Pod Insights a16z Podcast The Basics of Growth Marketing: User Acquisition About this episode Growth is one of the most top of mind questions for entrepreneurs building startups of all kinds -- but how does one go beyond a mindset of "growth hacking" to thinking about growth more systemically and holistically? a16z general partners Andrew Chen (formerly of Uber and author of the book, The Cold Start Problem) and Jeff Jordan (formerly of OpenTable, eBay) dig into the fundamentals of growth, starting with user acquisition.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Once known as growth hacking, the concept of growth has now evolved into an entire discipline that spans marketing, product management, user experience, and more. Why? After achieving product market fit, startups need to capitalize quickly on that initial traction to capture and retain more users and market share before the competition does, and building an efficient and resilient growth strategy is a critical component. This episode from August 2018 is part one in a two-part series on the basics of growth with two longtime experts, A16Z General Partners Andrew Chen and Jeff Jordan, interviewed by Sonal Chokshi. They focus on the key metrics for growth and the basics of user acquisition, as well
0:42 Speaker 00 as more nuanced topics like balancing paid versus unpaid acquisition channels, the role of network effects, and more. We'll share part two of the series, which dives deeper into engagement and retention, next week.
0:54 Speaker 01 The content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. For more details, please see a16z.com/disclosures.
1:12 Sonal? Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A16Z Podcast. I'm Sonal. Today's episode is all about growth, one of the most top-of-mind questions for entrepreneurs of all kinds of startups, and especially for consumer ones. So, joining us to have this conversation, we have A16Z General Partners Andrew Chen and Jeff Jordan, and we cover everything from the basics of growth and defining key metrics to know, to the nuances of paid versus organic marketing, and the role of network effects, and more. Part one of this conversation focuses specifically on the aspect of user acquisition for growth, and then we cut off and go into the aspects of growth for user engagement and retention in the next episode.
1:53 Sonal? But first, we begin by going beyond the concept of growth hacks, and beginning with the fundamental premise that businesses do not grow themselves. So, the topic we wanted to talk about today is growth, which is a big topic. What would you say are the biggest myths and misconceptions that entrepreneurs have about growth?
2:10 Andrew Chen? You know, not only is there the misconception that it happens magically, then the next layer, I think, is that it's really just like, oh, a series of like tips and tricks and like growth hacks that kind of keep things going as opposed to like a really rigorous understanding of how to think about growth, not just as the top line thing, but actually that there's acquisition, that there's engagement, that there's retention, and each one of those pieces is very different than the other. And you have to like tackle them systematically.
2:38 Jeff Jordan? Done right. It is a scientific discipline because it requires you to understand your business and business dynamics at this incredibly micro level.
2:48 Sonal? I love that you said that because one of the complaints I've heard about growth hacking is that it's just marketing by a different name. And what I'm really hearing you guys say is that there's a systemic point of view, there's rigor to it, there's stages, there's a program you build out.
2:59 Jeff Jordan? If you're fortunate enough to achieve product market fit and your business starts to take off, when in the wonderful situations, you get this hyper growth where, you know, growth year over year, you know, it's triple digits, it's just exploding. And then gradually the law of the large numbers start to kick in and maybe the 100% growth becomes 50% growth the next year. And then the law of large numbers continue to kick in and it's 25% and then it's 12 and a half percent. And so growth tends to decay over time, even in the best businesses. And so the job-
3:30 Sonal? Didn't you used to call it like gravity?
3:32 Jeff Jordan? They called it a gravity. It just would get, it comes down to earth. And then the job of the entrepreneur is to be looking years down the road and say, okay, at some point, growth in business A is going to stop. And so I want to keep it going as long as I can. And there's a whole bunch of taxes to do that. But then the other strategy is, okay, I need new layers on the cake of growth. At eBay, the original business was an auction business in the US. And so, you know, some of the things we layered on early or we layered on fixed price in the US, not revolutionary, but it really did increment growth. Then we went international and then we layered in payment integration. And each time we did that, the total growth of the company would actually accelerate, which is very hard to do at scale.
4:12 Sonal? That's the whole point. Like, there's intentionality to it. It's not an accident.
4:15 Jeff Jordan? It's not an accident.
4:16 Sonal? You guys introduce new businesses, new layers on the cake.
4:17 Jeff Jordan? Businesses don't grow themselves. The entrepreneur has to grow them. And, you know, occasionally you stumble into a business that seems to almost grow itself. But there just aren't many of those in the world, and that growth almost never persists for long periods of time, unless the entrepreneur can figure out how to continue to drive.
