20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner

Matt Lerner
There's really only like six channels in the world. If you think about how are the ways you find out about stuff you hear from a salesperson, some partner brings you in because to enable you to do something, you see some ads, you do a Google search or there's some content or inbound paid ads or maybe hear about it from an influencer. That's really kind of it. I'll say categorically, the best growth people I hired and managed in my time at PayPal had no marketing experience, had no product experience at all. This is 20 growth with me, Harry Stebbings.

Harry Stebbings
Now 20 growth is the show where once a month we sit down with the best growth leaders in the world and we discuss growth strategies and how the best start and scale. Growth teams today were joined by an OG of the growth world, Matt Lerner. Now Matt spent eleven years running growth teams at PayPal and led the growth marketing program at 500 startups. Hes also the best selling author of growth Levers and how to find them this is a very granular episode on starting and scaling growth teams. Get the notebooks out.

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You have now arrived at your destination. Matt, I cannot believe it has been, I think it must be. I mean, 810 years since we first met, you were one of the first people I met in tech in London. So thank you so much for doing this. Likewise.

Matt Lerner
It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me. Now, I would love to start with some chronology. So how did you make your way into the world of growth and what was that entry point for you? I mean, my career started in Silicon Valley, humanities, philosophy and rhetoric undergrad, and so I was kind of taking any job I could find.

And what I sort of got pulled to was this, figuring out how to get customers stuff. And eventually in 2004, I joined the growth team at PayPal and I learned just a ton of stuff in almost eleven years there. And then after that I left, I became a VC myself. That's kind of when we met. You know, as a VC, you just get to see so many startups rapid fire and see inside of them and what's happening and their metrics and the people's personalities.

To be honest, I started to see a lot of teams wasting a lot of money and a lot of real talent making the same mistakes over and over again. Very preventable mistakes. That combined with the fact that I didn't love fundraising as we were just talking about. So I left VC and I started my own business where I work with startups and kind of help them avoid those preventable mistakes and find their high impact growth levers. If we just unpack a couple of elements, that eleven years at PayPal is a hugely impactful segment of your career, what are one or two of your biggest lessons from that?

Harry Stebbings
Eleven years. So many of them. I think towards the end it got to the point when you're in a big company where having the right answers, like five or 10% of the problem, and getting the entire organization to change people's mindset and align resources ends up becoming like 80 or 90% of the problem. And so I'm very much more shifting my time and my hiring strategy and everything more around influence. That was a big piece of it.

Matt Lerner
The other big one, when I look back on my time at PayPal, 90% of our growth came from like 10% of the stuff that we did. I could go back and say, you know, there are five or six things, obviously before my time. Getting on eBay, referral bonuses and, you know, network effects growth, getting early, getting engaged with web developers who were building the sites and implementing the payment systems, getting pre integrated with shopping carts and hosts some outbound sales that drove almost all their growth. But they did a ton of other stuff. They spent hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing campaigns, building products that frankly nobody ever used.

And you can do that when you're generating hundreds of millions per year in free cash flow, but startups don't have that luxury. But then, you know, when I step back as a VC and start to look at other success stories, I start to see that pattern repeat of like 90% coming from 10%, you know, and you can see it. You've had these people on your show, canva and Dropbox and all of these. And so that sort of got me into this question of like, okay, as an early stage startup without all that free cash flow, how can you figure out what that 10% is as quickly as possible? Now you've had eleven years, you've also seen so many preventable mistakes from the side of the investor.

Harry Stebbings
When you sit here today, what do you know now that you wish you'd known when you entered the world of growth? I think the biggest thing, how much of growth is actually figuring stuff out is actually information discovery rather than running playbooks, doing best practices, copying what other companies did. You know, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out, you can do SEO, you can do ads, you can optimize your funnel, but figuring out the details of, you know, Google has 100,000 search results for any query. How are you going to be in one of the top three results, which are the only ones anyone's going to click on? When you've got companies with way more money than you and ten years have head start who are locked into those top three positions.

Matt Lerner
Ads are sold at auction, right? So, which means you've got to be able to outbid companies. And right now, the ones who are winning those auctions have the best unit economics, the smoothest funnels, the most creative testing behind them. So much of growth is just trying to figure stuff out as quickly as possible. What's the hardest thing about figuring stuff out in growth?

The hardest thing about figuring stuff out? I think it's hubris. I think it's that people come in and they don't realize they need to figure stuff out. They have their best practices, they have what worked in their last job, they have what they heard on your podcast and they're like, all right, let's do this and turn on the tap. I mean, you see so many startups make this mistake where they over invest in time and money and energy and building a product in launching some massive campaign and it doesn't survive first contact with the customer.

And they did that because they were sure they were right, but they weren't. And so just having that humility and that curiosity going in can save you so many ways to cycle, so much time and resource. There's so many questions that I want to dig in straight on, but I want to set the foundations of like what growth is and what it isn't because it is so widely ambassadors as a term, like what is growth to you and what is it not? The simple definition I use for growth is you've got some value that you deliver. You help customers do something they're trying to do, they're struggling.

And growth is the ability to find customers and help them understand the value that you're going to deliver to them and get them to use and love your product or service. The way that's sort of different from traditional job functions like marketing or product or sales is kind of different in three ways. First of all, most of the time with growth, there's no playbook. So, you know, if you're marketing dish soap at Unilever and you hire someone from Procter and gamble, like they're going to walk in, they're going to know 90% of the job. But you're creating a product that no one's ever sold before, maybe even a new category.

So there isn't a playbook to do that. And that brings me to the second thing, which is that you're trying to sell a product that nobody's looking for. And again, maybe a category no one's even looking for. So you've got to figure out, who is this customer? What is it they're struggling to do?

What do they think they're looking for? Where are they looking for it? And so you can turn up there and look like that thing and answer those questions that they're going to have. And the third piece that's really different is it cuts across disciplines. If you're in finance or sales, you can mostly just, like, do your job and not have to worry about.

