Andy Johns

Startups should consider the role of a content strategist much sooner than they typically do. My experience has been that they play a leading role in crafting a quality user experience by introducing more clarity, simplicity, brevity, and humanity.

What is Airbnb Plus? "A selection of places to stay verified for quality and design." Perfectly clear. Fidelity tells me my fund has "12-b-1 fees". What are those? Wealthfront clarifies that for me... it's Fidelity's marketing fees that they are passing onto me, the customer.

The most underrated member of a design team is the content strategist. They're masters of the oldest design tool - written word. A company can differentiate w/ a better arrangement of words (e.g. @theskimm). Consumers trust products that speak to them with clarity and humanity.

The best designers I know lean on these two tools the most: - pencil and paper - long conversations

So, startups need to avoid the one-size-fits-all approach to growth. Not all companies should have a growth team. The original growth teams all came from network effects businesses, after all! (LinkedIn, FB, Twitter, Airbnb, Uber, Lyft...) But it may not be appropriate for you.

The reason is that non-network effects businesses may operate in a sector where growth (and who wins) is determined by a product arms race i.e. Mac vs PC. The superior product wins. A large growth org detracts from a focus on product innovation, which is the key driver...

It leads to more registered users of the app, but that doesn't produce compounding downstream effects on growth since there is no network effect at play. So the role of a growth team in a non-network effects business is less useful, and can even be a big distraction...

The leverage from a growth team at a network effects business is large. HOWEVER, the same is not true at a non-network effects business. For example, an a/b test yielding a 10% increase in signup rate for a fintech app is helpful, but its value is linear. Not exponential...

As each user adds more friends, their individual engagement goes up, which leads to their friends engaging with them more, which leads to each person being more likely to invite another user to join, and so on...

The growth team will be optimizing the various drivers of the network effect, which produces an EXPONENTIAL impact on growth. For example, if I increase friending rate by 10% on Facebook via an a/b test, that leads to a large downstream effect across the whole network...

I separate the world of startups into two buckets: (1) those WITH a network effect (2) those WITHOUT a network effect. For startups with a network effect, it's ok to build a growth team early (right after PMF) and for it to have a large role in the organization. The reason is...

If a startup is thinking about building a growth team it shouldn't assume it needs one b/c a few high flying startups have one. It's a nuanced decision based on the business model and market type. Here's the nuanced approach that I use to decide if a growth team is appropriate...

Dang. This is a bummer to hear. For those of you that haven’t read his books, please do. @claychristensen was such a wonderful writer and teacher.https://twitter.com/StevenLevy/status/1220783585969438720 …

The ills that plague early-stage startups are ills of abundance, not ills of scarcity: - too much capital - too much competition - too much ego

Have one MVP definition for trust-building systems that’s set at a high bar. Have another for non trust-building that is lower, to support moving fast and iterating, but that sets the bottom at “it has at least one form of customer delight” otherwise it’s not an actual MVP.

So, even the non trust-building features should have an MVP definition that specifies at least one form of customer delight is present, otherwise it’s not a true MVP in the eye of the customer. It’s just something that you shipped because it was easy to ship. Here’s the TLDR...

The most common misunderstanding of Minimum Viable Product is that Viable = easiest to build. Viable was meant to mean “delivers at least one form of customer delight”. So it’s ok to have a high bar MVP and a low bar MVP, but not the LOWEST bar MVP...

What this implies is startups can move fast and be scrappy on some features and be slow and deliberate on others. But there’s one catch, which is that non trust-building features still must have at least one form of delight in order to qualify as an MVP...