20 Growth: Viral Loops; How To Create and Sustain Them, Why Interviews for Product and Growth Hires are BS and What To Do Instead, Mastering the Onboarding Process; Structuring the First 90 Days with Adam Fishman, Former Head of Growth @ Lyft

Adam Fishman is one of the leading growth practitioners of the last decade. Most recently, Adam was the Chief Product and Growth Offer at Imperfect Foods, where Adam built a 40-person product and growth organization, responsible for 70% of overall company metrics and growing revenue by 400% in one year to $600M annually. Before Imperfect, Adam spent 4 years as VP of Product and Growth @ Patreon, driving the company pivot and rebrand and helping the company scale to $1BN GMV and $100M in revenue. Finally, before Patreon, Adam was the Head of Growth @ Lyft, Adam was the first growth and marketing employee hired, grew the team to 18 people, and reported directly to the founders. In Today's Episode with Adam You Will Learn: 1.) Entry into Growth: How Adam first made his way into the world of growth when "growth" did not exist as a function? What were Adam's biggest lessons from leading Lyft's growth team? How did that impact his mindset? What are some of Adam's biggest takeaways from his time at Patreon? What are some of the biggest mistakes he made at Patreon? 2.) The Basics: Growth 101: What and When: How does Adam define "growth" today? What is it? What is it not? When is the right time to hire your first growth hires? Should this first hire be a seasoned growth leader or a more junior growth rep? What characteristics and skill sets should this growth hire have? 3.) The Hiring Process: How should founders structure the hiring process for their first growth hire? What 3 questions should all founders ask in the hiring process for growth? How can founders use data and case studies to really test the skillsets of growth candidates? Why does Adam believe that the hiring process for growth and product is so broken? 4.) The Onboarding Process: What is the right way to structure the onboarding process for new growth hires? How should growth hires create cross-functional relationships and communication with the rest of the team? What has worked for Adam in the past? What has not? What are the signs that are new growth hire is not working? How long should they be given? What are the signs that are a new growth hire is working? What is the sign of "exceptional"? 5.) Adam Fishman: AMA: What growth decision has Adam made without data? How did it go? How does Adam define "viral loops"? What makes one better than another? Where do so many make mistakes with viral loops? Adam led the rebrand for Patreon, what is the secret to a successful rebrand? What are some of the most common pitfalls to avoid? Items Mentioned in Today's Episode with Adam Fishman Adam's Favourite Book: First 90 Days, Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels

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

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  Welcome back to 20 Growth with me, Harry Stebbings. This is the show that asks who on earth knows when and how to hire your first growth team members? And we bring in the world's most prominent growth leaders to share their thoughts, advice and tips on doing exactly this. Today, I'm so excited to be joined by Adam Fishman. Now, Adam is one of the leading growth practitioners of the last decade. Most recently, Adam was the Chief Product Officer and Growth Officer at Imperfect Foods. There, Adam built a 40-person product and growth org responsible for 70% of overall company metrics and growing revenue 400% in one year to 600 million annually. Before Imperfect, Adam spent four years as VP of Product and Growth at Patreon,

• 0:40Harry Stebbings?

  driving the company pivot and rebrand and helping the company scale to a billion in GMV and 100 million in revenue. Finally, before Patreon, Adam was the Head of Growth at Lyft. And Adam was also the first growth and marketing employee at Lyft, growing the team to 18 people, reporting directly to the founders. But before we dive into the show today, if you've been listening to 20 VC, you've probably heard of Brex, the first corporate card for startups with no personal guarantee or credit check, up to 20 times higher credit limits than traditional cards, plus rewards like 3x on eligible Apple products and 7x points on tools like Zoom and Slack. Brex has helped thousands of companies scale faster to reach their full potential. This month, they're extending their special offer to our listeners.

• 1:23Harry Stebbings?

  Apply for the Brex card with the code 20VC, that's 20VC all spelled out, to receive a $500 credit after spending $1,000. Even better, you can also apply for Brex Cash, a bank account alternative with unlimited free wire and ACH transfers with no balance required to create an account. You can apply for an account today at brex.com. Now, second, very few products change the way that one lives. I got a Whoop this year alongside my girlfriend. She gets rather competitive on the data, but we'll leave that for another day and to save my sanity and the relationship. Um, but the Whoop has changed how I think about two things, recovery and actually body temperature monitoring. I'll go into them. First, I never used to do a rest day in the gym,

• 2:06Harry Stebbings?

  but Whoop's recovery score has changed the way I think about rest, using it to

• 2:10Harry Stebbings?

  How are my active days? Not seeing it as a weakness. The recovery school is such a good motivator for this. And then second, I know when I'm getting ill or potentially about to ahead of time. My body temperature spikes and I know to take it easy, stay in, look after myself. You have to invest in yourself if you want to perform in business or sport at the highest level. Whoop is a game changer. Go to whoop.com and use the code VC at checkout to save 15% and get free shipping today. But that is enough for me. So now I'm so excited, Tando, it's the one and only Adam Fishman.

• 2:48Speaker 02

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 2:51Harry Stebbings?

  Adam, I heard so many good things from Mike before the show, so thank you so much for joining me today.

• 2:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, thanks for having me here. Yeah, all those bribes to Mike have definitely paid off. I hope I live up to all the hype and I'm glad to be here.

• 3:02Harry Stebbings?

  You were bribing him. I was bribing him too. Mike, what is going on?

• 3:07Speaker 03

  He's double dipping.

• 3:08Harry Stebbings?

  What is Greylock's salary clearly isn't enough for Mike these days. VC life has taken him, huh?

• 3:16Harry Stebbings?

  Poor Mike, he does the intro and he's been so kind and we rip him in the first minute.

• 3:20Speaker 03

  Throw him under the bus right away. Yeah.

• 3:22Harry Stebbings?

  But I do want to start, when we look today at some of the growth, obviously been a part of Patreon, Lyft. I'd love to hear, what was that entry into growth for you?

