20Growth: Three Growth Lessons Scaling Whatsapp from 0-100M, Why You Should Hire a Head of Growth Sooner Than You Think & The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring for Growth with Ryan Wiggins, Head of Growth @ Mercury

Ryan Wiggins is the VP of Growth and Analytics at Mercury where he oversees a Growth team and founded the Analytics function. Prior to this, Ryan built Growth teams at WhatsApp, where he helped grow WhatsApp Business from 0->100M users, Workplace, and Facebook Ads. If that was not enough, Ryan is also an active angel investor. In Today's Episode with Ryan Wiggins We Discuss: 1.) From US Department of Commerce to Leading Growth Teams: How Ryan made his initial foray into the world of growth with Facebook and Whatsapp? What does Ryan know now that he wishes he had known when he made the entry into growth? What advice does Ryan have for people who want to change their career but are not sure what they want to do? 2. ) Who and When: Building the Team: Should we hire a Head of Growth or a more junior growth hire first? What are the different profiles of growth hires? How do they change with business model? When is the right time to hire your first growth hire? What are the single biggest mistakes founders make on the timing of growth hires? 3.) How to Hire: The Process: Structurally, what is the right way to hire for a growth team? What does the interview process look like? What do you want to get out of each meeting? Should case studies be used, if so, should they be used for the company hiring or of the company where the candidate is from? What does the comp package look like for different growth hires? Who should be brought into the growth hiring process? What stage should they be involved? 4.) Onboarding: Setting Growth Up for Success: What is the ideal first 30,60 and 90 days for new growth hires? What can leaders do to ensure they are set up for the maximum chance of success? What are three of the biggest red flags bad growth hires show in the first 30 days? What are the biggest mistakes founders make in the onboarding process of growth hires?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  This is 20 Growth with me, Harry Stebbings. This is the monthly show where we sit down with the best growth leaders to unpack their tips, tactics and strategies to scaling growth themes. And today, we're joined by Ryan Wiggins, VP of Growth and Analytics at Mercury, where he oversees a growth team and founded the analytics function. Prior to this, Ryan built growth themes at WhatsApp, where he helped grow WhatsApp business from zero to 100 million users, Workplace and Facebook ads. And if that wasn't enough, Ryan's also an extremely active angel investor. But before we dive into the show today, and I'm really excited about this next sponsor, because a few of my portfolio companies use it and love it. So do you know the impact of your marketing efforts? It's more important this year than ever to know the impact. Or how much you've spent so far this month and what you got as a result?

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• 1:31Harry Stebbings?

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• 2:15Harry Stebbings?

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• 2:32Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 2:35Harry Stebbings?

  Ryan, I am so excited for this, my friend. I spoke to Alex Schultz, I spoke to Corinna New, I spoke to Sachin. I know so much about you, but thank you for joining me.

• 2:44Speaker 02

  Hey, Harry. Excited to be here. Really excited to get to chat.

• 2:46Harry Stebbings?

  I would love to start with a little bit on you. So first question is, how did you make your way into the world of startups? And then secondarily, how did you make your way to Mercury today?

• 2:55Speaker 02

  I started my career as a customer support role at Facebook right out of college. I didn't really know what I wanted to do, but one day someone offered a SQL class and I took that class and it basically changed my life. I used that in my support job. I tried to basically figure out why I was getting yelled at so much and tried to improve what we were doing with customer support. Then a couple of years later, when I was looking for a new job, it turns out that I was doing the whole time was growth. That got me connected to Alex Schultz and a team at Facebook known as Growth Marketing that sits at the intersection of data, product and marketing. And I spent six years there helping grow different products across Facebook, things like Facebook Ads, Workplace and WhatsApp, where I spent about three years really going deep on how we grow some products. At some point, I wanted to go explore some

• 3:40Speaker 02

  earlier stage problems and so started to look and stumbled across Mercury. How I ended up at Mercury was that I started some conversations and then took a look at the product and immediately knew that I wanted to join. For those in your audience who aren't aware, Mercury is banking for startups. We offer a product that helps startups solve all their banking needs and it's such a better banking experience than anything else I had experienced. And since then, about two years in, we've scaled to over 100,000 startups. We have established a super strong product-led growth motion and I've gotten the opportunity to help build a world-class analytics team.

• 4:13Harry Stebbings?

  So I meet this with respect. You don't have the Harvard-Stanford Facebook Growth Team LinkedIn profile, like Brian Hale and like many other greats. My question to you is, do you think we place too much emphasis on these logos? And what do you advise people who are navigating their careers and maybe like you, didn't always know that this was what you'd ultimately do in the end? What would you advise them?

• 4:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I started my career And pretty humble backgrounds. And the thing that's interesting is that growth wasn't even really a job when I started. Basically, my entire career has been unplanned, but there have been two guiding principles that have guided a lot of my career that have come in the form of advice. And the two kind of things that come up is that first, at the end of the day, you have to pursue things that you're really curious about. And you have to use those curiosities as a way to add value to the team you're on. I've always had this saying, which is that you should blossom where you're planted. I've tried to do that as much as I can. And when I've done that, it creates options for where I can go. Second, someone once gave me the advice that you should try to pick a role and a person you want to be and try to understand your skill gap to that role. And then once you find opportunities to apply that skill gap, you try to make progress in that.

• 5:20Speaker 02

  And you can reevaluate over time, but if you're pointing in a direction, trying to make progress in that, you'll grow in ways that you didn't expect. But I found that those two principles have helped me and helped guide my career and given me opportunities that I wouldn't have ever expected.

• 5:34Harry Stebbings?

