Luc Levesque: recommendation

Transcript context

…Let me follow on that thread real quick because I find some founders still want to have someone come help them with growth even though they know they don't have product market fit, even though this tip comes up every single time when I'm talking to growth person, like, "Wait till you have product market fit before doing growth stuff." So could you just add a little bit of why that's important while we're on that topic? Growth advice is generally always applicable. And if you can start thinking about how to build your product early, even if it's pre-product market fit, you're not going to do any damage, but you may be wasting some capital on an advisor or a growth person too early. The problem that I see is if you start growing a product that doesn't have product market fit, you're actually doing more damage than good because you have a product that is now being exposed to the market through growth levers and through optimization that is giving a bad experience with your product. And you want that product that you know is tight and you know has product market fit to start building the flywheel and start growing. You don't want it to be growing if it doesn't satisfy that need that you're trying to build out for. So I can see it having more damage than good because when somebody tries something, they're unlikely to try it again. And so that's the dangerous game you can get into. So you're better off with a good product that's satisfying a need and then growing from there. I will say to kind of play devil's advocate with myself and something that I've done actually in one of the products, I've built several consumer products and grown them, is that sometimes to know if you have a product, you need users to use it. So there's like some subtlety in here, but I would say if you are trying to get users in to start playing with it at scale, I mean try to focus in on a market that is maybe off the grid. Like pick some English-speaking country that's a bit off the grid that you can isolate your marketing to so you can start getting dozens or a couple hundred people per day coming in and giving you feedback. I've seen that work too. So I'd say wait till you have product market fit. If you do start growing your product early because you need that signal from people actually using it beyond just focus groups and friends or small numbers of people, try to do it off the grid in smaller markets that you can get kind of contain the growth and get what you're really trying to get, which is that signal on is it working or not. Awesome. Okay, I threw us off track. Let's get back on track. So we're talking about when it makes sense to find a growth advisor and then what to look for and so on that you might want to work with.…

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