Growth

TIP! The aha moment should be measurable in a quantitative way. Plus, your aha generally cannot be reflected by a simple vanity metric. So, for example, this cannot be just a ‘login’ or ‘view’ action. Just because you log in or view something, doesn’t mean you’ve received value.

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

The key here is that acquisition only truly makes sense after you’ve solved activation and monetization. Otherwise, you’re pouring water into a leaky bucket. But once those foundations are in place, acquisition becomes a high ROI lever. You’re feeding more users into a system that you already know can activate and convert.

You can spend all day driving traffic and launching pricing experiments, but without activation, it’s just churn with extra steps

So human desire of course doesn’t change that much over years or generations or millennia depending on how much you abstract, and people want the things they’ve always wanted. They want love and money and status and a sense of belonging, and they want to influence, and they want to get answers. They want to create, and they want solutions to their ... See more

“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