Yeah. And so growth leaders and growth teams have to be, and everyone on your podcast has said this, but they have to be super cross functional and really good relationship builders and able to help the other people around them be successful. The most challenging question for you to answer, but given the multidisciplinary nature there, as you said, and the element of there not being playbooks and figuring stuff out, is growth an art or is it a science? If you have to choose one, I. Have to choose one.

Harry Stebbings
You have to choose one. I'm going to make the argument that it's both, but then I'll choose one. Okay. I think the argument that it's both is that when you see growth science without art, and, you know, these websites, I guess if we're naming names on this show, like some of the travel booking sites, you know, these flows where they've just over optimized and refined and a b tested every little thing. And sometimes it's like a yucky experience, but it's the optimal blend of conversion rate and aov and, you know, blah, blah, blah.

Matt Lerner
And they're just not great experiences. And then there's all these famous examples of ad campaigns where people have spent gazillions of dollars in Super bowl ads and all this stuff, and they just haven't sold more beer or shoes or whatever it is that they're trying to sell because it doesn't resonate with customers. It's just good entertainment. So I think at its highest form, it blends both. And the trick then is to be able to get artists and scientific people to work together.

But that's like a whole other story. Just picking up on that. You said about travel sites where the flow is maybe suboptimal for the user experience, but it's optimized for the conversion funnel for the aov. Does the user experience not correlate to the highest aov and the best conversion funnel? Can they be at odds?

Yeah, I think that's a really important misconception, actually. It's a huge false dichotomy. There a lot of times you'll get the best customers in situations where you're actually introducing friction into the funnel. So one example of that is, I don't know if you ever probably not tried to sign up for noom or calm. And they have these onboarding flows where they're like, what brings you here today and what are you trying to achieve?

And what have been your problems in the past, and how much do you weigh and what's your target weight? And blah, blah, they'll be 20 or 30 questions long. These long flows are actually really good at building intent and the A B test and optimize the shit out of these flows, and it is more of an onerous user experience. And what do they get from that? They get a higher quality lead that's like got sunk cost fallacy because they've put enough time in to get through 30 questions.

Harry Stebbings
Why do they do that? So sunk cost is part of it. Like, you're not going to not want to see your results when you get to the end of answering 30 questions. But a big piece of it is actually, and this, I think is brilliant, is they're sort of taking people through the mental purchase journey. So if you're selling expensive software, you can afford salespeople, and they're going to answer your questions and explain and demo and blah, blah, blah.

Matt Lerner
But if your product costs $10, $30 a month, you can't. So your users are coming in and wondering, how is this thing going to help me? Why are my friends recommending it? Does it work in my specific case? What about this?

What about that? And each of these questions doesn't just get some information from the customer and help qualify them, which is useful, but it builds intent. Because if you go to the doctor and you say, well, it hurts here, and then the doctor says, well, does it hurt when you do this? And does it hurt more at night? And if you're like, yes, yes, yes, then you believe whatever the doctor says is more likely to be accurate.

So they're actually showing that, yes, we understand you, and that builds intent. It's just fascinating, isn't it, that actually, like, a poor user experience can actually create higher conversions and be better for the business. I guess it depends how you define poor, but I think most people traditionally think of that as, like, lots of form fields. So the other kind of challenge I find with growth as a definition is, and I have two different people in the show. Some are like, it's about optimizing funnels, a b, testing everything, and then others are like it's about taking the big swings, seeing outside the box, and going, we're going to test a few things, but big things.

Harry Stebbings
Is growth about moving the needle with big projects, or is it about actually optimizing lots of little things? So the answer, of course, is it depends. So let me just give you a simple set of rules to figure out which at any given time it's going to be 70 31 way or the other. And one way or the other depends on where you are in your company's growth. So in the beginning, it's premature to start optimizing.

Matt Lerner
You need to figure out the big stuff first. Once you've got one lever working, two levers working, then you can start devoting resources to optimizing and trying to squeeze more juice out of that lemon. But then you've always got kind of your 30% who are like, okay, what's the next big lever? Is there a market segment we're missing? Is there a use case that we're missing something like that?

Is there a channel that we could start to develop? When you look at going back to the art or science, I just want to get an answer on this pushed. Which one is it today, and has it changed? Actually, we look at a world of AI where maybe creativity is more front and center. What is it if I push you?

I mean, if I were running a company and you had a gun to my head and I had to choose one, I'd say science. Because science without art can deliver business results, and art without science, if it does, it's very rare and exceptional, down to luck. It just doesn't. When we think about data versus intuition, there, that kind of gut feel. Can you take me to how you think about how the best growth leaders act on data versus intuition and what's worked for you?

The best growth leaders understand if they possess the knowledge base to start to be intuitive. So it's easy to walk into a room, you know, and the highest paid opinion, the alpha in the room, is going to spout all their intuition and all their opinions, and they could be right or they could be wrong. You know, chat GPT will just very confidently tell me things that are patently, scientifically false. Right? So you get to a point to have good intuition, when you understand growth as a system in your business, and that has a few parts, you need to understand the customer's context.

Who are we selling this to? Where are they stuck? What are they trying to do? What do they think they're looking for? Where are they looking for it?

And then you understand sort of your growth model mathematically and you know, where are the biggest points of leverage, where you should be focusing for the maximum impact, and then you know, your, your business and your capabilities and what you're good at and can be great at and what you can't. Where does a growth model actually start, Matt? Like, I think so many people will listen to this and so many fans will listen. I'll be like, oh yeah, sounds great. Step one, I've got a company today we sell accounting for SMBs.

Harry Stebbings
Where do I start on my growth model? Because I don't really have one. The way to map your growth model is you start with your North Star, and that's going to be a metric that increments when you deliver value to customers and something that encompasses the entire funnel. And you stress test it a bit so it's not creating perverse incentives like, hey, is there a way we could game this and make this number go up without actually delivering business value? Do most startups choose the right North Star or the wrong north star?

And what mistakes do they make in choosing it? The biggest mistake with North Star, it's a very reasonable one, is they choose their North Star as revenue or profits, always. And you know, as an investor, you're like straw man that for me, like, why wouldn't my North Star be revenue? Like we're a business, right? And the problem is at early stage or at any stage, but there's so many ways to deliver revenue without actually delivering customer value.

