YouSaid · the spoken record

Matt Lerner

lines on the record
70
first
2024-05-31
most recent
2024-05-31
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

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

  1. “So the times the North Star would change first of all in the beginning sometimes before product market fit. You're just still figuring out how you deliver value to customers. And when you learn that actually it's something fundamentally different, then you might want to change your North Star.”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I think that's a really good test of the strength of product market fit, absolutely. But you can have product market fit with six customers and next year it's seven customers and you don't have a business.”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “So I say, how would a normal customer behave if they absolutely loved your product? And how many of them are behaving that way? And track it in cohorts and make it go up over time.”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “The biggest mistake with North Star, and it's a very reasonable one, is they choose their North Star's revenue of their And you know, as an investor, you're like, it's straw man that for me. Like, why wouldn't my North Star be revenue? Like, we're a business, right? And the problem is.”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “The way to map your growth model is you start with your North Star, and that's going to be a metric that increments when you deliver value to customers. And something that encompasses the entire funnel. And you stress tested a bit, so it's not creating perverse incentives like, hey, is there a way we could game this and make this number go up without actually delivering business value?”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “So you get to a point to have good intuition when you understand growth as a system in your business. And that has a few parts. You need to understand the customer's context. Who are we selling this to? Where are they stock? What are they trying to do? What do they think they're looking for? Where are they looking for it? And then you understand sort of your growth model mathematically and you know where the biggest points of leverage where you should be focusing for the maximum impact. And then you know your business and your capabilities and what you're good at and can be great at and what you can't.”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “The best growth leaders understand if they possess a knowledge base to start to be intuitive. So it's easy to walk into a room in the highest paid opinion, the alpha in the room is going to spout all their intuition, all their opinions, and they could be right or they could be wrong. You know, ChatGPT will just very confidently tell me things that are patently scientifically false, right?”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I mean, if I were running a company and you had a gun to my head and I had to choose one, I'd say science because science without art can deliver business results. And art without science, if it does, it's very rare and exceptional down to luck. It just doesn't enter.”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “said the answer of course is it depends so let me just give you a simple set of rules to figure out which at any given time it's going to be you know 70 30 one way or the other and one way or the other depends on where you are in your company's growth so in the beginning it's premature to start optimizing you need to figure out the big stuff first once you've got one lever working two levers working then you can start devoting resources to optimizing and trying to squeeze more juice out of that lemon but then you've always got kind of your 30 who are like okay what's the next big lever is there a market segment we're missing you know is there a use case that we're missing something like that is there a channel that we could start to develop”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “I guess it depends how you define poor, but I think most people traditionally think about it as like lots of form fields.”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “So sunk cost is part of it. Like, you're not going to not want to see your results when you get to the end of answering 30 questions. But a big piece of it is actually, and this is, I think, is brilliant, is they're sort of taking people through the mental purchase journey. So if you're selling expensive software, you can afford salespeople. And they're going to answer your questions and explain and demo and blah, blah, blah. But if your product costs 10 bucks, 30 bucks a month, you can. So your users are coming in and wondering, how is this thing going to help me? Why are my friends recommending it? Does it work in my specific case? What about this? What about that? And each of these questions doesn't just get some information from the customer and help qualify them, which is useful, but it builds intent. Because if you go to the doctor and you say, well, it hurts here, and then the doctor says, well, does it hurt when you do this? And does it hurt more at night? And if you're like, yes, yes, yes, then you believe whatever the doctor says.”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Yeah, I think that's a really important misconception, actually. It's a huge false dichotomy there. A lot of times you'll get the best customers in situations where you're actually introducing friction into the funnel. So one example of that is, I don't know if you've ever probably not tried to sign up for Noom or Calm. And they have these onboarding flows where they're like, what brings you here today? And what are you trying to achieve? And what have been your problems in the past? And how much do you weigh and what's your target weight? There'll be 20 or 30 questions long. These long flows are actually really good at building intent. And the AB test had optimized this shit out of these flows. And it is more of an onerous user experience.”