I'm excited to share a new growth framework that @danhockenmaier and I have been developing (with help from the amazing @reforge crew)
I've been finding myself coming back to this framework often when talking to founders about growth.
Thread
2. 💥 Turbo boosts: One-off events that accelerate growth temporarily but don’t last (e.g. PR, events, Super Bowl ads)
4. ⛽ Fuel: The input that your engine requires to run (e.g. capital, content, users).
Companies grow primarily through four possible Growth Engines:
• Performance marketing: FB, AdWords, TV, etc.
• Virality: Word-of-mouth, referrals, inviting friends, etc.
• Content: SEO, shareable videos, or newsletters, etc.
• Sales: Salespeople
• Uber/Lyft: Virality + Performance marketing
• Snapchat: Virality
• Zoom: Virality + Sales
• Slack: Virality + Sales
• Salesforce: Sales
https://t.co/djWwLzhqOk
Next, we have Turbo Boosts. Similar to a turbocharger in a car, these are tactics that can accelerate growth for a period of time but don’t deliver ongoing acceleration. They include things like:
• PR
• Events
• Brand marketing campaigns
Third, we have lubricants. Lubricants don’t drive growth directly, but instead optimize the efficiency of your engine. Also, without enough lubrication, your engine will stop. There are 3 broad categories of lubricants:
• Conversion
• Activation
• Retention
https://t.co/MlrmElVjF0
Finally, we have Fuel. Without it, even the most optimized engine won’t run. The type of fuel required is specific to the type of growth engine you’re running:
• Paid marketing and sales engines primarily need capital, which can be invested in ads or salespeople
• Content engines unsurprisingly need more content, which can be used to attract users.
• Viral engines require only more users, who in turn refer additional users.
Huge shout-out to @bbalfour and @onecaseman for their help with this post, and to my brother-from-another-mother @danhockenmaier
https://t.co/ZGW1qWT5zC
More from Lenny Rachitsky
Earlier today, I gave a talk at the @SubstackInc's writer conference about building a writing habit. Below are the ten concrete strategies I shared that have helped me publish a post every week for 1.5 years 👇
0/ First of all, just sharing advice about this topic gives me serious impostor syndrome because writing is still pretty new to me, and I have much to learn. But these are things that have helped me, and I hope they'll help you.
1/ Strategy 1: Commit publicly
This was maybe 50% of my initial motivation. Having told people I was going to write weekly made me feel bad when even thinking about skipping a week. It gave me just enough nudge to keep
1b/ You don't need to make this super public. Just sending an email to a few friends regularly with your concrete goals about writing (and anything else) works wonders.
1c/ If you *really* want to be motivated, ask people for money. Nothing motivates you more than people paying you for regular
0/ First of all, just sharing advice about this topic gives me serious impostor syndrome because writing is still pretty new to me, and I have much to learn. But these are things that have helped me, and I hope they'll help you.
1/ Strategy 1: Commit publicly
This was maybe 50% of my initial motivation. Having told people I was going to write weekly made me feel bad when even thinking about skipping a week. It gave me just enough nudge to keep
I'm kicking off an experiment. Inspired by the great @joulee, and building off of the great inbound questions I continue to get from ya'll -- I\u2019m going to start using my newsletter to answer your questions. \U0001f44b
— Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) September 12, 2019
Sign up belowhttps://t.co/z1F1efMcue
1b/ You don't need to make this super public. Just sending an email to a few friends regularly with your concrete goals about writing (and anything else) works wonders.
1c/ If you *really* want to be motivated, ask people for money. Nothing motivates you more than people paying you for regular
Life alert: I\u2019m adding a paid plan to my newsletter \U0001f91e
— Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) April 7, 2020
After much prodding from readers and friends, I\u2019m going to take the leap and give this life-path a shot.
Consider subscribing and joining me on this journey \U0001f64fhttps://t.co/gtFm4POGSQ
Matt Mochary has been CEO coach to @naval, the founders of OpenAI, Notion, Rippling, Robinhood, Coinbase, Reddit, Plaid, Flexport, Opendoor, partners at Sequoia, YC, Benchmark, and many others.
He also open-sourced his entire curriculum, templates and all. Here's a link 👇
The Mochary Method Curriculum ➔ https://t.co/A8J51IzYhz
My recent conversation with @mattmochary where we talk about fear, anger, innovation, how to lay people off well, and his coaching practice ➔
Also in podcast form ➔
For more from Matt, buy this book
He also open-sourced his entire curriculum, templates and all. Here's a link 👇
The Mochary Method Curriculum ➔ https://t.co/A8J51IzYhz
My recent conversation with @mattmochary where we talk about fear, anger, innovation, how to lay people off well, and his coaching practice ➔
Also in podcast form ➔
For more from Matt, buy this book
The most sophisticated growth team no one talks about: @WishShopping
1. The #1 shopping app in 40+ countries
2. Rumored to often be the #1 spender on FB and Google
3. 2 million items sold daily
I sat down with @cplimon to learn about the notoriously secretive company. Read on 👇
1/ Your brand constraint is Wish's opportunity
Wish's superpower is leaving no room for taste or opinion. It's what happens when a machine builds a company based on data. The founder didn't plan to sell cheap goods to low-socioeconomic customers, but where the data took him.