Matt Lerner
And as an early stage startup, decreasing password sharing or bundle or upsells, things like that, you know, they'll make you a little more money, but no one's going to hyper grow because they shut down password sharing, right? So you need to focus on things that deliver value to customers. And the second problem with money is if you take, you know, your six functional heads in your business, engineering, product sales, whatever, and say, give me your best ideas for making money, they're going to give you six different strategies with six different resource sets moving in six different directions. And a startup can't move in six directions. But if you tell your marketing person, your growth person, your sales person, your engineer person, how do we get more weekly active users?

They're going to have a productive discussion and they're going to be able to figure out how they each fit into that value chain. I always think that actually it should go back to a user behavior like number of sheets created, do you know what I mean? Number of tables shared, number of whatever that is, because there's so many different ways. Also, weekly active users. You could have people who use it once a week for a month.

Harry Stebbings
If it's an accounting solution, maybe end of month doesn't mean they don't love it or not getting value. I say, how would a normal customer behave if they absolutely loved your product, and how many of them are behaving that way and track it in cohorts and make it go up over time? Do you agree with the. I think it's the Sean Alice or the Rahul at superhuman, which is like, if my product were removed, how many people would be viscerally upset? I think that's a really good test of the strength of product market fit.

Matt Lerner
Absolutely. But you can have product market fit with six customers and next year it's seven customers and you don't have a business. It depends how much they pay. When does the North Star change? Or does it change so the time.

The North Star would change. First of all, in the beginning, sometimes before product market fit, you're just still figuring out how you deliver value to customers. And when you learn that actually it's something fundamentally different, then you might want to change your North Star. Do you think you should be figuring out how you deliver value to customers? I didn't mean that badly.

Harry Stebbings
But, like, you know, we start companies to solve problems. Figuring out how you deliver value. Well, the whole point is I started my accounting business to make it easier for SMBs to do their finances. Surely you solve a problem because you know the value you want to deliver. But it's going to end up being more granular than that.

Matt Lerner
If you grabbed ten SMBs and said, hey, how can people make managing your finances easier for you? You get ten different answers. So they're looking for a really specific help, and they may end up using all your features, but they're going to sign up for a thing. There's some specific thing they're trying to do in a specific situation. Spreadsheets and Xero and whatever is coming up short, and you've got to figure out what that really specific thing is.

Harry Stebbings
Okay, so there's times in the meaning where we're kind of figuring it out, and then when we set it, is there a time post setting it where it's like, add might be time to change that, first of all. Yeah. If you learn something about your customers and it's actually wrong, we think, you know, accounting software, we think that they were signing into, like, log expenses, but in fact, it's mostly about filing quarterly VAT returns and people who log expenses don't retain, but people who file quarterly VAT returns do retain. So that tells you, okay, we're looking at VAT returns filed as our North Star, and that's a much lower frequency. That's a quarterly rather than a weekly active user cadence.

Matt Lerner
The other one is if you just spawn a second business line that's different, like Amazon's North Star from 1996 was repeat purchases. Obviously, AWS has a different north star, right. It's going to be something around server usage or cycles or something. So we have that North Star metric. We know when to change it.

Harry Stebbings
How do we align teams around it? I'm a big fan of questions, because, you know, if you tell people things, you don't have children yet, but if you tell people things, they may or may not listen. But if you ask them questions, it forces them to think. So once I have it, explain the North Star to the whole team. I have each manager go around and ask each person, explain to me how your work impacts the North Star, because they have to think at that point, and then they're going to tell you something, and they may tell you something you didn't know about them or their job function or their business, or you may realize they're missing an important piece of context about their business.

Matt Lerner
So that usually leads to a really productive discussion. And then after that, I'm like, okay, given that string of connections of you to the North Star, which could be two, three, four orders removed, what's the most impactful work you can be doing this quarter to move that number? You mentioned before about seeing so many preventable mistakes when you're a venture investor. And I wanted to dig in on it, but I was like, no, no, let's do the definitions of growth first. What were the biggest preventable mistakes?

Harry Stebbings
Because I see revenue as the North Star metric is one of the biggest. I see. So I guess see how much we want to dig in on this one. If you're familiar with Anna Karenina. Yeah, I love Anna Karenina.

Matt Lerner
Okay, so there's a section in the beginning where you're right on the first page, actually, where he says, happy families are all alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy. And as a VC, you're smiling because you know that successful startups are kind of all alike. They have the market fit, they have the amazing founder, they attract talent, and unhappy families, like, there's just a million ways a startup can go pear shape. And you've seen them all. And I sort of boiled it into three patterns, and I'm curious if this resonates with you.

And this tends to come back to sort of the founders DNA and their personality style. Some of them are overthinkers and they just spend too long debating. Measure twice, cut once. Sure, sure. And the most common profile for that I find is actually people who've been in large organizations for long periods of time, but actually have never been a founder.

And we can even say consulting or investment banking organizations if we want to be more specific. Sure. I find investment bankers actually have a faster velocity than strategy. Yeah, strategy consultants. And honestly the slowest executors are the vps of product from big company.

Yeah. You've never been a founder before. And they raised 5125 from Andreessen. Three years of money and it's just like, ah, the speed is not there. Yeah.

With all that money, you don't need to be faster. You can hire people and build shifts. Sure. 100%. Okay, so that's one.

So three patterns. One is under think over thinkers, one is under thinkers. And these people, you know, they have a bias for action and that's great. So they build something based on their sense of the market. And you know, of course, 99.9 out of 100 times it doesn't work.

So they build the next thing. They build the next thing, they build the next thing. And the problem is the solution set. And the market you're playing in is so broad, you just can't brute force it. But each time you build something else, you're making the product more complex, you're making the experience more complex, you're making the organization more complex, you're making the sales process more complex.

The value proposition is slowing you down at a time where you need nothing more than speed. Right? So you got your underthinkers and then the last type. And I think this is also close to what you're talking about with your vp of product. Are these higher and delegate types.

