years? Three? Five?? Sadly, I’ve noticed it’s more like 12 to 16 months. Why so much turnover? Because being head of growth is hard. If your company is underperforming (which is common right now with everything going on in tech), you might suddenly become the scapegoat. People expect the person with “growth” in their title to fix everything, regardless of the reasons their underperforming are within your control. Over time, that person either gets frustrated and leaves, or the company gets frustrated with them ..read more

Most employee incentives built in today’s companies are efficiency-focused. You execute at a certain level of productivity, hit your team or company KPIs and get rewards. For example: Reach a sales quota, and get a commission. Achieve a target stock price, and receive a bonus. Surpass a specific goal, earn a promotion… A requirement for these incentives to work is a well-defined process: you have historical data to forecast future results, a documented step-by-step guide to follow, and a clear understanding of the mechanics of your tasks. The incentive theory of motivation is ..read more

You read that growth study with the charts going up and to the right and it seems like it's working for everyone but you. You talk with a growth colleague and they tell you about the amazing program they created that 2x'ed their conversion rates in a week, but yours is still the same. You watch that growth series and it seems like all the experiments worked but yours. You start to blame the team for the lack of brilliance, you blame your boss for the lack of resources, you blame the company for the lack of ideas, you blame your audience for the lack of knowledge, you blame marketing for ..read more

Combining Growth OKRs with Company KPIs Enough with the alphabet soup, it’s that time of the year when companies are projecting goals, planning strategies, and aligning teams toward a unique mission for the next year. But, how can one combine something apparently uncertain like growth KPIs with the precision demanded by performance management methodologies, such as OKRs? Let’s start by setting the stage: Company OKRs: OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) is a management framework designed to encourage companies to set, communicate and monitor organizational performance. It’s a fram ..read more

W Framework for strategy creation As we approach the end of Q3, many companies are starting to plan their next year — even without taking their eyes out of Q4. A company's result is the sum of the performance of all its moving parts, ensuring all of them are synched towards one common direction, and a clear goal is your best chance to achieve the expected outcome. While for most departments, this basically means analyzing historical data, reverse engineering results, gathering learnings and scaling what's already known inside their scope of actuation... it's totally different for a g ..read more

Growth or Waterfall — which methodology to use and when? Waterfall Vs growth methodology Regardless of which methodology description you choose, all of them are basically systematized frameworks intended to organize a team around a specific goal, facilitate its productivity, its tracking, execution, and management. However, when to apply each may not be crystal clear at first sight so we will break it all down the similarities, differences, and when each methodology should be applied. The waterfall method: is a linear or sequential approach to project management and works based on fi ..read more

How to Build Powerful Referral Loops This article was co-authored with Thorsten Strauss, founder of Hello Growth. Viral loops. Self-perpetuating, ever-increasing growth through referrals. The core growth driver of many, if not most unicorn companies. Who would not want to know how to build a viral loop? How to go viral? Today, we break it down for you. By the end of this article, you’ll know how to build a viral loop and whether it is the right loop for you. This is article 3 in our series on funnels and loops. Article series on funnels and loopsHow does a viral refer ..read more

Value-first onboarding and how to stop losing new users you don’t even know you’re losing Quick question. What’s the most important metric when it comes to converting sales through your SaaS product? Hint: It’s not signups. It’s not PQLs. It’s not even actual purchases. It’s activated accounts, the number of new users that received value from your product during their onboarding. Grow the number of new users that receive value now — and you’ll see the number of paid subscribers grow later. But if tracking value during onboarding sounds strange, you’re not alone. When I worked a ..read more

After a couple of decades of (almost) continued growth in the tech space, fueled by innovation (and pandemic-like events), where multiples skyrocketed and power-points were more common than spreadsheets in VC meetings, and getting funded became easier than getting revenue… reality (or correction, call it what you want) finally hit. The new normal goes beyond the expected WFH: companies with <2y of runaway were instructed to cut costs, layoffs and hiring freezes are happening at every company that raised insane amounts of money, breakeven is becoming the new Northstar, SPACs started to ..read more