4:35 Sonal? I remember a post you wrote, actually a few years ago, on the oh shit moment when growth stops. Because people are a little blindsided by it.
4:41 Jeff Jordan? And that's the flip side of it. You know, early on, you get this great growth, you had to keep it going. When it stops, your strategic options have been constrained dramatically.
4:49 Andrew Chen? A lot of times when you're looking at what seemingly is an exponential growth curve, in fact, it's really something like, oh, you're opening in a bunch of new markets, right? So there's sort of a linear line there, but then you're also introducing products at the same time. And you're also reducing friction in, you know, signups or retention or whatever. And so the whole combination of those things is really kind of like a whole series of accelerating pieces that looks like it's, you know, this amazing viral growth curve, but it's actually like so much work underneath.
5:19 Sonal? Right.
5:19 Andrew Chen? You know, that makes that happen.
5:20 Sonal? I've also heard you talk about being able to distinguish what is specifically driving that growth. So you don't have this exponential looking curve without knowing what the lever that you're pulling to make that happen, or knowing what's happening, even if it's kind of happening naturally or organically. Can we break down some of the key metrics that are often used in these discussions, including just what the definitions are, and then maybe just talk through how to think about them?
5:41 Andrew Chen? Right. Yeah. When you look at a large aggregate number like total monthly active users, right? Or you're looking at like-
5:47 Sonal? MAUs?
5:47 Andrew Chen? Yeah, MAUs, right? Or you're looking at, you know, the GMV, like adding up all the transactions in your marketplace, right?
5:54 Sonal? So gross merchandise value?
5:55 Andrew Chen? Yep. And so when you look at something like that, and if it's going up or down, you kind of don't have the levers at that level to really understand what's really going on. You want to go a couple of levels even deeper. How many new customers are you adding? As you're growing more and more new customers, right, a bunch of things happen. If you're using paid advertising channels, things tend to get more expensive over time because, you know, your initial kind of like super, super excited core demographic of- Customers, they're going to convert the best. And as you start reaching into, you know, different geographies, different kinds of demos, all of a sudden, they're not going to convert as well, right?
6:30 Sonal? Just to pause on that for a quick moment, you're basically arguing that growth itself halts growth in that context.
6:36 Andrew Chen? Right, so the law of large numbers being that there's only a fixed number of humans on the planet. There's only a fixed number of people that are in your core demographic, right? Once you surpass a certain point, it's not like it falls off a cliff. It's just more gradual that the customer behavior really changes.
6:50 Sonal? How do you determine what's what when you don't have product market fit? Sometimes, aren't these metrics ways to figure that out? Or is this all when you have product market fit? Like, is there a pre and a post difference between this?
7:02 Andrew Chen? Very concretely, like, you want to understand how much of the acquisition is coming from, you know, purely organic, people discovering it, people talking to each other as opposed to, you know, oftentimes, you'll run into companies that have over 50% of their acquisition coming from paid marketing. And like, that tells you something that you're, you know, needing to spend that much money to get people in the door.
7:21 Sonal? So CAC, customer acquisition cost, that's what you're talking about when you talk about acquisition.
7:24 Jeff Jordan? CAC is what it costs to acquire a user. Blended CAC is what it costs to acquire a user on a paid basis, plus then also what quote unquote free users you acquired. So if you're acquiring half your users through paid marketing, you're paying $100 to acquire a user, but half your users come in at zero, paid CAC's 100, blended CAC's 50. I view blended CAC as a really dangerous number. Most of the best businesses in the internet age of technology haven't spent a ton on paid acquisition. And so one is, you know, you've got the first cut with this, okay, the truly magical businesses, you know, a lot of them aren't buying tons of users. Amazon's key marketing right now is free shipping. And then the economics of paid acquisition tended to grade over time,
8:09 Jeff Jordan? you know, as it grows and you try to scale it. And, you know, largely, you're cherry picking the best users. And then you're trying to also scale the number you get to grow. You know, I need twice as many new users this year as last year. And you typically pay more. So that magical LTV to CAC ratio, which early on says, oh, we're three to one. You know, in two years, it'll probably be one and a half to one if you're lucky or something like that. So we typically do try to look for these other sources of acquisition, be it viral, be it some other form of non-paid.
8:41 Sonal? When I quickly define LTV, it's lifetime value of the customer. But what does that mean?
