Sean Ellis: belief

Transcript context

…We're going long, which is amazing. I think there's so much value here that we're collecting for folks. So let just ask maybe a couple more quick questions. One is actually from Andrew Chen who is currently partnered at a partner at A16z. He wrote about growth for the longest time. I think he helped popularize growth hacking for better or worse with his article and it being the future of VP of what is it? Growth Hacking is the new VP of marketing, right, Is the title. So he actually had a question for you that he shared with me. His question is, growth strategies have changed a lot over the past decade. What is the biggest difference now versus when you first started working on growth? When I first started just being data-driven on customer acquisition was enough to win and being test and data-driven on customer acquisition. All the other companies were like CPM focused and so we could do really well just with lots of testing and some creativity in how it all worked. But that over time as, now I would say most online marketers are very data and test drive. They know they need to do lots of testing. And so to be competitive today, you actually have to be able to be super efficient at all parts of the business. So again, like how you convert, retain, monetize, and that's when it gets hard. Getting a marketing team to be data and test-driven is pretty easy. Once you start getting into activation and referral and engagement and retention, now you're talking about the overlap between marketing, product if it's B2B, bringing sales in there, customer success, and those teams are not used to working together. And so it's really hard to drive the collaboration that's needed to have an effective testing program across the entire growth engine. And that's pretty much any business that's been successful with it, implemented it super early in the business, and so very few later stage companies have been able to make much progress in replicating that type of approach. It's just gotten harder basically. Things are just getting harder.…

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