Kieran Flanagan: Hiring Tips for Growth; North Star Metrics; Hubspot's Mistake | 20VC #916

The Evolution and Definition of Growth

• Three Stages of Growth Maturity: Companies typically evolve through a trajectory of chaos (organic, unstructured growth), centralized (establishing a dedicated growth team), and decentralized (embedding growth principles into product management).
• Pre-Product Market Fit (PMF) Strategies: Growth is viable pre-PMF when mechanisms for acquisition, onboarding, and retention are built directly into the product roadmap rather than treated as an afterthought.
• North Star Metrics by Stage:
  • Pre-PMF: The primary metric is retention, specifically finding a cohort of users who engage with the product meaningfully.
  • Post-PMF: The primary metric shifts to revenue, which aggregates acquisition, upgrade, and retention efforts.
• Common Pre-PMF Pitfalls: Founders often waste resources optimizing for scalable acquisition or complex virality loops before solving core product-market fit issues; the advice is to "grow into the problems you have" rather than solving problems that don't exist yet.
• Growth Definition Variance:
  • Marketing/Sales-Led: Growth teams primarily manage performance marketing channels (search, paid ads) and rarely interact with product mechanics.
  • Product-Led Growth (PLG): Growth teams own the full funnel including performance marketing, onboarding, touchless retention, and monetization flows.

Organizational Structure and Hiring

• Hiring Sequencing: Startups can begin with a single growth engineer obsessed over a core metric before needing a dedicated growth leader, who becomes necessary only when bandwidth requires management of a growing team.
• Team Structure by Motion:
  • Product-Led Marketplaces (e.g., Airbnb): A central growth team lives within Product, owning all GTM metrics, while Marketing focuses on brand and positioning.
  • PLG SaaS (e.g., Calendly, Figma): A centralized product team handles onboarding/monetization, while Marketing handles demand generation (SEO/Paid Search).
  • Sales-Led: Growth functions remain within Marketing, focusing on performance marketing with a shift toward experimentation frameworks.
• The "Beginner's Mind" in Hiring: Founders should prioritize candidates with relevant experience who are eager to learn new problems ("beginner's mind") over "expert" candidates who may be set in their ways; the most successful hires find new challenges interesting.
• Case Study Design: Effective growth interviews include a theoretical growth model where candidates must prioritize metrics, design experiments, and defend their choices against counter-arguments to test their conviction and strategic thinking.
• Common Hiring Mistakes:
  • Hiring based on personal brand strength rather than actual skill, as strong brands often mask average execution.
  • Mistaking "company brand" for individual capability, such as assuming a former Google/Facebook growth manager can immediately replicate success in a 10-person startup without adjusting to a different context.
  • Failing to define the specific mission and 12-month goals for the growth team before hiring.
  • Not acting as an active sponsor for the growth team, leading to friction with other departments.

Content, Brand, and Community

• Media as a Strategic Imperative: Future tech brands must transition from purely educational content to inspirational, pop-culture-driven content to maintain relevance and emotional connection with audiences.
• Distribution Neglect: A critical failure point for content strategies is the lack of distribution planning; great ideas often fail because companies publish content without a strategy to drive visibility.
• Community Definition and Scale:
  • True Community: Defined as a tribe of people who believe in the brand's values and engage meaningfully, distinct from a broad list of social followers.
  • Breadth vs. Depth: Scaling communities requires balancing broad reach with deep, small-group interactions; future growth may rely on Web3 mechanisms like ownership and incentives to drive this breadth.
  • Three Pillars of Winning Communities:
    1. Personal Growth: Providing intrinsic value through learning and achievement.
    2. Connections: Facilitating peer-to-peer networking and collaboration.
    3. Reputation/Ownership: Offering visible social proof (Web2) or equity/ownership stakes (Web3) in return for community contribution.
• HubSpot's Community Gap: While HubSpot excels in educational content and certification, it has historically under-invested in "communities of practice" that actively connect certified users with each other for peer learning.

Cross-Functional Execution and Leadership

• Living in the Gray: Effective cross-functional communication requires understanding the "fog" between black-and-white stances, specifically recognizing that Product/Engineering solves problems while Marketing often pushes solutions.
• Language Alignment: Teams must establish a shared "dictionary" of problems rather than directives; alignment is often achieved through friction and iteration rather than a single perfect playbook.
• Remote Onboarding Standard: Success in remote roles relies on structured 100-day plans focused on relationship building (scheduled meetings, introductions) rather than immediate output delivery.
• Leader's Goal of Redundancy: The mark of a scalable leader is their ability to make themselves redundant by building systems and teams that can execute their former tasks, freeing them to tackle new strategic challenges.
• Investor Perspective: Angel investing provides a grounded view of the extreme difficulty of company building, highlighting the importance of speed, velocity, and the high stakes involved in founder decision-making.

Specific Tactics and Forward-Looking Statements

• Enduring Tactics: Email automation remains a constant and critical growth lever, having changed little over the last five years.
• Declining Effectiveness: Paid advertising is becoming less effective due to rising CPMs and privacy changes; search traffic is also facing headwinds from Google's reduced availability.
• Failed Platforms: Marketing on Clubhouse is cited as a tactic that has effectively "died" or plateaued completely.
• Impressive Recent Strategies:
  • Canva: Successfully built a distribution engine by templatizing the entire product and creating a marketplace for user-generated templates.
  • Step (Move): Leveraged game mechanics to drive growth within the move/app category.
• Future of Growth: The industry needs more definition around team structure, goals, and alignment to help founders leverage growth effectively; the field is moving away from vague "growth" titles toward specific, measurable functions.
• Kieran's Domain Anecdote: Kieran previously purchased a domain for a remote workers matching service (now realized as "Lunchbox," valued at ~$1B) but did not pursue it, illustrating the difficulty of execution even with a validated idea.