Originally Published on December 2, 2015 on LinkedIn. Updated: August 8, 2018 During the early days of a start-up, the focus is typically on user growth. I.e., getting more people using and enjoying their product or service. A lot of times, this is done by offering the product for free…

Proper processes are key to ensuring things are done in an efficient manner. They should scale with your organization — as you grow in headcount, the more you typically need. Further, mission-critical tasks that have to occur regularly should also have strong processes around them as well. But with that…

The early days of a start-up are rough. Days are filled with scrambling for funding, users, and the ever-elusive product-market fit (i.e. PMF for you hipsters). A lot has been written about how you can tell whether you have PMF or not (e.g. would 40% of users be upset if…

In sports, the one thing that is harder than winning a championship is defending it. When you become a champion, you also become a target for all the other teams. In business, success will always attract competitors. There will always be those that want to take your place, disrupt your…

We hear it all the time: Network Effects are the Holy Grail of Growth. For the uninitiated, network effects speak to the improvement of a service or product experience as more people use it. A common example of this is the phone system. The phone experience would be terrible if…

Every now and then, I run into someone who has a great idea for a startup but isn’t ready to share it because someone may steal his or her idea. Uh huh. Secrets There are a lot of secrets in the world. We don’t openly share a lot of information…

Nir Eyal’s Hook model is pretty popular these days within Growth Hacking circles. The model goes something like this: Trigger the user to do something The user does something The user is rewarded for his/her action The user commits to the product The end result is that the product plays…

There’s a lot of information out there around how to build a growth engine, how to organize for growth, how to hire for the skills required for growth, etc. But the one area that there doesn’t seem to be a lot of guidance around is about how to actually start…

For those of us in conversion rate optimization (CRO), we’ve all been there: suffering from a leak in the conversion funnel. Perhaps users are bouncing off the landing page, or not submitting their email address, or falling off in the buy-flow, or getting mixed up by the payment process. Whatever…