"Until you work at a place like Wish, you don't know what data-driven is. Everyone else is data-driven when it's convenient, when it agrees with your opinions. Wish is great at ignoring their own emotions. It's data-driven with as much intellectual honesty as possible."
For example
2/ Differentiate by serving the under-served
Most of Wish’s initial sales came from places like Florida, greater LA county, and middle-America. Specifically, zip codes with 95% Spanish speakers. Later, Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe (avg household income $18,000/year)
1. The #1 shopping app in 40+ countries
2. Rumored to often be the #1 spender on FB and Google
3. 2 million items sold daily
I sat down with @cplimon to learn about the notoriously secretive company. Read on 👇
1/ Your brand constraint is Wish's opportunity
Wish's superpower is leaving no room for taste or opinion. It's what happens when a machine builds a company based on data. The founder didn't plan to sell cheap goods to low-socioeconomic customers, but where the data took him.
"Until you work at a place like Wish, you don't know what data-driven is. Everyone else is data-driven when it's convenient, when it agrees with your opinions. Wish is great at ignoring their own emotions. It's data-driven with as much intellectual honesty as possible."
For example
cursed wish ads pic.twitter.com/eMlx4LqgKA
— big meaty claws (@leisurepIex) June 4, 2019
2/ Differentiate by serving the under-served
Most of Wish’s initial sales came from places like Florida, greater LA county, and middle-America. Specifically, zip codes with 95% Spanish speakers. Later, Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe (avg household income $18,000/year)
More from Tech
I think about this a lot, both in IT and civil infrastructure. It looks so trivial to “fix” from the outside. In fact, it is incredibly draining to do the entirely crushing work of real policy changes internally. It’s harder than drafting a blank page of how the world should be.
I’m at a sort of career crisis point. In my job before, three people could contain the entire complexity of a nation-wide company’s IT infrastructure in their head.
Once you move above that mark, it becomes exponentially, far and away beyond anything I dreamed, more difficult.
And I look at candidates and know-everything’s who think it’s all so easy. Or, people who think we could burn it down with no losses and start over.
God I wish I lived in that world of triviality. In moments, I find myself regretting leaving that place of self-directed autonomy.
For ten years I knew I could build something and see results that same day. Now I’m adjusting to building something in my mind in one day, and it taking a year to do the due-diligence and edge cases and documentation and familiarization and roll-out.
That’s the hard work. It’s not technical. It’s not becoming a rockstar to peers.
These people look at me and just see another self-important idiot in Security who thinks they understand the system others live. Who thinks “bad” designs were made for no reason.
Who wasn’t there.
The tragedy of revolutionaries is they design a utopia by a river but discover the impure city they razed was on stilts for a reason.
— SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) June 19, 2016
I’m at a sort of career crisis point. In my job before, three people could contain the entire complexity of a nation-wide company’s IT infrastructure in their head.
Once you move above that mark, it becomes exponentially, far and away beyond anything I dreamed, more difficult.
And I look at candidates and know-everything’s who think it’s all so easy. Or, people who think we could burn it down with no losses and start over.
God I wish I lived in that world of triviality. In moments, I find myself regretting leaving that place of self-directed autonomy.
For ten years I knew I could build something and see results that same day. Now I’m adjusting to building something in my mind in one day, and it taking a year to do the due-diligence and edge cases and documentation and familiarization and roll-out.
That’s the hard work. It’s not technical. It’s not becoming a rockstar to peers.
These people look at me and just see another self-important idiot in Security who thinks they understand the system others live. Who thinks “bad” designs were made for no reason.
Who wasn’t there.
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To people who are under the impression that you can get rich quickly by working on an app, here are the stats for https://t.co/az8F12pf02
📈 ~12000 vistis
☑️ 109 transactions
💰 353€ profit (285 after tax)
I have spent 1.5 months on this app. You can make more $ in 2 days.
🤷♂️
I'm still happy that I launched a paid app bcs it involved extra work:
- backend for processing payments (+ permissions, webhooks, etc)
- integration with payment processor
- UI for license activation in Electron
- machine activation limit
- autoupdates
- mailgun emails
etc.
These things seemed super scary at first. I always thought it was way too much work and something would break. But I'm glad I persisted. So far the only problem I have is that mailgun is not delivering the license keys to certain domains like https://t.co/6Bqn0FUYXo etc. 👌
omg I just realized that me . com is an Apple domain, of course something wouldn't work with these dicks
📈 ~12000 vistis
☑️ 109 transactions
💰 353€ profit (285 after tax)
I have spent 1.5 months on this app. You can make more $ in 2 days.
🤷♂️
I'm still happy that I launched a paid app bcs it involved extra work:
- backend for processing payments (+ permissions, webhooks, etc)
- integration with payment processor
- UI for license activation in Electron
- machine activation limit
- autoupdates
- mailgun emails
etc.
These things seemed super scary at first. I always thought it was way too much work and something would break. But I'm glad I persisted. So far the only problem I have is that mailgun is not delivering the license keys to certain domains like https://t.co/6Bqn0FUYXo etc. 👌
omg I just realized that me . com is an Apple domain, of course something wouldn't work with these dicks