They're like, you know, I'm humble, I'm not an expert. So I'm going to hire six heads of my six important functions and they're going to come in and do their best practices. But if you really don't have fundamentally product market fit, a strategy, a sense of who you're selling to, they're each going to give you best practices. But you don't need to be good at six things, like a startup needs to be good at one and a half things, tops. You don't know if that's a sales motion or if that's product led or what.

And so your resource asks far exceeds your ability to deliver. And then all those trade offs you were trying to make just bubble right back up to the founder. So I think one of the biggest mistakes that I see is founders sort of split across channels too broadly and they don't nail one channel efficiently. Kit Bodnar from HubSpot said on the show that actually it takes one channel to get 50 million an error and two to get to 100 million an ARR. But actually so few even have one ever that really works.

Harry Stebbings
Actually, I think it was Adam Gross who said that if you had to paid under 100 million an error, you're not really product led growth. My question to you is, do you agree in terms of channel diversification too early being a massive problem that you see founders make? And how do you think about that early channel strategy? So first of all, I think the exception on paid below 100 million ARR is it's a good way to get eyeballs quickly for testing. So it's a good way to validate stuff quickly, but it shouldn't obviously be the crux of your growth early on.

Matt Lerner
You know, the channel thing, I think people overthink that a little bit too. So obviously let's try them all and see what sticks is not efficient because none of them are going to work the first time you try them. Or Facebook will work a little bit in the beginning because they want to get you to spend more money. But pretty quickly as you try to scale your unit, economics will deteriorate. So first of all, it's kind of a false distinction because most successful businesses end up using some combination of this sort of post hoc hierarchy of channels we put on it.

So it's kind of a false distinction, but there's really only like six channels in the world. If you think about how are the ways you find out about stuff you hear from a salesperson, some partner brings you in to enable you to do something. You see some ads, you do a Google search, or there's some content or inbound paid ads, or maybe hear about it from an influencer. That's really kind of it. And then if you're in like b, two, c, you probably can't afford salespeople, partners probably won't make sense.

It's even a shorter list. And you can just sit with that list in an hour with your co founders and whittle it down. If there's no one's googling anything related to your product, you're not going to do SEO. If your unit economics are tight and you have a long payback cycle you're not going to do pay. Like, if your product isn't expensive, you can't do sales.

So if you just take these six channels and, like, cross off the four or five that probably don't work, you've got your channels, and that's like 1% of the challenge. 99% of the challenge is getting it to work because each of these channels is hard. You know, we talk about, like, Google ranking in the top three for anything these days is going to be very hard. Paid ads are sold at auction, so you're going to have to outbid people who are spending $100 million and have huge teams who've been optimizing this for decades. Sales outbound.

Like, how many sales emails do you get and LinkedIn messages and how many of them do you ignore? So really doing the experimentation to refine and get a channel or a combination of channels working is really where people should spend their time, not, as you said, trying the checklist of different ideas. The thing I find funny is content. Everyone now moves to content. Everyone has a fucking podcast.

Harry Stebbings
And I just find it so funny because it's like, you will have to do 200 shows, no one will care, you will not make any money, and then you also have no proof that it works. Still, good luck. And everyone's just like, it's just so funny for me because the other thing that's really hard, I find with a lot of channels is it takes a long time and you often don't have data knowing it works, you almost just have to suspend disbelief and say, but it could work. In part of the book, you mentioned a locksmith moment. I just wanted to unpack what a locksmith moment was for startups and how you think about it.

Matt Lerner
So the locksmith idea crossed my mind. It was early in my time at PayPal, and I was living in San Francisco in like a gated apartment complex. One day I walked home and I got to the gate that led to the courtyard to all the apartments, and there was a sticker over the lock. It said 24 hours emergency locksmith. It had a phone number on it.

I thought, this is a clever locksmith. She could have bought ads on public transit or pod sponsored podcasts, I wouldn't have remembered. But she figured out where I'm going to be when I suddenly realized I need a locksmith more than anything else, which is locked out of my apartment complex because someone squirted glue in the lock because it's San Francisco. And I thought, that's the key. So every successful startup finds this kind of exact moment of highest need and figures out a way to insert themselves.

Harry Stebbings
There is finding people where they need it the most. The key, can you create demand from nothing, from synthetic air? So you said there about the locksmith, which is like someone puts glue in the lock and you know you need it now. Some products you don't need now. How does the role of growth vary in those two opposing worlds of like, ah shit, I broke my leg, I need it now.

Versus, oh, that would be cool. Athletic greens. We were all just fine before athletic greens, and yet some people spend tons of money on it. In terms of finding that person. I think the hard thing is they do have different needs and different things resonate.

What are some lessons on what works in terms of the messaging that you use? Because for one person on athletic greens it might be recovery and for other it might be optimal brain function or whatever that is. How do you think about effective messaging in a more horizontal product? So for a very horizontal product like airtable, I mean, it's really hard, but you're going to find initial use cases and you're going to kind of start there and expand. But if you came to me with your startup and said we have this product, we need to find our customers, I start by kind of using survivorship bias on our side.

Matt Lerner
So I tell you, let's find some people who actually did sign up for your product and assume that whatever they think you do for them, that's the thing your customers want. And then I go and start to interview those people and we use a jobs to be done interview technique which kind of gets to the core of like what was their problem and what were they trying to achieve and what they're trying to achieve. I say like a good headline on a landing page completes the sentence. Now you can, so I'm trying this and oh, now you can close out your quarter in minutes, not days or whatever it is that they're trying to do. So then I'm going to do those interviews, I'm going to find out the different, now you cans the different outcomes that people have.

And then if I've got ten or 50 customer interview transcripts, now what I used to do is just read through them and I'm looking for the verbs. Now you can use a large language model to do that. And it's like pull out all the verbs, all the outcomes of what people are trying to do. And then I've got a shorter list and then sometimes I'll just show, I'll mock those up as landing pages and show them to people and like, what do you think that means and what will that enable you to do? Or the other one is just very quickly, like in a week for $500, you can just test a bunch of ads.

