YouSaid · the spoken record

Darius Contractor

lines on the record: 53
first: 2022-05-18
most recent: 2022-05-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Meetings, especially in this remote work world. So I think it's kind of under reflected on viral opportunity that's still really prescient today.”
2022-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pretty recently, I've talked to some interesting companies that actually use the calendar as a growth vector. Obviously, when you're flexed about it, but a lot of these B2B SaaS companies that grow through a PLG like product-led growth motion, at the end of the day, one person has to use it. They share it with another person who then uses it, who shares it with another person, et cetera, et cetera. And so there's examples like Dropbox and Slack and others who do it. And then one of the key examples is, you know, Zoom. You and I first were introduced to Zoom, almost certainly through someone sending us a Zoom link that we kind of hesitantly clicked on. And then we had to install some software, which is weird. And then we fell in love with Zoom and we shared it with our friends in the same way. And that's really kind of a calendar meeting level of virality. That's also shared by on a lower level, like a company like Warmley, like automatically updates your calendar to have links to people's LinkedIn and just some interesting info so you can get to know them a little bit before without doing manual searches. And it really is like a fundamental viral mechanism of like meeting people through calendar entries and one to one.”
2022-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This perception that growth is separate from product and marketing, that it's its own skill that's maybe not completely trusted, or that it's a lot of hacks, just like sending more email, more notifications. And really, as I was saying, it's a third circle in the Venn diagram. It's really trying to take this mindset of the marketing goals of growing the site and the product and engineering tools and capabilities to change the product itself and having this overlapping merging of marketing, product engineering, data, and user psychology and bring that all together to really make an amazing delightful experience that serves the user in an even more nuanced way that then leads to results. So this idea that growth is like a separate discipline, I think doesn't help as much as saying that growth is actually an interesting integration of other disciplines and a refinement of the detail with which they're applied that can really apply to anyone. And that's why you see growth product and growth marketing as emerging disciplines in different companies.”
2022-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do see founders trying to do this bolt on growth thing where they say, hey, the whole company set up just the way I want. Everyone says I need growth. I'm going to hire you, put you in a corner, and expect you to double revenue. That is really hard because as we talked about earlier, growth often overlaps with product team and the marketing team. You need to collaborate closely with them. And as we saw earlier, there are data needs to growth. They need to have that data infrastructure to understand what's going on and how to optimize it. And growth is hard. Like it's taking something that was some other person's more or less best idea for how something should work and improving upon it in a statistically valid way. That's hard and takes time. So oftentimes I see people not giving the growth team as much integration, personnel support, and time they need to really make an impact. I sometimes think of the growth team like a laser. Like they can do amazing, very accurate, very powerful work, but just like with a laser, you need to hold them on a given point for a long time.”
2022-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think Andrew Chan has this interesting blog post or reflection that I've growth, the weird thing about it is you really can't control it if you're in a hot air balloon everything's rising right now and it's not something you did or can't control it's just things are going up and so it's really this kind of updraft that like helps your company and what is to be celebrated but because it's not controllable you're not able to always direct it not able always to reproduce it when you want so in many ways I see that as just kind of a tailwind that's moving your business forward but you really need to make sure that you optimize your experience within it and”
2022-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think one interesting thing affecting a lot of growth that I've seen, especially where I sit in growth, is that some of these kind of macro volume growth techniques don't apply as well to a lot of the hot businesses of today. So for instance, the way you grow Facebook is very different than the way you grow Snowflake, even though both are incredibly valuable businesses. And a lot of it comes down to two factors. Volume, like how many people are on the site and how many transactions you have and intent. If you have low intent, high volume, you can very quickly kind of direct the river to another place. If you have high intent and low volume, you have kind of this job of convincing a small number of people to do a drastically different action. And that's quite a bit harder because high intent people are less easily convinced by like moving a button around. You really need to give them a lot more information. So I think this high volume AB testing growth is a little less focal, optimizing for the users on a lower volume basis is incredibly important for a lot of the successful startups today.”
2022-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's still the case. There's this kind of viral is one of the best ways to grow SEO is a fantastic way to grow. Paid is like a scalable way to grow as kind of like the one, two, three of cheap and scalable until more expensive and scalable. And so still, if you can get a product viral, that's amazing. It's a little bit harder now than it was, though.”
