# When To Make Your First Growth Hire? How To Structure the Hiring Process for Growth? Five Core Things the Best Growth Hires Do in the First Week? What to Expect New Growth Hires to Achieve in the First 30 and 90 Days with Hila Qu Growth Advisor 20Growth · Jan 18, 2023 · 51 min · 9,678 words Speakers: Hila Qu, Harry Stebbings Source: https://www.996.fm/episodes/20vc--ep-204755c0/ ## Cold open **Hila Qu** [0:00]: The first thing is to create a growth model. The second thing is a build experimentation program. Make this more formal. Have a cadence. How many experiments are you trying to launch every week? What is the process? Have this to be a part of your operating system. **Harry Stebbings** [0:15]: My word. What a tactical and granular show we have in store for you today on this 20 growth. ## Intro **Harry Stebbings** [0:19]: 20 growth is a monthly show that takes you inside the mind of the world's best growth leaders to reveal their tips, their tactics, and strategies to scaling growth teams. And I'm so thrilled today to be joined by Hila Qu. Hila is one of the leading growth execs of the last decade. Hila helped scale Acorns from 1,000,000 to 5,000,000 users as their VP of growth. Hila then joined GitLab, where she launched their PLG motion on top of an established sales motion and built their first ever growth team. Today, Hila is an adviser to amazing companies like Replit and funds like Capital, OpenView, and First Round. I wanna say huge thank you to Josh Almond for the intro to Hila's Day without which this episode would not have been possible. But before we dive into the show's ## Sponsor read **Harry Stebbings** [0:59]: day, I need your help. 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Jasper is an AI assistant for business that helps marketers, sales reps, and other creators accelerate their writing process and repackage content into different formats, languages, and tones. Unlike broad use AI tools, Jasper was built for business, and this makes a big difference. It incorporates SEO, a plagiarism checker, and a browser extension. So you can call up Jasper in pretty much any text box or platform you use online. Visit jasper.ai/20vc for a demo. Your burnt out team will thank you. Three, two, zero. You have now arrived at your destination. ## Conversation **Harry Stebbings** [4:25]: Hila, I'm so excited for this. I had so many good things from Josh before the show. So first, thank you so much for joining me today. **Hila Qu** [4:32]: Thank you for having me, Harry. It'll be a fun experience. **Harry Stebbings** [4:35]: But I wanna start with a little bit on you and provide some context. We see Acorns, we see GitLab. And how did you make your way into the world of growth and come to lead some incredible growth orgs at Acorns and GitLab most recently? **Hila Qu** [4:46]: Yes. So believe it or not, I was a biology major, and I suck at doing experiments in the lab. I caused actually some explosions. Everyone is safe, so don't worry. But I always loved the idea of scientific experiment. So I got my MBA. I transitioned into the business world initially as a data analyst. But very quickly, I found that doing data analysis is awesome, but I don't get to do anything with my awesome recommendations. The PMs, the marketers, they don't take my recommendations. So I joined a very small startup called growthhackers.com, and I become a product manager growth. And back then, that title is confusing. Product manager growth? What do you exactly do? But I love that role. It really allowed me to use my analytical background, my product manager background, my marketing background, and pretty much do everything. And from there, I become this growth person. I joined Acorns and ended up leading their entire growth team as VP growth. And most recently, I joined GitLab, building their growth team from scratch as well. Now I work as a growth advisor. I'm really deep into the world of growth. **Harry Stebbings** [5:54]: I love it. And I spoke to Josh before the show, and he said that I really had to dig in on the Acorns journey because you were so instrumental to building that growth organ, really making sure it worked so efficiently. He asked what tactic really worked and what did you learn from that? **Hila Qu** [6:08]: There are definitely some, I would say, mega learning from my Acorns experience. First of all, the company really starts as a product that people love. We have a feature called round up your spare change so that you can invest this very small amount of money. Early adopters loved it, and that powered the initial word-of-mouth growth. And from there, I think one thing we did right is that we layered on multiple growth channels. Initially, it's word-of-mouth. We quickly expanded to paid like Facebook. We're very early in capturing the Facebook wave. We added paid referral, and then we diversified into more paid channels. We added new product lines so that we can charge more. And then that higher revenue allow us to unlock higher cap in paid channels or more paid channels. I think that layering on really helped. That's one learning. The other one I would say is we established a full funnel growth team. By full funnel marketing, growth product, analytics, design engineer, we sit together. I manage that team. I'm responsible for acquisition, how to get people download the app, but also I'm responsible for getting them to sign up, invest their money, become a paid customer, retain, maybe try other products. Full funnel approach allow us to unlock many opportunities and experiments and successes. **Harry Stebbings** [7:23]: You mentioned Facebook now. I have to dig in on it because Josh brought it up specifically. In terms of Facebook ads and optimizing them, I'd love to just go a little deeper. How did you figure out how to optimize Facebook ads and what really worked on Facebook ads for you? **Hila Qu** [7:38]: Yeah. First of all, I think as a disclaimer, this was back in 2008, 2019, and the world of Facebook and paid ads change every day. So specific tactics may not work, but I can definitely share the process. We figure a new channel out. I would say there are a couple of things. In terms of process and team, we have a team that we do daily stand up. Your typical engineer teams do daily stand up, but our acquisition team, we do daily stand up. In the daily stand up, we will watch where we are in the App