So you have one ad design and six different. Now you can headlines and you show it to like a lookalike audience or highly selected target that looks like your customers. And these ads won't be profitable. That's not the point. But the point is you can test half a dozen, 612 messages in the space of a week against your audience and see what gets them to click.

Harry Stebbings
I'm so pleased that you said that about kind of really almost kind of the importance of the testing process to find product market fit. Because everyone on the show says when it comes to timing of hiring a growth lead or a growth team, post product market fit, it's always post product market fit. And then there was one guest who said, no, you actually sometimes need to create demand to understand what product market fit is, to understand what resonates. And so you should hire them pre product market fit for those reasons. Where do you sit on when is the right time to hire growth?

Matt Lerner
Okay, so I'm going to contradict what a lot of your previous guests have said. Great. Fantastic. The reason I'm going to do that is because your previous guest, M and NCR, worked for companies like Shopify and HubSpot and segment, and they have gazillions of dollars and they have huge budgets and they have brand appeal. The best growth people in the world would be thrilled to go work for those companies.

Little startups don't have the brand recognition. I mean, they're, they're not really great jobs. They don't have a ton of money. The equity is, you know, a bit sus, and so you just, you can't necessarily hire a growth genius at that stage. So part of it is just the level of talent you can hire.

And if you think about like growth, this is something that cuts across every function. It's the hardest thing your company is going to do. So you want the most talented, smartest person in your company who's closest to the customer, the most impatient, the fastest mover. And that sort of starts to look a lot like a founder. So I really believe very strongly that your first head of growth is your founder and their first hires.

I wouldn't start by hiring somebody senior. So I see this play out badly a lot where people are like, I'm going to bring in the magical growth wizard and they're going to grow my company and just goes pear shaped. More often than not, these people are like, bring in their playbook they ran at their last company or their bag of tricks or whatever, but they don't fundamentally understand your business, and you probably wouldn't let them do that if they were good. You wouldn't let them have all the engineering resources and all the product resources and all, like, you wouldn't let them do the stuff that they need to do to be successful anyways. So first hires for me, once you understand roughly how your business is going to grow, maybe it's content and inbound, maybe it's paid, whatever I say, hire people who can do 50% of the hard things you need and figure out the other 90%.

You've got a list of hard things you need. You know, whatever good direct response, copy user experience, funnel optimization, deep analytics about retention cohorts. You're not going to find someone who can do all those things, so find someone who can do half of them. And then the other 90% is between the time you write the job spec and the time that their butt hits the seat, everything's going to be changed, and six months later everything's going to be changed again. So fundamentally what you're going for is what is their rate of learning?

So I'm looking fundamentally for bright generalists who can do some of the things I need as my early growth hires, with the idea that if these are really talented, bright people, hopefully someday one of them will be able to grow into my head of growth. Okay, so we're going to go through the process. I'm an angel investment of yours and you're going to advise me. Okay? So I've got that person who kind of knows 50% of the core skills and then they can learn and adapt fast enough.

Harry Stebbings
How do I find these candidates? Matt, I don't have a growth network to pull from what is the right way to start the process and start getting candidates in pipe. I've actually found, even when I've worked for kind of unknown startups, that general broad inbound tends to work. But I find the mistake people make is that they apply too many filters to the search. You know, you write the job spec and the recruiter is like, well, what do you want?

Matt Lerner
And you're like, six years of experience and a series B high growth fintech in London, went to a good university, former management consultant. It's like, okay, but she already has a job. Like, what about the rest of the world? And so if you just remove filters like geography or like a certain university degree or certain work experience. Often you can find these bright generalists.

I'll say categorically, the best growth people I hired and managed in my time at PayPal had no marketing experience, had no product experience at all. They were coming into organization where they were surrounded and supported, but they were both former scientists, and they were really good at figuring things out. Did they have commonalities in their backgrounds around that then? Were they all maths grads? Was there other things in their profiles that were common despite the lack of.

Harry Stebbings
Of marketing? I mean, one of them was a physicist, the other one was a computer scientists, but in a university doing academic research. And so both of them understood data, and they could think from first principles, and they understood this idea of causation and correlation and experiment. So it is like a science rooted mind. Yes.

Matt Lerner
Scientists are always aware of what they don't know, unlike, you know, most people in most jobs. You're just always, you're wrong all the time. You're at these. You see these big gaps in humanity's understanding of whatever your discipline is. And you've got to come into a startup with this assumption that you only know, like, 10% of all the stuff you're going to need to know for this to be hugely successful.

And scientists come in with that curiosity and humility. I mean, as a venture capitalist, we're never wrong. So you're simply wrong because, you know. You feel great every time you make a check, right? You write a check.

You're like, I feel great about this company. And then the data tells you, well, no, you were stupid about 80% of these companies, 100%. It is one of the most unique jobs in the world. I said to my mother the other day, can you imagine, like, a chef in a restaurant, where 90% of the meals they produce can be terrible, the worst. As long as 10% are great, you can be the best in the world.

Harry Stebbings
She's like, I don't get this at all. I'm like, it's a unique position. Okay, so we have this profile. I love that in terms of actually the best tires, not necessarily coming from that background. So we put that out, put it on, indeed, put it on, whatever we want to do.

And we have this top of funnel. Start the interview process. Interview one. What am I trying to achieve from that first interview? Matt?

I've never done this hiring process before. What questions do I ask? How do I do it? So remember, I said, you want someone who can do 50% of the hard things you need to do, and figure out the other 90%. So my entire interview process is going to be focused around figuring that out.

Matt Lerner
So I've got my little list of like five hard things, and I'm going to start like a funnel, create rapport. I start with really broad questions. What are you great at? What's your favorite work to do? What would you rather delegate by their answers to that?

I can already start to tick off things on my list where I'm like, okay, it's obvious they can do this. I'm not worried about their ability to do that. I'll end up with one, two, three things where I'm not sure they've got it or not, and then I'll go deeper into questions about that. And those are going to be questions typically that don't have a clear right or wrong answer, but are important. So, marketing attribution, how do you think about first click versus last click and how to learn and spend your money wisely, how you break apart a retention problem or whatever?