8:46 Jeff Jordan? When you're shown an LTV to CAC ratio, you have no idea what you're seeing essentially, given all the potential variations of the number. So we will almost always go for clarity. LTV, lifetime value, should be the profits, the contribution from that user after all direct costs.
9:03 Sonal? How do we define the LTV to CAC ratio? What do the two of them in conjunction mean?
9:07 Jeff Jordan? Let's break them down. LTV is lifetime value. What you're striving to there is the incremental profit contribution for a user over the projected life of that user. So not revenue per CAC because typically there's costs associated to user. What's the incremental contribution that user brought from?
9:25 Sonal? And that you mean the user brought to your company?
9:27 Jeff Jordan? To the company, yes.
9:28 Sonal? So it's a value of your customer to the bottom line?
9:31 Jeff Jordan? It's the value of each customer to the bottom line. And then you compare that to the CAC or cost of acquired customer to understand the leverage you have between what I need to spend to acquire a customer and how much they're worth. If your CAC is higher than your LTV, you're sunk because it's costing you more to acquire a user.
9:48 Sonal? Oh, then the value you get out of it.
9:49 Jeff Jordan? Than you get out of the user.
9:50 Sonal? Yeah.
9:51 Jeff Jordan? If it's the opposite, at least you're in the game. I get more profit out of the user than I get the cost to acquire that user. And then there's these dynamics on how does it scale over time? CAC tends to go up. LTV tends to go down because on the CAC side, you're acquiring the less interested users over time. So they cost more to acquire and they're worth less. And so that LTV to CAC ratio, in our experience, almost always degrades over time with scale. And so when you're in that conversation, you're in a very specific conversation of, okay, how much room do you have? How is it going to scale? What's going to impact your CAC, like competitive thing? So there has to be a lot.
10:34 Jeff Jordan? It has to be like 10 to kind of get you over that concern that, oh, my goodness, those two are so close that you have no margin for error.
10:41 Sonal? Right. This also goes back to the big picture of the layers on the cake. Because if you have other layers, you don't have to only worry about one layer's CAC to LTV ratio.
10:49 Jeff Jordan? It really does affect the calculation. If it's, I'm in a new business and I have a whole different CAC versus LTV ratio, then that's a different conversation as well.
10:58 Sonal? And the big picture there is that. If you don't know the difference of what's doing what, when, you might get very mistaken signals, mixed signals about your business. And so you guys don't want blended CAC because you want to know what's driving the growth.
11:09 Andrew Chen? I think what blended CAC gives you is it gives you a sense for at this particular moment in time, you know, what's happening. The challenge is that when it comes to paid marketing in particular, it's easy to just add way more budget and to scale that than it is to scale organic or to sell SEO. Blended CAC is giving you a snapshot, but then as you're trying to scale the business, you're trying to increase everything by a hundred percent over the next. You're trying to double everything. Then all of a sudden, you know, your blended CAC starts to approach whatever your dominant channel actually looks like. And so if you're spending a bunch of money, then it'll just approach whatever is your, you know, paid marketing CAC. What entrepreneurs should think about is what is the unique, organic, new thing that's going to get it in front of people without spending a bunch of money, right?
11:54 Jeff Jordan? A lot of the best businesses have this very interesting, I'll call it a growth hack. I mean, OpenTable, when I was managing it, did not pay any money at all to acquire consumers. You're like, how can you do that? You know, we had millions of consumers. The restaurants would market OpenTable on our behalf. You go to the Slanted Door website, back when they were an OpenTable customer, and you'd see, you know, you're looking, you go there to try to get the phone number to make a reservation. You say, oh, make an online reservation. And we then got paid to acquire that user. But that hack was a wonderful thing that scaled with the business and got us tons of free users.
12:29 Sonal? To be fair, and this is another definition we should tease apart really quickly before we move on to more metrics, that also had the quality of network effects, which we've talked a lot about in terms of these things growing more valuable the more people that use it. Is that growth? What's the difference there?
12:43 Jeff Jordan? Well, the business grew into the network effect. The key tactic to build the network effect was that free acquisition of consumers, that the more restaurants we had, the more attractive it was to consumers. The more consumers who came, the more attractive it was to restaurants. So there is a wicked network effect that came up.
13:01 Sonal? Like a flywheel effect, right?
13:02 Jeff Jordan? If you're not spending anything on paid acquisition of consumers, how do you start it? And the placements that OpenTable got in the restaurant, both physically The restaurant, but particularly on the restaurant's website was the key engine that got the network effect started. You had to manually sell some restaurants, come for the tools, stay for the network. But then, once the consumers got enough of a selection and started to use it, it was game over.