Store ranking, and we're like, yeah. We're up or no. We're down or some other companies jumped out from nowhere and we hate them. So that really gave us a lot of velocity and focus on this. So that's one. And then we have a cross functional team as well. We have designer and channel experts and data person and myself in that room together. So we share all sorts of data. We brainstorm experiments. We launch them quickly. I think a big part of making Facebook work is there are lot of standard best practice. We use lookalike audience. We optimize towards our best customers, like who are looking like our best customers. That's our goal. But we do large amount of creativity testing. All the ads we produce, we launch new ads every day. We do all sorts of ads. One thing that's really funny, there is this company called Cameo, and they have the celebrities and doing things, and we have them do ads for us. We basically have a early partnership with them. We have some celebrities. We try. Like, they record a short scene. We do ads. We also do a bunch of very native ads. Someone go to gas station and then just pump gas and say Acorns help them. Audiener person gas station version works much better than a celebrity. And we also do a lot of interesting ones, things you wouldn't expect work actually work. We'll ask people to do a math question about investing, calculating if you invest 1¢ today, 2¢ tomorrow, 4¢ on Wednesday, how much it'll be? People guess it wrong, but that grab people's attention, and they go to the App Store, download Acorns ad. Tons of creativity, ads testing that really unlock a lot of success. And we definitely layer on the tools and the data. We have tools for attribution. We have a singular. We have a lot of internal data analysis. So I think the team, the creative ads testing, the tools, data, all of that together unlock the success for us. You mentioned that about **Harry Stebbings** [10:03]: the diversification of channels early and layering on the channels. The thing that I often see is founders very keen to diversify their channels early when they have something that's working. And I always say, if you've got something that's working, great. Double down on it. Don't get too queued too early. How do you advise founders on channel diversification? Should they start with many at the start? How do you advise them on the diversification of channels in the early days? **Hila Qu** [10:27]: I think you are absolutely right. If you find something that works, definitely don't let it go. Double down it. Try to squeeze everything out of it. In the very, very beginning, you want to try a couple of different channels just to get some ideas because you will learn something. All the rules changing all the time. You will learn something out of it. But usually from paid perspective, Facebook, Google, maybe TikTok now are the biggest ones. You want to figure them out. Usually, one of those, if you figured out, is enough for you, and a lot of learnings you can apply to other channels. The other thing I would say, don't only focus on paid, and we will talk a little bit later. Paid is powerful. Paid is quick. But over time, you will see all the best, most successful companies, they always have some sort of viral approach or content based SEO approach. Those take time, and those is much deeper, much harder for Facebook to change rules overnight and mess it up. So you want to layer that out as well over time. **Harry Stebbings** [11:26]: I think the number one reason people fail with content is they give up too easily. Exactly. Yes. As you said, it takes time and you have to be patient. We mentioned what worked well. On the flip side, what didn't work well? And what did you learn from that not working? **Hila Qu** [11:41]: Many things didn't work. Right? At one time, we sponsored NASCAR. It's a lot of money, but we didn't see any visible lift in our results. We try to distribute content on many financial media, like very established media outlets that doesn't give us direct results as well. Snapchat, Pinterest, those work, but those are hard to scale. You don't get large scale similar to Facebook and Google. There's one experiment I remember that's really interesting to share. We have this paid referral mechanism. You invest. You invite your friends. You get $5. Your friend get $5 to get started. That's very typical standard paid referral. We layered on a monthly campaign on top of that to make it even more attractive. For this month, if you invite five friends, on top of those $5, you may get additional benefit of $50. Or we experimented. We plant a tree for every friend you invite. I think those monthly promotional campaign with additional money incentive worked. We get people to do things. Some of them, they invite four friends. They didn't get to five. So they didn't end up getting the bonus, but we get the number. We get new users joining. So initially, everything looks great. The number is good. We used this for a while actually. But over longer term, we begin to see that the quality of invited users drop, which is expectedly will happen. There is this trade off. You always want to do things that impact number, but you also don't only want to look at the near term results. You want to monitor long term metrics. On the other hand, some channels will work. There is this period of time it'll work great. After some time, it will die down. It is a forever trade off. **Harry Stebbings** [13:27]: I think that's a really important thing for founders to understand, which is your CAC today will not be your CAC tomorrow. As you saturate your initial market, you will not only have a reduction in quality of your subsequent user, but you'll also be paying more for them in a lot of cases, which is why I love it when it's, this is my CAC forever. Yeah. So I totally agree. Now this series is designed for founders who are building out growth teams, and think that's just a big question on definitions first. How do you define growth and VP or head of growth first? **Hila Qu** [13:53]: Yeah. I think growth is a tricky thing. It is both the results and the discipline. And whenever you have that, it is a hard job. Growth is by results, what are you trying to grow? You want to grow your ARR, your revenue, your user base, your metrics, whatever. I think the other layer is you want to grow them sustainably. And growth as a discipline, it