• 3:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I started my career as what I would call like a quantitative marketer. I tried to be an engineer in school, but I kind of gravitated towards business and consumer psychology instead. And then I was kind of in the right place at the right time, early in my career. And I caught this wave of web analytics and experimentation, pre-Google Analytics, way back in the day, when Offermatico was the only testing tool out there, well before like Optimizely and all these other things. And so I got like really deep into marketing channel and conversion optimization. I basically lived in Excel. I started writing front end code as a hobby when I got bored. My career kind of went through this series of step function changes and responsibility and scope.

• 4:13Speaker 03

  And I had a couple of really big jumps. So the first one was when I left the kind of cushy public company world and I joined a company called Zimride as their head of growth and we pivoted Zimride to Lyft in about four or five months after I joined. And Lyft was like getting a graduate degree in company building. I learned a ton about how to scale a business, like every corner of the product, like no job responsibility was off limits. And it was really like a catalyst for my career growth. And so now I would consider myself more of like a product led growth practitioner. But I've really done everything from like marketing, even like sales and ops and customer success. Like I've led all of that stuff, but now I really focus most of my time and energy on the product experience. And that's what I did at Patreon, et cetera. Yeah.

• 4:55Harry Stebbings?

  Before we kind of discuss the meat of the show, I do want to dive into those two experiences with Lyft and with Patreon. You know, such incredible companies and hyper growth. If you were to isolate one or two key takeaways for you from your time at each, what would they be, do you think?

• 5:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a great question. I think from Lyft, it's probably the impact of speed on decision making and a healthy relationship with failure. Like I think a growth person has to be almost immune to failure because you get so many things wrong in your career. But at Lyft, we moved so incredibly fast. When you move at that pace, there's very few mistakes that are actually permanent, can almost change anything, right? And reverse decisions and it really sort of changed my tolerance for making bets and assessing risk. That's been like the bar that I've held up at every other company that I go to is how fast we can move. So that's Lyft. Patreon, I think it would really be like respect and reverence for our customer. One of the things that growth people can get a bad rap for is just sort of being like bull in a china shop, sort of like growth at all costs, right?

• 5:53Speaker 03

  But there were more than a few times at Patreon where we did something that seemed like it was in the best interest of our customers. And we were really wrong and boy, did we hear about it when that happened. When you work with creators, they have the biggest and loudest megaphones on the internet. And you really learn to respect their input into the product building process and decision making. So definitely something I picked up at Patreon in my time there.

• 6:15Harry Stebbings?

  So normally I have like a structured process with shows and structure, as you saw with the schedule. But I do want to touch on, on two things before actually, because they're very relevant to what you just said. You said kind of about the immunity to failure. I agree, as long as there's lessons that can be learnt from the failure. And with speed, sometimes there's not the lessons and it's just you kind of fail the same thing. So how do you think about learning from failure in growth? Is that postmortems? Is that reviews? What is that?

• 6:40Speaker 03

  I think like really, we do a lot of experimentation in growth and that might be prototyping. That might be quantitative experimentation and you're going to be wrong probably more often than you're right. Especially as you do more and more things, it gets harder to be right over the long term. Like a failed experiment is fine as long as you take something away from that. You learn something new about your customer, you learn something new about your growth model or your business. That's sort of super important to me. And so, yeah, I've done it through postmortems. I document experiments really, really well. Make sure that I share that stuff really broadly with the company because everyone can benefit from that stuff that we're learning. And yeah, you just have to develop a thick skin because growth is about taking a lot of structured shots on goal.

• 7:23Speaker 03

  Not just like firing the spaghetti cannon at the wall, but with that structure, you're still going to be wrong a good, healthy percentage of the time.

• 7:30Harry Stebbings?

  Second element there, which is you mentioned kind of Patreon and sometimes getting it wrong and customers being upset. How do you figure out whether to use data or whether to use intuition when making growth decisions? Intuition could say, no, I know they will love this. The data might show actually they prefer something else. How do you think about data versus gut?

• 7:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that's a really great question. I almost never rely on gut. But I also think it's a kind of a failure to over-rotate on just quantitative data. So the mistakes that we made at Patreon, we're typically just looking at numbers and thinking, oh, these numbers say that if we do this, it's in the best interest of creators, it's going to work great, like we know what our bounding box is and our error potential. And then, oh, by the way, we forgot to ask a single creator of how they would feel about this change. When you do that, you learn that just because the data says something, doesn't mean that everyone's going to be excited about that. And even could be the majority of people are not excited about that. So I always want to blend quantitative assessments with qualitative discussions with customers, prototyping, like things like that.

• 8:34Speaker 03

  You can't just do one of those things and expect a fantastic outcome.

• 8:38Harry Stebbings?

  It's kind of all tying in, so I'm going to weave it back to the schedule because otherwise I'll just completely like go off tangent, which is

• 8:45Speaker 03

  That's fine.

• 8:46Harry Stebbings?

  Obviously it's 20 growth and growth is misused, thrown around too much. How do you define growth and head of growth today? What's that to you?

• 8:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think you nailed it there. If you ask 10 people about growth, you'd probably get 10 different answers and on this particular question. So I define growth as the function or functions that understand how a company grows, what levers they have to accelerate that speed and scale, and then can take a measured and tactical approach to testing out those levers, which helps them separate fact from fiction. Overall job of a growth function or a growth org is to connect more people to the value that the company is already creating. Get more people to attach, get more people to come back. So that's typically around acquisition, finding new customers, retention, which is like activating and keeping those customers, and monetization, which is turning those customers into money.

• 9:37Speaker 03

  You're not like inventing things from whole cloth when you're doing growth. You're taking stuff that's already there and you're getting more people to touch it, to experience it, to build habits around it, et cetera. When you talk about like growth leaders, right, like the VP or the head of growth, that's the person who steers the ship. So depending on the stage of the company and the title inflation of the role, this could be a solo practitioner, a manager of managers. Personally, I don't think you should be a head of growth as a solo practitioner. Yes, you're the head of growth, but like you're a one-person show, right? So I tend to think of the role more in the ladder camp, which is like a manager of managers or a leader of a small team. And you're responsible for kind of driving the strategy of your group forward.

• 10:18Harry Stebbings?

