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A conversation I've had recently with multiple early-stage companies: once you've proven product-market fit, assuming retention supports it as a viable vector of growth*, you should commence paid marketing so as to optimize the product beyond core, fanatical early adopters (1/X)
2/ The question usually takes the form of: "We're at X thousand DAU, all sourced organically and exhibiting strong retention. We are torn between hiring a Head of UA or Head of Growth." Assuming resource constraints: Head of UA.
3/ "But arent we leaving money on the table by acquiring users into a non-optimized product?" is a common response. Sure. But you need to prove your product against a broader audience than early adopters in order to enable that scale. https://mobiledevmemo.com/a-b-testing-can-kill-product-growth/
4/ In other words: if you only optimize the product for highly-qualified users that discover it organically, it wont be optimized for users acquired via marketing. And there's a bigger business to be built in establishing sustainable, systematic marketing https://mobiledevmemo.com/the-only-growth-metric-that-matters/
5/ I call this approach the "Growth Sandwich." Expand the DAU-base with paid marketing, re-test feature configurations with experimentation, repeat. If the product is hyper-optimized for some small audience then lack of scale is conditioned https://mobiledevmemo.com/building-a-virtuous-cycle-between-product-and-marketing/
6/ As a generalized rule, user "quality" tends to degrade as "scale" increases with marketing campaigns because of click propensities, multiple exposures, etc. This same dynamic applies to a product's growth over time. https://mobiledevmemo.com/quality-vs-volume-fallacy-mobile-user-acquisition/
7/ If the product ambition is to ultimately reach large scale, it needs to be optimized for the scaled DAU profile of a large target audience. Focusing too intently on DAU growth OR product optimization is a mistake; team needs to oscillate between the two https://twitter.com/eric_seufert/status/1378358252195483653
8/ *How do you know if a product's retention supports growth through marketing? https://mobiledevmemo.com/high-growth-low-growth-no-growth-systematic-growth-with-dau-replacement/
