Lauryn Isford: commitment

Transcript context

…This episode is brought to you by Eppo. Eppo is a next generation A/B testing platform built by Airbnb alums for modern growth teams. Companies like Netlify, Contentful, and Cameo rely on Eppo to power their experiments. Wherever you work, running experiments is increasingly essential, but there are no commercial tools that integrate with a modern grow team stack. This leads to wasted time building internal tools or trying to run your experiments through a clunky marketing tool. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved about our experimentation platform was being able to easily slice results by device, by country, and by user stage. Eppo does all that and more, delivering results quickly, avoiding annoying prolonged analytics cycles, and helping you easily get to the root cause of any issue you discover. Eppo lets you go beyond basic click-through metrics and then set you to north star metrics, like activation, retention, subscriptions, and payments, and Eppo supports test on the front end, the back end, email marketing, and even machine learning clients. Check out Eppo at geteppo.com, get E-P-P-O.com and 10x your experiment velocity. Is there an example of that that comes to mind when you talk about being a little stuck on a metric? Is that something you went through at Airtable or anywhere else you worked? I've gone through it plenty of times. We actually at the organizational level on the Airtable growth award changed our north star metric a couple times which is a big deal that manifests for several teams. Roughly the arc of that change for us was shifting from being a growth org focused on revenue to a growth organization focused on user growth and customer growth. This for us was a really important moment where we decided that it was most essential in our work to grow the business to bring millions more people onto the platform, using the product and finding value in the product, because we were taking a decade's long view that they could always become monetized or converted customers later, and there wasn't really a rush. We felt that focusing on revenue led us to make some decisions that were a bit more short-term oriented than would be ideal. There's also a dynamic here where in the world of enterprise SaaS, the world of B2B SaaS, there's a new theme called product-led sales that's very hot right now, and this means that often in a PLG company there's some ideal end goal of handing off certain customers to have a sales conversation or to close an enterprise contract. In that case, you might actually prefer to delay revenue for months or quarters or years to manifest it later, and when that's the case, your growth team should be fully aligned in lockstep with sales and with go-to-market team and focusing on user growth is actually the right call. So, that's an example of a big pivot that we made, and in doing that, we felt more strategic clarity and were able to move faster. That is an awesome story. How long did that process take and any advice for folks that might be going through a similar journey of maybe we should rethink our north star metric not and not be revenue? Any advice there?…

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