  The question is, do you hire a tenured head of growth who can then build out their own team first? Or do you hire younger growth reps, growth engineers, growth product people? What's the right decision?

• 10:30Speaker 03

  It depends on a few factors. So the first thing I'd say is, do you have a growth model as a company? Has leadership team as the founder, CEO done the work of understanding? How does this business grow? What do our loops look like? What brings new people to the product? What keeps them around? What monetizes them? So that's like the starting point. Secondly, you have to Ask yourself, based on this model, do we know what org functions and skills are necessary to iterate on this model? And to test out our hypotheses. And then finally, my next question is sort of how involved does the founder want to be? In running the team. Ideally, they want to stay very close, but sometimes they really don't. They want to be very hands off. If those three things are true, then I recommend hiring someone around like the director level or a touch below that.

• 11:14Speaker 03

  Someone who wants to be a player coach, you can build processes for testing and iterating on the model. They can create a baseline of data if it doesn't exist. They're really good at communicating. So they can share knowledge across the org and kind of start to build out that team. There's really is like a sweet spot here. Two junior and you just have a bunch of order takers that can't prioritize their way out of a wet paper bag. And figure out what they should be doing, or they've maybe only seen it done one way before. They just sort of like want to rubber stamp it and say, well, this worked here. So therefore it must work here. Two senior and then you don't have a doer. You have somebody who's like, well, I'm here. My first job is to hire 10 people. And that's not very helpful either, because growth is about making progress.

• 11:54Speaker 03

  You need to be making that tangible progress. So you've got to kind of find someone in that sweet spot, mid level, maybe punching above their weight a little bit.

• 12:01Harry Stebbings?

  When we think about that positioning within the org, we hear the hailed Facebook growth teams, which are obviously standalone and born in heaven. And then there's other companies which integrate them very much into product or marketing or different functional areas. How do you think about the question of whether growth teams should be standalone or baked into existing functions?

• 12:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a great question. I think people have been really hard pressed to try to replicate the Facebook model to a T. Even people who come from Facebook sometimes struggle with that. It's never is clear cut. I think where people sit also depends on the growth model and how you grow. If you have an acquisition problem, a retention problem, a monetization problem, that can really tell you like where and how to focus. And then what your product does and what market you're in can really dictate the channels that are available to you for growth. For example, if your product should really be growing like virally, the invitation, referral, collaboration, things like that. Then you probably want to start with growth. Part of the product work, right? You want to have a product manager that oversees growth.

• 13:02Speaker 03

  If you've got fantastic retention, if you don't grow that way, maybe your best channels are in paid acquisition for growth, then you might prioritize growth in the marketing org and you might try to find like a growth marketing hire or something like that. So it really like comes down to you put someone is dependent on how you should be growing. One thing I'll add to this, though, is org design is rarely static. As a leader, you've got to make sure that you communicate that because the only constant in a startup is change, which includes org structure, right? Like I was at Patreon for over four years. I was at Lyft for three years. We change things a lot, what you did, who you worked for, who you reported to. Most of the standalone growth teams that I've seen eventually get folded into one of the other orgs,

• 13:47Speaker 03

  product, marketing, something like that. But I've also seen teams break out standalone growth teams in order to drive more focus for a period of time, especially if it requires like a few different functional roles in the company where you're introducing a new loop. There are pros and cons to each structure. There's no perfect answer. Sometimes you get focus, accountability, good decision making, but then you might also be seen as the cowboys of the org. Depending on the egos of the leaders in charge, that could be a problem if you're not part of their group. The flip side is like in an embedded org, you don't have the organizational tension, but sometimes you have worse focus. So like the number of times where I've heard companies tell me things like, yeah, we're going to get to that. Our growth team is going to get to that right after we work on this core product issue or set up this marketing campaign.

• 14:32Speaker 03

  That's not focused, right? That's not a good growth team.

• 14:34Harry Stebbings?

  You mentioned the word loop there. When we spoke before, you said about building growth models around growth loops. Naturally, as any egotist insecure VC, I pretended that I knew what you meant and didn't question you. What did you mean by building growth models around growth loops? And how do you advise founders on it?

• 14:52Speaker 03

  Ah, I love the humility of this conversation here. This is great. Just don't tell the other VCs, right? So the growth model is like one of my all time favorite tools. It's probably the most important thing and foundation to alignment, communication, prioritization.

• 15:08Speaker 03

  Structure like all the stuff that we just talked about depends on the growth model. And this is what I I teach this at Reforge, where I've been for the last 12 months as an EIR. It's one of the first things I do with advisory clients. Like I've done this now dozens of times with companies. I start with a growth loop and a loop is to like break it down to its simplest thing. A loop is a self-contained cycle where the inputs into the loop become the outputs. So they generate something and then that feeds back into the top. So I'll give you like a perfect example of this. At Lyft, we had a very strong, what I would call clinically a financially incentivized viral loop. So this is your classic like give get referral structure. I invite you to Lyft and you sign up and you get ride credit.

• 15:54Speaker 03

  And then, once you take a ride, I get ride credit as the inviter. So that invited person then goes on to repeat that invitation for other people. So they become the output of that person joining becomes the next input into the system. That's a really simple loop. So a product experience is comprised of a bunch of these things. And you can build them over time and add them on and they compound. So they can work on not only acquiring users, but retaining, engaging, helping people form habits, reminding them about the product's value. And so the growth model is when you build this out end to end visually, that's qualitative growth model. And then when you apply numbers to this to understand the different steps in your loops and the rate of change between the steps. That's a quantitative growth model.

• 16:37Speaker 03

  But even just like mapping out your loops and creating a simple visual of how you grow and the steps between them is an excellent starting point. It points you at like, where are your levers for growth? What should we be leaning into?

• 16:50Harry Stebbings?

  When you map it out, should there be very few steps? Is it the fewer, the better from input to output?