  Speaking of growing in ways you didn't expect, a Facebook and WhatsApp are two meteoric growth case studies over the last 10 years. I'm just fascinated when you review those years that you spent at both organizations or within the organization there. What are one to two of the biggest takeaways for you, Ryan, from seeing firsthand the hypergrowth there? And how did that impact your mindset?

• 5:54Speaker 02

  I joined WhatsApp in 2017. WhatsApp was very different than everything I had learned at Facebook. And for six years at Facebook, the thing I had learned was that data is core to everything. You understand funnels, you instrument things, you don't make a decision without having some data to the table. But when I joined WhatsApp, it had a billion and a half users and it really only had about one product manager, about two to three data people working on it. So what I learned about WhatsApp and how WhatsApp grew was really kind of three things. First, it was the right product for the right market. If you look at the market at the time when WhatsApp launched, the app stores and smartphones were just launching. SMS prices across the world were about 10 cents a message. And the second thing is that WhatsApp built a product that was really simple and it was reliable.

• 6:35Speaker 02

  They focused ruthlessly on the core things you should do, which is be able to send a message and it go through. And it always worked. In the four years I worked on WhatsApp, it never went down. But then the kind of third thing was that they added fuel to the fire and found. What was working and try to enhance that. In particular, there was some partnership deals early on in the lifecycle of WhatsApp, where they partnered with carriers to offer free data packs. This kind of aligned incentives with WhatsApp and the carriers, because carriers wanted people to buy the data packs, and those users would then buy the data packs and use WhatsApp. So it was kind of a virtuous cycle of growth. That led to a product that just took off and became a fuel for a lot of growth.

• 7:11Harry Stebbings?

  Can I just dive in and ask, when you look at the growth of WhatsApp, did it ever not go up and to the right? Was there ever a quarter where it was flat or where it wasn't meteoric?

• 7:21Speaker 02

  So I think that WhatsApp hit S-curves along the way throughout. And when you look at an overall WhatsApp growth trajectory, the thing that it looks like is a just straight upwards trend. India coming online and reaching, I think, around 600 million smartphones over the course of the last 10 years has been just a huge boon to WhatsApp's growth and has been something that kind of always adds incremental numbers. And it's become a really saturated product in that market. But there are some markets where WhatsApp wasn't as big. And like the United States has been a country where WhatsApp has some adoption, but hasn't quite reached a scale. Total growth has sometimes been flat and sometimes even negative over that course of time. The thing that I kind of found was that, okay, so WhatsApp grew basically without the Facebook data-driven approach. That doesn't mean that data doesn't have any value.

• 8:05Speaker 02

  And so core to the lessons that I learned are things that, first, you need a great product. Second, you need to have a deep understanding of your customers. And that can come through data or just true customer empathy. But then, third, you have to have an incredible growth execution loop. And when you combine all those things, you get a product like WhatsApp that is truly something that has taken over the world.

• 8:24Harry Stebbings?

  What is an incredible growth execution loop?

• 8:26Speaker 02

  It comes to understanding the dynamics behind a product and what will help pour fuel on the fire. And when I think about what makes growth really work, is the intersection of product experiences, marketing, and partnerships and sales that kind of fuel the fire. But that has to be built on top of a product that is fundamentally retentive and something that provides value and people really want. And so when you have that core product, and then you have the three rocket boosters of growth product, marketing and sales and partnerships, that is the combination that really wins. Growth is a system. And often when I get asked to come in and grow something, what most people are actually think they're asking about is growing acquisition. But I actually think that's where it's totally wrong. Because often, if you look at the kind of growth journey from acquisition, getting in

• 9:10Speaker 02

  front of someone, to conversion, someone going through a funnel, to then activation and retention, there are often problems that exist in that bottom funnel that make it such that if you were just to go try to do acquisition, you wouldn't reach kind of a scale that you need to. And so you have to think about that kind of full customer journey. And then think about the levers that you can pull in that journey. And sequencing matters a ton for how you actually drive an impact that is kind of at scale.

• 9:32Harry Stebbings?

  When you say sequencing matters a ton, what does that mean? And how do people get sequencing wrong?

• 9:38Speaker 02

  Often I found that when someone is asking me about trying to grow something, they want acquisition, but what they actually have is conversion and retention problem. You have to look at the full funnel of that experience and understand, is there a drop off? One example of this with WhatsApp Business when we launched pretty early on is we had a product that was starting to get really strong adoption. Team really wanted to go do some acquisition. But when I went through this growth system, the thing that I found was that retention was dropping off in an enormous scale. It was something that was actually really concerning, some of the lowest retention I've seen. And as we dug into that a lot further and we started to talk to customers, one of the things that we found was the transition from the WhatsApp consumer app to the WhatsApp business app was broken. It was some technology that didn't exist, you lost some chats along the way. But if you're a business, starting a new app, losing chats is actually the most critical thing.

• 10:23Speaker 02

  And you could just switch back to the consumer app and get going. And so one of the things that we started to do before we actually focused on pouring fuel on the fire with acquisition, was we fixed initial transition that the common customer is going through. That basically doubled retention and was an angle change in growth. And then when we added in acquisition, we grew at a rate that was totally different. It wasn't just a step change, it was an angle change. And I think that's ultimately what I'm looking for in growth, is trying to find what's fundamentally broken in the system. And then when we pour fuel in it, how do we really get that kind of fire going?

• 10:52Harry Stebbings?

  If we think about that holistic picture of growth being what most leaders get wrong about growth, in terms of what growth people get wrong about growth, what do growth people get wrong about growth?