How do you get resources from a department where you don't have any official authority over them? I usually use question pairs and talk me through it and tell me about a time when who does this? Well, in your opinion, and why? Things like who do you follow, who do you copy? Things like that.

And then the other questions are really around that 90% of what they're going to need to figure out. So I'm trying to figure out, literally, do they have a growth mindset? And these are the questions. I've been using them again and again for years, and they just never fail and it's never close. No one's ever like, kind of maybe so.

The first one is just like, what are you hoping to learn in this role? And good people will already have thought, they may not have like a stock answer, but they're going to have thought about where they're at in their life and what they need to learn to get to where they're going. The second one is, tell me about a mistake you've made. Some people are comfortable talking about their mistakes, and some people think it's like a trick question to find out their weaknesses and they have some scripted answer. And then if they tell you about a mistake, like, what are their nonverbals?

Are they comfortable talking about it? And then do they unprompted? Do they tell you the lessons and what they do differently? Like, had they thought about this mistake before the interview? The third question is just, do you have any questions for me?

Because good growth people are annoyingly curious like, not fun at cocktail parties, but very good. They ask all these like, sounds obvious, but oh, hold on kind of questions. And then the other piece I need to figure out there is, are they a playbook runner? Are they going to come in with their playbook and execute it? Or are they going to try to write a new playbook?

Because the way you get promoted in a lot of companies in product and marketing is by doing the stuff you're supposed to do, but doing it faster and doing more of it and making fewer mistakes and managing more people and more budget and making good decks. And none of those things are useful in an early stage startup. You actually don't want to do most of the things, you don't want to spend most of the money, and you can hire the people. So to find the playbook writers, I'll ask things like, what do you see as the big open questions right now in our business? Do you prep them ahead of time for that?

Harry Stebbings
Then do you send them a deck, a fundraising deck, maybe from the last raise? Do you send them prep on the company itself just so people are in informed enough to come in and be like, oh, I know your business, or is it like on the fly? Let's see how quick they think. It may not be a first round interview question, but I don't prep them. And the truth is I don't necessarily need them like most interviews.

Matt Lerner
I don't need them to have the right answer. I want to know how they got there and what they think. And maybe it's like, well, you're in this industry and your competitors are all doing this. So no, I don't prep them, but I still find they get good answers from good candidates. What are the biggest mistakes people make in those early interviews?

I think the biggest mistake early on in hiring is just being dazzled by the names on a CV and where you've worked in the past and what you've done. And I think I already said I have very little use for experience. And if you worked for a successful company in this space, it doesn't mean you knew how to cause that success. It just means you worked there. Do we do case studies?

Harry Stebbings
Often people like to bring a growth experiment as part of the process and say, hey, do you do that? And do you test in some tangible way the skills, the 50% that we want to see them have? I don't tangibly test stuff as far as case studies, I'll just do it informally. You know, tell me about a time when you walk me through it. What did you learn if you had it to do over.

Matt Lerner
As far as skills, you know, this isn't engineering. I find if people can talk about it well, and if I know they have a bias for action, that they're either going to be able to do it or figure out how to do it. What's the biggest mistakes you've made in hiring? I've done this more than once, and I'm not proud of this, but there have been people where I interview them, and they're brilliant and they're talented and I really like them and I really want to hire them. But something in the interview process suggests that maybe they're dishonest or lack integrity.

And it's always a small thing, like when the interviewers debrief and they told this person one thing, but they told this person another thing or two things that didn't make sense. And it's like, oh, it's just a little thing. Don't worry about it. And what I realized was nobody lies about just one thing. And if they lie about little stuff, if they don't have integrity, then they lie about big stuff.

And so I bring those people in and they are bright and they're talented and they do cool stuff, and then they do something that really puts me in a bad position. How did it turn out in the cases where you got it wrong? I had to let those people go after, you know, I was in a situation where I was embarrassed. I looked bad, my organization looked bad. It cost us some money where, like, really nasty things happen.

Harry Stebbings
Do you need to be in person for growth teams? I think a lot of it is creative is testing. As you said, it's multifunction. Do you need to be in person? I think there needs to be a part of it that's in person.

Matt Lerner
A lot of it is really solitary. A lot of it is almost like coding, like spending time with data, talking to customers, making sense of interviews, refining and designing creative, setting up experiments. So a lot of the execution is solitary, but a lot of the knowledge sharing and ideation process is coming together. So my rhythm is I'll have typically, you know, a day, a week at least, or two days where you're together, and always a weekly growth meeting. And that point of that weekly growth meeting is, what's the most impactful work?

How's it going so far? What did we do last week? What did we learn from that? Win, lose or draw? How are the numbers trending?

And therefore, what should we do this week? So you're going to look at the results of all your experiments, the stuff you tried, your customer conversations, your data analysis, you're going to take everything you learn and you're going to share it with the whole team, and they're all going to be a little smarter and they're all going to have some new ideas. And then you can have a really productive conversation about ideas they didn't have coming into the meeting that suddenly make sense. And so at once that's like an information sharing pump. And on the other hand, because it's a weekly cadence, it pushes the pace.

You're like, we have our meeting on Monday. I need to have my experiments done by then. And the cadence of experimentation and learning is critical. Now we've decided we want to hire this person they're joining. I've no idea how to do onboarding.

Harry Stebbings
I think every startup does onboarding terribly. For any role for growth, it's even harder and it is hard. What is the right onboarding process for a new growth hire at a startup? So every company is kind of different and how much they like process and organization. So I'm going to just give you the core principles and people can adapt it to their systems.

Matt Lerner
But there's basically two steps here. The first one is they need to become an information spongeBob, and they fundamentally, there's like three or four buckets. They need to get to learn everything they can about your customers. So it'd be some listening to customers and a lot of digesting customer research and looking at old experiments and what worked and what didn't and talking to sales and customer service people. They need to understand the growth model mathematically.

Where do customers come, how much do they cost us, where do the conversions, drop offs, which cohorts retain all that stuff? And then they need to understand like your team and capabilities and who are the other people here and what can we do? How do I work with them? Once you've got all that, then step two is prioritization. So remember early on I said 90% of your results come from 10% of the stuff you do.

