YouSaid · the spoken record

Archie Abrams

lines on the record
83
first
2024-11-07
most recent
2024-11-07
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “So, yeah, so at the highest level, we think about that total cohort value, right? We bring in a set of merchants in a given year. How much, GMV, how much that set of merchants worth over the next three, four years to Shopify, right? And that's the most important thing that we want to focus on. And then that, of course, from an efficiency standpoint, that, of course, meeting our payback guardrails and all of that. So that's kind of like the macro growth perspective cohort value.”

    2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “We build a choine to make those support advisors kind of. Superheroes. And then on the help center, all of our AI stuff to make kind of a great customer experience for people who are just engaging in a self-serve. So it's the tooling and the experience for merchants.”

    2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Group sits within growth because we want to think about customer support as part of this merchant journey of coming on, giving entrepreneurship a try all the way through to here's the support I need as I'm becoming a multi-billion dollar business on Shopify. So those are like the three big growth product buckets and then within growth marketing, the more traditional channel setup paid all the different channels online, offline, SEO, email and affiliates.”

    2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Growth RD, three pillars. One is what we call growth products. And so this is basically everything from kind of landing pages, sign up, onboarding, monetization, so trial incentives, the like, all the way through to what we call our home feed, our engagement to basically get more merchants. Again, to retain, but to keep giving entrepreneurship a try to become bigger and bigger businesses. So that's growth product, kind of the full life cycle there. Second is what we call our enable pillar. And this pillar is building tools for both growth and the rest of Shopify. So things like experimentation platform or communication platform of our business intelligence tooling that powers a lot of what we're doing, our Martech work to support our growth marketing team. And then our third bucket, which is maybe a little different from most growth teams, is actually our customer support.”

    2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Two big groups within growth. So one is what we call growth RD. So this might be, you traditionally consider like product design engineering data, your traditional product teams. Then we have growth marketing, which in Shopify's case is paid acquisition, media buying, affiliate marketing, email, content, and SEO. So that's kind of like growth R&D, growth marketing.”

    2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Bunch of people, a conversion rate. I just want more people to get activated. And then once you start thinking that way, you realize actually the best way to get more people to get to a step, sometimes and often is just get more people in the door in the first place. So make it easier to sign up or reduce friction. It's the opposite, right? And so that will always hurt your conversion rate, but it may actually give you more people on the outside. And a lot of teams get very nervous, retention rate went down, their LTV went down. Oh my goodness, this is going to affect our ability to pay. No, your CAC also went down by probably more. And so now you have the ability to likely spend more. And you have more people through the door getting to each point in the activation or the immersion journey.”

    2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “But in practice, I talked about it's actually almost always easier to just make it harder to do the thing right before your step in the funnel to increase your conversion rate. If I make it harder to sign up, it's going to be very easy to increase sign up to activated rate because I just have fewer people and the people who made it through are higher intent. And so I see teams get really stuck when they're trying to optimize conversion rate, but they just make it harder to do the previous thing versus everyone is thinking about absolute number of people who made it through their, quote, stage of the funnel. So instead of, I'm trying to convert”

    2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Yeah, I think one of the things that happens, particularly in a large, and Shabai score authority is about 600 folks, like when you have teams naturally break up the world into different funnel stages or different points in the journey, it gets very seductive to look at my part of the funnel and what's my conversion rate through that part of the funnel. And then the team starts to optimize for that conversion rate as their North Star over a longer time period. I'm going to try to move my conversion rate from 10 to 12% or what have you.”

    2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Totally. So things like trial, trial dynamics, trial length, trial amount, it means incentives. So what is in your product? What do people value and need in order to be successful? So in Shopify's case, that might be like App Store credits or things like that. But those are the two forms of monetary friction we talk about. And then, of course, actual price point. But that's what the kind of the larger bucket of monetary friction is.”

    2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “In terms of getting people set up versus do the, I'm going to constrict the funnel step right before me to make my local conversion rate look better, which is. Bane of my existence, but something I see a lot of teams implicitly or explicitly do when they get too focused on rates as a way to think about the world.”

    2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “I think the big thing about all of our metrics is We get very nervous about is the easiest way to increase retention is always to constrict the funnel stage one above the retention metric you're trying to optimize for. The simplest way to increase my sign up to activated thing is just make it harder to sign up and bolts that will always happen. It's when you have teams on that kind of like local conversion rates you kind of get all these weird team incentives is they're optimizing to basically implicitly make it harder to do the step before them. And because we focus on that long term GMV number emerges who are successful orienting every team to think about the total number of people, not the rate, but the total number of people who got to the end of their kind of part of the journey is a very powerful way to incentivize people to do the right thing.”

