20Growth: Three Growth Lessons Scaling Whatsapp from 0-100M, Why You Should Hire a Head of Growth Sooner Than You Think & The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring for Growth with Ryan Wiggins, Head of Growth @ Mercury

21:07It helps you think about what is the most important thing to do, and how can we go execute on that very quickly? And so I usually start very small, and as you start to do that kind of explore or the exploit mindset, that is the fundamental principle of explorer. But at some point you do need to scale it up, and you need to start adding more resources to help take things bigger. But it has to come from something that's working, much the product has to actually be working before you bring in a growth team, I think a growth team has to be working before you scale a growth team as well. Do you think founders really know when it's working?

21:35And what I mean by that is do you think we can trick ourselves into thinking, ah we're at 50 km or hour, this is real customer demand, but actually it's forced, it's founder -led sales maybe, they may not be churning, we don't have enough data to know about retention. Do you think founders actually understand where they really are? The thing that is important is is it repeatable, right? And when When you say founder let sales, the thing that I often think about is that if founders haven't make every call, it's not repeatable. Because there's a lot of things to do when you're building a company and the founder having to be able to sell every deal is not the thing that is repeatable.

22:07And I think at that stage, definitely not. I think what I'm looking for is actually like, has it scaled beyond the founder or one other kind of test that I think about is if you stop that activity, if you like back off, if you're running ad campaigns, if you turn them off, what happens? And if it totally goes to zero, you actually don't have something that's working because you're not certain to see that organic adoption is happening. And I think that it's very rare that a product exists totally through just direct sales only or marketing only or other things like that. You tend to see something is happening when you do one of those, is other channels start to take off as well.

22:40And so to me, you actually need to see that something is working when you pull back your effort or lower your level of investment. As a growth leader, here's the channels that we're using. Do you want to take a channel that is working and make it better or take a channel that is not working and trying to make it work. I think that when you have something working, is the first priority to make that thing work as well as a camp. So I always start with how can you maximize what is working and accelerate it? But ultimately you start to face this question of when should you stop working on a lever or when is there bigger upside elsewhere?

23:10And so I think a lot about when do you hit diminishing returns and when is there opportunity cost? And so when I'm looking forward as a constant evaluation of what do we think we can gain? What do we kind of have a friend of us in this channel? What else could we be working on? and how do we make that tradeoff of impact cost and excitement about those different options? See, we now know that we need to build out the growth theme more. We want to embark on that process, and so we're going to start hiring Ryan. We are hiring for our growth theme, but also we're aware that Canada's often for startups are non -obvious and underappreciated, often the obvious bunny or the biggest company is earning the biggest salaries.

23:45Where do you find great, non -obvious talent and growth talent? And what I really look for is the change agents, particularly in operational roles. And some of this comes from the bias of my journey into this role, but where I started in the Facebook Austin office, which is an operational team that handled customer support operations for some different Facebook teams. The people that stood out in that where they could get things done both kind of within the teams that they're working on, but then actually impacting kind of the core product of Facebook are the people that you want to be looking for as untapped talent that is not yet being reached.

24:17And so I think a lot about who are the people that are being able to make changes from difficult positions or places that you wouldn't expect change to be happening from? In those roles you learn a level of scrappyness, you learn Kessa Rambathy, you learn humility, that sets you up for success in a bunch of ways that like the traditional PM that has started right out of college doesn't necessarily have and so I look for someone that has been making some changes and been able to affect that change. I have Mercury one of the best PMs I've worked with with someone that came from the customer support.

24:44She taught herself how to code and she was able to like just learn all these small little tasks that helped her do her job better But then created a skill set that was very well rounded admit that she could just get shit done And that's what I look for is the person can get stuff done even when it's tough because I think that that's what you're ultimately looking for Is a diverse skill set able to go through walls and build things that last which you ever high someone who hasn't done growth before It depends because I think many things can look like growth But if I go back to what is my definition of growth, I think growth is a system of optimization and being able to understand a problem in the system and change that system towards positive outcomes.

25:21It doesn't have to be called growth for me to be down with that to hire for that, but I do need to see that how the ability to understand the system make changes and then that change have an impact. That is the core line that goes throughout that skill set. Okay, so say we have this camber pool in mind. We now need to run a process and run. I've never hired for a growth team before or growth higher before But in terms of the light structure, how should we literally structure the process for growth higher? I think the fundamental things you're looking for are really three things one I think you're looking for some background examples of being able to get things done and ship impact Can they get stuff done beyond their position or what they would have beyond the system of the company that they were in?

26:01If you just sail with the wind behind your back, you're not a great sailor you have to be able to go through the difficult times as well. Second, you're looking for the ability to understand customer behavior and do analysis. Can they break down problems into actionable insights, go from an idea to actually what would you do to execute on that idea? I think that's something that's really critical and what you're looking for is someone that isn't going to be blocked by other people and need to pull a bunch of resources. They need to be someone that can generate value without needing to pull as much from other people.