is really using scientific methods to grow business KPIs. There are the core methods around data and experimentation, which is similar to scientific method. There are different levers you can grow. You can grow by growing acquisition or activation or revenue or retention. All of those different aspects will lead to growth. You can also grow by different channels. You can grow by product. You can grow via marketing. There are also the channel aspects. So growth is both results and a discipline and approach. **Harry Stebbings** [14:44]: So now we have the definition, the meta definition of growth there. The way that growth is implemented changes drastically, whether it's B2C or B2B. For founders listening, we have both that listen. How does it differ between b to b and b to c? And how should a b to b growth team look compared to a b to c? **Hila Qu** [15:02]: Yeah. That's a great question. I build a b to c growth team at Acorns. I build a b to b growth team at GitLab. So I think b to c growth team, as I mentioned, the full funnel team is the most powerful. I have growth marketing who is mostly focused on acquisition. They are the channel experts. They want to get more users to download app, sign up for a product via all different channels. There is the life cycle marketing aspect, thinking about email, push notification, messaging, how to engage your existing users, and there are basically CRM specialists in those teams. And then the last piece is the growth product team, where I have growth product manager, engineer, designer, analyst. They work on all sorts of experiments, how to make sign up flow more efficient, how to get new users onboarded quickly, how to increase conversion rate. They basically do a lot of experiments across the entire user journey. And then there is the data analyst component. So that's the most typical B2C growth team. You have user position, life cycle marketing, growth product and data analyst. And they usually report to the product org. That's the most likely setup. B2B growth team is a different animal. The core team is the same. You still have the PM. You have the design engineer analyst. So the squad itself is very similar. But I would say the product led growth organization here, b to b company is broader. At GitLab, I was head of the product growth team. I sit in the product org, but I have a counterparts in marketing. I have counterpart in sales, which is totally new, doesn't exist in b to c. This is because the user journey, the buying journey in b to b is much more complex. You have multiple stakeholders you need to convince. The cycle is three months rather than three minutes comparing to downloading the app. That org is broader. And in terms of reporting structure, most commonly, teams still report to the product org. **Harry Stebbings** [16:56]: When I hear you, I hear pretty extensive growth orgs, and I'm thinking, wow. This is quite a developed org, and that's quite a costly growth team. If we peel it back for an early stage founder thinking about their first growth hires, when do you advise founders on when's the right time to make the first growth hire? **Hila Qu** [17:12]: I think the overall principle you probably heard many times is get your product ready first. Find your PMF and hire thinking about hiring for growth. But I would love to add some nuance to it. For example, I with a founder. He has a product that's a Chrome extension enabled collaboration. He has 10 people in his team. He's talking with me about growth and hiring for growth. I suggest him to hire a growth PM right now even before raising the series a. Why? Because for his product, that collaboration, that viral growth is so critical. It's almost part of the product. So you want to figure that out early on. He ended up finding someone from, I think, from Dropbox with that viral growth experience that helped him actually raise the next round. So if your product has a social collaboration network effect, that kind of thing, think about Slack, LinkedIn, or Airtable, Figma, hiring for growth early on, a little bit earlier will allow you to engineering those growth loops into the product itself, and that can be very powerful. **Harry Stebbings** [18:16]: I also think early growth hires can help you find product market. I hate it when it's like growth is not a solution to product market fit. But as we said there about the testing of different channels, quite often, your ICP, your ideal customer profile, will be different to how you anticipate. And actually, a growth hire who's tested several different channels can find that Pinterest with middle aged women in America is actually your ICP when you thought it was younger women. Do you know what I mean? They can find elements that you didn't know before which suggest product market fit. So I like that nuance. Next question, how do we know what profile to hire for that first growth hire? Are they senior, junior? What does that hire look like, do think? **Hila Qu** [18:54]: In terms of senior, junior, when I talk with early stage founders, I advise them to hire the experienced growth PM or experienced growth marketer. Don't go for VP growth from the very beginning. Don't go for someone very junior who hasn't done this before because that middle layer gave you some advantages. They have experience, especially in one of the area. Try to find someone who is very analytical, good based data, and they want to learn the other aspects. They also have the drive to become a head of growth one day. All of of those components is more advantageous to the founder and also give you the options. You can potentially grow this person into your head of growth. Or if that doesn't work out, you can still have the option to hire an external head of growth to partner with this person. As I mentioned, when I joined growthhackers.com, my title is PM growth, but I was doing everything. And I was learning everything pretty much new as well, and I was very scrappy. I tried to do things without engineer or without data, without everything. I think you want to find someone who is like that, have the potential to become your head of growth one day. I think a lot of **Harry Stebbings** [20:00]: potential growth hires are nervous about being the first. For founders listening, what can they say to convince a potential growth hire that they should join and this is the right place even though