I don’t think I’ve met a founder that loves board meetings. They are a critical part of running a startup, but then can easily become low ROI activities consuming a ton of the time of the CEO and executive team and not helping the company move forward in a meaningful way. To make a board meeting effective, you need to enable an environment of brutally honest conversations. You want to facilitate transparent, direct, and constructive conversations. To do this, many folks focus on the board presentation and notes. But over time More and more execs and people internally are included in creating a ..read more

In March, LinkedIn launched an AI assisted growth loop. Fareed Mosavat and I recorded a convo where we broke it down step by step. We were shocked when we looked up the stats. From March to June it went from generating 0 to 1M uniques per month according to Ahrefs and is on one of the steepest growth curves we’ve ever seen for a content loop. ?️ Note: Fareed and I are thinking about turning this type of convo into a podcast. Is this something you’d listen to? Let me know on LinkedIn How LinkedIn’s AI Assisted Content Loop Works The feature is called a "collaborative article." You may have see ..read more

The first thing I ever created (even before incorporating) for Reforge was a Business Hypothesis Canvas. Here is the actual one I wrote for Reforge in 2016. If you are like me, when I get a new business my idea my brain runs in a million different directions. The Business Hypothesis Canvas helped me: Structure the brain chaos into something coherent. Force myself to see and answer questions I hadn’t thought of yet. State my core hypotheses. Focus on what ultimately mattered. Communicate all of this to others in a clear and simple way. The majority of the hypotheses reflected in thi ..read more

Superhuman was founded in 2015 (3ish years ago at the time of writing this). From their landing page, they are building “The Fastest Email Experience Ever Made.” To this day, you can still not sign up and instantly gain access to their product. Yet, they have received more press, word of mouth, and funding than 95%+ of other products. Why? Because they've done the exact opposite of what most do for product and feature launches. Let me explain... Right now someone, or an entire team, inside your company is probably pouring a ton of energy and thought into a new product or feature launch. That p ..read more

Superhuman was founded in 2015 (3ish years ago at the time of writing this). From their landing page, they are building “The Fastest Email Experience Ever Made.” To this day, you can still not sign up and instantly gain access to their product. Yet, they have received more press, word of mouth, and funding than 95%+ of other products. Why? Because they've done the exact opposite of what most do for product and feature launches. Let me explain... Right now someone, or an entire team, inside your company is probably pouring a ton of energy and thought into a new product or feature launch. That p ..read more

We’ve all heard the rallying cry of the “One Metric That Matters”. Choose your north star and focus. Grow 7% week over week. If you grow daily active users (DAUs), the rest will follow. But blindly buying into the concept of the one metric that matters (OMTM) is a fatal oversimplification. In a recent essay, Casey Winters, formerly Growth at Pinterest, says: “The search for one key metric for a complex ecosystem like Pinterest over-simplifies how the ecosystem works and prevents anyone from focusing on understanding the different elements of that ecosystem. You want the opposite to be true ..read more

We’ve all heard the rallying cry of the “One Metric That Matters”. Choose your north star and focus. Grow 7% week over week. If you grow daily active users (DAUs), the rest will follow. But blindly buying into the concept of the one metric that matters (OMTM) is a fatal oversimplification. In a recent essay, Casey Winters, formerly Growth at Pinterest, says: “The search for one key metric for a complex ecosystem like Pinterest over-simplifies how the ecosystem works and prevents anyone from focusing on understanding the different elements of that ecosystem. You want the opposite to be true ..read more

This post is the HubSpot Sales case study that illustrates the concepts of the 4-Fits Framework, a 5 post series in which I explain the four frameworks you need to align to grow to a $100M+ company. Subscribe to receive the rest of the series.   When I joined HubSpot in January 2014 the mission was clear. One, help build the foundation for a new $100M line of business. Two, do it with a freemium and touchless model. The journey was one with many twists, turns, and lessons which I've boiled down into the Four Fits Framework that I went through in the past five posts. In this pos ..read more

This post is the HubSpot Sales case study that illustrates the concepts of the 4-Fits Framework, a 5 post series in which I explain the four frameworks you need to align to grow to a $100M+ company. Subscribe to receive the rest of the series.   When I joined HubSpot in January 2014 the mission was clear. One, help build the foundation for a new $100M line of business. Two, do it with a freemium and touchless model. The journey was one with many twists, turns, and lessons which I've boiled down into the Four Fits Framework that I went through in the past five posts. In this pos ..read more

Get the customizable Growth Interview Prep Worksheet that accompanies the post here. You walk into your growth interview after hours of preparation. You’ve perfected your 2 minute pitch, polished your work stories, and maybe even done some case prep. You’re ready to showcase your achievements and you have an answer ready for any question they throw at you. But there’s one big problem you’ve overlooked - the interview isn’t actually about you. Most candidates approach the interview process as a way to showcase themselves and their accomplishments. But, the best growth candidates orient the proc ..read more