So which work do we do in our limited Runway is actually a super important question. So I'm going to have this conversation with this person about, okay, given all that after 30 days, what should we be doing and what should we not be doing and why? Even if I completely agree with them, I'm going to stress test the shit out of that. Because why are we doing this and not this? Because it's a very important decision and is worth spending some time to get that right.

Then it becomes a question of like, is that stuff actually happening? How's it going? What are we learning if this works, how big can it be and how can I help this go faster? Are there any quick and easy wins that people can do joining teams in the growth role? And should they be going for those quick wins?

Every good growth person with some experience has a bag of quick wins that will work. Changing a bad headline to a good. Now you can headline going back through. Most people track sign ups and conversions for their paid stuff, but they don't look at customer value. And you may find that certain channels bring you higher or lower value customers and you can just shift spend to the ones that bring you high value customers.

If you haven't been emailing your database and you've got a good email sequence, you can wake up a bunch of dormant leads really quickly and there's a dozens of these quick wins and you can do them. And especially if you need money or if you have one of those founders who's impatient for traction, fine. But if you think about any of those things I just said, they're kind of one and done. You know, once your headline's good, you're not going to. If your conversion goes from 1% to 10%, you're not going to ten x that number again, sadly.

So that's where eventually there's just no getting around kind of doing the fundamentals. How quickly do you know when they're not great or if they're not good enough? I always think actually in most roles it's about a week, which is why I try and pay people to take a week off their job beforehand. And I say, hey, Matt, it's a big decision for you. Let's pay you for a week, join for a week in kind of quiet and we'll see if you like it.

Harry Stebbings
And I put it on them as like a few. You can see if you like us. But I think in a week, you know, if someone's good, I think that's. A really good approach. Any way you can sort of try before you buy it works well.

Matt Lerner
But yeah, I think it's pretty obvious right away the bad candidates come in bad with people, you know, all output, no input. Mentally, it's usually pretty obvious. I think once you've got some experience. Are there any big mistakes gross people make in their first days in a role? It's the opposite of what I just said, right?

It's coming in and trying to run your playbook from your last job and feeling like you've got all the answers, instead of having the humility and curiosity to understand. How does this business work? Can I ask, what growth experiment did you have the most conviction in that then turned out to be wrong? I'm just intrigued. You've got eleven years at PayPal.

Harry Stebbings
It must have been some things where you're like, I really went all in on this. I was just wrong. LinkedIn, actually, for my business now, someone who I really respect gave me advice to start posting on LinkedIn as like a way to build my list, and I was really dismissive of it. I don't remember why, I just didn't like the idea at first, but I respected this person enough. I was like, you know what, I'm writing these weekly emails anyways.

Matt Lerner
I might as well turn them into LinkedIn posts. And I started doing it, and just like you said, like, nothing, nothing, nothing. And eventually, like, one started to get some traction and then nothing, nothing. And then one got a lot of traction and it really snowballed and it turned into, you know, kind of my main source of new subscribers to my list now. But I was completely dismissive of that.

Harry Stebbings
Is subscribers to your list the North Star metric for your business? No, it's just a funnel driver. The ultimate North Star metric for my business is how many startups can we help? What have been some lessons in the LinkedIn building? You know me, I love content.

Any big lessons for you in building the LinkedIn following? It's humbling because I have all this stuff that I think is amazing, and some of it doesn't perform and some of it does. And I'm always surprised. Often the more intellectual stuff I find doesn't perform. I will often tweet stuff about kind of, I don't know, temporal diversification of different vanisher vintages and.

And people like, no, your stuff is amazing. But then, you know, you tweet stuff about, like, perseverance and grit. It goes crazy. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think there's something there.

Matt Lerner
Like, you know, if I look at people's most successful LinkedIn or Twitter posts, a lot of times there is some emotion, there's just a human story in there, even if there's some data. Final one, before we do a quick fire, which is like, what's a growth loop to you? Everyone always says on the show about growth loops, and everyone has very different definitions. We talked about kind of that kind of channel leading to core base and whatnot. What is a growth loop, and how do you think about how startups should think about it?

I mean, fundamentally, it's any positive feedback loop anywhere in your business? It basically means if you go to sleep and stop doing it, it keeps running itself. So that could be a classic thing like a referral loop. It could be a financial loop. If your ads are paying back five x in 30 days, then you have a positive ad spend growth loop.

There's these network effect loops where you bring people on your show, they create content that brings you listeners, which then increases the desirability of your show, which brings you better guests, virtuous circles. So once you've mapped your growth model, you look around and say, where can we find a positive feedback loop here? And then you double down on the growth loops that you find. Yeah. Can you double down on more than one or two at once?

It's hard. The doubling down is really down in the trenches of a really tweaking and optimizing. Going from 0.5 x return on ad spend to three or four x return on ad spend is 100 experiments or more. Should the growth team be in the core functions, be it marketing, be it product, should it be separate completely? So in an early stage startup, there just comes a point where your company becomes the growth team.

You go through fundraising, you go through building your product, and sort of the eye of Sauron turns and it's like time to do growth because the startup can't really do two things at once. And that means your founder is very involved in it, and all the kings, horses and men are on deck. When you have a larger company, it needs to stand outside. It needs to be cross functional and diverse, because growth people have a fundamentally different orientation, different approach to life than other groups, but they need to have really good relationships because they're going to need to pull resources. You know, when I was hiring these brilliant scientists, the other trait I was screening for was sociability, and people who could just go make friends with the engineers and the data scientists and everybody, and just get stuff from people who didn't report into us.

Harry Stebbings
Listen, I want to move into a quick fire round, and I want to start with you. You wrote the book. What's the hardest part of writing a book, Matt? I love writing, and I write emails and LinkedIn posts. I'm used to writing on short form and then turning that into a full book.

Matt Lerner
I completely underestimated the magnitude. That's like an architect who designs, like, loft extensions, having to design terminal five of Heathrow. It's just a completely different level of thinking. And I was hopeless. And thankfully, I found really good editors who were able to help me really sort out and sequence my thoughts and turn that into a concise book.