2022-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the wrong way. And so that's the way I kind of think about it for teams. You also do need to make sure you have a long enough mandate from leadership that you really have six months or a year to test and learn. That's also a failure mode of growth teams where they're expected to simply make a few front-end tweaks and like double revenue in three months.”
2022-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's one of those things where you have to look at the bigger picture. I mean, growth teams do need to deliver win on some cadence, and you can use it to say, look, we need some more wins in the future, and let's keep motoring on this. It's also the case that oftentimes the first six months of a growth team will really be setting up infrastructure and starting to get initial learnings. Those learnings will tell you all the wrong direction such that you can find the right directions. Kind of like Edison says after his thousandths light bulb attempt, like I found a thousand ways that it won't work. And that in some ways shrinks search space for finding the ways that will work. A little bit you need to come with some kind of like hope of previous stories or previous experiences where you found a bunch of failure ways that got you to the right way. And really what it is, is the team is learning how users think about the product and what works for this particular product. And each time you fail, you effectively get like a reverse vector. If you're failing because you went more technical, maybe the next experiment can be less technical. And that actually gives you like reverse vectors that you can then test because you've effectively found a way to move the needle. You just move.”
2022-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It can be. I mean, growth experiments can sometimes be a little bit more capped, and they're against a backdrop. The way in which it's similar, I'll say there's an amazing way that growth experiments can multiply each other. You might have a growth experiment that just gets you like a 1% win. And you're kind of like, who cares? And then you have another experiment that gets you a 1% win, and it's a who cares. But if you know anything about compound interest, as you add up those percentages and they multiply each other being on different parts of the flow or somehow additive or multiplicative really, it can add up very quickly. 10 plus 10 plus 10 plus 10 isn't just like the sum of it, it's the multiply of like 1.1 times that number of things. Really, it can get to double classer than you think.”
2022-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You end up learning when you're wrong. You end up learning which of your gut feels are really going to lead you astray and which of them are actually commensurate with real value in the market. So for instance, I used to overinvest in kind of silly social products or just things that people I know were doing. And now I have a little more refining quality of is this person the right match for this company? And is this company something that's really valuable to the market right now? And that really defines my investing more than has in the past.”
2022-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's really interesting. In some ways, investing in growth are very similar. In both cases, you need to use your head, your heart, and your relationships to make a, frankly, likely to fail decision about 70% of growth experiments fail. And people say about 50% of company investments fail. And so it's one of those things where really it's kind of majority failure and it's a question of finding ones that when they succeed are going to be big enough to make up for all the failures, if you will, pay for all the failures. I actually invested in Calm and Airtable early because I love the product. And at the time, I didn't actually fully understand how universal they would be. And the more growth I've done, the better I feel about investing. There's this idea of achieving a threshold of knowing well enough that this is worth your time and kind of going for it in growth because you never really know whether growth experiment is going to work until you try it. And the same with an investment. You don't really know whether team's going to succeed at the early stages when you usually invest, when you start an investing. You really just never know. And because of that, you need to have some threshold of like knowing well enough before you pull the trigger. Over time, I think with both.”
2022-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Forgiveness 40% of the time and then permission 60%. So mostly you should be on board with the team, but occasionally, yeah, you want to be a little bit that loose canon who delivers amazing results.”
2022-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the one that kind of comes up for me when you ask that at Dropbox, we are optimizing the onboarding and the initial install of the Dropbox client. We are also optimizing monetization, kind of the whole funnel. One thing we realized that once someone would go over quota, they used up their whole two gigabytes of free storage to Dropbox, that would be a time where they're much more likely to convert to paid. Because we tell them, look, you're out of storage, you need to pay in order to keep growing your files. And people would say, okay, makes sense. Here's my 10 bucks a month. So I thought to myself a little bit, what if they immediately got to that point? This is also based on the user research I've done even just around the company where people said, I said, when did you fall in love with Dropbox? And they said, when I moved all my files in, then I paid for it and I realized that they're safe now. Like I could throw my computer out the window and all my files were in the cloud. That's kind of an amazing aha moment, which is hard to access for most people. Most people are not going to drive.”
2022-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really well. I wonder if I could use that same messaging on my experiences because effectively it's all the same product, it's all Dropbox. So that was a really great way to, I guess in a sense, postmortem, to dig down into experiments, they've either failed or succeeded and learned from that and build kind of a culture that grew stronger as we went over in time.”