13:25 Sonal? Right. That was one way of going around the bootstrapping or the chicken egg problem and seeding a network.
13:29 Andrew Chen? Network effects have, there's a lot of really positive things about them. And one of the big pieces is that virality is a form of something that you get with a network. You know, the larger your network is, the more surface area, the more opportunities you have in order to encounter it, right? And so, you know, in the case of, you know, Uber, where I was recently, you know, by seeing all the cars with, you know, the Uber logo, those are all opportunities to be like, oh, what is this app? I should try it out. And so it's mutually reinforcing, then you get more riders and then you get more drivers that are into it. And so, you know, I think all of that kind of plays together.
14:02 Jeff Jordan? I'd bring two examples up. The Pink Lift mustache, when they first got to San Francisco, you could see it once in a car and you'd go, huh, that's pretty weird. You see it twice in the car and you say, something's going on here that I don't know about and I have to understand what it is. Lime, it's the same kind of thing.
14:18 Sonal? Right.
14:18 Jeff Jordan? They're bright green and they glow essentially. So when someone sees one in the wild, someone bolts by them in a glowing green electric scooter and you're just like, okay, what is that? And Lime hasn't spent a penny on consumer acquisition.
14:33 Sonal? Right.
14:33 Jeff Jordan? Because, you know, their, their model is such that that physical queue in the real world leads to it.
14:39 Andrew Chen? The other one I'll throw in as well is within workplaces, you know, enterprise products, there's a lot of kind of bottoms up virality that comes out of people, you know, kind of sharing and collaborating. Yeah, like for example, Slack is a great, you know, example of this. And so these are all kind of really unique ways that you can get acquisition for free. And so then your CAC is, you know, quote unquote, zero as a result.
14:59 Sonal? You guys have talked a lot about organic. It makes it sound to me as a layperson that you don't want paid marketing. What's your views on this? Like, is it a bad thing? Is it a good thing? I don't mean to moralize it, but help me unpack more where it's helpful and where it's not. Are there any rules of thumb to use there?
15:15 Jeff Jordan? I mean, there have been a lot of great businesses that have leveraged paid marketing. I mean, the OTA sites, online travel agency, Priceline and Expedia just spends, you know, they spend the GDP of many large countries in the acquisition. And then it's often a tactic in some good businesses. But if it's your primary engine, a couple of things happen. One is the acquisition economics tended to degrade over time for the reason we're saying.
15:38 Sonal? This is your guys' point about, right?
15:38 Jeff Jordan? And it leaves you wide open to competition. If you need to buy users, I mean, if you're selling, you know, the new breed of mattress and you need to buy users and early on, you're the only person competing for that word. Flash forward a year or two, there are like six new age mattress manufacturers with virtually identical products competing for the same consumer. The economics are not going to persist over time. And so, you know, one of the key questions in businesses driven by heavy user acquisition is kind of how does the play end? You know, it usually looks pretty good at the beginning of the play, but in the middle, it starts getting a little complex and then there's tragedies at the end.
16:15 Andrew Chen? And I think if it is something that you're using in conjunction with a bunch of other channels and you're kind of accelerating things, that can be great. For example, when Facebook in the past has broken into new markets, they'll start with paid, you know, marketing to kind of get it going. And so in a case like that, really paid marketing is a tactic to kind of get a network effect jump started.
16:34 Sonal? Gotcha.
16:34 Andrew Chen? Right? And then you can kind of like pull off from that if you'd like. But if you're super, super dependent on it and you don't have a plan for a world that all the channels are going to degrade, then you're going to be in a tough spot within a couple of years.
16:46 Sonal? Do you have a sort of heuristic for when to stop the paid? Is there like a tipping point to know this is when you move?
16:51 Andrew Chen? I think in terms of how much paid you do as part of your portfolio, I think that's the right way to think of it is it's one out of a bunch of different channels. Right? And so I would argue the following. So first is you really have to measure the CAC and LTV and be super disciplined about not spending ahead of where you want it to be and not to do it on some, you know, blended number that doesn't make any sense.
17:11 Sonal? Right.
17:12 Andrew Chen? The other part is you really want it to be a small enough minority of your channels such that if you were to get to a point where it turns out to be capped, that you're okay, that you can live with that.
17:21 Sonal? Your business will survive and continue to grow.
