Advice on Organizing and Running Growth Teams from Dan Hockenmaier and Gustaf Alströmer

Today we have Dan Hakan Meyer and Gustav All Strimer. So, Dan was the founder, advised investor, and advisor at Basis One, which is growth strategy consulting. Previous to that, you were a director of growth marketing at Thumbtack. Gustav's a partner at YC and also was a product lead for growth at Airbnb.

So, Gustav, why don’t you start it off?

Sure, so I was thinking about getting right into it. Dan, you advise a lot of startups on growth, and you kind of get into their teams and work directly with them on growth. What is the most unpopular advice that you give to the founders of the companies that you work with?

So I say nine times out of ten, we are talking them out of doing things that they want to do. I think, you know, as you know, there's this huge power law to growth. I think most of the gains come from, you know, one channel, a handful of tactics, and most early teams are really good at coming up with good ideas that they want to try. Often that has diminishing returns, so we're often talking them out of things.

I think the second class of things would be actually that the company may not be ready for a traditional growth effort. I think it's really important to think about where they are in terms of product-market fit and when the right types of tactics should be used.

This is, yeah, in terms of being specific around that, like what are the most common things that people are trying to jump onto soon?

So, I think really heavyweight acquisition, particularly if it's unsustainable, prior to having the right kind of retention. You don't have to have best-in-class retention numbers, but you need to be seeing some cohorts of people for which retention truly levels out, and they use the product very long term. If you don’t see that, you're not ready. Particularly if you're doing things like paid marketing or others, which can have big burn implications, you can get to that too fast. That could be really problematic.

So, let's say I run a series B company, it's a consumer company, and I just hired you to help me figure things out. What are the questions you are going to ask me, and what is the data you want from me?

So, I think it's a really healthy exercise to actually start with a pretty traditional spreadsheet model. You know, what are the kind of channels of acquisition? How does traffic convert, activate, retain? What do your different cohorts of retention look like? And how does all this link up now? How do your existing users then start referring other users? How does monetization fuel your paid growth strategy? When you build something like this, you can like play around and say, "What happens if our activation rate goes up by 5%?" Usually, that's really powerful, much more powerful than a 20% increase in next acquisition.

So, I think about the kind of full stack of things and how it all links together, and it's a really good starting point for where there's leverage.

So, if I am that founder and I couldn’t hire you, I can’t afford you. Who is the person in my team that should kind of make that spreadsheet? Like, where do I start if I don't hire you?

So, I'm a big fan of smart analytical generalists, actually. It depends a little bit on whether you need more of a marketing business type person or more of a technical person. But somebody who, one, has kind of low pride of ownership and just wants to move fast, test things, and figure out what works, and is deeply analytical can often get a lot of that work done.

I mean, I think you know we can talk about the composition of a large scale growth team, but that's a luxury that many don’t have. So, finding somebody who can do lots of those things before you know what’s really gonna work is really valuable.

So, what signals during an interview would you look for?

So, I think the big thing is can they hold the equation of your business in their head? So, like do they know how a change is going to impact the overall output of what your business is optimizing for?