Harry Stebbings
What's the biggest mistake that people make when hiring for growth? The biggest mistake is being dazzled by the names on the CV and going for people with lots of impressive experience. The hard thing about growth is there really is very few growth pros. True growth pros, do you know what I mean? And the ones who are out there aren't going to come to work for you.

That's it. And they're like a million dollars each. You're Elena Werner's at Dropbox. She's not going to come join your series, a company in London. Yeah, I agree with you.

So you have to find the diamonds in the rough. That's why I'm thinking so much about talent and ability and just get them in there and see how they grow. Because every one of these great growth people started as an SEO person, or an analyst, or a content marketer or an engineer, and just learned and grew very quickly. So many of the great growth people started in SEO. That's one thing I really see from.

Matt Lerner
Doing the shoahi, and that's because it forces you to think about customer intent, right? We talked about like, you've got your product, but your customer has this context, this thing they're trying to do, this thing they're looking for. And you literally cannot do SEO unless you spend your whole time thinking, what are people looking for and what are they trying to do? How does growth change in the world. Of AI in 1 minute?

So what I see right now happening is a few things. First of all, the floor for creative has gone up. AI models can now do design and copy better than 90% of people. So there's just no excuse for doing that badly. Two is they can automate previously hard to do tasks like cold outbound.

That all becomes a lot more effective. It becomes more effective or less effective in the commoditization of it, because you actually have this infinite supply now of it. And actually it's relatively generic in how it's done. For the majority of me right now, it feels like we're still on the ascending curve. Like suddenly lots of people are getting good cold outreach in a way that they didn't.

They will become a nerd to that in a year. But at the moment, the windows kind of still open. That's my one worry. It's like, will we see outbound really just decay and die as a channel completely because you just have infinite supply of it and suddenly it's like, shit, we need to find WhatsApp or text as a new channel loop because it's just too saturated. I have to be humble there because I don't like outbound and I've been declaring the death of outbound for many years now.

And it just, it kind of works for the few people who really nail it and figure it out. It still kind of works. I think that, but I'm not going to commit to that answer. So we have kind of raising the floor on content. We have that in terms of outbound.

Harry Stebbings
Anything else? LLMs can help you parse large amounts of customer conversation data quickly and pull out the most important themes. And if you know the most important things your customers are talking about, that's a huge advantage. So that's the other big one I'm seeing right now. Do you think this is the most exciting time, technologically speaking, in your career?

Matt Lerner
So I live through.com revolution 1.0, but it's right up there. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, 2009 mobile apps, you know, and Airbnb and Uber and Stripe and like, so many amazing companies were getting born. So that was a huge one. And then.

Yeah, certainly.com 1.0, wherever, like people were first building these businesses and like Netscape. Was ipoing, what growth tactic do you think has stayed truly dominant over the years? You know, I listed the six channels before sales and advertising, and most of those had been around for a long time. Influencers are new, but, you know, some of this stuff is new. Network effects, I always loved it.

Harry Stebbings
Like what? Influencers new because in the days of, like Audrey Hepburn, she was an influencer for the things that she wore, the cigarettes that she smoked. It's just a different channel with which it's presented. That's a great point. The democratization, the long tail of influencers opening up programmatically is a new thing.

Matt Lerner
You know, network effects, product led growth is new in like the last ten years. But a lot of the stuff, we've been buying ads since forever and the fundamentals that make it work, like having the right message, having the right design, testing and experimenting, haven't changed. What would you most like to change about the world of growth? So the thing I'm trying to change in my business and the thing that bugs me is back to when I was a VC and I just saw so many people wasting so much money and talent. Like these entrepreneurs are brilliant, talented people on stuff that I just knew wasn't going to work, and making these, again, repeatable mistakes over and over again, you know, waiting to hire ahead of growth, hiring a person with a dazzling resume, building this big complicated product before validating it with the market.

So I just love to see people shift from thinking they have all the answers and prematurely moving into an optimization mode, and much more into like a discovery and curious and experimentation and learning mode. Are you negative on the future of european tech and innovation? I'm absolutely not negative on the talent. I mean, Europe produces incredible talent, but what you see is a lot of the best talent in Europe is going to move to an environment that's more friendly to startups in terms of regulatory, in terms of funding, in terms of pools of labor, in terms of tax rates, especially now that there's remote work. So I think the challenge for Europe is going to be to create reasons for these people to stay to list on european markets to raise their later rounds.

Harry Stebbings
Final one, what's the most recent company growth strategy that's most impressed you? One thing that is happening new that seemed last couple years that I can't believe more companies are not doing. And this, we actually, I mentioned it earlier, but if you go to some of these sites like calm or noom, they have these long convoluted onboarding flows that do a really good job of roping people in getting them through the whole kind of information journey and building intent. And that's a neat thing because it can run you through an entire sales process without actually needing a salesperson. And to me that just seems like the most obvious thing in the world for b, two b companies to do for anything where customers maybe are only thinking about the problem and there's like eight steps to thinking about your solution.

Matt Lerner
Or, you know, we just need to move them like a considered purchase, non impulse buy just seems like the most obvious thing to start to adapt those. Matt, I've loved doing this. As I said, it's been so long since we, I mean, it was like eight years ago since you're on the show last night. It's great catching up with. It's so nice.

Harry Stebbings
You look, you look the same. I look older. But thank you so much for doing facial hair. Now I know I have facial hair. I actually have wrinkles.

This is what venture does to you. Fuck. But thank you so much for doing this. My pleasure. Harry is great catching up.

I just love doing these shows because we get so many messages and notes from founders saying that they shape how they do, what they do in their companies because of the shows like this. Like 20 sales, like 20 product, like 20 growth really is so special for me to see. You can watch this interview on YouTube by searching for 20 vc. But before we leave you today, they say ad creative is king. But man, is UGC creative a pain in the arse to pull together.

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Harry Stebbings
And stay tuned for a fantastic episode this coming Monday with Danny Reimer, general partner at Index Ventures.

20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner

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1. Introduction to Growth Channels

2. Hiring and Managing Growth Teams

3. The Science of Growth

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