Growth

Distribution Is the Hard Part

Most founders think the hard part is building the product. It’s not.

The hard part is getting anyone to care.

You can build something great. It can solve a real problem. It can even be timed perfectly. But if no one notices, it dies.

This is where most founders get stuck. They think the job is to build. They think if they ... See more

A common experimentation mistake: discarding a newly launched experience (like an onboarding flow) because it underperforms the old version.

The old version has been optimized over the course of many smaller experiments to a local maximum.

The new version is raw and unoptimized and may have much higher potential.

Data alone will rarely give you the co... See more

There's a famous quote about founder focus. I'd amend it: "First-time founders focus on product, second-time founders on distribution AND retention." Because in the end, retention is all you need.

“Goodhart’s law is real. The moment a metric becomes a goal, it’s no longer a useful metric... No metric by itself is a complete heuristic for a complex business. There’s a million different tensions in a company, and you can’t keep all of them in harmony by optimizing for one thing.”

For this reason, Shopify doesn’t use KPIs or OKRs. But as Tobi ex... See more

None of these viral mechanics keep on compounding, which actually makes sense. It would be a little absurd if things just kept on growing. What then is the true secret behind virality? And he said, it is word of mouth. It is the virality you can't measure that isn't a mechanic that isn't in a future.

It is when one user spontaneously tells another u... See more

The secret to true virality isn’t viral mechanics but word of mouth. LinkedIn’s head of growth revealed to Rahul that no app has sustained a viral factor above 1 for long periods—even Facebook peaked at 0.7. What drives growth is when users spontaneously tell others about products they love.

And then Twitter came along and obliterated a lot of blogging because it fulfilled the same desires more conveniently. And part of the reason it was more convenient was that it reduced cognitive strain because it eliminated tons of choices.