2022-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe I call them like learnings more than post mortems. One of my refrains is that in life you can only do one of two things. You can succeed, or you can learn, you never quote unquote, fail. One thing that I started up at Dropbox that was kind of is every two or three weeks we get together and there were multiple growth teams at Dropbox that was so big. We'd share all of our learnings, bi-weekly learnings, lunch on Fridays. What you're asked was is to show up with what you plan to do, ideally some screenshots and some product experience to make it like more concrete. And then oftentimes we'd ask people, what do you think want A, B, or C? And people are like, hmm, B. And then we do the reveal and say, actually C1. Oftentimes we don't know exactly why. Sometimes we'll run user research and try to figure out from users mouths why it won, but even then that might not be perfect. It was always a really great way for people to understand what other teams are doing, see the kind of exploratory experimental kind of mindset, especially for teams outside growth. There's a great way to learn growth. And then also learn from each other. Say like, oh, someone used that message on this page. It worked.”
2022-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A department because it can kind of like take some time, but really it's a fantastic investment for the long term success of the growth team and something I've developed more and more over the years.”
2022-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Place that I've historically struggled, and I think I've improved this a lot the last few years really getting the strategic approach that's in my head communicated clearly to the org. Early in my career, I worked with a bunch of people where we just all knew the shared strategic context and without really discussing it in depth very much. And it was a smaller org and it was a different time. But I didn't actually build the muscle of saying all the list of things in my head that led me to this particular execution strategy and getting people on board sequentially with it, which I call kind of the zipper technique. You have to start at the most basic and like sequentially get it up. And if you get stuck anywhere, you have to go back. Once you do that, everyone understands, okay, this is why we're doing this specific thing and the strategic context of the business and these other trade-offs as far as the executional context and how we build the business. And with all that together, it makes total sense that we start with this lightweight experiment that maybe give us like great learning before going into deeper stuff. So sometimes I wouldn't do that thorough communication, even with the founders, let alone the other like.”
2022-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's surprisingly hard sometimes to pick that core metric. When you back out a little bit, it seems obvious like you want more users to use your product and you'd like them to monetize at some level. But when you zoom in more, each metric can kind of be this like genie-wish problem. Yes, we want that metric, but not at the expense of this other metric. Based on that, let's not say that we really want that metric. So one classic one is, yes, we do want to either monetize or move people towards these deeper experiences, but we also don't want to push them so hard that we lose like low intent users. And so that can be like a real trade-off of like, hey, are you willing to push people to give up this lighter way of operating for the deeper way of operating? That's when I've hit a few companies.”
2022-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably more time than you might expect. I'd have different thresholds at six months and one year. I wouldn't have very strong thresholds after like one or two months. So really after one or two months, you're expecting them to get some good context and understand what the org needs and to start setting up like a basic North Star metric that aligns with the strategy and build a relationships and the team plan to get there. So really what you should have, I think, is two things after the first say two months is clarity as to what the state of things are and confidence that you're on a road towards improving them. Any head of growth should be able to give you kind of clarity and connect the current metrics on the ground to the business situation, like the kind of overall strategy, strategic direction in history. Tell that story at least in a basic way after two months. Although depending on the data support, it might be either a very rough story or it might be something where you get more nuance over time.”
2022-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Landing pages. And then the growth team needs connection to the core product so that the logged in homepage, et cetera, reflects the need of the growth team. Like, for instance, if you need some kind of call out linking to a new product feature in order for it to grow. So the CEO at the end of the day or whoever's running the overall product engineering marketing orgs needs to set up relationships and expectations between the orgs that foment collaboration.”
2022-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a really great question. I think it is incumbent on the leader of the organization in order to set up growth and frankly all the departments for success to not only have clear expectation of the org and the leader of the org, but also clear kind of cross expectations of what support and collaboration is expected from the CEO by those orgs, either to accomplish the goals of the org or the goals of the company. So for instance, I think one way to set a growth team up for success is to say, hey, the whole company for this coming year wants to move this metric by 40%. Users could be activated, could be revenue, what have you. As part of that 40% goal, we might even assign a percent of that to marketing or percent to a growth team and a percent to a core product team. And then also say that, look, each one of you needs to collaborate with the other, maybe 20% of your time in order to like help unblock each other to achieve these metrics. Because obviously a marketing team needs someone in product ends to collaborate with such that they can get the sign of flow right and maybe the in-product connections to the marketing.”
