Explosive Growth: A Few Things I Learned While Growing My Startup To 100 Million Users & Losing $78 Million

Come up with a controversial or interesting topic. Create a controversial, interesting, or taboo hypothesis that relates to the industry, usually done through a company-wide brainstorm. Example: Do blondes really have more fun?

Book Recommendation: The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry by John Warrillow.

#ExplosiveGrowthTip 16: Can you identify the one thing about your product that users want more of? Have you tested offering this to them for free if they get some friends to join?

Testing different background colors showed us how simple changes had massive impacts on user behavior. In case anyone is wondering, yes, a pink background for females did lead to substantially more activity from that demographic.

#ExplosiveGrowthTip 22: If people are complaining about something, it means the product is good enough that they care about it. The real problem is when no one’s complaining. Is anybody complaining about your product?

#ExplosiveGrowthTip 37: The best time to raise money is when you don’t need to. Is the company financially stable enough where you can walk away from a bad or mediocre term sheet?

#ExplosiveGrowthTip 67: Can you quantify how much superior your core product offering is than the competition? Is it 10X better?

#ExplosiveGrowthTip 10: You can often find success at the intersection of passion and expertise. Are you passionate about the problem your product solves?

#ExplosiveGrowthTip 46: Marketing a product with a low NPS is essentially saying to potential customers, “Hey, my product sucks, come check it out.”