• 16:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think the advice that I give to people is don't overcomplicate it. Try to create as simple of a structure as possible. A typical loop will have maybe between like three and six steps, depending on the speed of that loop and the complexity of the product. Don't build out a loop that has like 47 steps in it because that's not going to help you with prioritization, right? Look at that and go, well, we're no better off than we were before. It's like too granular. To come back to our Lyft example, in that financial viral loop, it's very simple, right? Person signs up, person takes a ride, person invites someone, that person signs up, that person takes a ride. The cycle repeats itself. Within that loop, you've got a bunch of levers for optimization. You have the incentive structure, you have the conversion rate from sign up to taking a ride.

• 17:41Speaker 03

  You have the rate of which people invite other people. You have the number of invitations sent. Each one of those things is like a concrete lever that can be worked on and improved upon to make that loop spin faster and grow bigger.

• 17:52Harry Stebbings?

  I guess at some point, the loops plateau one. And then two, should teams have multiple loops concurrently running to ensure efficient growth?

• 18:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, there are definitely plateaus to loops. In Reforg, we call that sort of hitting max scope or hitting your horizon. Some loops plateau much earlier than others, depending on how much work it takes to keep the loop spinning. So things that are generated by users typically have a much higher ceiling because every new user can generate and participate in that loop. Things that are generated by the company or paid advertising or things like that tend to have lower scopes because there's a limit. You hit that limit much faster and there's much harder like efficiency targets to get over. In terms of like how to have multiple loops, I typically recommend that companies start with one core loop or maybe two core loops that they can really work on for a while.

• 18:43Speaker 03

  But you have to be able to project that out and see when you're going to start to run out of steam. And then try to sequence into new loops or expand the eligible population that can go into your loop. There's a whole bunch of different strategies to pushing past that scope limiter, which we won't go into excruciating detail on this podcast on.

• 19:01Harry Stebbings?

  How do companies that you've advised most go wrong in trying to create loops?

• 19:07Speaker 03

  The first thing I would say is they try to think that everything is a loop. It's really only a loop if it is a closed circuit that feeds back into itself. So a lot of people will be like, well, what about business development and partnership? Like that's a loop. We get this partner and that feeds in here and then we get another partner. A lot of times I say, well, okay, in theory, yes, but that's a very slow process. How long? Long is a single cycle of that? And how much work do you have to put in to maintain that? Does getting a new partner close the next partner? Probably not. You still have to put a lot of energy in from like your business development or your M and A or whatever. Stuff like that is where companies get really hung up. That's one. The second place is trying to have too many loops and focusing on too many things.

• 19:49Speaker 03

  It's better to narrow and focus on a core set of things at the beginning and really extract as much value out of those before getting distracted and moving on to the next thing. And so like focus and thinking that everything is a loop are kind of two big, big problems that I see with a lot of, a lot of the companies that I work with.

• 20:07Harry Stebbings?

  Can you tell me about a loop that you've tried personally that went wrong and what you learned from it?

• 20:13Speaker 03

  Oh, boy. Yes, right. I talked at the beginning about failing a lot, right? So here's one where you would think in theory that it would work, but really the sort of psychology of the customer is what kept it from working. So the example is, let's take an ed tech business. So for a period of time, I was the head of growth for a company called Wiseant, which was the largest tutoring marketplace in the United States. So helping you find a local tutor in your neighborhood. We were masters of SEO, local search for like, I need help with calculus in the zip code. We tried to implement a referral loop where as a parent, I would invite another person. I would get credit towards tutoring. They would get credit towards tutoring. And we built a really nice system for doing this and no one used it. It was like a pretty historic flop.

• 20:57Speaker 03

  So then we started talking to people about, well, why aren't you using this? We started like digging into the why, what we were observing. And what we found is that the problem with a invite or sort of referral loop in the United States is that there's a huge stigma associated with needing a tutor. Parents don't want to tell other parents that their kid is seeing a tutor because it makes them feel like their kid is dumb. In and of itself, no one is going to share this product in an proactive way. You're not going to bump into somebody in front of the school in the morning and go, hey, little Johnny is struggling in math. Let me recommend this thing to you because it's almost like an embarrassment for you as a parent. But this is very different than other countries, like sort of Asian countries. Like tutoring is just embedded in the world.

• 21:41Speaker 03

  Like it's like a part of what you do. But in the US, not surprisingly, maybe our American exceptionalism here, it's really kind of like a stigma. And so that loop didn't work at all, even though if you're doing pattern matching, you would say, oh yeah, sure, it should work. It's money. People like free money.

• 21:56Harry Stebbings?

  Listen, I want to dive into the hiring process. And so we're going to take it in the slant that you took it with me, which is that director level, kind of the mid-tier, not super junior, not super senior. And we're going to go with that. How do I literally structure the process, Adam? I've never hired a growth professional before. Can you just walk me through it from ground zero?

• 22:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. So first, my take on this, so I'm going to answer your question, but first I'm going to say that I have a little bit of a non-traditional answer for like the beginning part of this. Like, I try to interview people on the job, especially leaders. Having gone through a bunch of executive interviews myself, probably like over a dozen times. I think that the traditional interview process for leaders is broken. And the best way to learn about someone is really working side by side with them. I learn a ton about companies just from being an advisor and working with them one hour a week, way more than in my conversations leading up to that relationship. However, you need to assess people in some way before you do that. So I'm going to like set my Adam hot take to the side for a second

• 22:59Speaker 03

  and tell you about like how I would structure an actual interview process. So like, here's the steps. Pre-work is first. You need to understand what you need. If you're a founder and you've done your job and you have alignment around how you grow, what levers you have at your disposal, then you definitely have a sense for the types of skills and background that you might need. Don't hire a marketing person. You really need is a product person. Don't hire a product person when what you really need is a marketer. My first step, know what you need. I tend to like what I call like quantitative generalists as my early growth hires. So these are people who can effectively prioritize and have a, no pun intended, growth mindset.

• 23:37Speaker 03

  And they're really good communicators because building the growth function requires a lot of knowledge sharing and a lot of confidence building and bringing people along for the ride. So that's sort of one. I also like failed entrepreneurs for this role because they have a really good appreciation for how important it is to acquire and retain customers. Maybe they built a great product and then they couldn't get anyone to use it. They have a real appreciation for why growth is really important. That's like step one. Then I write down the core competencies that I want to test against throughout the interview process and figure out how you Be testing them. So what this looks like is like a quantitative exercise, a prioritization exercise, some sort of behavioral and situational interviewing, and probably a take home assignment that ends in a presentation. We have to communicate understanding with people.

