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Brian Hale

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2022-04-06
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2022-04-06
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  1. “Absolutely. It's been an absolute pleasure. I hope that it's an educational somehow and I really appreciate you taking the time with me today.”

    2022-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I would say I was really impressed with Airbnb, just the way that booking has gotten a lot clearer. It's gotten a lot easier. It's gotten a lot better. So I really impressed what they've done over the last three or four years. Honestly, TikTok has been pretty darn impressive. In the early days, I thought it was really difficult to use and figure out. And now like I always got in there and I was like, okay, it's really hard to create one of these things. It's really confusing. None of these buttons have labels. I have to understand all the swiping. I don't get it. And then I showed up a year and a half later and I was like, oh, like they've actually gotten rid of a lot of the unintuitive things. So TikTok I would put in there as another one where they clearly have embraced this kind of growth mindset and they're doing it.”

    2022-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I like the really boring ones, basically. I love companies like Airbnb. I love companies like Facebook or Google or DoorDash or these kinds of things where they figured out something that people fundamentally want, and then they're just like working on grinding on making it better and better and better. The best growth strategy is you show up a year later and a year later and a year later, and you can feel how the product has gotten better and better and better. Or you'd used it two years ago and you come back again and you're like, wow, this is improved a lot.”

    2022-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Spent the last 14 years to get to the point where almost in everyone in America uses it. 25 years. I mean, these things, if you want to do them and you really want to have amazing, incredible best in the world companies, it takes a long time and it takes just relentlessly getting 1% better every day for over and over again.”

    2022-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “You're communicating to try and bring people back to your product, it's not that complicated, but it is not hacking, relentlessly improving every step along the way and making it truly frictionless and easy. It's really hard. None of those are like hacks, though. I would say the hacks are the kind of spammy stuff. You hacked the thing and then you got all this traffic, but then someone shuts you down later. So I'm always wary of the term growth hack because inherently sort of makes it sound like you're not trying to do this in a sustainable, repeatable way. That's really the way to drive growth over decades. I mean, look at these companies like a Facebook or a Google or a DoorDash. Like they become important. Their overnight successes like in their seventh or eighth year of existence. And then after they're an overnight success, they keep growing. Like look at Amazon. Was it overnight success in like 2007, 10 years into its existence?”

    2022-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I would banish the term growth hacking. So it's not hacking if you're doing it properly. And I would say actually if you're talking about growth hacking, at least a yellow flag, because ultimately, if you're doing it well, what you're doing is you're doing great marketing where you're explaining the value of your thing, and then you're helping people to onboard and realize the value. You're optimizing things to remove all the pain out of the process.”

    2022-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “In the early days of early wildcatting days of social stuff, basically none of the platforms they all were trying these interesting platform things. There were ways to hack those systems and get a whole bunch of traffic really fast. Or Google like the early days of Google SEO where you could spam things and trick the algorithm into giving you the top rankings and stuff. All of that stuff is dead. All the platforms hate that stuff because it makes their product worse. And so they have relentlessly killed that stuff. So I think the lesson in that is I never really did that much of that stuff, but I have a lot of friends who worked at companies who were trying to hack and spam in these kinds of things. And the lesson is like, don't do that stuff because one day if that's your strategy, there's a whole group of people trying to kill what you're doing. You never want your whole like growth strategy to be something.”

    2022-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “The kind of product growth tactics have not changed, buttons mattering, things like optimize your registration funnel, things like notifications, any kind of friction, removing errors, or removing things that confuse the heck out of people or things that are broken. That fundamental making it friction-free and smooth and clear and easy for people, which is really easy to say and really hard to do, has not changed at all. And that will never change.”