they are the first? **Hila Qu** [20:12]: I would say what is helpful for the founders to explain is, first off, the culture within the company. Growth can make or break when the culture is not right, when the company itself is not really thinking about data or using data and experimentation as a discipline to make decisions, when he or she not only need to do experiments, but also need to convince everyone, right, bank for resources. That's the hardest part. So I think if the founder himself or herself has the growth mindset, believes in data, believes in experiments, believes in the scientific approach, and the leadership is aligned, that is very important sign for me, at least if I'm thinking about joining any org. And also lay out the potential and the opportunity for this role. It is new, but everything is there for you to mess up with and figure out and try. Say, **Harry Stebbings** [21:03]: I decided not to hire this growth hire, and I went for an agency. When does hiring an agency work well, and when does it not work? **Hila Qu** [21:12]: In general, I think agency should comes a little bit later. If you're thinking about figure out your growth mechanism, this is fundamental to your business. To your point, like, you have PMF, but also you need to have channel. You need to have some sort of unit economics and channel works. Otherwise, it's not a viable business. Hire agency for that feels very irresponsible and work in the most cases. You need to think about you for building a skyscraper. You need to be the architect. Founder need to be very invested in figure out growth channels, and you can hire someone with expertise to work alongside with you. That is the main thing. But certain building block later on may be outsourced, or you may tap into expertise. The most things I see may be successful than others is if paid is your main channel, some agencies specialize on that. You can use them to scale. Or you need more support in creating creative ads. You don't have a capacity in house. Maybe you can tap into some consultant or agency. But the most fundamental things is about figure out your growth model, the initial channels that cannot be outsourced. **Harry Stebbings** [22:21]: You mentioned tapping into knowledge and wisdom there. Some tap into the knowledge and wisdom through growth advisors like you and Elena Werner, who are obviously both incredible people to add. When does a growth advisor work? When does it not at work? And how do you advise founders on whether or not to bring on a growth advisor? **Hila Qu** [22:38]: The benefit of hiring growth adviser is that growth adviser actually can help you figure out that growth architect, that map, not just building blocks or tactics. What is the growth model? What are the potential channels you should try? What are some product led growth mechanisms you need to build internally? And I would say growth advisor need to be paired still with a team. Advisor don't have the capacity to execute things, so you need to have someone to execute. As a recent example, one of the company I advised, they are series b. They want to do product led growth. They have something, the basics. They don't know how to do it in a scientific way or scale it. They paired with me as an adviser with their head of investor relationship. It sounds interesting. But this guy, he's very analytical. He's very smart. He doesn't have growth PM experience, but he knows data so well of the company. He knows all the teams. He can socialize the product team, the marketing team, all of them. Our partnership actually was very successful, much more successful than I expected. That's another thing. To pair with a growth advisor, you still need to have someone internal who can work with this person to make it work. **Harry Stebbings** [23:49]: How do you compensate a growth advisor? Is it pure salary? Is it salary and equity? He is the founder. If I wanna work with you or some of the best, what does that look like just so I can budget for it? **Hila Qu** [24:00]: I've seen both models for myself and also many other experts I know. We usually have a monthly returner model. We have a six months engagement or even a year, and then it's a usually a blend of cash and equity. Personally, myself, for earlier stage, I may be willing to take more equity if the company is really great and awesome. For a little bit later, it's more towards the cash side. **Harry Stebbings** [24:25]: This is really unfair of me to ask. On the equity side, I know founders listening will be great, but is it like point 1% or is it like 2%? If you're early stage with series a, what kind of level is it just generally? Like point one, two? **Hila Qu** [24:39]: Personally, for me, I think it's definitely much lower than the you hire a full time executive. For me, I don't ask for that. I usually ask for a reasonable amount. And the key thing is that as an adviser, I'm incentivized to participate in the upside. Even a small percentage of equity will be actually more powerful than sometimes a large amount of cash. **Harry Stebbings** [25:00]: Absolutely, if you're there at the series a. Now you are my growth advisor and you're my friend, okay, on this mission to hire my first growth hire. But I don't know how to hire them, so you're gonna help me. How do I literally structure the process of hiring my first growth hire? What do the stages look like? From step one, what do I do? **Hila Qu** [25:21]: Yeah. Yeah. And I actually helped quite a few founders going through this process. First thing is write the job description. It shouldn't be your standard job description because as I mentioned, the first step, there are some homework for the founder to do. You need to think about your growth model. What are the initial growth lose or growth mechanisms that's important because that is something you should be trying to look for. For example, I work with a founder of FinTech app. They figured a lot of things out. They also figured out a lot of early paid channels, and their payback is great. I'm like, yeah, for this growth person, you really want to have someone with super strong paid channel expertise because you already figured it out. You literally need someone to amplify it. So you need to do the homework, figure it out because that will go to your job description. In those job descriptions, I usually advise the founders to lay out some early