New user growth is generally a good thing. Generally.
There are times when a growing user base is an indicator of strong startup performance, and there are times when a growing user base is misleading at best and detrimental at worst. For the most part, telling the two apart begins by understanding the relationship between retained users and newly acquired users.
Simply put, retention metrics indicate how often people return to your product. With a few exceptions, retention is one of the most important indicators and a great starting point for further research in understanding whether or not your product is addressing a particular market need.
It would be easy to start this off by citing some silly empirical study which suggests that there’s been a rise in loneliness, put some numbers together, identify some very superficial correlations and back everything with one or two authoritative sources, to make my claims more convincing and call it a day. But my point isn’t to convince anyone of anything – this is just a couple of paragraphs of nothing more than a few thoughts jotted down on a lonely Sunday afternoon.
The origin of this question is the following: if you had the resources today, would you know how to deploy them in order to drive growth for your startup? Chances are you said “yes” and yet, the truth is that the overwhelming majority of founders will end up engaged in completely arbitrary activities and “best practices” at some point, myself included.
There is, however, a simple way of thinking about this, which should save you some time and resources.
Growth sounds empowering and exciting and it is of little surprise that a lot of founders are often very eager to begin working on growth-related activities in the infantile stages of their company. Yet the time and resources spent on these activities are often disproportionate to the output they produce, causing all kinds of trouble. Hence, I thought I’d share three prerequisites to growth that I think an early-stage company ought to address before turning to growth.
Continue reading Three Prerequisites Before You Start Working on Growth
– What’s the goal of business?
– To maximize shareholder value!
I bet you’ve heard that before. I recently heard it during a strategy talk in a room filled with all kind of senior managers and execs. They all nodded in agreement, while I sat there thinking “Damn. I don’t even know what the goal of business is, how am I a founder?!” Continue reading WTF is Maximizing Shareholder Value
Imagine you’re one of the few lucky founders who brought on a stellar team to execute a pretty viable business idea.
Everyone can feel you’re onto something, just a few more iterations and you’ll nail it. You’ll have Product-Market-Fit!
This is part two (part one here) of a talk I gave at the 2017 Travel Tech Con in San Francisco. I am very humbled to have had a chance to join the discussion alongside with some of the greatest industry leaders, such as Travelport, Amadeus, Skyscanner, JetBlue Ventures, Hipmunk and many more.
Now, I started out by saying that this wasn’t going to be a tribute to bad airline service, but maybe I lied a bit. I love it when airlines screw up. We built ClaimCompass as a platform to enable passengers to get some money when their flights are delayed, canceled or overbooked. We’ve had tens of thousands of passengers turn to us for help, and so far in 2017 alone, we’ve had claims for over $3M. Note that our clients are in a sense somebody else’s clients – they turn to us after an unpleasant experience with the airline, which most of the time won’t even talk to them. This has taught us a lot about the importance of customer service and what we can do with it.
Continue reading Beating your customers won’t help beat the competition (part 2 of 2)
This is part one of a talk I gave at the 2017 Travel Tech Con in San Francisco. I am very humbled to have had a chance to join the discussion alongside with some of the greatest industry leaders, such as Travelport, Amadeus, Skyscanner, JetBlue Ventures, Hipmunk and many more.
It starts a bit dorky, but bear with me, please.
I bet many of you traveled to be here today from near and far, you took the plane, the car, the train, and as much as I’m flattered to see so many of you listen to me speak, I must ask: why?
Why are you here? Continue reading Beating your customers won’t help beat the competition (part 1 of 2)
