You've just been hired to lead growth at a startup?

Here are 14 things you need to know to drive growth

by @yemi_uc

1. Recognize that you're somewhat responsible for the business in your role

In some companies, product is responsible for driving business growth, in some others it's finance, in some others it's sales, and in many startups, it's the growth team.

Were you hired because no one knows how to do marketing on the team or were you hired because the company believes your role is important to business growth?

2. There are many problems to solve. Don't try and get into everything

If you were not hired as an internal contributor, but as a manager don't get into execution in Month 1. Zoom out and understand the business' growth problems because they are more nuanced than you think.

Use a high-level framework like AARRR growth framework to figure out how the business is performing in each stage. If you don't apply a high-level framework, you will have an incoherent growth plan.

Example: solving for monetization and traffic at the same time is distracting for your product thinking, and you'll both be under-investing in the 2 of them because they require different types of product thinking.

3. Another great framework is "Revenue = Traffic * conversion rate * LTV/AOV"

If you work in eCom and marketplaces, then treat this framework as your bible.

You can solve your traffic problems independently of your monetization problems with very clear thinking.

4. Don't jump into retention unless it is really bad

It's incredibly hard to fix retention and if you don't have 1000s of users performing your retention metric - DAU, WAU, MAU, et al - then you won't have enough data to fix anything and you would have burnt time.

Retention is important, but figuring out acquisition is more important in many instances.

Example: eCommerce companies sometimes have to re-acquire the same user multiple times via paid marketing, and that's fine because they turn a profit on each transaction.

5. Fixing growth is an operational problem that cuts across multiple teams (engineering, product, finance, marketing, customer support, operations)

Often, your influence will stop at marketing and maybe you will be given engineering resources sometimes.

Use engineering to make your marketing better instead of trying to build one-off ideas or products that will need updates.

Example: Engineering can help you solve your paid marketing attribution problem, or help you do programmatic SEO, or help build out an affiliate program.

The point is, don't use engineering to build new products. Use engineering to enhance your marketing capabilities.

6. Select a growth stage to give attention

Often this will be acquisition, but each company is different and you need to know what is important to the business when you're joining (posting user growth, solving retention, revenue expansion, et al).

7. Spend your 1st and 2nd month understanding the business and building out your growth dashboard

You'll definitely revisit this almost every month until your 6th or even 12th month when you understand all the nuance of the business.

Tap the screenshot to see must-haves

You can use a spreadsheet to track these numbers. You don't need any fancy tools.

You want to track these numbers month to month to observe trends and week to week to easily catch changes in the system.

8. Know your unit economics

Your growth strategy needs to be repeatable and scalable. Knowing your unit economics lets you know the idea space you can operate.

9. Deploy strategies not tactics

Growth is about finding a repeatable, insight-driven process to fix your business problems. You cannot get that with tactics.

With a solid strategy, you put in x and you get y. Your growth should be as mechanical as that.

10. Your strategies for each stage should have not more than 2 goals (make it 1 if possible)

Example: solving blog traffic requires a different kind of thinking than solving for email capture.

11. Measure everything

This seems a bit counter-intuitive to having 1 or 2 clear goals, but it's not.

You always want to have weekly or daily data on every interaction that gets you closer to your core metrics.

12. Growth should be mechanical and predictable

Often, "growth teams" are looking for their next dope tweet or their next viral blog instead of creating a factory that understands how to create dope tweets or creating a content factory that self-distributes content.

13. Try to tie your growth strategies to money in the bank

The business needs to make money, so you need to be clear on how your work affects the company's bank balance.

14. Repeat all the steps above as frequently as you can

There's always new information and what you believe before about the business changes, so review your growth plans every month or quarter to be sure you're not moving in the wrong direction.

Lastly, each business is different, so you need to solve for your specific problems. You can't apply the lessons here verbatim.

If you like this thread, subscribe to https://africanstartupteardownpod.substack.com/p/coming-soon 

Subscribers get first access to every podcast where @yemi_uc and @NnamdiO_ teardown how consumer internet companies in Africa grow.

And if you don't like the thread, you're a witch