KPIs and initial focus areas that will map to what you need and also the expertise of the person. And what **Harry Stebbings** [26:21]: are some examples of the KPIs be? Would that be the revenue numbers, the user numbers, the DAOs? What would that be? Just take an example. **Hila Qu** [26:29]: First of all, the North Star metric. Right? What are the key thing? For B2B business, it may be revenue. For B2C, it may be active users, but also some initial focus areas. For example, for one company I work with, I help them figure out activating new users, onboarding, and free to paid conversion. Those are one of the initial possible focus areas. So in the job description, talk about, hey, there will be a lot of focus on the onboarding, activation, conversion. That will help you track the right expertise and also make your thinking super clear as well. **Harry Stebbings** [27:03]: So we have the KPIs in the job description. We figured out the growth model. We figured out a couple of the growth loops. So we've got a kind of understanding of what sort of profile we want from that understanding. What do we do now, Hila? **Hila Qu** [27:15]: The next step is usually try to share this around. And then once you begin to get some candidates applications, try to do some screening. I would say there is a company list that has great growth people, and I share that with the founders. From there, I help a couple founders actually create a take home assignment because that is a very nice way to really know their thinking and allow the candidate to share their more comprehensive thinking as well. And then the last step will be the interview. And you need to interview with the founder, the leadership team, your collaborators, maybe someone in your team as well, engineer, designers, but also the VP marketing, VP sales if you need to work with them. Can **Harry Stebbings** [27:56]: I ask you, on the take home assignment, is that always on your business, the one that you're hiring for? Or is it on the business that they've worked in before? Because obviously, they'll have a lot more historical expertise from the business they've worked. So how do you do take home assignments? **Hila Qu** [28:11]: I try to do it in my business, in the company that's hiring, because you want to get people who are quick thinking, right, quick at learning new things. That's essential skill set of a growth person. I have a couple questions I like to use. One of those is just go to my company's website, go through the entire journey as a new user. Pretend you're new. You're exploring Acorns. You're exploring GitLab. Download the app and try it yourself. Construct a new user funnel. What are the steps you will include in the funnel? What are the numbers and metrics you will try to collect to understand whether this funnel is effective or not? That can help me know, hey, how do they think about things? How do they think about data? Do they know the most important concepts like moments and things like that? Is that funnels ended at downloading app? That's a big red flag. They don't even go beyond that. So that's one. The other one is I will ask them to propose three experiment ideas and share their hypothesis and how will they measure success metrics. That again helped me understand what's their level of growth expertise. Do they have great ideas? Sometimes we do get great ideas from candidates and we test them and we let them know as well if we have the results back. The last component is a more heavy data analysis component. I usually share some real data, a real problem we're trying to solve analytically. I will allow them to think very open ended how they approach this problem, what other things they may try to look, what other conclusions they will draw from the preliminary data. What **Harry Stebbings** [29:43]: would be some really big red flags for you, why you'd be really worried when you saw them in the interview process? **Hila Qu** [29:48]: One of my favorite question I ask is what is the most unexpected experiment result you saw and what do you do after it? And the reason I love that interview question is because people get prepared about their most successful experiments. Don't want to ask for that for sure. Unexpected, they must have done a lot of experiments and then they have something unexpected. And what they do after to dissect that results and to take out the issues and figure out the next step is critical. If I hear them, like, no. I don't have any unexpected experiments. Everything work as I planned. That's a red flag because that's not possible. Sixty percent of AB testing fail. If you have done growth or experiments, you should have something. That's one. The other red flag, I would say, too big of a ego, lack of self awareness and not just growth, but for growth is even a bigger red flag because you will fail a lot of times. You need to work with a lot of different teams. You need to be willing to negotiate, have a communication, or rather than prescribe your thing to everyone. That's a little **Harry Stebbings** [30:51]: I think one I see is like a rigid mindset, which is where you have a growth leader who's had success in a playbook in Facebook ads from 2018. And now, you know what? It's this way. And you're like, the world's changed a bit. So you've helped me hire this great candidate, and we're onboarding them. We've spoken before about the first ninety days and start there. You've broken it down into first week, first month, and first quarter. What do we want to achieve in the first week? **Hila Qu** [31:17]: Yeah. I think first week is really about get a lay of the land. I would say the five things you want to focus on, learn about what tools you have. Do you have Optimizely as experimentation tool? Do you have a product analytics tool like Amplitude? And also understand the past initiatives, what worked, what didn't work. The second thing is dive into historical data. Gross people crave for data. If you can do that, that's great. The third thing is meet with your manager, your CEO, and other leaders, And then the fourth thing, meet with your own team, your collaborators. Here is designers, analysts, or your people in your team. Last one is try to sit in a customer call. Just get a feeling of who they are. **Harry Stebbings** [31:56]: Okay. So we have that as a first week. That's a busy first week, Hila. I'm impressed with your