• 11:02Speaker 02

  I think ultimately is that the product experience matters. I see far too many growth leaders jump to Notifications, upsells or things like that. But in my experience, there's usually one thing that drives most of the results. And people get too bogged down in trying 100 growth hacks to actually move a number. But really, you have to find the right thing. I'll give you like one classic example from WhatsApp that we use a lot in the kind of the consumer experience. Which is that as we talked about in France and the United States or some of those markets, WhatsApp isn't used by everyone. But in those markets, people still sign up for WhatsApp. And it turns out when you sign up for WhatsApp and you have no one to talk to on WhatsApp, you don't use WhatsApp. And so what we were doing is we were looking at inviting as a mechanism for how we could increase utility of WhatsApp in these markets. That WhatsApp wasn't working. And we tried a bunch of different entry points throughout the product to invite people.

• 11:46Speaker 02

  But the thing that we found was that an entry point, when you're searching for someone that doesn't have WhatsApp, was the top entry point. It became 10x bigger than any other entry point. And it makes sense because the context of what you're trying to do in that app was met by that entry point. If you're trying to search for someone, talk to them, they don't have WhatsApp. So adding a little invite entry point makes it that you actually want to invite that person gets on WhatsApp and you're more likely to use WhatsApp. That one thing was better than the 20 different things that we tried. To me, it's really about thinking about what is the right thing at the right place at the right time for someone? That kind of is the most important thing about growth. And I think sometimes we're too caught up in, oh, we just need to send another notification. We just need to like add an upsell. But actually, it's really thinking about that core product experience. What's the user problem?

• 12:29Speaker 02

  And how do we actually go solve that with a product experience that leads to growth?

• 12:32Harry Stebbings?

  How do you define what is a successful user? I think this is the hardest question that not enough people actually get right in their own business. When you think about WhatsApp, it could be the number of messages sent a day. It could be the number of times you return to the app on a daily basis. It could be the number of contacts you have that use it. How do you advise founders on the right metric that determines user success?

• 12:55Speaker 02

  At the end of the day, there's a reason people use a product and stick around it. And one of the most common analyses I do when I start on a growth problem is think about what is the retention curve? So up the percent of people that start, what percent of people stick around? And basically try to correlate that with actions people take early on. For WhatsApp, if you look at that, one of the things that matters a lot is having people to talk to. And so the more people you have to talk to, the more likely you Just a ground on using WhatsApp. But actually, that's not the thing that matters. What matters is the one person that you want to talk to. And we can't necessarily know that one person. But we know that if you have more people, you're more likely to have the one person. And so you have to think about what's kind of the core dynamic of the app. What's the value the user receives? And then what's the thing that helps represent the actions that people take that lead to that? An example of that is the Facebook 10 friends in 14 days.

• 13:39Speaker 02

  It really is about having kind of connections on the app that make it so that you have content that you can see and experience the core value of the product. Then the growth effort is how you drive that action that leads to the retentive behavior.

• 13:51Harry Stebbings?

  You said about that one action is much more helpful in a lot of cases than like 100 little actions or hacks. How do you think about speed of execution and the importance and success of growth teams? And kind of growth experiments?

• 14:04Speaker 02

  I think speed is one of actually the most important parts of a growth team. And I think it's something that differentiates a growth team from just a core product team. And really, I think there's a kind of two dimensions of speed that really matter. One is having really tightly scoped projects that validate a hypothesis. And two is getting like quick impactful results. And so to break those out a little bit more. One, I think that growth teams should constantly be in an explore then exploit mode, where they're placing quick bets, getting quick results, and then doubling down when something's working. And I think that's kind of an iteration loop that can happen in a matter of days or weeks, not months. And so a growth team should constantly be in that dynamic. The second thing is that I think sometimes teams aim too small. If you're an early stage company, if you're an early stage product, you're looking for something that clearly impacts top line growth. You're not looking for 1% wins.

• 14:48Speaker 02

  Sometimes not getting a clear signal is a signal in itself. And I think that sometimes people get lost in, oh, maybe this is going to improve by 10%. No, we're not looking for 10% wins. We're looking for 50% or things that kind of double behavior. That's going to lead to a different outcome. And I think that those things are really important when you think about speed of execution.

• 15:05Harry Stebbings?

  How long do you wait? How much signal is enough signal? And I just see people try things now, like, we need more time. A week isn't enough. How do you determine when enough data is enough to decide whether to continue or to cut something?

• 15:19Speaker 02

  There's actually a science to this, which is that when you run an experiment, you can measure the measurable impact of an experiment and the sample size you need to. Be able to affect that experiment. And so there's some online calculators. If you just go Google sample size calculator for an experiment. This is something I use all the time because basically if you're trying to make a 1% change, you need a huge audience. If you're trying to make a really big change, you need a small audience. And so the things I think about are like, what's the size of impact? We actually expect to change. How quick can we measure that? And how many people are going through an experience? And if you can't measure an experiment with the kind of sample size that you have, it's not even worth running the experiment. And that's one of the science pieces of this. The other thing is I think sometimes you have to look at the input metrics. Maybe there's a downstream action like messaging someone that is going to take a little bit,

• 16:03Speaker 02

  but does someone have contacts? Do they import their contacts? Do they invite someone? Those are actions that lead to an output. And so thinking about the difference in input metrics versus output metrics is one dimension that I think actually helps teams understand. Are we seeing the positive actions in income or the input met before we're seeing in output metrics? And you can feel confident that maybe there should be more time if there's a lift in the input metrics. But if you're not seeing the input metrics, you're never going to see the output metric as well.

• 16:28Harry Stebbings?

  We've jumped a step here, which is really the assumption that this can all be done by an initial team. When we think about the teams that actually work on this day to day, how do you advise founders on when's the right time to really start thinking about hiring a growth team?