17:23 Andrew Chen? Exactly. You can still get the growth rates you want and you can still, you have such strong product market fit that you're able to maintain that.
17:28 Jeff Jordan? Take a couple of sector examples. You know, e-commerce, a lot of companies struggle with, okay, how do I get organic e-commerce traffic? So most e-commerce companies rely heavily on paid user acquisition. You know, typically, one of the interesting things is they degrade over time and they're all competing for the same user. It's hard for e-commerce companies in most segments to be profitable. And you'd look at the same kind of dynamic in meal kits, in, you know, restaurant delivery. If you can't differentiate yourself and you're highly reliant on paid marketing, the movie typically doesn't end really great. And so we look for segments where there's a balance, or they've come up with that really unique growth hack and they're not then reliant on paid channels. And then, by the way, paid channels can degrade too. I
18:12 Jeff Jordan? mean, when I made a couple of investment mistakes where the paid acquisition looked really good, and then actually what they were doing were they're arbitraging something like Facebook's early mobile attempts, where the people who participate in Facebook mobile ads early got real deals. They were nowhere near kind of the price they should have been trading at. So you're like, man, look at these user economics are awesome. And then Facebook, you know, kind of got to equilibrium when supply and demand met and the cost went up multiples. And those businesses that looked so good early just, you know, got incredibly stressed because the, you know, they had no alternative to that inflation.
18:49 Sonal? That's a case of platform risk where you're dependent on the channel of on Facebook mobile or whatever the specific channel was there. But Andrew, you were also earlier talking about just a cap on how much is possible. You both referenced the fact that things can become very competitive, that your competitors can also buy the same. Channels and then it gets very crowded or very expensive. So there's multiple layers of the risk of the paid is what I'm hearing, but you have to be aware of that.
19:12 Andrew Chen? Yeah. So I think on the acquisition side today, there's a couple of really interesting opportunities that might be, you know, temporal, right? And it may go away, right? But for example, I think that if you have a product that is very highly visual, and I think this is, you know, one of the reasons why esports has gotten, you know, so huge is because you have a product that naturally generates a ton of video in an age which all the platforms are trying to rush to video, right?
19:38 Sonal? Yeah.
19:38 Andrew Chen? And so, you know, maybe this will be less of an opportunity coming up, but like, you know, that's.
19:41 Sonal? Why would you say that's temporal? Because.
19:43 Andrew Chen? Because the competition will.
19:45 Sonal? Do the same thing.
19:45 Andrew Chen? Yeah, we'll do the same thing, right? Like, I think we're now going to move to a thing where like all of these different kind of software experiences all are incredibly shareable. Like, there's no point these days in building a new game that doesn't have built in recording and publishing to Twitch and built in tournament systems and all the community features and all that stuff that you need. And, you know, I think it used to be that you would think of a game as just the actual IP, but in fact, it's sort of these layers and layers of social interaction and content around it. And I think that's both true as well as all of these different brick and mortar experiences that are making themselves highly Instagrammable, that are adding areas where you actually stand there and pose.
20:24 Sonal? Oh, my God. My favorite story about this is the restaurant's trend of making square plates and layouts. So it really fit beautifully with Instagram. That's one of my favorite things in the world is when the physical world adapts to the digital.
20:35 Andrew Chen? And then you can go the other way too, right? Which is physical products like scooters that remind you to engage digitally. The other, you know, what fun example I always like is everyone's had the experience now where they're just like in a room talking and then their, you know, Amazon Echo just turns on and is trying to go. And I'm like, you know, they have no incentive to fix that.
20:53 Sonal? Yeah.
20:54 Andrew Chen? Because like it reminds you that it's there and reminds you to talk to it. I think the big takeaway here is that you have to really be creative and really be on the edge of what everyone's doing, right? And so if it turns out that everyone's really into video and they're really into Instagram right now, you have to think about like, how does my product actually fit into that trend?
21:14 Sonal? Yeah.
21:14 Andrew Chen? And if you can find it, then. Then you can get an amazing killer way to get jump started. And if the trend lasts, then great. Accelerate it with paid marketing. Accelerate it with PR. Do all that stuff to kind of keep it going. I wanted to make the distinction that we're mostly talking about growth and acquisition.
21:28 Sonal? Yes.
21:28 Andrew Chen? And that is what startups mostly care about in the early days. Because you don't, you don't really have any active users, right? But the other part of this is that you see all the users who show up and how active they are starts to change over time.
21:41 Sonal? Well, thank you guys for joining the A6NC podcast.
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