productivity. Next, first month, as a founder, what should I expect you to do in the first month? **Hila Qu** [32:04]: I think first month, you need to begin to generate some results. The quicker you can generate results, the easier it will be for you as a growth leader or growth practitioner to move forward. Try to find some early wins. Try to do some quick fix. Try to just make some impact. The five things I pick for first month is pick a growth metric, the first one. Second, identify a focus area where you want to work on rather than you want to change DAU on the first day. What are the smaller things, specific thing you want to work on? Launch some experiments. Try your best. Change something. Analysis wouldn't change results. You need to do something to change results. The fourth thing is set up some communication mechanism with your customers and also with your stakeholders. If you sit in product, but sales VP is an important person, try to set up that communication channel. And the last one is start to fill in the gaps in infrastructure to data. If you need to re instrument some tracking to get better data, or if you need to look into some tools, start to look into that. **Harry Stebbings** [33:10]: So I'm gonna unpack some of those elements later, but I wanna finish on the first quarter. First quarter, what should you be doing? **Hila Qu** [33:17]: First quarter really is assuming you are lucky and you work hard, you get some quick wins, you get some excitement around you. That momentum and excitement is very important. Now you want to take that to build this thing into a more program culture and make this more formal. You have a sustainable growth process that will allow you to generate wins constantly. There are five things again. The first thing is create a growth model, understand how your product grow. The second thing is a beauty experimentation program. Make this more formal, Have a cadence. How many experiments are you trying to launch every week? What is the process? Have this to be a part of your operating system. The third thing is choose a system of records. Document learnings, document results is such a big part. Otherwise, it get lost. And after two years, a new hires begin to do the same experiments he already did two years ago and didn't work. The fourth thing is start a weekly growth meeting. Again, this is part of the program systemization. And the last thing is create a growth culture. Growth culture is so critical. A lot of times, I saw why growth team fail is this company doesn't have a culture to nurture it, to make it successful. So, yeah, those are the five things I would try to aim for in the first ninety days. **Harry Stebbings** [34:36]: Hila, I was listening to you there, and I had so many questions listening to you. But now I get to dive into them. You said in the first week, dive into historical data. Many founders don't necessarily have the best data repositories, the best data ready for a growth hire. For founders listening, what from a data preparation side can they do to ensure that their new growth hire can really ramp up fast on the data preparation side? **Hila Qu** [35:01]: So first of all, many growth person are also data person. My favorite profile to hire is a former analyst to turn growth PM. So if you can find a unicorn like that, this person can help you clean up some of the data as well. That's one thing I would share. But another, I would say for B2C product, there are a couple data sources you should try to have available. App Store data is not enough if you have a app. You want to have marketing channel attribution data from tools like Adjust or things like that, so that you know which channel is bringing which users. That's the number one question. The other thing is product analytics and user behavior data. A lot of founders in early stage, they use Google Analytics, it's okay. But I would say it's last generation of analytic tool. You want to have tools like Amplitude or Mixpanel or things like that really require you to have a tracking plan and also instrument the tracking of the events so that you know what users are using in my product. Where are they come from? What they are doing? That's the product analytics. So I think the first step, if you want to hire a growth team or start a product led growth motion is instrument product analytics, amplitude, mix panel, panel, so that you know what features users are using and connect that with the back end purchase data so that you have that usage and purchase journey. That's the most fundamental thing. The next level requirement, if you can do that, is have all the data sources connected again, Salesforce data, which record sales activity, Marketo, which has all the marketing activity, how that linked to the product usage data, but that's much harder. It **Harry Stebbings** [36:39]: is much harder. And so let's just say we've got all the different data sources. You said for the first month now, we've got this beautiful amount of data from all these different channels. You said first month, you should pick your growth metric. How do you advise these new hires on how to pick the right metric to focus on? **Hila Qu** [36:56]: So I think the first thing is figure out the North Star metric. You can talk with the CEO. You can talk with the leadership team. You can ask them, what is the most important metric? I'm hired for growth. What I'm trying to grow here? What is the most important thing? **Harry Stebbings** [37:09]: Just pause on that. I always ask this, and everyone always says, ah, revenue. Mhmm. The revenue is not an in my eyes, and we can have a debate on it, it's an output. It's not an input. It's amount of sessions created will drive the revenue. Amount of referrals made will drive the like, the output is the revenue, but it's not the input. Do you see what I mean? It's a result. So how do you advise founders on how to choose a North Star metric? **Hila Qu** [37:34]: Yeah. Exactly. I think North Star metric need to be in the intersection of three things. The first thing is the business objective, revenue usually is the business objective. Sometimes it's something else. The other thing is users are getting value from your product. You need to think about users because otherwise the revenue may not last. And the third thing is the strategic direction, the strategic focus of the company at this