• 16:41Speaker 02

  The thing that I think is the moment that you're looking for is that the product has a core product market fit and at least one channel is working for bringing in some new users. It doesn't have to be huge, but it has to be consistent and reliable and stable. If it's not there, to me, the company is the growth team and the CEO is the growth PM. It should has to be core to building and you can't bring in a growth team to create growth out of nothing. It has to be about doubling down on what's working and scaling out to new channels. You know, the growth has to be fundamental to what the product experience is today. And I see a lot of sometimes founders come to this problem and say, oh, I want a growth team. And what they're asking actually asking for is someone to run marketing to get people in the door. And that can work, but that's not a growth team. That's a marketer that is bringing people into the door.

• 17:25Speaker 02

  And so I think you really have to think about how is the product working? And is something hitting there? And then it's time to pour fuel on the fire.

• 17:31Harry Stebbings?

  I'm an early stage founder, Ryan, and I'm thinking about adding my first growth hire. Should it be a growth? Leader who can hire their growth team? Or should it be a jack-of-all-trades growth person who is much more versatile? How do I think about that profile type leader or more junior?

• 17:48Speaker 02

  I think that there can be some early roles around setting up infrastructure from an engineering perspective or from a marketing standpoint, where you're getting the measurement of your product or the conversion tracking set up. But I think you should bring in a growth leader pretty early once you understand that it's time to grow. Because you want that person to basically architect the system of growth that you're building for your company. And I think that's like a pretty critical aspect of this. And so how I think about this is lace of early foundation, get to know that it's working, but then pretty quickly bring in a generalist growth leader that can start to think about, you know, where do we want to take this? And how to maximize what we have?

• 18:21Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, so we do that. Say we are the first person in the growth org at a company. As hypothetically speaking, someone actually hired me. What should they be? How should they do it? What tests should we run? What advice do you have for that as the first growth person in an org?

• 18:35Speaker 02

  I think that this has been the niche that I have found myself in my career, and it's something that I truly love and enjoy doing. And so I have a couple of different things that I think are really important. Early on in the kind of journey of a growth leader at a company, I think there are a couple of things that should really happen. First, I think that growth leader should go through the customer journey from discovering the product and becoming an active customer. Go through it like a customer would in the end, take screenshots of every step, aggregate that and share that back with the team. 99% of the time that I've done this, I've found that the team hasn't actually looked at that experience in a while because it gets lost in the changes. And so taking a fresh set of eyes at this problem is something that is kind of really important for setting a good foundation. The second thing is I think there are a couple of analyses that are really critical to run.

• 19:18Speaker 02

  First, I think you have to understand where your users come from and how has that changed over time? That can give you an insight into what are the dynamics that are driving growth of this business? Second, I think you have to think about what's the funnel from someone showing intent to becoming an active customer? Where are the drop off points? What are the friction points? What's working and what is not working? And then five, this thing that we briefly talked about, but are the key actions that lead someone to becoming highly active? Is there people that become successful? And what did they do early on in their life stage that made it so that they become successful? And so that's a maybe foundation of understanding. Ben, I think as a growth leader, one of the things you have to do is you just have to try to ship something. I think it's important to think about what is the process of going from an idea to actually implementing something? Who's willing to step up? What are the friction points?

• 20:01Speaker 02

  What is kind of the engineering systems that are involved with that or the business processes that exist around that? And so you're going to have to start from a place of curiosity, but then quickly shift into being someone who gets something done and trying to understand how can we do that in a repeatable motion?

• 20:15Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask you, in terms of building the team around us, you said before, before we jumped to hiring this full growth team, you said that building with the minimum number of people possible is actually maybe better. Why do you think it may be better to have less people? And what are the advantages of that leaner team?

• 20:31Speaker 02

  I think at some level, I strongly believe in the principle of Metcalfe's law. And for those of you who aren't aware, the Metcalfe's law is the notion of in a communication system, the number of nodes in a communication system mean that the complexity and the value of that communication system grows exponentially. And so when you think about that, if you have a huge team, it is more complex to get anything done because you're having to coordinate across a bunch of people. And so the thing that I look for, is there one to four people that can get something done? And trying to keep things as small as possible to iterate as quick as possible, keep the communication loops tight, keep the alignment tight. And it helps prioritize, it helps you think about what is the most important thing to do? And how can we go execute on that very quickly?

• 21:12Speaker 02

  And so I usually start very small and as you start to do that kind of explore than exploit mindset, that is the fundamental principle of explore. But at some point, you do need to scale it up and you need to start adding more resources to help take things bigger. But that has to come from something that's working much. The product has to actually be working before you bring in a growth team. I think a growth team has to be working before you scale a growth team as well.

• 21:32Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think founders really know when it's working? And what I mean by that is, do you think we can trick ourselves into thinking, ah, we're at 50K MRR and ah, this is real customer demand? But actually it's forced, it's founder-led sales, maybe they may not be churning. We may not have enough data to know about retention. Do you think founders actually understand where they're really at?

• 21:53Speaker 02

  The thing that is important is, is it repeatable, right? And when you say founder-led sales, the thing that I have And think about is if a founder is having to make every call, it's not repeatable. Because there's a lot of things to do when you're building a company and the founder having to be able to sell every deal is not the thing that is repeatable. And I think at that stage, definitely not. I think what I'm looking for is actually like, has it scaled beyond the founder? Or, you know, one other kind of test that I think about is if you stop that activity, if you like back off, if you're running ad campaigns, if you turn them off, what happens? And if it totally goes to zero, you actually don't have something that's working because you're not starting to see that organic adoption is happening. And I think that it's very rare that a product exists totally through just direct sales only or marketing only or other things like that.