    2022-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I think there's a myth that somehow this team is magically somehow better at growth than everyone else. I think the team is just incredibly, incredibly focused and incredibly set up for success. And that is actually replicatable at other companies, but it's actually really hard to replicate because you have to understand, like this whole conversation, there's like 10 or 15 nuances to doing it well. If you don't really understand all of the things that are going into that, it will fail. And so that's why there are a bunch of really successful growth teams out there. But there's a lot of failures. It's because I think fundamentally the people setting it up misunderstood what they were doing. And so then it fails because it was not set up for success or you hired the wrong people”

    2022-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “The new users to twenty friends and be really clear about the thing you want them to go do, that's just a shorthand for like, it's 80% of the value of retention of friending, but it doesn't mean that it suddenly goes to zero at 21. That's absolutely ridiculous. The most important friendship to go get is the first one. So that one is way more important than 19 to 20. The myth kind of then, after a while, becomes a problem. Under 20 friends is high value, and they just try and get everyone high value friends to happen. But actually, it's a curve and it's a smooth curve where the biggest jump is from zero to one and then from one to two, it goes down slightly as a diminishing return curve. So mostly these things are diminishing return curves, and there is no magic moment. It's only an operational thing for the team to help them focus. That's why we talk about this magic moment, not because it actually works that way.”

    2022-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “The myth of the magic moment. Okay, so I would say there is a total myth of the magic moment. Now, I also perpetuate the myth, so I'm partially to blame. But the reason I will say this, so this is really fun and interesting. The reason I say it's a myth is because there's no magic drop off in the graph where all of a sudden someone is 100% retained forever and ever. That's not a real thing. It's a smooth curve. As, you know, like if you look at retention by the number of connections, the number of friends someone finds, it just goes up and up. It continues to go up into the hundreds, two hundred, three hundred, four hundred. It still helps. So there is no like magic moment. The thing was 20 friends and 28 days or something like that. That is a myth, but it's a very useful myth. And the way it's useful is that it gives a team a concrete thing to try and go do. And it's way easier to operationalize for a team.”

    2022-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “We figured out if we can get you to tell us your college, that will help you ramp up. But why? Well, it helps the algorithm figure out who you might be friends with. So”

    2022-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “We changed it to say boost post, and that increased dramatically. I think I said this publicly so I can talk about it. It increased people buying ads by 17%. So just changing the word on the button was a 17% increase. So I didn't really have data. I just had anecdotes. And that one worked out really well. Now that was okay. It was really simple change and very low cost. Another one in Facebook land was we were obsessed with this idea like the onboarding experience and we were trying to come up with all these different ways to try to ramp people up. Now in the end all we had in terms of data was a bunch of people don't ramp up, right? So I don't know. It's not like conclusive data about this problem, that problem. Honestly, that whole effort we did a whole bunch of things in the end, the only thing that really, really mattered was friending. Do you make friends on the platform? That's what mattered. And everything else that kind of mattered ultimately went back to friends.”

    2022-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “So a positive one is one thing that's really interesting about growth is that buttons really matter. So this is often extremely counterintuitive to people, the placement of the button, the color of the button, words on the button matter a lot. In advertiser growth for Facebook, we created a new button so that you could buy an ad directly from a post. The button originally said promote. Now it was a huge success. A lot of people were buying ads from that because it removed a lot of friction. They didn't have to figure out their creative. They already had a creative and they could just turn it into an ad. The mistake we made was that we were thinking about it like an ad but the companies or the small business owners did not know what that meant. They were like, what is a promote? So I didn't have any like data to say that. I just had anecdotal conversations with some people. I was like, look at this amazing new thing. And they were like, what is a promote? I don't understand what you're talking about.”

    2022-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Oh man, I think for the most part you can have a hunch that something might be really important. Sometimes there isn't data to say one way or another, or like to be conclusive. I'll give you like a positive one and I'll give you a negative one.”

    2022-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “It's not but it rhymes, right? It rhymes, but it's not the same. The other is they piss everybody off and they try to plow into everything without building any relationships. That's another way they can really screw it up. They can be set up for failure where they weren't given the resources to do the thing. And then they're like, okay, I found the opportunities. Here's what we need to go do it. But then through some breakdown, like finance isn't funding the engineers or whatever is necessary to do it. That's probably the third biggest fail state.”

    2022-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “I mean, I think if one of those components I talked about is way off. They're not really data oriented and they are assuming the thing that worked at their last company is exactly the same at this company. And they're just doing that. That's a real common fuck up, right? It's because it's like our fail state. That might not be where the drop-off is. The problem might be somewhere else. And if they never bothered to get really intimately familiar with the data and all the steps along the way for the user, they're hitting the wrong target. So one is like you assume it's exactly the same as your last company. I can tell you it's not.”