time, maybe for this year. As an example, like Uber, they may choose a, let's focus on safety for this year because they are all sorts of incidents. That's the most important thing we want to focus. Maybe it's not revenue at this moment in this year. Maybe in their early stage, may focus on user growth or rider growth or driver growth at some given time. And then later stage, they may focus on revenue because that's the bright moment to focus on that. So North Star metric need to be reflecting your business objective, user getting value, but also your strategic direction. When I joined at GitLab, I talked with our CEO. We have ARR, not ARR, ARR growth as our North Star metric for the company, which is fine. But for me, as a growth leader, I need to break that down into inputs exactly as you mentioned and work on the inputs. I cannot work on revenue directly, but I can work on the new user activation rate, free to paid conversion rate, or some other metric that is the input to that ARR. **Harry Stebbings** [39:00]: When do you change that metric? Number one, most important one. **Hila Qu** [39:04]: Yeah. I think North Star metric shouldn't be changing very frequently. Otherwise, it's not a North Star metric. But the focus area metric, the free to pay conversion rate, the retention rate, the specific input metric, I tend to reevaluate that quarterly with my team. Did we make enough headwind on this one so that we can move to the next one or we want to continue? **Harry Stebbings** [39:24]: You mentioned activation and conversion there. I do have to touch on it because you mentioned before to me that they're your two favorite growth levers. Why is that the case? Why activation and conversion? **Hila Qu** [39:33]: First of all, those two levers are the easiest place to find quick wins. As a new growth person or growth leader, you want to find quick wins because wins change people's perception. You can get more resources, everything else become easier. Those two places are the easiest place to find wins. Even now when I work with my advisory clients, I usually do a new user funnel audit with them as one of the first things. I look at their marketing, I look at their sign up flow, I look at their onboarding experience and the purchase experience. There are usually a lot of low hanging fruits you can pick and you can experiment, get results right away. So I think it's a great way to find quick ones and build confidence and trust. **Harry Stebbings** [40:13]: You've also said before about how important loops are, but that does not mean we should abandon funnels. Just so I can fully get this, what's a funnel and what's a loop for anyone listening? **Hila Qu** [40:24]: There are three main category of growth loops. There is the content SEO loop. Basically, content can bring traffic and users can generate more content. So that's one. There is also the paid loop where you can use those paid channels to get users spend money, and then you use money to buy more ads and get more users. And then there's viral loop where in Acorns case, I invite my friend to join and my friend can invite someone else to join. Loops is compounding, meaning what you do here will bring more of that. Users will bring more users. Content will bring more content. So it's awesome. It's compounding. It's every growth person's dream. It's very important. But funnel is also important. Funnel is just a different perspective. I still look at funnel every day. Funnel is is a way to look at all the steps within the loops. If I'm inviting a friend to join, that is a loop. But I still need to look at the step, like, I sign up for Acorns. I invite a friend. My friend accept. There is a conversion rate, drop off rate in each of the step. That's how you look at a funnel. Loop is a strategic tool. You think about how to construct the mechanisms, how in product grow. It's compounding. It's very powerful, but you don't think about that every day. You think about maybe initially when you're building the product and you look as a growth leader, you look into the future, you are thinking about the next loop, you need to invest now in SEO so that it will kick into play in a while. Loops is a execution tool. You look at the steps, you look at the conversion rate, you launch experiments to drop them, you look at it day to day, people who are executing look at a funnel much more closely. What are **Harry Stebbings** [42:04]: the biggest mistakes founders make when it comes to loops? **Hila Qu** [42:07]: One, don't think about loops. You only think about funnel. You don't think about those powerful things. You'd miss the opportunity of constructing those. The second thing is by having it there doesn't mean it will work as a loop. Just put four things into a circle and draw a line, connect them, doesn't make it a loop. For example, if I launched a referral mechanism in Acorns, doesn't mean people will use it. There are things you can do to make people to use it. You can add incentive, experiment with the experience, make the process super smooth, think about the motivation, why this loop will spin. Just put four things there. It doesn't mean it will work. You need to make it work. **Harry Stebbings** [42:45]: I absolutely also think the amplification of loops, which is like you can very quickly see inorganic things that work. So content that works incredibly well, where it hits and you've got above 50,000 views on whatever platform. Double down, pay, promote it everywhere else. AB test content that works, and then spend to get even better. You said before about kind of systems of record and codifying these learnings. How do you do that? What tools do you use? Who's responsible for codifying it? How do you do that lesson documentation? **Hila Qu** [43:17]: There are two steps. One is documenting. The growth PMs or the people doing the experiments is responsible for doing that. And there are so many tools. It doesn't need to be fancy. We used the Google Doc. We use the slide deck. If you have tools like Confluence or any knowledge documentation system, can use that. At GitLab, we have everything open source. We have a handbook, so it's open and public. And actually, people look at our experiments and it's categorized by, is this activation and acquisition? And you can click in to see what's the hypothesis, what we tested, what's results, what's the next step. That's super