• 22:35Speaker 02

  You tend to see something is happening when you do one of those is other channels start to take off as well. And so to me, you actually need to see that something is working when you you pull back your effort or lower your level of investment.

• 22:46Harry Stebbings?

  As a growth leader, here's the channels that we're using. Do you want to take a channel that is working and make it better? Or take a channel that is not working and try and make it work?

• 22:56Speaker 02

  I think that when you have something working is the first priority to make that thing work as well as it can. So I always start with how can you maximize what is working and accelerate it? But ultimately, you start to face this question of when should you stop working on a lever? Or when is there bigger upside elsewhere? And so I think a lot about when do you hit diminishing returns and when is there opportunity cost? And so what I'm looking for is a constant evaluation of what do we think we can gain? What do we kind of have in front of us in this channel? What else could we be working on? And how do we make that trade off of impact, cost and excitement about those kind of different options?

• 23:27Harry Stebbings?

  Say we now know that we need to build out the growth team more. We want to embark on that process. And so we're going to start hiring, Ryan. We are hiring for our growth team, but also we're aware that candidates often for startups are non-obvious and underappreciated. Often kind of the obvious bluntly are kind of the biggest companies earning the biggest salaries. Where do you find great, non-obvious talent and growth talent, Ryan?

• 23:50Speaker 02

  And what I really look for is the change agents, particularly in operational roles. And some of this comes from the bias of my journey into this role. But where I started in the Facebook Austin office, which is an operational team that handled customer support, operations for some different Facebook teams. The people that stood out in that where they could get things done. Both kind of within the teams that they were working on, but then actually impacting kind of the core product of Facebook are the people that you want to be looking for as untapped talent that is not yet being reached. And so I think a lot about who are the people that are being able to make changes from difficult positions or places that you wouldn't expect change to be happening from. In those roles, you've learned a level of scrappiness, you learn customer empathy, you learn humility that sets you up for success in a bunch of ways that like the traditional

• 24:33Speaker 02

  PM that has started right out of college doesn't necessarily have. And so I look for someone that has been making some changes and been able to affect that change. And Mercury, one of the best PMs I've worked with was someone that came from customer support. She taught herself how to code and she was able to like just learn all these small little tasks that helped her do her job better, but then created a skill set that was very well-rounded and meant that she could just get shit done. And that's what I look for is the person can get stuff done even when it's tough. Because I think that that's what you're ultimately looking for is a diverse skill set, able to go through walls and build things that last.

• 25:06Harry Stebbings?

  Would you ever hire someone who hasn't done growth before?

• 25:09Speaker 02

  It depends because I think many things can look like growth. But if I go back to what is my definition of growth, I think growth is a system of optimization and being able to understand a problem in a system and change that system towards positive outcomes. It doesn't have to be called growth for me to be down with that, to hire for that. But I do need to see that how to like ability to understand the system, make changes, and then that change have like an impact. That is the core line that goes throughout that skill set.

• 25:34Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, so say we have this candidate pool in mind. We now need to run a process and Ryan, I've never hired for a growth team before or growth hire before. Well, in terms of the like structure, how should we literally structure the process for a growth hire?

• 25:48Speaker 02

  I think the fundamental things you're looking for are really three things. One, I think you're looking for some background examples of being able to get things done and ship impact. Can they get stuff done beyond their position or what they would have beyond the system of the company that they were in? If you just sail with the wind behind your back, you're not a great sailor. You have to be able to go through the difficult times as well. Second, you're looking for the ability to understand customer behavior and do analysis. Can they break down problems into actionable insights? Go from an idea to actually what would you do to execute on that idea? I think that's something that's really critical. And what you're looking for is someone that isn't going to be blocked by other people and need to like pull a bunch of resources. They need to be someone that can generate value without needing to pull as much from other people. And the last thing I think is product sense intake.

• 26:31Speaker 02

  Can they make decisions that are going to fit within this broader kind of company perspective? So those are the kind of the three dimensions that I look for. And I think there are many configurations of what you can actually screen for and how you can set up the interview process. But those are the three pieces that I'm really looking for when I hire someone that is a growth leader.

• 26:46Harry Stebbings?

  Just what we say again, I'm a first time founder hiring my first growth eyes. Interview, case study, deep dive. How do we structure that process?

• 26:55Speaker 02

  The first interview is a interview about their background and kind of what led them to here. What I'm really looking for is take me through the journey of your career. Why did you choose the things that you worked on? What are some example projects that you helped guide and how did you guide them? I really love going through examples of what people have worked on, asking them to break down why things worked the way they did and how they would have gotten more impact out of it if they could.

• 27:17Harry Stebbings?

  What are the best and what are the worst there? What are the green flags in how they describe those experiences and what are the red flags?

• 27:23Speaker 02

  The thing that I'm really looking for is the ability to understand the system behind what's happening. Can they understand that it's not just about adding an entry point, but actually there's a value that matters for a person at a given drop off? And that they can understand that there's something broader beyond just the one change they made and find consistent wins or break it down into like, how could you take that and maximize something? Those are some of the dimensions that I'm really looking for in that background is can they think broader than just the example about their kind of role and how they entered that? Great people I find are people that are able to a problem, which is like, how do we get more people to sign up? Break it down into composable pieces and then figure out the seven things that you should try. And then this one works. Oh, let's take that one thing that works and ten X it. That is often the thing that I'm looking for in that kind of background thing.

• 28:08Speaker 02

  In the worst cases, the thing that I see is someone that is just running a playbook, someone that is just doing the thing that either their company would do or what you could find on a blog or things like that. To me, you have to be curious. You have to be trying to understand how the dynamic of the product is actually working, not just what's the change.