• 24:21Speaker 03

  You really want to like simulate the on the job experience as much as possible during this process.

• 24:26Harry Stebbings?

  I need to dive in on these tests. If we go through them, can you just give me an example of what each one means? So I actually know. Number one was what?

• 24:34Speaker 03

  A quantitative exercise. Quantitative exercise is maybe you give somebody a dummy data set. And I've actually done this before with growth PMs and things like that. So you give somebody a dummy data set and they have to organize and draw insights from that data set and make recommendations against it. So you might say like, here's a whole list of users and sort of cohort behavior and things like that. What are you observing here? And what do you think this means? They could be wrong, but you want to see how they like manipulate data. Can they build a cohort chart? Can they do some of the basic like building blocks of growth and understand at least quantitatively, what are we observing with this set of users? Oh, everyone seems to drop off at week three. That's really interesting. What are you going to do with that information? Well, I'm going to dig into what happens in week three in the

• 25:18Speaker 03

  product experience. Are we sending people a communication? Are we not sending people? Like all of that sort of stuff. So that's sort of like your quantitative exercise. That's one. Then you've got a prioritization exercise. So the prioritization section might be things like you share some data or sort of snippets of your growth model and then a list of themes and tactics for them to sort through. And you say, how might you prioritize this based on this data or this knowledge that I'm giving you? And then people will say some things and then you give them additional constraints and new information throughout and you see what they do with the prioritization. So do they have a framework? How do they think about the impact and the confidence and sort of like the reach of these different experiments? And so are they effectively like sorting things? Are they applying some sort of, again, framework

• 26:03Speaker 03

  to figure out how to prioritize? So that's like the second one. That's your prioritization exercise. Very similar to what you do in a PM interview, by the way. But as a leader, prioritization is critical, right? There's like the behavioral and the situational interviewing. So this is really Designed to get at that growth mindset. It's a lot of the tell me about a time when you did X. Or tell me about a time when you observed Y. I think Patreon was kind of the master of this because we also would do behavioral fit. And we had a system of core behaviors that we wanted people to have. Certain like actions that they had demonstrated that they'd taken in the past. And so that's like where all of these come in. Typically, the types of people that you put into this interview situation are not like direct team members.

• 26:46Speaker 03

  They might be people who are sort of stakeholders or something like that. But they're doing a lot of that behavioral situational interviewing.

• 26:52Harry Stebbings?

  What questions do you like to ask there that really test the behavioral elements? Oh. Of whether this person is a prick or not.

• 26:59Speaker 03

  Yeah. Great question. I ask questions that get at people's level of risk tolerance, grit and humility. So I ask questions about times where people were sure that they had the right answer to something. And they ended up being wrong. And then how they communicated that to folks. I asked people on like how they recovered from that and iterated towards a better outcome. Questions about their ability to influence. Tell me about a time where you convinced your CEO of something. That they were completely on the other end of the spectrum opposed to you. Or tell me about a time where you did something wrong and got a piece of feedback about it. And how did you respond to that feedback? What did you do with that? How have you learned from it? When have you done better in the future?

• 27:40Speaker 03

  So I'm really trying to understand their ability to grow and change. And like you said, not be a jerk. If someone is not good at taking feedback, you can suss that out in an interview process. Like there's a heavy level of ego that you can detect in an interview process by how these people, how people answer questions. So.

• 27:59Harry Stebbings?

  I'm never wrong and when I was, it wasn't my fault.

• 28:03Speaker 03

  Exactly. A lot of that, right? Like where do you seek to blame? Do you point it at yourself? Do you like point it at other people? As a leader, it's always your fault, no matter if it really is. You want to find folks who have that mentality.

• 28:14Harry Stebbings?

  Is that kind of it then after those four stages? Is that kind of it? Do we have everything we need? Do we make the offer then?

• 28:21Speaker 03

  What I left out is this sort of like communication presentation stage. So you want to make sure that people can come in, maybe dissect a business that they like, talk about how it grows and present an approach to changing it in plain language that a kindergartner could understand. That's what they're going to have to do with the company, right? Let's say they've nailed all of those things. Yes, it's time to get to an offer stage. Then you may want to get in and do like a real hands-on exercise with someone as like the final step. So maybe that's like a multi-hour brainstorm or working through like a roadmap together, really seeing like how will they collaborate with you in a working session? And then of course, I can't leave out my back channel references, right? Like I'm constantly sleuthing, connecting to people to try to find out.

• 29:05Speaker 03

  I mean, you do this as a VC, right? You gotta know the dirt on someone before you hire them.

• 29:11Harry Stebbings?

  That would constitute additional work and so we tend to avoid all of that. That would justify feet and so that would be egregious.

• 29:18Speaker 03

  By the way, I have a fantastic story about this, about VCs backchanneling. Can I tell it really quickly? It's like a 30-second story.

• 29:24Harry Stebbings?

  I love the story.

• 29:25Speaker 03

  The original Series A investor in Zimride, which became Lyft, was Raj Kapoor at Mayfield. And when Raj was doing his due diligence on John and Logan, Raj somehow found Logan's high school principal and contacted Logan's high school principal from Southern California and asked him about Logan. And he learned this hilarious story that Logan had reprogrammed an autodialer to call everyone in the school and tell them that school was cancelled for the day and threw it into like an uproarious like chaos. And so Raj was so impressed by that story and that the principal remembered Logan like a decade after he graduated high school. That was like a big positive signal for him to invest.

• 30:10Speaker 03

  Talking to your high school principal is pretty great.

• 30:12Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, so we've made the offer now. We've done those four pretty stringent processes. We made the offer that joining, amazing, onboarding sucks everywhere.

• 30:22Harry Stebbings?

  How can I as a founder and as a leader make the onboarding process as smooth as possible for my mid-level growth first hire?