2022-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I think about that kind of early ones that come to mind as most important are context and relationship building. So for context, they really need to know the history of the product, all the things you've learned, especially things you tried in the past, because that shows maybe obvious directions to go that perhaps you've tried out already, especially in areas now owned by growth. Ideally, growth owns”
2022-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think Pinterest has one of the best systems of growth, a list of all the current growth experiments. You automatically run reports on it, et cetera. I think the only other company that really has that system is Facebook. And Pinterest may be just being like a newer company, maybe has like a refresh on that that's maybe a little simpler. Facebook's system is incredibly detailed and incredibly powerful, but it's also built for a credibly high volume, very, very metric space environment. In general, I think people at Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, PO the companies may be really do no growth. They know how to run these successive experiments. So all those companies, I think, have like really great growth culture where people have metrics come with experiments, execute, and kind of everyone on the team knows how to do it. I think those are all great places to dig for people.”
2022-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have all those things, but some idea of how they kind of go deep on some aspect of kind of secret knowledge, if you will, and get insights is really key. And you don't find that, I'd say that's a bit of a red flag. Also, of course, references are always great. You definitely want someone who ideally has done the general type of thing you're looking for before. Also be careful of. There's some quote-unquote growth people who've just, as I call it, thrown a log on a roaring fire. Like if you were at Facebook in the last five years, you might not have learned how to do zero-to-one growth. You might have learned how to do a hundred to a million growth much higher level. And that might not be what your company's looking for. So also be cautious of people who have learned different lessons at different stages of companies or whether those will map.”
2022-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, fair. So red flags would be if you're not able to really kind of collaborate with this growth leader, if you're not able to kind of get on the same page, one failure mode here is sometimes that people just want to apply their previous playbook. So if they came from Facebook, they're like, oh, yeah, yeah, we're just going to run a million experiments and throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. And you might be like, wait, that doesn't sound like what my business needs. Like maybe we don't have the traffic to run that many experiments. We need a more nuanced approach. So first off, I just make sure that their approach to growth maybe isn't fully what you would do because you're bringing on a new leader with new opinions, but it feels like it meshes with like your business and how you're approaching it. So I think if they don't mesh with you and your approach, that's a red flag. I think they need to be able to competently tell you about how they go deep and get insights. And they can go deep with users and understand their perspective, go deep with the data, go deep with like the existing company to learn from the company. And they can also have some good intuition. Some people have a really refined idea of like what this product needs even just looking at it. Ideally, they”
2022-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, you would want to give them data. You also want to give them your strategy. Like, where is the business going? Where has it come so far? A little bit of the product history. And I think for this first engagement, just kind of testing it out, giving them high-level data, the kind of things you give to your investors or advisors. So things you put in a board deck, maybe like plus all the appendix slides. So these are things like where the revenue's gone, how the user growth has been at those high-level things. Ideally, if you have them, some of the conversion rates of like the onboarding flow, monetization, retention rates, cohort graphs, like if you have some of that kind of industry standard growth model stuff, that's really great to give them too. But at some level, kind of give them all the somewhat clearly put together reports you have and then see what they do with them.”
2022-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Timescale and have the right expectations generally, then I would deep dive and potentially give them kind of a take home assignment pretty much of like, how would you grow my company? It's not a bad one for ahead of growth. And they kind of lay it out.”
2022-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a great question, and it can be a little bit tough in growth, I feel like. It's maybe not as standardized as some other fields, like maybe engineering leadership and such. So first, of course, you want to get your growth engine going, product market fit, do an initial kind of early growth team yourself, as I described. And then once you're like, this is like becoming a thing and is kind of a machine that I want someone else to run and scale. And I have some people to put on it because there's not really going to be a growth leader who's going to come in with like zero people usually, then you'd figure out what kind of growth person you need as I described. You'd probably go out to your network and then go out to the market at large with a recruiter, find a list of candidates, and then talk to them probably with an initial session hitting on a few of these points. Like, how do you get insights that lead to growth? How do you think about strategy and choosing metrics? How do you think about working with other teams? If you get kind of their approach to like metrics, strategy, collaboration, and getting insights that drive growth changes, that'll give you a good feel about whether you're on the right track. And make sure you establish rapport with this person. You're on the right kind of”
2022-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Marketing, you did this research, we did this research. Let's combine the research and go achieve a goal together that's hopefully achieving both of our team's metrics, which is frankly somewhat on the CEO to set up metrics in such a way that teams want to collaborate and then reinvest that kind of local success into bigger and bigger experiments. So to directly answer your question, the whole company should be sharing this user research, whether it's led by growth or marketing or some of the local feature team, they should probably format the results in a consumable way and then distribute it broadly to kind of like a product or company user research list that everyone can learn from.”