• 28:25Harry Stebbings?

  In terms of case studies. How do you think about using case studies? Do you think they should be your own company or the company that the person's experienced and worked with before? So they have more natural domain knowledge coming in.

• 28:37Speaker 02

  One of the things that I try to get away from in interviews is biasing based on the prior context of a given problem. And if I'm using an example that they went through, I actually think that it's about the work that they did. But I don't think it's worthwhile of going much deeper on a case study for their prior company. But there's a lot of inherent knowledge that you understand in that problem space that it's going to be difficult to communicate in an interview. I also think that you can't quite use the problems of my company as the problems of the day, because it ends up making the candidate feel like they're providing free work for you or you have biases around what your solution would be. And so the thing that I think about, is there a problem that is generic enough or not a problem of the day that helps establish the framework for thinking and lets you go deep on a couple of different dimensions? And so case studies are critical, but I try to think about,

• 29:22Speaker 02

  can it be about the more general problem of what the case study gets at versus something that would be influenced by my thinking of the day?

• 29:30Harry Stebbings?

  Who do you bring in on the decision process? Who's the people who should be on the hiring committee that say, yes, we should hire this growth person?

• 29:37Speaker 02

  I think that it should be the leadership team should be core to it and the people that are going to make decisions about the future of the company. I think the cross-functional partners they work with is going to be critical. So the team they work directly with, if it's marketers, if it's engineers, if it's partnerships folks, you've got to get those people working together and understand, can they work as peers? And then if there's going to be reports, you need to get some report signal as well and management skills too. And so the thing I think you're looking for is 360 overview of how does that person work with other people? I also think that the analysis part is critical. And so if your company doesn't yet have an analytics team, understand how you can try to build that skill set or bring in external advisors, because I think that fundamental to growth is analysis and you have to add that skill set into it.

• 30:19Harry Stebbings?

  How much do I pay them? What does that comp package look like, Ryan?

• 30:23Speaker 02

  I think compensation varies by location and the seniority of the role. But one dimension that I think is really important for a growth role that is slightly different than maybe some other roles is that you really want skin in the game so that the growth person has equity upside in the problem. The thing that I would look for is what is the kind of combination of salary that kind of fits their needs, but then equity that has a meaningful contribution such that if that person succeeds, they would have reasonable upside. And that is a combination of things that I'm looking for. It's good to give a sliding scale of that. Present an offer, but say if you want more equity or if you want more cash, like we can talk about that. But I think you do have to think about that balance of reasonable cash, sizable equity, and then trying to find that is important. The other thing correlated with that is you have to be pretty critical about if it's working or not.

• 31:07Speaker 02

  You don't want someone to have a huge equity package and just be sitting resting, investing. You want them to like know that they're going to be evaluated by their performance and they will be compensated as such that if you do well, you're going to have huge upside. But this isn't going well, we're going to call it. And so I think that's an important aspect too.

• 31:23Harry Stebbings?

  First growth hire, I dig now, my friend. I've been doing many shows. It's not a senior hire. It's a 28 year old to 35 year old, but it's a first growth hire. So it's not a growth leader. What's that range in terms of salary?

• 31:36Speaker 02

  I think in the United States, I think it's a reasonable assumption that 150 to 250 cash and then some sizable equity packages is the range that you're looking for. That kind of varies by seniority and skillset and ability to kind of manage or build a team and experience. But I think that you're looking for that. You don't want to try to match some of the big companies that can offer huge salary and equity packages. You do want someone to be scrappy and to understand that their upside is going to come from the growth.

• 32:03Harry Stebbings?

  So we've hired the person. Fantastic. We've done it, Ryan. Well done. They're joining our company. Woohoo. Now we need to onboard them. A kind of segment of the hiring process which is continuously fucked up. So what is the right way to onboard growth talent? What does that optimal onboarding process look like?

• 32:20Speaker 02

  To me, month one is about getting to know the people, the product and the kind of processes. What I really look for when I'm onboarding someone is an exponential growth trajectory for themselves as being the person in that role. And so in that first month, the thing that I'm really trying to get them in is all the context that we can possibly have. Do they have the right relationships? Do they understand the problem and the customer journey? And do they understand how they can get stuff shipped? And that first month, actually, you may not see much progress, but by month three, What I expect is someone to be starting to form opinions and starting to make changes that are having a clear input into a successful trajectory. And so what I'm looking for there is are they finding unique insights? Are they making changes and helping ship things that wouldn't have otherwise been shipped?

• 33:02Speaker 02

  Are they bringing clarity with strategy and kind of the tactics that we're building? And helping bring people along in the communication of what they're doing. And that's how I think about it is that one month and then three month timeframes. And I think that it varies by the person, but that's essentially the path.

• 33:17Harry Stebbings?

  What are the biggest red flags for you? If you have someone join at first 30 to 60 days where you're like, it's not working out. What are the big red flags as to why that would be?

• 33:27Speaker 02

  Three things that I really look for as red flags. One is I not team. Are they thinking more about themselves and their position than how the team operates? And the broader kind of mission of the company? You really want to see someone that is adopting and adapting to the company that you're working on. Second, are they thinking about sustainability and systems? If someone's just coming in and launching a new notification in their first month, probably looking for the quick wins that kind of show that they're making progress, but not things that are actually going to lead to long-term success. And what's the sustainability of what they're doing? And will it be something that is a repeatable pattern? Or is it kind of behaviors that are quick wins that may be annoying to customers? But you may not see that annoyance early on. And the last one is ignoring feedback. I think early in this kind of first month to three month period,

• 34:10Speaker 02

  the thing that you want to do is have a really good feedback cycle with the leadership and cross functional peers. And if someone is not taking feedback about, hey, you might want to focus on this rather than this. That's a huge red flag to me and something that we've got to act on super quick. Because being a leader means that you take feedback.