• 30:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, you're right. Onboarding sucks in the vast majority of companies and I don't know why. It's not that hard to get right. So the way that I think about this is you've got a new hire coming in. They have a ton of momentum and a ton of political capital because they've just made it through your hiring gauntlet and you're super excited to have them there. Everyone is like, great, our savior, we're pumped. Those first few months are critical to their success. Think about it like onboarding a customer. This is your activation experience. This is going to drive long-term retention and success of your customer, except now your customer is an employee. I think about it that way and you've really got to focus on setting up this person for success, helping them achieve their first few wins and kind of continue that momentum and capital.

• 31:11Speaker 03

  I think everyone should read the book, The First 90 Days. Student of that book, I recommend it to everyone. So I make sure that we have a really clear and agreed upon 30, 60 and 90 day plan and that other people in the org know what this plan is. Not only just me and the person I've just hired, but other people that they're going to interact with. So they know how they're spending their time. Month one is basically learning, building relationships, evaluation of the team, if there is a team. Month two is iteration and improvement on the growth strategy or creation of one if it doesn't exist. And then month three is really like longer-term planning and alignment. Set up people with expectations of plans and deliverables at each one of those months.

• 31:54Speaker 03

  Typically, the plans have decreasing fidelity the farther out you go because it's hard to be certain about six and 12 months into the future. But I spend a ton of time with this person in the beginning, talking many hours a week, like side by side. It's crazy to me that some founders don't spend much time with new hires. They're just sort of like, good luck, here you go, this is your job now. And you just spent countless hours interviewing this person. Now is when the real work starts. So that's how I do it. I break it down into a 90-day plan with clear milestones at each of the 30, 60, 90. So yeah, that's how I get people started.

• 32:29Harry Stebbings?

  I love it. Thank you for that. You said about communicating. To the wider org, how do you do that? Is that in shared Notion docs? Is that in pipe drives? Help me understand. How do you do that and let everyone kind of feel the accountability?

• 32:41Speaker 03

  I'm a written communicator. So like when I joined Imperfect Foods as their Chief Product and Growth Officer, I built this out in a Google Sheets file. And I had specific rows, specific milestones, my plan, and very specific deliverables and what success would look like. And I worked with the CEO who I was reporting to, to align on this stuff and say, hey, you're good with this? This looks like the work that I should be doing because I think this is the work that I should be doing. And then I shared it with everybody who I was working with, the entire executive team, my own team, which was like 20 or 30 people at the time. So like, I just published it far and wide. I was like, hey, whole company, this is a public document. You want to see how an executive spends their time? This is what I'm doing for the next three months. I'm a big fan of over-communication.

• 33:25Harry Stebbings?

  Golf.

• 33:28Harry Stebbings?

  Love it. I totally agree. Okay, so when we think about these new hires, how long do we give if we don't think it's working? Say it's 45 days in, you're like, yeah, the first month of relationship build didn't really go well.

• 33:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think a lot of this depends on the person and the learning curve. So if they've done growth, but they're in a very new industry where they've never like worked in that space, the learning curve is going to be pretty steep. I'd give them that 90 days to find their footing and make solid recommendations to get alignment and maybe notch a few small wins in that time. But I think like one of the things that separates the good from the great is a lot of the best people that I've worked with, they come in on day one and they've already been thinking about the business. They've got a plan, they've done some homework, they've done some learning upfront, they're asking really thoughtful questions. They've probably done this during the interview process, by the way, and they're moving fast because in growth, time is of the essence.

• 34:25Speaker 03

  If you're getting to 45, 60 days and you're not seeing momentum, I'm not talking about like change in the trajectory of the company because that's hard. But I'm talking about like, there's a feeling that you can get that this person is working hard and they're moving and they're hungry to understand and build and they're like chomping at the bit to get going. If you're not feeling that part of the way through that 90 days, it might be time for a conversation and like a level setting of expectations.

• 34:54Harry Stebbings?

  Listen, I spoke to some of your friends before this show, speaking of references, and they said you were world class, world class, when it came to cross-functional communication. This is tough because not many of those people are, having interviewed quite a few. So what does great cross-functional comms look like? And like, as granular as possible, what do you do to make growth an integrated and welcome part of a multi-functional org?

• 35:19Speaker 03

  I've iterated on this quite a bit, and I have a few frameworks that I follow. First, one of my absolute, like, must-have expectations for myself and for anyone that I hire is that they have to over-communicate until everyone gets it. The most knowledgeable person always thinks that everyone else has the same level of understanding as them, and they're always wrong. You have to simplify and over-communicate, and I expect like, myself and everyone on my team to be the ambassador for our work with stakeholders. It builds trust, it's ridiculously important. Second thing I do is I adjust communication to the person or the group. So sometimes, sending that CEO or CFO an email is not the right approach. You've got to sit down and like, take them through it, one-on-one environment, and make

• 36:02Speaker 03

  sure that they really understand the what and the why. That's hard, it's time-consuming, but it saves you time in the long run. The third thing that I do is I create reliable, predictable communication streams. So for example, at Patreon, I had a weekly email. I started at the first week that I got there. I didn't even know very much about the business, but I started sending this communication. It went out to a core group of stakeholders, leaders, peers, my own team. I called it the "Ship It Friday" email, which is ironic because you're not supposed to ship things on a Friday, but that's the name. And it had a couple of important sections in it, and they were the same every week. How are we doing? Highlights and lowlights from the week, important learnings about our customers, our growth model, experiments, et cetera, and what was coming up in the near future.

• 36:43Speaker 03

  And this email update was so reliable and consistent that if I missed a week, people were upset. They were like, "I look forward to getting this communication." It was fun, it was funny, there was occasionally like, a gif or a meme or like, an Easter egg in it. But I had people coming up to me in the company and saying it was the clearest articulation of what an org was working on and the outcomes they were delivering. And people replying and asking questions and giving feedback. And that's how I knew that I was on to something because people were like engaged with it.

• 37:12Harry Stebbings?

  I love that. I didn't know this. How long did that take to write?

• 37:15Speaker 03

  In the beginning, it took time. It took probably thirty to forty five minutes because I was doing everything myself. Eventually.