    2022-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Totally. It's really important. Like also, the growth team folks can't be cocky and pushing on everybody or anything like that. That's not a good environment. So they really have to be very collaborative. And it's really important that your leader has a collaborative attitude. So I think tactically the way to do that is you make sure that the team that if the growth team's coming in working on someone else's code, that team is agreeing to do differ views and check it. So it becomes a back and forth and it's not a one-way street.”

    2022-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Go well. So it really worked at Facebook pretty well because there was a culture that other teams were allowed to touch other people's code. A good friend of mine was working at Growth at Google and they really have a totally different culture about this at Google where it's really hard to go and change anyone else's code if you're not in that department or you're not in that team. And so it's really hard for structurally this concept of a team, like I said, that can go and change whatever they need to change to drive growth. If there's a culture of don't touch my stuff.”

    2022-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Well, you should have started two, three months ago getting all of your others aligned that you're going to do this thing. Because the other way you can mess it up is where everyone else is really insecure or tries to block this from happening. You see this sometimes because of the nature of what I'm talking about. Most companies, they have their boxes. So everyone's used to having their little domain, and the other teams are not really getting in there and trying to mess with their code or change anything about their system. So for this to work, you have to have a culture where everyone knows that this team is going to be trying to grow the whole pie for everybody and add just more fuel behind the engine, right? More people through, more people using. And that means they might need to go and touch. So like if the security team is really, why are you trying to mess with my login flow, right? To our earlier conversation, that's not going to.”

    2022-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Then the main thing is you need to figure out whether this person can be a good leader and a good manager and can manage a team. Because if you're the founder and this isn't your domain, then you need to make sure that they're not only good at growth. The other way I see this fail is you bringing in someone who's like really a hotshot individual contributor, but they're not really a manager or leader, and they've never really had to manage the whole team. And then you like shove them into a situation where they can fail because they've never done that before. I would say you want to up level in terms of also getting someone seasoned who has management experience before has led the teams before. And so that's why often PMs tend to be really good people because that's a large part of the job naturally. There can be other different ways. It's more this management leadership skill set because you need to integrate everybody together.”

    2022-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Yeah, absolutely. One is being really structured about the various things you're going to test them on. So I like to have someone who is really experienced with data test them about data. So like I'll have a whole interview about analytics. Another is give them a gross case study, not usually not the one for the company that actually about. It's usually one where it's sort of neutral ground. It's important not to be biased by your own knowledge, so it's better to look at someone else's app and then have them do like a breakdown. So it'd be like, here's a registration funnel for I don't work at Airbnb, so Airbnb. And then can that person look at step by step? Are they asking for the data that they would need this the right data?”

    2022-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Will be extremely curious. They'll have a lot of questions for you about how the product is doing, of the retention, and all these kinds of things, because they will fundamentally know, in growth, at least, that they don't want to get involved in this situation where they don't product market fit or the companies not actually ready for them to be there because they probably will have ended up in situations where it wasn't very good. And so they have the experience to kind of know that, and they will remove themselves out of the process, or they'll be really excited. The company kind of has a lot of the right pieces in place. The second is they will usually have opinions about how things are doing. I remember interviewing this one woman. She started going through all the flows and started nitpicking all the details, and they were all the right details. And I was like, okay, this person is going to be fantastic, very, very detail-oriented. In growth, it's all about the details.”

    2022-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Always a really terrific investment, but it will fail if you're just thinking about hiring just like the one person. Think about hiring a person who's going to hire a team and set it up the right way. So now you're thinking about it that way. Now, how do you find the person who's going to know how to do that? You really want to make sure that you're asking them, like, how do you think about growth? Does this person ask you about retention at all? Does this person ask you about anything about the team they're going to have? Do they ask you about the state of your data? Are they curious about whether you know anything about your funnel drop-offs or any of these kinds of questions?”

