Melissa Tan: recommendation

Transcript context

…A lot of the things you're talking about are based in how growth starts at a company. I imagine one of the most common questions you get is, how do I start to invest in growth? How do I hire my first growth person? How do I build a team around them? It's one of the most common questions I get. So let's spend a little time here. What is your advice to founders that are just starting to think about building their initial growth team and how to approach that to look for initially and kind of think about that longer term? I get this question a lot as well. I'd say initially when a company's starting out, the goal is getting to product market fit and figuring out who their ideal customer profile is, like their ICP. And at this point, I think everyone at the company should be thinking about growth. They're finding their first few design partners that they will co-create the product with. They're figuring out who is their product resonating with, who is maybe also the decision maker in purchasing the product. And they're figuring out, do we want kind of a bottom up product led motion? Are we going to lean more heavily into sales? Are we going to do both? After you reach product market fit and you're starting to get your first few customers, the first growth per person I see more often than not isn't someone driving acquisition. You need to find your first a thousand or thousands of customers and you need to do it at scale. And so if that is the focus of the company, typically what I would recommend is somebody that they don't need to be an expert, but ideally they understand maybe one or two channels well and that they're the channels that you have hypothesis, you will find traction in. And I see this person a little bit like a portfolio manager, right? Because you're trying to figure out ... Usually companies don't have many channels that are split evenly. They find one or two that really work and make up like it's 80/20 rule. It makes us up 80% of where the signups are coming from and this portfolio manager is testing different things out. Even you could leverage agencies. There are a lot of agencies out there for SEO, for paid marketing, et cetera, but they are smart enough to define, is this working? How do I do it at scale? You also want to make sure it's quality signups that are actually monetizable. And so that is a role typically if you're hiring an acquisition of that first growth person. And then the other two areas to focus early on, but I don't think you need a dedicated person for are activation. You want to make sure as you're pouring leads into the top of funnel, you're activating users. And here I don't think you actually need to do AB testing. Your volume isn't probably going to be strong enough. I think even just finding five individuals that are part of your target audience, just doing user testing, set up a Zoom, watch them onboard onto the product and have them talk out loud. You'll fight a lot and you can also just take best practices of onboarding checklists, et cetera. So activation and then I've said this a lot, but pricing and packaging, really thinking about pricing, but I don't think that needs to be a dedicated person. What kind of profile have you found to be most successful for this sort of person? Some people will look for like, I want to hire Melissa and let's just go big. The best person I can find and have them own this versus someone that's just new from school that's going to figure it out and I guess they're somewhere in the middle. What do you find that's best for that first hire?…

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