• 37:23Harry Stebbings?

  That's okay, though. Thirty to forty five minutes, everyone can find the time for.

• 37:26Speaker 03

  It's a really good use of time as a leader. And eventually you find tactics to kind of distribute the work. So you create a template that your team can fill out and submit to you. So as your team grows and you're not in the weeds on everything and you don't have all the knowledge, you create that system so that the team can participate and help you.

• 37:43Harry Stebbings?

  I think a big mistake that people make on something like that in particular, they feel that it has to be perfect. I'm not going to say it out this week, because like, I would say it's better that it's not perfect, but goes out, but you do know what I mean?

• 37:53Speaker 03

  Yes, ship it. The worst case is somebody reads it and they're like, I don't understand. And they write you back and they say, hey, help clarify this. That's actually a good thing. They're giving you feedback. They want to know. They're hungry for information. The last like final thoughts on communication. One, the old saying, a picture's worth a thousand words. I think like prototype is worth a whole chapter in a book. So I try to communicate with visual aids whenever possible. Words on a page are great. A picture of what the thing is actually doing is even better. It's something that people can play with. That's one. And the second thing is, I practice transparency, candor and kindness in all of my communication.

• 38:28Harry Stebbings?

  I think it's also just, it's about making it human. Like you said, the memes with the gifs with me taking the piss out of myself, getting thrown out of school. Otherwise, it's just like, this is how you build authentic relationships and.

• 38:39Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 38:40Harry Stebbings?

  I don't even know if it's more productive. It's more fun. One other thing that I was told about your world class skills, but someone mentioned your insane work on the Patreon rebrand. Tell me, what makes for a successful rebrand? What's required? And where do many go wrong, do you think?

• 38:56Speaker 03

  There aren't a lot of growth leaders who come into a company and then realize that they need to rebrand and reposition the company because that's the main impediment to growth. But that was the situation I found myself in after joining Patreon. So like, don't assume that you know what you're doing. Ask for help. That's one. The second thing is that when you're doing work around branding, there's a lot. A lot of teammates who are skeptical that you need to do this work because they're thinking about the day to day and they're like, hey, the business seems fine right now. But they're not necessarily doing the job of the growth leader, which is to look into the future and see that there's a ceiling that you're going to hit. It's not their job to do that. So you have to bring everyone along for the ride, especially the CEO and the founder whose baby this company is.

• 39:37Speaker 03

  For example, at Patreon, like this was Jack's thing. He designed the brand. He positioned the business. To go to Jack and say, this thing needs to be different than what you started it as. Like, that's a tough conversation to have. Same with a skeptical engineering manager, the board, everyone. So if you don't bring people along for the ride, it's going to be a grind to get it done. And then the third thing I would say is I brought a lot of my like growth skills to branding and positioning. So it's really hard to test a brand change. You can't be like, hey, this whole thing looks different. What do you think? A B test. Like, that doesn't really work because you can't go back from that. So we did a lot of customer interviewing, qualitative, brand blind, positioning, statement testing.

• 40:16Speaker 03

  This versus this. And they didn't know we were talking about Patreon, but we built up a lot of confidence that shifting from crowdfunding to membership, which is what Patreon is now, was sort of the right move. And then the last thing that I would say is like really effective repositioning. A lot of people don't realize like your brand is just your words and your visuals. That's the promise that you're making. But the product experience is what really delivers on that promise. Once we had the confidence that we were moving in the right direction, we introduced a whole bunch of new features and functionality at the same time that we updated our look and feel. We rallied the whole company around this and we continued this drumbeat. And then the last thing that I would say is when we launched the new brand and the look and feel, I prepared people to not look at Twitter for about two weeks,

• 40:59Speaker 03

  which one of our board members told me, don't look at what people are saying about this. Everyone rushes to social media for their hot takes. They don't like this logo. They don't like the way this thing looks, who designed this? This could be done by a two-year-old with a crayon. Like, everyone's negative about it. And then it all fades away in two weeks and people move on. Because there's another brand that they want to shit all over. People hate change.

• 41:21Harry Stebbings?

  And you know what the other thing is? I think that when it comes to the brand. And the messaging, the devil lies in the neutral, which is like, if you look at so many brands, they don't stand for anything. You're like increasing efficiency within teams. And you're like, sounds so unattractive. The way like be opinionated, I always think. I want to move into my favorite, which is a quick fire, Adam. Does that sound okay?

• 41:45Speaker 03

  Sounds great. Let's do it.

• 41:46Harry Stebbings?

  What are the parallels between management and parenting?

• 41:50Speaker 03

  They're the same cultivating a growth mindset, providing choices, difficult conversations and empathy and collaboration, goal setting, rewards. Like I always thought of myself as a great manager. And then I had kids and I realized that tiny humans are a lot harder to deal with than adults. And then I took a parenting class and I realized a lot of these managerial frameworks are the same things that they're telling us to do with our kids. I think it was an eye opening experience for me. I don't think employees love to be referred to as your children, but they kind of are. Parallels are like one in the same.

• 42:21Harry Stebbings?

  You also can't fire your children when you need to cut burn.

• 42:27Harry Stebbings?

  I'm sorry, Dad wants to mute our headphones. You're out. You're out.

• 42:31Speaker 03

  That's the only difference.

• 42:33Harry Stebbings?

  Tell me, what tactics in growth have not changed over the last five years?

• 42:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think a lot of it is the foundational things like psychological principles, biases, topics like loss aversion, scarcity, status. Those sorts of things are like universal and permanent. Channels come and go, but some of the like core principles around how to motivate and how to tap into emotion, like those probably will never change. So yeah, those are the things.

• 42:57Harry Stebbings?

  What has totally died a death tactic wise?

• 43:00Speaker 03

  Far too many things. Leveraging social graphs, address books, incentivized referrals. Like they're not nearly as novel as they used to be because people have like productized that. Company generated content, which you typically call like content marketing, much harder to do now. SEO, much harder to do well. They haven't necessarily died, but the bar for success is higher because there's like so many experts out there now and so much written about how to be great at this. And so everyone's competing for the same few positions.