    2022-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Yeah, so I would have two things. The first thing you need to know is you can't just hire a growth professional and then unleash them on your company and expect anything to change. You really need to think about it is if you're going to hire a growth leader, you also need to think about, I need to hire a growth leader and I need to make sure that the resources are there for this leader, the engineering data design, and marketing and marketing budget. It really depends on the particular situation, the particular product in question. You're not hiring a growth professional, you're hiring like a growth team. And you can structure it in a couple different ways. That's less important, but you need to make sure you're thinking full stack. That's a bigger investment for a startup. It's a team maybe that I would use to create my next set of features or go after a whole new market. Now, usually if you have product market fit, extending and growing the penetration of something, that's really hard to get product market fit. So I say it's almost”

    2022-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Well, if they can send them up themselves, but if I'm the founder, I want to know these people who purport to know all about growth are really data people. So I think that is like an interview question.”

    2022-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Little time on understanding what is going on with their product and identifying where the biggest opportunity to improve it is.”

    2022-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “I would say ninety five percent data, very, very tiny amount gut. And this is the other thing that teams really misunderstand. If you're trying to do growth and you don't have a whole bunch of data horsepower one way or another, when we looked for product growth people at Facebook, we tried to find people who knew SQL. You would try to get PM sunoq and you would try to get a lot of data scientists and data engineers in these teams. What you really want to do is you want to find the places where people are getting blocked. So it's a ton of funnel analysis, looking step by step by step by step. It's a ton of going through the flows and looking for anything that could be confusing, cutting it by one place or another, and finding those drops and then coming up with hypotheses based on where the data told you the opportunity is to then try and run experiments. And what a lot of teams do is they jump straight to experiments and they spend way too”

    2022-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “And you should just log them in right then and there on the swap. And people are like, if they're using an Apple DoorDash, they're hungry. And if they just can't log in, they just go make a sandwich. If they're trying to get into Facebook or Instagram and they can't log in, maybe they just decide to watch TV instead or go to TikTok. It's all of these moments in time when someone could get blocked by something. And a lot of these things are highly technical. That's what's kind of counterintuitive about growth. I think a lot of times teams are trying to think of solving their problem to try and increase growth, but their problem is a power user problem, not a marginal user problem. And they're focused on the wrong people.”

    2022-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “To log into your product, making sure they can get in? Heck no, they're not doing that at all. They are like actively trying to block bad guys. One of the teams, and it took us a long time, honestly, Facebook, to really figure out that we needed to have an explicit login team inside growth. But when we did, it was fantastically impactful. Gosh, here's a classic one. You go to do your password and you're like, I can't remember my password. So then you go to like password reset. And we've all done this before. you type in and it's like okay cool i go to my email i get the link and then they're like okay you have to create a new password and you're like okay and then you type it in and what is the damn thing say it says you cannot use your existing password again and you're just like are you effing kidding me just like let them log in that like they're trying to get into they're not actually trying to reset their password they're trying to just get it and now you're saying password”

    2022-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Get in there to sign up, to log in, to open it again, etc. And the truth is that it is way easier to reduce friction and make things easier than it is to increase people's intent. So it's much easier to push on that side. And so when I say a marginal user, I mean the user that you would have lost that's on the margin of not using you at all. And so a lot of what growth is doing, moving people from zero to one. You're like taking it from not using your thing to using your thing and all the things that take you over that way. So I'll take one. People, all companies almost never think about this, but log in. Like login, really important for growth. Most companies put login teams inside of security. So the login team lives inside security team. And what does the security team responsible for? What is their metric? They're responsible for stopping bad guys. So are they obsessed with making all the marginal users who are having struggles?”

    2022-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “So the first thing what companies naturally do once they have product market fit is that they build for themselves. They build for themselves because they're all employees and everyone who uses the product is an employee. And if you work there, then you use it a lot. Companies naturally pivot really hard to building for their power user. And that's because they are their power user by virtue of the fact that they are there working there, right? So that is super, super natural tendency. But what a growth team needs to do is obsessed about marginal users. These are all of the things that get in the way of somebody using the product when they're not, don't really have a ton of intent. So you can think about growth as like there's a curve. On one side, you can increase growth by increasing intent and making the people more interested in your product. And the other thing you can do is make it easier to use. You can make it easier to”