2022-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, maybe I'll just continue on to number five strategic communication is a key trait. So one of the things they need to do is when you're interviewing people now I'm talking about, they need to show that they can communicate the goals of the growth team and the operational procedures of the growth team. Like what is this growth team doing and why? Very much because they have overlap with marketing and like how it's messed, how you get to customers, that first experience with customers that marketing often feels ownership over, as well as the product flow, like how you onboard, how you monetize all that stuff, which oftentimes the product team feels ownership of. And so really they need to be a great communicator so that they can kind of bridge these gaps. In some ways, there's kind of a Venn diagram of marketing and product. Growth is like another circle in the center, not just the overlap, but like a circle that's like overlapping all three of the Venn diagram spaces. And so one question is, can they fit their goals into the goals of local partner team? Can they build bridges? And I think of it as like judiciously use their trust in organization to create measurable impact saying that, hey,”
2022-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's true. You don't want to lead the witness too much. Like, if you say, Are you excited about this particular value prop? Oftentimes people are trying to look good and trying to say the right thing, partly because you're probably paying them. You're probably giving them a $50, $100 gift certificate to participate. So they want to kind of try to make you happy. It's also just a social thing. So what you have to do is kind of show them that you're happy already and this is great. Thank you for being here. Additionally, give them open-ended questions. One of my favorite questions is if you saw this page, what would you think? That doesn't preface them with anything. It gets them ready to like just give you their raw unfiltered perspective. And then what would you think about this? How would you interact with this? What needs would you have that be satisfied by this? Could you see yourself using this? Relatively high level questions and slowly getting deeper into their perspective and digging into things when they bring them up. So they say, yeah, I think this would be good, but like maybe for my friend, not me. It's like, okay, well, why would your friend use it? What value would they get? And then why wouldn't you use it? Digging in there and then maybe more towards the end of the”
2022-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thank you for giving me on Target. Number four is customer development. And so that's really talking to users. It's a key source of insight as to potential optimization and misunderstanding. And also it's a window into the true user value that you're bringing. Like oftentimes your customer version of your user value will differ slightly from your own personal perspective on it. It'll often be more specific and have its own kind of flavor.”
2022-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the people who refunded and all the other stuff and aggregated up, and it's like a huge, just knowing how much money people paid you total is actually a pretty tough query. Ideally, you want to give a data team, a set of data engineers to preaggregate that and make that kind of like a one-line answer on top of that table. That's kind of a deep dive, but getting that data layer right is one of the things that often trips the team up. One more analogy for you there is it's a little bit like if you ran a subway restaurant and when someone showed up, you hadn't actually pre-cut the meat or pre-cut the veggies if they wanted a ham sandwich, you kind of go out back and like have this big ham hawk that you'd slice a piece off of and then like a cucumber that you're cutting up right there, it's going to take a long time to make you a sandwich. It's from like raw ingredients you got from the store. But if you give a data engineer enough time to show up at 6 a.m. cut everything up put in little refrigerated boxes then when you want your sandwich i.e. your like data he can just assemble it and give it to you in five minutes and so that's part of the trick of like data engineering that”
2022-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a great question. And even having a CEO like yourself ask that question in a real way is already a win. So let me just say that you're already ahead of most CEOs. I'd say you don't feel like you haven't already set up in a great way. Then what you need to do is make the space and the people to set it up. So a great growth person can at least knows what good looks like, even if they aren't necessarily fully capable of all the mumbo jumbo of data under the hood. I mean, they're not necessarily data engineers. What I would do in that case is pair a great growth person with a great head of data and make sure they have staffing to build that out. Just a deep dive on that for a second. One of my favorite missing pieces, like the Gatorade in the water, if you will, is really good dimension tables, which are like pre-aggregates of your audit tables and just all your tracking. And they're aggregated tables that then you can easily query. So for instance, if you Harry said, hey, I want to know all the forever revenue of each of my customers. Usually that would be a really complex query because you have to query both the people who paid you”
2022-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Turning data into insights because data is really the lifeblood of a growth organization. I like to think of data for a growth team as like water for a sports team. A non-obvious but incredibly important capability such that the team can do its job.”
