Interview, Fireside Chat
Kieran Flanagan: Hiring Tips for Growth; North Star Metrics; Hubspot's Mistake | 20VC #916
- Organizations are projected to evolve through chaos, centralized, and decentralized stages, with decentralized growth principles expected to become embedded in product workflows within the next two years as the market definition of growth solidifies.
- Pre-product-market fit entities are expected to prioritize retention as their North Star metric by building acquisition, onboarding, and retention mechanisms into the product from day one, whereas post-fit companies will shift focus to revenue.
- Growth functions are predicted to be integrated into performance marketing teams via iteration and experimentation, though paid channels and SEO will likely remain the core focus.
- Founders are warned against scaling acquisition or virality loops before establishing a user-fitting use case, a mistake that risks wasting resources and energy.
- Hiring practices for growth leaders are expected to evolve toward three-part interview processes covering passion, problem-solving, and case studies, with success dependent on defining specific team excel conditions for the next 12 months rather than relying on personal brand or past associations with top-tier firms like Google or Facebook.
- Future growth leaders are anticipated to actively build systems to make their own roles redundant, freeing them to address new challenges.
- Brands are expected to transition from purely educational models to "media brands" that create inspirational content to maintain an ever-present position, while tech companies must engage pop culture and take distinct points of view to avoid the disadvantage of sitting in the middle.
- HubSpot's strategy is projected to shift from a transformational "inbound" message to a standard best practice, requiring an engagement pivot from a passionate "tribe" to a broader cohort, while also improving its "community of practice" through live workshops and cohort learning.
- Media teams will likely struggle to hire top-tier full-time creators due to high costs and a preference for independence, leading to the exploration of "creator programs" with upside incentives and editorial freedom.
- Content production is expected to face significant waste due to insufficient allocation of resources to distribution, creating a tension between measurable short-term revenue attribution and necessary long-term unmeasurable brand differentiation.
- Community definitions are expected to remain vague across the market, though future tooling may better segment communities by "depth" and "breadth," with Web3 potentially offering ownership incentives for scale compared to Web2's reliance on reputation.
- Horizontal product companies are expected to remain horizontal for mass distribution while verticalizing specifically for monetization and targeted sales efforts.
- Deep community connections will remain difficult to justify for business leaders due to the absence of defined payback periods or direct revenue correlations.
- Cross-functional communication is expected to shift from black-and-white directives to navigating "gray" areas requiring shared problem definitions among growth, product, and engineering.
- Remote onboarding is predicted to require significantly more proactive scheduling of meetings and introductions to compensate for the lack of organic in-person interactions.
- Operational and project management tasks are expected to be delegated by leaders who lack enjoyment in these areas to focus on other strategic activities.
- Growth tactics such as email automation are expected to remain constant and important over the next five years, while paid advertising channels are projected to become less effective due to privacy regulations and rising costs per mille (CPMs).
- Search marketing is expected to face challenges as organic traffic from Google continues to decrease for advertisers.
- Growth strategies are anticipated to become more defined regarding team structure, goals, and alignment, which is believed to significantly improve founders' ability to leverage growth.
- The angel investing experience is expected to serve as a grounding mechanism regarding the extreme difficulty of building successful companies, while future structures will emphasize clarity on what growth teams should excel at within specific 12-month contexts.
- Kieran recalls missing a billion-dollar opportunity by not securing the domain "remote.cal.com" before its acquisition by "Lunchbox," which subsequently achieved that valuation.
- Canva is expected to remain a model for growth success through its execution of a templated marketplace model that extends distribution and traffic acquisition.