    2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “The nuts and bolts of get more information from folks, build trust in there, give them the right amount of guidance when they come on in a personalized way. And that may sound like, okay, that's kind of obvious, but the amount of impact by just nailing those flows has never ceased to amaze me and setting up that person for long-term success. kind of monetary friction and then just really good onboarding personalization A well of opportunities there”

    2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Going back, there's always a lot of value in thinking through. Of monetary friction, as I mentioned, that's always going to be something to explore trial dynamics, different types of incentives, all those things are very kind of impactful. I would say on things that are maybe more practical for everyone, there's an enormous amount. And we do see these with long-term effects, but just the nuts and bolts of sign up, collecting the right information. And you usually want to collect more information than most people think you do in your sign-up flow if you can leverage that to personalize the guidance. And this is for a SaaS product, the guidance that someone can get when they onboard into Shopify. So whether you're coming on Shopify is a very diverse product, in-person selling, online selling, different channels.”

    2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “GFE over time, which quarrelling. Better. And there's a retention than profit. And then really the absolute number of merchants who are on the platform and then reaching certain GI.”

    2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Two things. We have two layers of holdouts. So one is the more of the holdouts of every change in a quarter holdout 5% across the board. Second is for changes that only affect new merchants, what we'll do is we'll take that group of folks that's called a 50-50 split and then run that for a few weeks. And then what we're doing at the long-term effects is we actually ship the winner to 100%, but we're looking at the cohort of folks who was assigned to the experiment were going back and looking at those people who are signed a year later. So it allows us to still ship, get stuff out, but we've kind of held the experiment in a way that allows us to see those long-term effects just for the cohort that was exposed. Not only works if you're doing it on new users for existing, it's a little more complicated. That's okay. And then in our experimentation tools, all experimenters are paying that three months, six months, nine months, 12 months with here are the updated results”

    2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Do that. And if you can't, you know what I would say still, you should just bet on if something is showing lift up funnel, still ship it. And it's probably not going to hurt you, but don't overestimate the amount of impact that this is having. So it's funny like two things here is like don't like my recommendation folks is don't think, oh my goodness, I have to wait all this time. If you didn't move the upper, the short-term impact, you're not going to have the long-term lift. Still ship if it's short term lift. Just be reasonable that if you can measure it longer term, you'll get better at identifying what things are that are really impactful.”

    2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “I mean, I think at the end of the day, that is going to be the most effective, and you actually learn the most. I think it is, though, even in shorter term horizons. Really being as specific as you can be about what are the early signs of success in your product in making sure you instrument those and then making sure particularly kind of upfunnel experiments, you are actually looking at those the further downstream metrics to make sure you have some understanding of what's moving down. So as deep as you can go in the funnel for as long as you can wait.”

    2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “You think about in a business case, if I give you a little less, a little monetary boost and reduce that monetary friction, I can actually causally change your ability to become successful. Because I've given you a little bit more time to try that idea a little bit longer. I've given you that opportunity to move your business over to Shopify. And so often in those types of experiments, you see that you've basically unlocked a class of people who might have given up. Without that monetary, reducing that monetary friction.”

    2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “I think a lot of this has to do with. We call it monetary friction, right? So one of the hardest things to do with the business is when you're getting started is you might not have any revenue coming in, right? And you're kind of bootstrapping, which in Shopify's case might be $39 a month, but it's still, it's a real expense. And so typically when you can lower the barriers to monetary friction in some form, that could be all sorts of monetary friction early. The common belief is that we'll usually get lower quality folks coming in the door because usually discounts are associated with lower quality.”

    2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “That are actually extremely valuable entrepreneurs who go on to be successful that you missed in your kind of normal short term. Measurement techniques. And so kind of all across the board, we see that. But actually, the most common is it actually isn't a long term lift from a lot of things that you might think of the short-term R.”

    2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “I think there's probably two things that have been very common. And I would say in quite a few cases, you get a short, you get a lift on a metric up front, a more short-term metric, number of people who become a paying shop or number of people who make their first sale in Shopify's. And then you look a year later. There's actually no incremental lift on GMV from that cohort. And so I think it actually trains a lot of us in growth or looking at these short-term metrics. A lot of the time it is actually more pull forward effect than you fully, fully So this effect size goes away. There are cases where the experiment has flipped the other way. And then there are cases, and these are the most interesting ones where you realize that you uncovered a pocket of merchants.”

    2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Correct. And I mean, on growth, we're definitely in the, you know, we want to drive metrics on a short term basis, and we can do that, obviously. But we have the luxury and just the way kind of Toby kind of thinks about the world and the way we operate to really think about these long-term effects and make sure that we're holding ourselves accountable with these long-term holdouts and then constantly refining the input metrics that we're using and getting a lot smarter about that. But because we take that long horizon, it allows us to be better in the short term and just get a lot smarter and a lot of counterintuitive things. And I would encourage everyone, if you can, look at some of the experiments that you thought were your biggest winners. Look at the downtree metrics for a year, two years on that experiment. And I'll bet you'd be surprised how many times the metric is different than what you thought it would be after a year.”