• 34:25Harry Stebbings?

  You said act on super quick there. I think we'll both recognize that people are generally too slow to let people go if it's not working out well. If it's not going to plan, how long should we give a head of growth and a growth hire? And they may be different there to prove their worth and prove their value.

• 34:42Speaker 02

  I think in most cases, you can understand three to six months if someone is working out or not. And that doesn't mean that they have to be totally changing the trajectory of your company in three to six months. But the question is, are they leading to a quality of work? That is the kind of understanding, choosing of smart And showing that they can execute on problems that is leading to any success. It has to be focused on the inputs and the quality of those inputs. And sometimes the output takes a while. For some of the roles that I've taken, it's taken me six months to 12 months to actually see a win. But that kind of early inputs of how they're interacting with the team, how they're coming to conclusions and then what they're building is, I think, enough to be able to tell this is going to be successful or it's not. And then you have to have a hard conversation and understand, can they change that trajectory? And if they can't, then it's time to let it go.

• 35:27Speaker 02

  But the thing I've found about letting people go is that you're always happier when you do than you ever would expect.

• 35:32Harry Stebbings?

  What are the biggest fuckups you've made in hiring? Mine's like, I've hired logos that give me confidence and then actually they weren't very good and they didn't play the role I thought they did. And it was like, ah, what do you think yours are?

• 35:44Speaker 02

  I remember once we hired someone that in the interview, the thing that we felt that was that they were super hard. They just presented themselves as like the expert and the perfect person for the job. And we all picked up on it in the interview, but we decided, oh, this person's got a bunch of skills and so we should do it. The thing is that people show you who they are in the interviews. And the things that you see that are red flags early on tend to be problems that kind of grow over time. And people don't kind of change their core behavior. And so the red flags for me are, one, taking the red flags I saw in the interview process seriously. And two, thinking about, did we hire someone because the system around them at their previous company made it so they were successful or were they uniquely successful? Ultimately in a hire, the thing I'm looking for is can they drive an incremental difference in a new scenario?

• 36:27Speaker 02

  And they should have some example of being able to do that previously.

• 36:30Harry Stebbings?

  Speaking of determining levels of success, on a project basis, how often do you do postmortems as a growth team? How do you structure them? Who's invited? How do you think through postmortems effectively?

• 36:43Speaker 02

  Maybe a controversial take, but I don't really believe much in doing postmortems for growth changes. I think that there should be a process in which you understand what you're going to do. You understand how that went and why you made the decisions you made and where you should go from there. And that should be a regular process, even something that happens monthly. But I think that it's very toxic for a growth team to get in navel gazing of micromanaging basically every small change that happens. If something breaks, you should evaluate it and figure out. Where to go forward, but it's constantly about that evaluation of what should we change? And where should we go forward? And what are the themes of what we're learning? Rather than, oh no, we launched this thing and it didn't work. Let's like spend a full day on it or even a couple of hours on it. I think that you have to be able to make a lot of changes and see what the themes of those are, evaluate what happened and then figure out where you go from there.

• 37:27Speaker 02

  And I think that's a model that I'm really looking for, rather than an immediate postmortem, which to me speaks to like taking mid step assessment of how things are.

• 37:34Harry Stebbings?

  I have to ask on review, when you think about growth decisions that you've made, talk to me about a growth decision you made without data to back it up. How did it go? And what was some takeaways for you?

• 37:44Speaker 02

  At Mercury, there were a ton of these, especially early on, because we were a pretty small company at the time and we didn't have a ton of data to inform what we were doing. But one example of this is the experience that I had when I joined Mercury was the product is the differentiated experience. And so one idea we had was maybe we should build a product demo so people can see our product. But we thought about how to do that in a Mercury way. And we went and looked out at other demos. They either didn't exist or they think about the value for the company. They try to extract an email, they try to walk you through these really annoying steps. You can't actually explore the product. And so what we built was a product demo where we just remove all the friction. You can see the product, you can go to demo dot mercury dot com. And we added a little open account button at the top and we just put it out. We didn't know if it would work, but it was kind of an experiment. Let people see the product, play around with it. And if they want, they can decide to use it.

• 38:29Speaker 02

  The reception has been like wild from that. Over a thousand accounts have signed up. We've had some huge deposits, basically sales sized deposits have come in without talking to anyone. It's become a huge growth lever and it even helps with things like recruiting, because employees see that and they're like, oh, that's a really cool product. I want to go work there. That to me is the classic example of product led growth and doing that explorer versus exploit mindset, was that we just launched something, put it out quickly, tried to see what would happen. And then we've gone back to that for a bunch of wins. And it's turned out to be something that's hugely successful. But at that precipice, it was really just a hypothesis that like, people want to see a product before they sign up for it. Let's do it in the way that we think we should do it. And it turned out to be hugely successful.

• 39:09Harry Stebbings?

  Talk to me about A B testing at WhatsApp. What's the story there? I got told I had to ask this one.

• 39:13Speaker 02

  So one of the craziest fun facts about WhatsApp is that WhatsApp got to a billion and a half. Users without running any A B test. They didn't even have a framework that could run A B test. But when I joined in 2017, we were starting to think about some business features that we were going to add. And in particular, one of the things that the team was most concerned about was the negative impacts of those business features. That if someone starts to get business messages, they might react negatively and turn off the app. But at WhatsApp scale, it's very hard to see that. And because it's a network effects product, that if you do start to see it, it's actually too late. And so one of the things that we decided to do was to build an A B testing system to understand the negative impacts of some of the features we were introducing. We ran that, we built that, worked with some great engineers to build it in a privacy safe way. We built that, we ran the experiments, we found that there were no negative impacts.

