This Week #2: Tackling the chicken-and-egg problem, building a growth team from scratch, and addressing overlap with PM peers 🤔
Sep 2019
In early-stage growth, focus on opportunities that can deliver exponential returns rather than incremental gains. Unless your product has viral mechanics built in, chasing small conversion improvements won't move the needle.
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This Week #2: Tackling the chicken-and-egg problem, building a growth team from scratch, and addressing overlap with PM peers 🤔
Sep 2019Early percentage improvements in conversion have poor ROI. Once retention is healthy, the biggest growth wins come from top-of-funnel activities like referrals, performance marketing, and SEO—not from squeezing another 2% out of your funnel.
28 Ways to Grow Supply in a Marketplace 📈
Jun 2019Airbnb discovered that 300 listings with 100 reviewed listings created a step-function change in booking growth. Below that threshold, guests couldn't find what they wanted; above it, the marketplace became self-reinforcing. Identify your magic number and treat reaching it as your primary early-stage goal.
28 Ways to Grow Supply in a Marketplace 📈
Jun 2019Looking back at Airbnb's growth, "most things we tried didn't have an impact—but enough did." Success came from many small wins compounding, not from finding silver bullets. This reframes failure as a necessary part of the process rather than a sign of wrong strategy.
A Three-Step Framework For Solving Problems 👌
Jun 2019Define success as a specific metric with a defined goal you can easily measure—ideally a concrete number like '10% increase in X' or '50% decrease in Y.' Pick a goal that's believable but ambitious enough that hitting it would genuinely excite your team and leaders.
Gokul Rajaram on designing your product development process, when and how to hire your first PM, a playbook for hiring leaders, getting ahead in you career, how to get started angel investing, more
Jun 2022If 90% of your customers come from paid acquisition, the music will eventually stop. A healthy product should have 40-50% organic growth and 50% paid. If your product isn't remarkable enough for people to talk about, you're building on a fragile foundation.
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