    2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Was different than we might have originally thought. And that would actually change. We do from that previous experiment. And so there's a lot of long term monitoring of experiments over these very long time horizons to both inform what those input metrics are, more importantly, hold ourselves accountable to that we actually move what we cared about, which is that long-term GMV in the right way.”

    2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Three major product groups at Shopify there's core product, which is basically building the 100 year the right things for commerce 100 years from now. There is merchant services, which is building things like payments, shipping, kind of the tools that entrepreneurs need to be successful with a more kind of shorter medium-term horizon. And then growth is really thinking about that end-to-end customer journey. How can we bring folks on and make sure they're successful? And then from a metric standpoint, We do have some obviously some leading indicators and growth that we're looking at on a given experiment or what have you. But the key in what we try to instrument in our experimentation is the ability to really look at long-term effects of experiments. So we have constantly will re-look at an experiment a year later, see that the way the GMV curve or the distribution”

    2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Yeah. So it's interesting. I think Shopify, we kind of very purposely set up different parts of the org to think on very different time horizons and with very different ways of thinking about how to build product and the like. Very different than a lot of companies that typically have maybe one kind of unified, there's one North Star that the entire company is rallying around. And so”

    2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Is thinking about a coordinative users we acquire in a given time period, say a quarter. And then over the next year, two years, three years, four years, five years, how much GMV have those merchants produced in total? Not about per merchant basis, but in total, did that cohort generate GMV? And if they generate GMV, that will translate into revenue and gross profit and all of those things that we can then use to reinvest in growing the business. So it's really looking at the total value, but on that GMV basis and GMV is a power law-based metric. And so it's really that power law that drives the success of each cohort. Again, going back to investing, same thing there. Each vintage from a fund, how much that return kind of is a fund that is really driven by the few really successful outliers.”

    2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Yes, try it and have it been first discussed. You can think of the other parallel is an angel investing, right? Most of angel investments are not going to work out, but the couple that do make that entire investment kind of portfolio successful.”

    2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “That definitely has some dynamics. I think the bigger factor is the monetization model. For most SaaS companies, they're making from a subscription, right? They're paying $29 a month is the only way that they're going to really monetize. Whereas our business works, you have folks who are paying a subscription. But as folks get bigger, because we're monetizing on that GMV that that merchant is producing or the revenue the merchant is producing in the form of payments and other services. Allows us to grow with the merchant in those really successful merchants, make the whole system work well”

    2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Correct. And that's really kind of a different insight than most SaaS companies that they get discussed where they really never want that person to leave. And we want to lower that barriers to get started and be successful.”

    2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Payments, which is tied directly to a merchant's success. So in a given cohort of merchants, a lot of people will start. Some of those people on their first attempt is entremership might not succeed, but the folks who do go on to be successful will kind of make that entire cohort of merchants. Help folks grow and those winners make the whole thing work.”

    2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “The way we think about church, really going back to Shopify as a kind of our mission and what we want to do, which is to increase the amount of entrepreneurship on the internet. And so as a business, we want to make it as easy as possible to get started with your online store, with your business. But most businesses do ultimately fail. And so the way we look at it is, can we lower the barriers to getting started and get as many people in the door trying their hand at entrepreneurship? If we do that, again, many of those businesses, many of those folks will maybe on their first attempt not be as successful, but we're going to have a set of merchants who go on to become extremely big businesses, the Alberts of the world, figs, etc. And the way the Shopify business model works is we do charge a subscription, but most of our revenue comes from”

    2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Yeah, absolutely. So overall, we're about 10% of e-commerce in the United States. So basically, if you're not buying on Amazon or Walmart, you're probably buying on a Shopify powered store. And behind the scenes, globally, we did about 235 billion in GMV in 2023, which is roughly the size of the economy of Finland. So we got a big economy and big impact happening from Shopify.”

    2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “When you have teams naturally break up the world into different funnel stages or different points in the journey, it gets very seductive to look at my part of the funnel and what's my conversion rate through that part of the funnel, right? And then the team starts to optimize for that conversion rate as their North Star. But in practice, it's actually almost always easier to just make it harder to do the thing right before your step in the funnel to increase your conversion rate. Instead of I'm trying to convert a bunch of people, I just want more people to get activated. And then once you start thinking that way, you realize actually the best way to get more people to get to a step is just get more people in the door in the first place. That will always hurt your conversion rate, but it may actually give you more people on the outside.”

    2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source