• 43:30Harry Stebbings?

  I do think most people are shit at that, to be honest.

• 43:32Speaker 03

  That could be too. Yeah.

• 43:34Harry Stebbings?

  I can be arrogant around it's content creation and media company, but the media companies, they just suck. It's boring.

• 43:40Speaker 03

  That's true.

• 43:40Harry Stebbings?

  Tell me, what would you say is the biggest mistake founders make when hiring growth teams?

• 43:45Speaker 03

  Two. One is that it's going to be a quick fix. Growth is not a quick fix. It's a system. It takes time. You can incrementally win, but it needs to compound over time. And the second one is that they need growth help when actually what they're struggling with is product market fit. So if you don't have product market fit, throwing a growth person into the mix is disastrous for your product. Because the last thing you want to do is put your product in the hands of more people when it sucks. You almost always fail with those two expectations.

• 44:11Harry Stebbings?

  Tell me, what would you most like to change about the world of growth today?

• 44:13Speaker 03

  I'd really like to see a lot more companies take a holistic approach to growth, thinking about acquisition, retention and monetization together as a system. Versus just sort of seeing growth as like an acquisition problem. Or we're just going to get this marketing team in here and they're going to take care of growth. So that's one thing. And the other thing is I'd like to see a lot more growth leaders like sort of stop pattern matching and build a broader skill set around understanding marketing, product and data. And figuring out what the right tools for the job are, instead of trying to apply the approach that they've taken in a previous company. And expecting it to work a hundred percent at their next thing. So those are two things.

• 44:51Harry Stebbings?

  What's been the biggest fuck up growth experiment wise you've had?

• 44:54Speaker 03

  This is probably Patreon. We did a bunch of experimentation around moving payment processing fees from the creator to the fan. So making the patron pay for it. We tried to understand what that would do to conversion. We had a really good quantitative sense of this. We didn't talk to a single creator about it and we announced that we were rolling this out and the world imploded. The internet literally caved in on top of Patreon. That was how angry people were. There were articles written. There were apologies written. First thing we did was we doubled down and we're like, no, why we need to do this. And creators were like, uh-uh, not having it. There were, it was named the fiasco. We did it right at the end of the year. It ruined my December. It was a very dark time for me.

• 45:36Speaker 03

  But quantitatively, it looked great. So we were like, yay, experiments. It was bad. We ended up backpedaling, rolling it back and learned a very valuable. Valuable and painful lesson. It punched us in the mouth for several months. Our growth rate slowed down. Creators lost a ton of trust in us. They felt like we were just like every other tech platform. We lost a lot in doing that. They have since recovered. We recovered. I kept my job. It was great, but it was pretty dark there for several weeks. That's the biggest one of my career.

• 46:05Harry Stebbings?

  Yay, experiments. That's rough. I know, I feel for you. I'm sorry, man. That's tough. Final one. Yeah. What one company growth strategy have you most been impressed by recently?

• 46:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm really impressed with companies taking advantage of new features in iOS. So things like companies like Locket, where they're taking advantage of widgets on the home screen and things like that, which are like interactive modules that you can implement. Locket is really cool. And one, it's entirely product-led growth. The story behind how they got started is awesome. They focus on a bunch of those principles that I talked about. Scarcity of invite and sending to people. It's a super simple product experience, hugely viral, sharing oriented around photos. It's like this nice middle ground between like sort of an annoying social media broadcast that everyone turns off and a one-to-one message that has like no viral coefficient. So like, I really like what that company and that founder's been doing.

• 47:01Harry Stebbings?

  What's it called? Locket? L O C K E T?

• 47:03Speaker 03

  L O C K E T. Yep. It's for sharing photos with your loved ones. So you and your mom, for example. Mom could have a little locket. I did see that you take walks with your mom pretty regularly, so, which I love. I do the same. But yeah, should try it. Get your mom on board.

• 47:16Harry Stebbings?

  You know what? The terrible name.

• 47:19Speaker 03

  We should work on that.

• 47:20Harry Stebbings?

  I'm on Twitter, can't find it. I'm on Google, can't find it.

• 47:24Speaker 03

  Oh, App Store. That's where you gotta go.

• 47:26Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, fuck, they need to change their name. I'm getting love lockets now when I'm Googling locket photo. Because yeah, photo is the worst thing.

• 47:33Speaker 03

  It doesn't help that in the States, Mother's Day is on Sunday. And so like, there's probably a lot of photo lockets, like, uh, at retail. Yeah.

• 47:41Harry Stebbings?

  I'm getting Tiffany. No, I want it fucking out. Anyway, listen, Adam, I normally have like fun on shows. This was a lot more fun. I really appreciate you putting up with me.

• 47:50Speaker 03

  Of course. Likewise.

• 47:52Harry Stebbings?

  Honestly, you were brilliant. So thank you so much.

• 47:54Speaker 03

  Thank you for having me. It's been great.

• 47:58Harry Stebbings?

  I mean, get your pen and paper out for that one. So many lessons there. Love doing that show. I want to say huge thank you to Adam for giving up the time to do it and for being so clear in breaking down so many different processes. If you'd like to see more, you can find us on 20vc.com. However, before we leave you today, if you've been listening to 20VC, you've probably heard of BRAX, the first corporate card for startups with no personal guarantee or credit check, up to 20 times higher credit limits than traditional cards, plus rewards like 3x on eligible Apple products and 7x points on tools like Zoom and Slack. BRAX has helped thousands of companies scale faster to reach their full potential. This month, they're extending their special offer to our listeners.

• 48:40Harry Stebbings?

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• 49:24Harry Stebbings?

  the way I think about rest, using it to power my active days, not seeing it as a weakness. The Recovery Score is such a good motivator for this. And then second, I know when I'm getting ill or potentially about to ahead of time, my body temperature spikes and I know to take it easy, stay in, look after myself. You have to invest in yourself if you want to perform in business or sport at the highest level. Whoop is a game changer. Go to whoop.com and use the code VC at checkout to save 15% and get free shipping today. As always, I so appreciate all your support and I can't wait to bring you a fantastic episode this coming Friday.