One of the problems we faced when I joined Eventbrite was that Eventbrite had a pretty low take rate, meaning when event creators sold paid tickets on our platform, we took a very low percentage. And when creators sold free tickets on the platform, which are the majority of tickets, we didn’t make any money. You need an incredible amount of volume to make profits with low take rates, like say Paypal or Stripe, and even though Eventbrite has tremendous scale, it wasn’t enough to make material profits. We needed a way to make more money for the value we created if we wanted to be a successful co ..read more

I work with a lot of startups these days, and startups are frequently excited to talk to me about advanced growth ideas. This makes sense. I’ve been able to have success in my career leveraging advanced strategies to help startups win and to take more control over their growth. I built a course called Advanced Growth Strategy after all. In 99 out of 100 of these cases though, this is the wrong topic. Inevitably, when I dig in, any startup asking me about doing something advanced on SEO, activation, or paid acquisition is not doing something much more basic well yet, and the impact of the more ..read more

This essay was co-created with Dan Hockenmaier. In marketplace businesses, the network is the product. If you’re not growing both supply and demand, the product generally isn’t getting better over time. And your network effects which compound organic growth are not getting better, and probably getting worse. Most marketplace founders and leaders intuit this over time, so they obsess over growth metrics. In this essay we explore one channel that helps many marketplaces scale faster than others: supply driving demand.  If a marketplace has the potential to use this channel and doesn’t, it l ..read more

This is part three in a series of posts related to some presentations I did for the TCV Engage Summit. The Summit gathered ~40 CPOs and product leaders to chat through topics centered around product development and product-led growth. This year, topics ranged broadly from incorporating AI to deliver world-class consumer experiences to defining and measuring different forms of community-powered growth. You can read parts 1 and 2 here and here. In a previous post, I talked about how product work post-product/market fit shifts from zero to one innovation to features, growth, and scaling work. But ..read more

At TCV’s Engage Summit in 2022, I gave a take on finding your next wave of growth, which you can read here. Sam Shank, founder and CEO of HotelTonight, asked me the question that everyone asks growth people, “What new channels are you seeing new consumer companies take advantage of?” My answer was disappointing as it always is, “What new consumer companies? Discord is the last one I have seen grow organically for a long period of time. Tiktok spent many billions of dollars buying up every ad they could on Facebook, Snap, and Google properties. It’s not really replicable.” I then proceeded to e ..read more

I’ve had the pleasure of speaking at TCV’s Engage Summit the past two years. The Summit gathered ~40 CPOs and product leaders to chat through topics centered around product development and product-led growth. This year, topics ranged broadly from incorporating AI to deliver world-class consumer experiences to defining and measuring different forms of community-powered growth. I never posted my talk from last year, so I’m adapting it into a blog post here, and will do the same for this year’s talk in the following weeks and as well as some follow up questions from the Summit I’ve had a chance t ..read more

I was recently on Lenny Rachitksy’s podcast again, and one of the topics we discussed was consumer subscription business. I thought I would actually write down a lot of those thoughts and add some more depth for founders and employees working on these businesses. Don’t worry I got more marketplace content on the way as well Shortly after I got into tech, investors started to fall in love with subscription business models, mostly on the B2B side. Across many different problems, subscription software sold over the internet seemed to produce dominant tech companies left and right. Even incumbent ..read more

I have written about the Chief Product Officer role in the past, and why the job is so hard. I also wrote about being a product leader during a crisis. But not much is written about starting as a new product leader. So, I thought I’d write a post about my first year as CPO, and share some general lessons. First, a reminder of the situation I started in. I had been an advisor for Eventbrite for about two years, so I had a lot of comfort with the CEO and many of the executives before ever starting the role. I believe this is an underrated way to start new roles for senior people because you can ..read more

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 ..read more

I’m excited to announce that public applications are open for the Fall 2021 cohort of Reforge. I’ll be participating alongside leaders from Tinder, Facebook, HubSpot, SurveyMonkey, Instagram, and more. [Apply to Join Reforge] 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. Fall Programs Begin October 4th I’ve worked closely with Brian Balfour (CEO at Reforge) and the Reforge team for the past 3 years to develop and host fo ..read more