2022-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I'm going to walk you through my five point system for identifying top people. And it speaks about art speaks to the art and science that we talked about earlier. It's really a bit of a combination. So first, I'd have specific interviews to gauge their understanding of your business. As I said, for me, I'm like PLG, B2B SaaS guy. So I'm like, Airtable is a good fit for me and other companies might be different. First figure out like, okay, does this person understand how people show up on board, the value they're getting, all that kind of stuff. You want to have some resonance there that this person gets my business and even maybe understand some of the non-obvious nuance even before I tell them. They don't need to be as expert as you, but having that quick ability to figure out your business is key. I wouldn't hire like a consumer expert for like a B2B SaaS business because it's just such a different world. Then they need to be expert in one or more key methods of growth, as I was talking about. If your business is viral, ideally this person has optimized viral flows, maybe has worked at some point in the career in like consumer because there's a lot of good viral flows there. Then they need to be great at turn.”
2022-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of match, and then people in those companies that match and then reach out to your network to find a potential match within there. And that's going to lower the learning curve for whoever you do hire because they already are going to come in knowing some of this stuff.”
2022-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, for sure. Once you get to that scale of growth where you're ready for someone, as we talked about, the next thing to figure out is kind of like what type of growth person you need. Effectively, like what flavor, because there's a bunch of different ones. And so first thinking about what business you're in, and then think about what channels you use. So for instance, are you a marketplace that's growing by word of mouth or a direct-to-consumer business, D2C, growing mostly on the back of paid marketing? Whichever one you are, ideally you find a growth leader who knows your kind of sub-discipline or your industry. So for instance, I don't have as much experience with marketplaces, but I do have a lot of experience with like virality and with B2B SaaS. So that's kind of my industry focus. And then you want to think about channels. Like what channels does this person have expertise in optimizing and deep understanding of? Because they're going to have to go super deep into data and know almost immediately like what's working and not working. And so that could be paid marketing, that could be virality, other PLG techniques, content and SEO. Those are each a little bit different channels. And so once you locate those two, you want to find companies that”
2022-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's been this kind of excitement about a classic model, but then there's a more standardized model I'll get into. The model that people think about is like Facebook and Uber, where you”
2022-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Business driven people are like worried about, to some degree, the existential factors of the business, like when it comes down to it, a business needs to make more money than it spends, and it only does that if people show up and spend money or get ad revenue or what have you. Certainly when you talk to CEOs, especially ones at different stages of the company, they might say, yeah, yeah, yeah, but what about that core metric we need? That core metric is often the thing they need to raise the next round of funding. So for an early stage company, it might just be some successful pilots if you're a B2B SaaS company. Like you might not even need that much revenue, but you do need a few people to say, yes, this is a great product. And we do want to pay for it someday. That's enough to raise the next round. For later stage company, it might just be either raw revenue or even some submetrics or revenue like the gross margin or other aspects of the business that they need for the public markets. Whatever that metric is that really makes the business successful, like helps to grow to the next level, that's the metric that I think of as that business goal.”
2022-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Numbers like run SQL queries, figure out how something's converting, and maybe most importantly, they're going to be open to making seemingly small changes that have big business effects and feel really good about that. Like sometimes you can literally reroute a flow and like double your metrics and you haven't created anything in an abstract sense.”
2022-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, getting me all these compound questions. The second part first of identifying growth people. This has always been a fun one for me. Especially interviewing engineers, they'll either be like hard growth, hard anti-growth or be what I call convincible. So really, to get excited about growth, you have to have a business mindset. You have to think to yourself, okay, how is this moving the metric for the business? And like, how is this going to help the business succeed? And the business success and metric success is like my success. There are some people who like this is all they care about and they have a hard time building beautiful things that don't have a very clear business plan attached. They kind of feel maybe insecure that like one am I even doing? Like does this matter? You also have the reverse of people who want to build beautiful things and they feel a little bit uncomfortable when it's too business driven. See, you really want to kind of suss that out in the interview or as you're working with them is even easier. And the people who are like more business driven or can be convincing into it, you say, hey, this is going to like help us raise our series B. And they're like, that sounds amazing. Like, how can I be part of an effort like that? Those people are going to be excited to look at the”
2022-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the first hire first, it goes to founder, then it goes to a small growth team 1 p.m., two engineers, like half a designer or something like that. That group can actually do a fair amount. Ideally, those are people who've been on your team a little while, who are more business and metrics focused, and work closely with the founder. And then I think you can start going to someone who's maybe like a growth PM, and then you can eventually build up towards like a senior like VP growth. But that VP growth is usually not going to want to join an empty team or definitely not like a pre-product market fit product if they know what they're doing.”
