Growth

“Explore and exploit, if you're familiar with it from growth background, is really just around what mode you're in. You're either in a mode of explorer where you have a bunch of unknowns and you're testing to see whether or not you like it, how well it works, whether or not it fits for you. Or you're exploiting, where you actually have found something that's really rich and really deep and then you're just trying to get more.”

“The exploring emerging channels framework has three core ingredients. The first is understanding if there is an overlap between what the customers need is, what your company's goals are, and what the channel actually does really well.”

“If you don't have a product that's providing real fundamental value to people, you can be a one hit wonder and have a flash in the pan and growth hack your way into something that might last for a few months but people will catch on it and then it'll disappear.”

“No one wants to make anybody upset, but through that upset on the other side of that, can often be a whole new possibility and a whole new revelation, and actually a lot of joy and freedom. I think that we forget about all the other possibilities that come out of difficult conversations and we just land on these really uncomfortable parts.”

“It's just not true that a bootstrap business can't get huge. We bootstrapped the entire business and now across all our companies we do almost $300 million in revenue. The only difference between what we do and what a VC does is the level of tolerance for burning money on fire.”

“There's only so many solo users who are going to pull out a credit card. Once you get to hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue scale, just the law of large numbers means that growth will slow. And so, you have to figure out where's that next growth curve going to come from.”

“The most superhuman user acquisition people out there are engineers and they don't need a marketing technologist because they set up the tool themselves. They know how the paid campaign runs and they just do it all. You'll typically find these super humans at small startups where the engineer is just told by the co-founder, hey, go figure out how Facebook ads work.”

“This is the irony of growth, is people think growth is overnight success and it's not. It is a lot of short wins and short-term execution for a longer-term gain and really understanding you have a lot of short terms towards the longer-term outcomes.”