New User Growth, Retention and Antigrowth

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. 

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What is a Growth Model?

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. 

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Three Prerequisites Before You Start Working on Growth

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.

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