    2022-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Well, I would say with that what you want to do, you really want to make sure that the people who are joining are bought into what they're doing. So I've seen fail states where like a team rally, this is kind of where I was going, but like team rallies and they create a growth team, it kind of comes like top down from somebody, the CEO or the founder or some VP. Or it creates self-spontaneously in some of these bigger companies. None of the people inside that group have any experience doing this. How does a recipe for complete and utter failure? So I would say most of the time when I see these teams fail, there isn't really any one who has done has deep expertise in this sort of thing. A lot of the things that matter are super counterintuitive and we can talk about all the things that are counterintuitive about growth. It's super counterintuitive. So if you're walking in cold, not knowing how it works and you don't have any...”

    2022-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “The notion of the Facebook growth team, and then what happened was we got asked to do advertiser growth. So I don't know if you remember Facebook's disastrous IPO. But it was disastrous. The stock price just completely tanked, the street was like, they're not going to make the shift to mobile. And there was two problems supply of ads and demand of ads. Well, supply of ads was fixed with the creation of newsfeed ads. But then you needed a lot of advertisers to buy that. So then I remember this meeting distinctly getting pulled in and being asked, okay, Mark and Cheryl, they want you to try to do the same thing we did for consumers for advertisers. Can you go make an advertiser growth team? I recall distinctly going, I don't know if it works that way. Like, does it work for advertisers the same way it worked for consumers? And lo and behold, it did, and we were able to massively increase the number of active advertisers from almost no growth to multiple hundred percent growth year on year after one year.”

    2022-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “It really depends on how big you are. I like to think of having a product growth team is you have everyone there that you need to change anything you might need to change. And so I think of it as like a full stack pod. Usually that involves PM. You probably have a data science person. You need design. You need engineers of all the kinds that you're going to work on if you have apps or websites or backend, et cetera. Then if you have sort of like usually I like to start kind of one full stack team and it's important to have it all the functions because you don't want to be blocked on doing the most important thing because you don't have a designer or because you don't have an analyst. So you really want to make sure you have the flexibility to tackle anything that you might need to tackle. But then it all starts with understand. And I think this is like actually the most crucial thing the way that companies who start a growth team screw this up because I saw this a lot at Facebook. So what happened at Facebook was there was”

    2022-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “If you can bring people to your product, then you can have some flow that you can work on improving it and measure your retention. But in the early days, if you don't have retention, all you have is a leaky bucket. And if you try to pour more in that, it's just going to go away. You should focus first and foremost on retention, what I like to call is just that's how you measure product market fit.”

    2022-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “Exactly at what point The point it goes flat at as a percentage of the beginning is how much product market fit you have, okay? That's like how you quantify the amount of product market fit. So I'd say it's kind of like binary. You have product market fit, yes, no. If you're in 1% 2%, I would say that's pretty much zero. There are some products that can survive with that kind of product market fit, but they have to be really expensive because make enough money off of that retention from that small amount that it's worth to keep going. So normally let's take an app or a consumer app or something like that. If you're like north of 10% steady retention, you probably have it there. If you're down in low single digit percentages, you don't have product market fit yet. And so in the early days, what I like to say is you need to have marketing in one form or another. You need to have people coming in to try your product. There's different models. Some teams do it with pay to ads. Some teams do it with really great PR.”

    2022-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Coming back up again, that's called like a smiley curve if it comes back up again. That's really good. But even if it just goes flat, that means you have product market fit.”

    2022-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Market fit is retention. And you can think about it as if you have a product people use it, think about it in terms of cohorts. So in the mathematical way, you can say maybe all the people who started for the first time using my product this month, maybe we take, we're sitting here in March, so we take the month of March or take everyone who started using in March. Now let's follow them forward in time and isolate that group of people who started using the product and let's follow them. How many of them are still using this product on a regular basis in the following months? Often it takes a long time to know whether you have product market fit because you actually need enough time to see whether retention stabilizes. So we call these like J curves. It's basically you graph it from the people who started forward in time and you see what percent of that group is still around. Draw a point on the graph for as long as you need to. And if the graph goes flat or starts”

