Growth vs. Retention

We have two big groups within growth. So one is what we call growth R&D. So this might be what you traditionally consider product design engineering, data, your traditional product teams. Then we have growth marketing, which in Shopify's case is paid acquisition, media buying, affiliate marketing, email, content, and SEO.

For growth in sales, I think the biggest learning from the the R&D side at least has been the scale is very different with sales, and so it's really hard to use as much quantitative data to make growth, to make some of those decisions.

And so that's where you start to have more scrutiny around what types of deals are we signing, what are the terms? Do we have liability exposure? What's it going to cost us if we actually scale? And it's great that we have this cool rate at 500 MTUs, what happens when we have a million MPUs? So, I worked at mParticle, which was a CDP provider for a...

Companies like Scale AI and PAVE are using OneSchema to make it fast and easy to launch delightful spreadsheet import experiences from embeddable CSV import to importing CSVs from an SFTP folder on a recurring basis. Spreadsheet import is such an awful experience in so many products.

Welcome to Lenny's podcast. I'm Lenny and my goal here is to help you get better at the craft of building and growing products. I interview world class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard won experiences building and scaling today's most successful companies. Today my guest is Dan Hockenmaier.

Dan hasn't shared a ton of his insights and experiences publicly, so I was really excited to chat with him and to dig into all the things that go into building a marketplace business along with coming up with your growth model.

Yeah, so basically none of it was true. I mean, the surprising thing to me was how viral this tweet went when ... Frankly, I actually look back at this person's other tweets. I think they worked at CB Insights, and the irony is the whole point of that business is to have good data, good data quality around private company data.

Because the fast execution, the AI stuff, that creates the top of funnel excitement that also inspires new use cases and new users to come to Airtable, including in large enterprise, right? Enterprises can use this stuff too.

It feels to me like that is the default culture, especially as growth teams become organizations and as those organizations grow with companies into growth stage public company territory and beyond. However, I do think you can build a different culture, and the only way to escape the trap of experimenting everything is to have a very intentional cu...

So, the rigor around your process was either there or it wasn't. This means though that there have to be other ways to motivate, reward, retain, and develop really good talent. So, a culture around the impact you had on customers as measured by qualitative feedback or as measured by deals that were closed or deals that weren't lost, or other kinds ...

People look around and they're like, "Well, that wasn't what we did. We set our team level OKRs and we went through the process and we made sure, and we followed the OKRs, we thought about the OKRs," and I said, "Yeah, but the company has a goal of let's call it bringing on a million new users in this year. We're a growth team.

So if that's a startup, how much runway do we have? What do we need to raise that next round? Are our investors looking for growth? Are they looking for profitability? What are they looking for in order for us to reach that next existential milestone?

In her work as a full-time investor, she gets to see what works and doesn't work across many companies. And one area that she spends a lot of time on is monetization, when it's best to start charging for your product, how to decide what to charge, and how to evolve your pricing. And that's what we spend the bulk of our conversation around.

Wow. Well, thank you. I think early growth folks like us have a unique bond and a lens on startups and investing. So, my operating background is something I lean on every day and has actually informed a lot of the thesis areas where I spend time now as an investor. So, hopefully, we'll bring it all together in that capacity.

If your users aren't inviting people to your app, you're going to have to find another way to acquire them, and that most likely means ads. If you're targeting older cohorts like adults, you're going to have to raise a huge amount of venture capital to finance that user acquisition pipeline and it's going to be extraordinarily expensive.

I can just give you an example. We were just talking about this customer support system that we had. The first system broke after three days. The next one broke seven days later, we had to replace it with a different one that could scale even better.