• 39:57Speaker 02

  We didn't prove the no hypothesis. And we were able to to launch that product and feel good about what we launched. And that A B testing framework has become infra that is run for a lot of other things in WhatsApp. But it's so interesting to me that so much of WhatsApp had been built without that. And then when it does get introduced, it's more to think about than downsides rather than the upsides of the kind of quick wins that often A B testing is thought about. What about growth in France? What's the story there? For WhatsApp, there are some markets where WhatsApp is not the main messaging app that exists in the market. And it comes down to a lot of competition in the places and France is one of those. And we were looking at the growth of what we could do to grow WhatsApp consumer. We thought about what are the markets in which we can help accelerate towards some true network effect that becomes the main messaging app?

• 40:38Speaker 02

  And so in France, what we did was we basically took that playbook of finding the product, marketing and partnerships that we could build to go accelerate our growth. And we executed that playbook over the course of a year where we worked on things like inviting in the product to make it so that people had the people that they wanted to talk to. We worked on marketing campaigns that WhatsApp had never run to bring in consumers to WhatsApp. And it turns out that people responded really well to that. We found some pretty novel partnerships as well in that space. And through that kind of combination of those three tactics, we were able to accelerate growth in France and see that we were actually increasing our market share of WhatsApp and put that on a trajectory to start to win. And it was one of the best successes we saw in growing the WhatsApp consumer app. And the interesting thing was that it wasn't about trying to grow in India.

• 41:23Speaker 02

  That market is already won, but trying to find the right markets and the right places in that. Playbook of growth is something that you can kind of pull from anywhere.

• 41:30Harry Stebbings?

  Ryan, I want to dive into a quick fire. I've basically just pelted you with questions for most of the show, but I'm going to do a quick fire where it's 60 seconds per one and then we rock and roll through them. How does that sound?

• 41:41Speaker 02

  Sounds great.

• 41:42Harry Stebbings?

  What tactics in growth have not changed over the last five years?

• 41:46Speaker 02

  Building an experience that connects users with key actions that are going to make it so they stick around in your product is something that hasn't changed and is never going to change. It's something that is going to always work. And I think it's going to mean that I always have some sort of job in this space.

• 41:59Harry Stebbings?

  What tactics have died a death on the flip side?

• 42:02Speaker 02

  I think that email and push notifications are something that has been so overused that it actually has led to channel blindness. No one's excited about them. They die a quick death and when someone, you actually annoy someone to the degree that they turn it off, you lose a channel forever. And so I think that the tactics of let's just send another notification on its way out. And hopefully that is the case, but something that I don't think works that well.

• 42:25Harry Stebbings?

  What would you say the biggest mistakes founders make when hiring growth teams?

• 42:29Speaker 02

  I think it's that it's just one thing, that I think a growth team has to be a system and a sustained investment. Just because you try it once, doesn't mean that it's going to work. You have to actually go at it and you have to understand the problems, make incremental progress and see that it's working. And then when it's working, you double down, but you can't just expect someone's going to come and run the best marketing campaign ever in history and that it's just going to take off. It has to be a lot more than that.

• 42:52Harry Stebbings?

  What would you most like to change about the world of growth?

• 42:54Speaker 02

  I think people need to talk to more customers. One of the things that I came up in was that a lot of growth people think about data and they think about the experience without actually putting products in front of people and asking them what the problems they experience are or what they feel about the growth tactic that's being introduced. And so I think talking to customers is something that I would love to see growth, the growth kind of practice spend a lot more time on.

• 43:16Harry Stebbings?

  How do you see the function of growth evolving over time? Does it look different in five or 10 years?

• 43:21Speaker 02

  I think it's about building a better product experience. And I think that it comes back to that fundamental of what is sustainable for a product? And what is native to that product? And I think that that tactic is going to be something that I see continuing to evolve and be important. But I think on the flip side, the thing that I see is Platforms are always getting more expensive. They're always more constrained. And if you particularly look at some of the trends that are happening with moving to richer formats like TikTok, it's just more expensive to create basic content. And so I think that it's always going to be more expensive to run ads. But if you can think about what are the sustainable kind of product experiences, that's really where you'll find a lot of growth value.

• 43:56Harry Stebbings?

  The final one, my friend, when you look at the landscape of great product experiences other than Mercury, what one product experience company growth strategy have you been most impressed by recently?

• 44:06Speaker 02

  One that I really love is Substack. Substack is a product that has built an incredible platform for a very targeted customer subset and provided a ton of value with them. But then as they've gone through the journey of building that initial product that provides value to writers, they've started to add on things that they can uniquely do because they have a network. They've added ways to recommend newsletters between different writers. They've added a mobile app that is quite compelling and has these features. They just launched a new kind of network effects product. And I think to me, the interesting thing about Substack is they're lining their incentives behind their core customer. And when you see that happen, the world is their oyster. And it's something I'm really stoked about and really excited to see how they've taken off.

• 44:46Harry Stebbings?

  Ryan, as I said, I heard so many good things before. I love the blend of WhatsApp growth stories. I love the blend of Mercury Stay. And then also Super Ashwell Advice. Thank you so much for joining me and also for putting up with me, moving slightly off schedule.

• 45:00Speaker 02

  Thanks, Harry. Really appreciate it.

• 45:03Harry Stebbings?

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• 46:32Harry Stebbings?

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