    2022-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “Yeah, for startups. So this, I would say it really depends on the moment in time for that company. In the very, very early days, the first thing you need to know about having a growth team, I feel really strongly about this. You should not have a growth team set up the way Facebook does or conceptualize it that way until you have product market fit. So I think we have to first talk about what product market fit means before you can have a conversation about should I have a growth”

    2022-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “And so, what that allows the team to do is to be free from most product or various teams around companies are restricted by, which is like the box of the pixels that they work on. So on the proc team, I would say you open up any app, you point at something, you draw a box around it, that's a team. Facebook, you have newsfeed, okay? Newsfeed team. You have groups tab, groups team. You can basically draw teams on the software. The idea of the growth team is that the product is basically a number. Like you're moving the number up from X to Y, and what do you work on? Well, you work on whatever is going to move that number up from X to Y. And you have freedom to figure that out. You have freedom to jump around and do the most important things to change the product outside of the product. And you bring that all together. And over time, you turn that into a whole suite of teams that focus on different inputs. But in the beginning, the real focus is each product is a little different. The things that matter for its growth are”

    2022-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “The first one I would say people think about the innovations of Facebook like the social graph or newsfeed or inventions like that. But a lot of the things that Facebook did that really, really mattered were like sort of organizational innovations or inventions about how the company was set up. So when I arrived at Facebook, there was already this notion of a growth team. It was pretty small. I arrived and I was like, oh, this is what I do. It's like a blend of marketing stuff, email and channel stuff integrated with product and it's all like considered one sort of thing altogether integrated and working as one. That was something that Facebook sort of figured out very early on. So I arrived and I was like, wow, I didn't know what I did was called growth. The power of this is that you have a team and the team's product is a number. It is a number.”

    2022-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “Yeah, so I was Facebook for 10 years. What happened was this guy Gokul Rajram. He was at Google. He started up AdSense at Google. And he stopped that and did a startup and I was helping him out with that when I was doing a startup before Facebook. Then he jumped into Facebook and he pulled me in, introduced me to this guy Alex Schultz, who's now like has the weirdest job ever. I think he's CMO head of data science and head of product growth. And weirdest job in the planet, but he's a ridiculously smart guy. So somehow I joined him. That's all because of Gokul. Bring up Gokul because Gokul works at DoorDash too. So when I was looking for my next adventure, I talked to Gokul and somehow I just fell down the rabbit hole.”

    2022-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “And he's like, How old are you? And I was like, oh, I'm 17. You hired my brother. And he's like, are you an engineer? And I said, No. And he said, send me your resume, which is Canadian for no, right? But I didn't know that. So this is the beauty of being young and naive. So I put together my resume and I put all these jobs on there. I had a news delivery technician. It was a tech company. So I was like, it's got to be technical sounding jobs. News delivery technician, marine ceramic technologist, culinary preparation engineer. He calls me back. He goes, okay, so you're a cook. You were a paperboy. What the heck is a marine ceramic technologist? And I was like, oh, that's a dishwasher. And he thought that was hilarious. So he gave me a job. I turn up and he's like, hey, the guy who's figuring out search engines is going to go get us a new office. Can you take over the search engine stuff? And I was like, okay, so that was Altavista and Hotbot back in 1999. And Google wasn't even really a thing. That's how I started doing actually growth and tech. And it started right from the beginning when I was 17 years old.”

    2022-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “I'm really super weird, dude. Everything about me is a total outlier. The first thing you need to know is I didn't go to college. I didn't drop out. I just didn't go. But it was totally not on purpose. It was just a complete accident. In high school, I figured out that my high school had this international baccalaureate program. And if you got into it, but then you switched out of it into honors, you could figure out your schedule so you had no class in the last semester of high school. And I figured this out in grade ten and I thought this was really funny. So I just did that and then I got to December and it was like, okay, there's no class. And I was like, oh crap, what do I do? And at that time, my brother, he's a software engineer. He got hired at this company in Victoria, British Columbia called ACDC. They made like the software used to watch videos and images on your Windows 95 desktop computer. But basically, I called up this guy and I was like, you should hire me.”

    2022-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “You so much, it's great to be here. You just do a terrific job on this program, so I'm flattered to be invited, to be honest, and I'm really excited. So let's do it. Let's go.”

    2022-04-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source