What to look for when you’re hiring a Head of Growth at andrewchen

What’s the biggest mistake that founders make in hiring their Head of Growth? In my opinion, it’s when the founders are trying to abdicate responsibility for their growth efforts, and hoping that a magical hire solves everything. The problem is, a startup’s growth is so fundamental that the founders have to take it on themselves. The buck stops at ... See more

And with Escape Velocity, we see the emergence of the classic “Growth Team” that the big companies have.  Escape Velocity,  Goal: Scaling up growth across many efforts and channels,  Roadmap: Multiple growth strategies — primarily 2 or 3 — that work in concert to grow the product to millions or tens of millions of users,  Outcom... See more

The “Head of Growth” at this [tipping point] stage is probably someone who is a doer. They should be able to create a detailed plan for how their first 6 months might look like, and the handful of people they might hire. This is someone who knows what they want, which is made easier since the company they’re growing has product/market fit. They are... See more

In the second phase, the Tipping Point, usually the growth efforts to focus on a set expert skills to scale rather than explore. If you are working on a product in real estate that competes with Redfin, the expert skill is probably figuring out how to capture high-intent traffic — like SEO/SEM. If you are working on social apps, it’s probably viral... See more

Since this essay is targeting at startups, I’m going to mostly focus on the first few stages of the framework and the skills that it implies for your new hire. If you look at each stage, they roughly imply a different set of problems you are trying to face – first, finding product/market fit and building the initial “atomic network” — a stable set ... See more