critical. That's one. The other step is beyond documentation is sharing. You need to proactively share this with your stakeholder, with the team, make this as valuable as possible because they may stumble upon something that will utilize this learning and make this learning doing more for the entire company. At Acorns, we often run ads that work so well, and we begin to implement that feature in the product. We have a retirement calculator ads. We talk about if you start saving today in twenties, in your thirties, what difference does that make in your retirement saving? The ads work so well. We implemented them in email. We implemented a feature in the product for the same concept as well. So that is critical too. **Harry Stebbings** [44:36]: Hila, I have so many things I could talk to about. I could talk to you all day, but I wanna move into a quick fire round. So I sing a short statement. You give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay? So what tactics have not changed over the last five years? **Hila Qu** [44:48]: All tactics changed in the last five years, but the fundamental principles, the scientific methods, data, experimentation, psychology, human being, those are the same. **Harry Stebbings** [44:58]: What tactics have really died? **Hila Qu** [45:01]: A lot of channel died down. Do you remember clubhouse become much smaller now? And a lot of other channels, they don't exist anymore. **Harry Stebbings** [45:09]: How do the best practices in China differ to those in The US? **Hila Qu** [45:12]: That's something I can talk about all day long. The most popular role in China's growth space is called operation. It doesn't exist here in U US at all. I was confused initially, but what is behind that is because the average labor cost in China is lower. So a lot of things that tend to be automated here in US are handled by human, and that's called the role of operation. And think about rather than using the product experience to onboard a new user, we have a V Chat group. We have someone in there responsible for talk with everyone to onboard you into a new program or new product. Yeah. That's that's one of the big ones. **Harry Stebbings** [45:51]: What are the single most common reasons why growth teams fail? **Hila Qu** [45:55]: And culture is the biggest one, and also lack of data foundation is another one. **Harry Stebbings** [46:01]: What would you advise a growth leader joining a new role in a new company today? **Hila Qu** [46:06]: Find the trains that already left the platform. Think about yourself as an investor. Try to be very critical and picky about those companies. Evaluate the culture. Evaluate the leadership team. Is there a foundation for growth to be successful? And try to stay ahead of the next wave. Think about AI. Think about web three. There are always something exciting. **Harry Stebbings** [46:30]: What would you most like to change about the world of growth, Hila? **Hila Qu** [46:33]: Yeah. I think one thing I would say product led growth is fundamentally data led growth. I would love more people to know the importance of data. What's **Harry Stebbings** [46:41]: the biggest mistake you've made in experimentation or new channel expansion? When you look back over the years, what's the biggest mistake you've made? **Hila Qu** [46:50]: I think the biggest mistake I made in my early days is try to move too fast without getting buy in from the stakeholders. The result, the experiment might be successful, but there's so much resistance in implementing the winner. **Harry Stebbings** [47:04]: Tell me, final one, what one company growth strategy have you been most impressed by recently? **Hila Qu** [47:09]: ChatGPT. They have such an awesome and revolutionary product. The almost growth is powered by that. That's one super strong word-of-mouth and organic growth. I think the Miro is another one. They're doing great in terms of B2B product led growth. **Harry Stebbings** [47:24]: I totally agree with you on shoutout gbt because it's almost like this UGC loop. I know the point is it's not UGC, but you implement enough inputs to get the outputs. So I totally agree with you. Hila, this has been so fantastic. Thank you so much for joining me, and I've so loved chatting. **Hila Qu** [47:39]: Yeah. Me too. I had a great time. Thank you for the opportunity, Harry. **Harry Stebbings** [47:44]: I really love shows like that where you get really granular. Onboarding discussion was really a highlight for me and absolutely love that. There's a fantastic article which I'll link to on the site 20vc.com. You can also find us on YouTube at 20vc. But before we leave you today, ## Sponsor read **Harry Stebbings** [47:58]: I need your help. I need your input on the twenty VC Miro board as I'm booking new guests that we should feature on the show in 2023. Now this is the only way to make suggestions. Head on over to miro.com/20vc and leave your suggestions with digital sticky notes or comments. That's miro.com/20vc, and Miro actually sponsored this episode. For those of you that have not used it before, it's this incredible tool that I think is truly game changing. Just ask the 1,000,000 plus people who sign up for Miro every month. It's a visual collaboration platform packed with the right tools, tech, and templates to grow your idea, your product, your vision at scale. Miro acts as a single source of truth across teams. That means you can get buy in much faster from teams like marketing, engineering, sales, product, basically anyone who needs to have a say to make growth projects grow. And even though it seems like a simple digital whiteboard, it's so much more. Caching out a sound acquisition strategy, brainstorming Miro, rethinking your sign up flow, using user research templates, quickly visualize team structures on a Miro board. However you need to grow, Miro can help. We use Miro all the time to brainstorm future shows, vote on potential guests, and leave notes for the rest of the team in our own time. Check it out again at miro.com/20vc to submit your guest suggestions. And I'm really excited about this next sponsor because a few of my portfolio companies use it and love it. 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As always, I so appreciate all your support, and we have an incredible, incredible show coming on Friday with Mike at Liquid Death, a master class on branding and marketing.