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “I'm going to make the argument that it's both, but then I'll choose one. Okay. I think the argument that it's both is that when you see growth science without art and you know these websites, I guess if we're naming names on this show, like some of the travel booking sites, you know, these flows where they just overoptimized and refined an A-B tested every little thing. And sometimes it's like a yucky experience, but it's the optimal blend of conversion rate and AOV and blah, blah, blah. And they're just not great experiences. And then there's all these famous examples of ad campaigns where people have spent gazillions of dollars in super bowl ads and all this stuff and they just haven't sold more beer or shoes or whatever it is that they're trying to sell because it doesn't resonate with customers. It's just good entertainment. So I think at its highest form it blends both. And the trick then is to be able to get artists and scientific people to work together. But that's like a whole other story.”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “The symbol definition I use for growth is you've got some value that you deliver. You help customers do something they're trying to do. They're struggling. And growth is the ability to find customers and help them understand the value that you're going to deliver to them and get them to use and love your product or service. The way that sort of different from traditional”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “The hardest thing about figuring stuff out, I think it's hubris. I think it's that people come in and they don't realize they need to figure stuff out. They have their best practices. They have what worked in their last job. They have what they heard on your podcast. And they're like, all right, let's do this and turn on the tap. I mean, you see so many startups make this mistake where they overinvest in time and money and energy and building a product and launching some massive campaign and it doesn't survive first contact with the customer. And they did that because they were sure they were right, but they weren't. And so just having that humility and that curiosity going in can save you so many ways to cycle so much time and resources.”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “I think the biggest thing, how much of growth is actually figuring stuff out is actually information discovery rather than running playbooks, doing best practices, copying what other companies did, you know, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out you can do SEO, you can do ads, you can optimize your funnel. But figuring out the details of Google has a hundred thousand search results for any query. How are you going to be in one of the top three results, which are the only ones anyone's going to click on when you've got companies with way more money than you and 10 years have had start who are locked into those top three positions? Ads are sold at auction, right? So which means you've got to be able to outbid companies. And right now, the ones who are winning those auctions have the best unit economics, the smoothest funnels, the most creative testing behind them, so much of growth is just trying to figure stuff out as quickly as possible.”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Hundreds of millions per year in free cash flow, but startups don't have that luxury. But then when I step back as a VC and start to look at other success stories, I start to see that pattern repeat of like 90% coming from 10%, you know, and you can see it. You've had these people on your show, Canva and Dropbox and all of these. And so that sort of got me into this question of like, okay, as an early stage startup without all that free cash flow, how can you figure out what that 10% is as quickly as possible?”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “So many of them. I think towards the end, it got to the point when you're in a big company, we're having the right answers like 5 or 10% of the problem and getting the entire organization and to change people's mindset and align resources ends up becoming like 80 or 90% of the problem. And so I'm very much more shifting my time and my hiring strategy and everything more around influence. That was a big piece of it. The other big one, when I look back on my time at PayPal, 90% of our growth came from like 10% of the stuff that we did. I could go back and say, you know, there are five or six things obviously before my time getting on eBay, referral bonuses and, you know, network effects growth, getting early getting engaged with web developers who are building the sites and implementing the payment systems, getting pre-integrated with shopping carts and hosts, some outbound sales. That drove almost all their growth. But they did a ton of other stuff. They spent hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing campaigns, building products that frankly nobody ever used. And you can do that when you're generating.”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “I mean, my career started in Silicon Valley, humanities philosophy and rhetoric undergrad. And so I was kind of taking any job I could find. And I sort of got pulled to was just figuring out how to get customers' stuff. And eventually in 2004, I joined the growth team at PayPal. And I learned just a ton of stuff in almost 11 years there. And then after that, I left. I became a VC myself. That's kind of when we met. You know, as a VC, you just get to see so many startups rapid fire and see inside of them and what's happening and their metrics and the people's personalities. To be honest, I started to see a lot of teams wasting a lot of money and a lot of real talent making the same mistakes over and over again, very preventable mistakes. That combined with the fact that I didn't love fundraising, that's what we were just talking about. So I left VC and I started my own business where I work with startups and kind of help them avoid those preventable mistakes and find their high impact growth levers.”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “There's really only like six channels in the world. If you think about how the ways you find out about stuff, you hear from a salesperson, some partner brings you in to enable you to do something, you see some ads, you do a Google search or there's some content or inbound, paid ads, or maybe hear about it from an influencer. That's really kind of it. I'll say categorically the best growth people I hired and managed in my time at PayPal had no marketing experience, had no product experience at all.”

    2024-05-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source