2022-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Parts of the engine that are like more obvious, you can maybe delegate to someone else on your team or a new hire even, and they can do that part of it for you. As you do that more and more, you end up moving towards the growth team. So I'd say first, it's effectively founder-led growth, I call it. Then I'd say it's founder-led and executed. And then founder-led and probably like team executed where you're kind of figuring out the mechanics of it and making into a more standardized affair. And as you do that, probably reaching a larger group with like more and more standardized message. And then eventually you kind of got your message figured out. You've got your process figured out, but the numbers just aren't big enough to map to the company's long-term vision. But it's kind of a machine. It kind of works. Then I think it's a great time to think about bringing in like a growth leader because that growth leader is going to come in with kind of industry standard techniques and have to learn your business and kind of micro industry. And they're going to be able to really help once there's kind of a standardized setup there.”
2022-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, for sure. I'll have both of those. So when a company's first starting out, you want to do something where you look for the kind of white hot center of the market. This is my friend James Courier's approach. Any given market has like a certain group of people who really, really desperately need your product, going to give you great feedback and really kind of be with you during those early stages where you're figuring out like what this product even is and what the important parts of it. So you want to start there and really as a founder, as an early team, you want to talk to those customers and really get on board with them. With the hope that this will lead to like a broader market over time. So what happens is that the first kind of growth effort is really just those first customers that you get relatively manually. You like reach out through your network or maybe some very simple marketing plays, but you reach get to a few people, make a product that works for them and expand that with time. As you do that, you'll eventually find that you're kind of doing the same things repeatedly. Like, oh, this is another customer in this space. And I'm just doing another onboarding and it's working. And you're like, okay, great. Now I've got this kind of engine that works a bit. Maybe now I can get some help with it. There's going to be.”
2022-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a great question, and one of my favorite stories of metric changing is from Pinterest and from Casey. They actually changed the metric to go down the funnel. Like first, it was just people arriving at the site, like kind of weekly active users, and then weekly active pinners, and then weekly active board creators or something. So it was like a deeper metric over time. And really what it is, it's a little bit like shining the flashlight or grabbing that part of the business and pulling it up with a crane. And over time, you want to pull up the whole business, so to speak. As far as the timeline, I like to reassess every maybe six months. I'm kind of a big fan of six months macro planning cycles because one year is very hard to like plan ahead and then one quarter is just too short to really get a tremendous amount done. So if you're looking at six months or maybe yearly, you can get a good sense of like, hey, is this the right metric focus area for the company?”
2022-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a super interesting one, and it's kind of non obvious. So, I like to use analogies to communicate these nuanced concepts. The one I think about for picking a metric, it's almost like you're trying to pick up a really large awkward object with a crane. Like, how would you do that? You can't just attach the crane to anywhere on the object. You imagine if you attach it to the wrong spot on the object and you try to pick it up, you're just going to flip the object over and it's going to like spin out of control. So there's a weird way in which you need to find the center of gravity of the business. Like where is the kind of heart and soul of the business such that if you were to pick it up by that point, the whole business comes with it. There's not too many unintended consequences. And to extend the analogy, sometimes you need like two or three metrics.”
2022-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Categories, so you'll often see growth product or growth marketing as like titles or department labels. I'm then happy to go in the head of gross job, but I'll pause there.”
2022-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I really think of growth work as optimization with the goal of improving a metric. And really, from a customer lens, it's bringing the value of the product to more people. It's kind of like expanding the people using and or paying for the product. It's usually incremental, but it can be transformative. It often involves A-B testing as long as you have enough traffic. In some cases, it doesn't. Sometimes I find growth is applied to pretty much anything that makes the metrics go up independent of testing or kind of optimization work. So I've had companies say that like, oh, we have an iPhone app and the Android app is just to like get more people. So that's a growth project. It could be kind of a lower G growth product. Like, yes, it grows the company, but I don't think of it as kind of an uppercase G growth product. Like, you don't need a growth expert to go build an Android app. That's effectively like new product work that relatively clear and doesn't use the growth techniques that we're talking about. Growth often overlaps with product and marketing. Growth can encapsulate paid marketing, SEO, virality, and other product-led growth changes to the product, which ends up overlapping in those two.”
2022-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source