26:29And the last thing I think is product sense and can they make decisions that are gonna fit within this broader kind of company perspective. So those are the three dimensions that I look for, and I think there are many configurations of what you can actually screen for, and how you can set up the interview process. But those are the three pieces that I'm really looking for when I hire someone that is a growth leader. Just want me to, again, I'm the first time found a hiring my first growth eyes, interview, case study, deep, that how do we structure that process? So the first interview is an interview about their background and kind of what led them to here.

27:00What I'm really looking for is take me through the journey of your career, why did you choose things that you worked on? What are some example projects that you helped guide? And how did you guide that? I really love going through examples of what people have worked on asking them to break down why things worked the way they did and how they would have gotten more impact out of it if they could. Now what are the best and what are the worst that? What are the green flags and how they describe those experiences and what are the red flags? The thing that I'm really looking for is the ability to understand the system behind what's happening.

27:28Can they understand that it's not just about adding an entry point but actually there's a value that matters for a person at a given drop off and that they can understand that there's something broader beyond just the one change they made and find consistent wins or break it down into like how could you take that and maximize something. Those are some of the dimensions that I'm really looking for in that background is it can they think broader than just the example about their kind of role and how they entered that. Great people I find are people that are able to a problem which is like how do we get more people to sign up break it down into composable pieces and then figure out the seven things that you should try.

28:02And then this one works, oh, let's take that one thing that works. And 10X it. That is often the thing that I'm looking for in that kind of background thing. And the worst case is the thing that I see is someone that is just running a play, but someone that is just doing the thing that either their company would do or we could find on a blog or things like that. To me, you have to be curious. You have to be trying to understand how the dynamic of the product is actually working, not just what's the change. In terms of case studies, how do you think by using case studies, do you think they should be your own company or company that the person's experienced and what with before.

28:34So they have more natural domain knowledge coming in. One of the things that I try to get away from interviews is biasing based on the kind of prior context of a given problem. And so if I'm using an example that they went through, I actually think that it's about the work that they did. But I don't think it's like worthwhile of going much deeper on a case study for their kind of prior company. But there's a lot of inherent knowledge that you understand in that problem space that it's going to be difficult to communicate in a new interview. I also think that you can't quite use the problems of my company as the problems of the day because it ends up making the Canada feel like they're providing free work for you or you have biases around what your solution would be.

29:09And so the thing that I think about is there a problem that is generic enough or not a problem of the day that helps establish the framework for thinking and lets you kind of go deep on a couple of different dimensions. And so case studies are critical, but I try to think about can it be about the more general problem of what the case study gets at verse something that would be influenced by my thinking of the day. Who do you bring in on the decision process? Who's the people who should be on the hiring committee that say yes, we should hide this growth person? I think that it should be the leadership team should be core to it and the people that are going to make decisions about the future of the company.

29:43I think the cross -functional partners they work with is going to be critical. So the team they work directly with, if it's marketers, if it's engineers, if it's partnerships folks, you've got I get those people working together and understand can they work as peers and then if there's going to be kind of reports You need to get some reports signal as well and management skills too And so the thing I think you're looking for is 360 overview of how does that person work with other people as a think that the Analysis part is critical and so if your company doesn't yet have an analytics team Understand how you can try to build that kind of skill set or bring in external advisors because I think that fundamental to growth is Analysis and you have to add that skill set into it How much do I pay them?

30:21What does that count package at like Ron? I think Commentation Barries by Location and the kind of seniority of the role. But one dimension that I think is really important for a growth role, it is slightly different than maybe some other roles is that you really want skin in the game so that the growth person has equity upside in the problem. And the thing that I would look for is what is the kind of combination of salary that kind of fits their needs, but that equity that has meaningful contribution such that if that person succeeds, they would have reasonable upside. And that is a combination of things that I'm looking for.

30:50It's good to give a sliding scale of that. Presented offer, but say, if you want more equity, or if you want more cash, like we can talk about that, but I think you do have to think about that balance of reasonable cash, sizable equity, and then trying to find that is important. The other thing correlated with that is, you have to be pretty critical about if it's working or not. You don't want someone to have a huge equity package and just be sitting, resting, investing. You want them to like, how know that they're gonna be evaluated by their performance and they will be compensated as such, then if you do well, you're gonna have to use up side, but this isn't going well, we're gonna call it.

31:21And so I think that's an important aspect too. First growth hire, I'm, I dig now my friend, I've been doing many shows. It's an order senior hire, it's a 28 year old, to 35 year old, but it's a first growth hire, it's not a growth leader. What's that range in terms of salary? I think in the United States, I think it's a reasonable assumption that 150 to 250 cash, and then some sizeable equity packages is the range that you're looking for. that kind of various buy seniority and skill set and ability to kind of manage or build a team and experience But I think that you're looking for that you don't want to try to match some of the big companies that can offer a huge salary and equity packages You do want someone to be scrappy and to understand that their upside is gonna come from the growth And so we've we've hired the person fantastic.

32:05We've done it rhyme well done They're joining our company. Woohoo. Now we need to onboard them that kind of segment of the hiring process, which is continuously fucked up. So what is the right way to onboard gross talent? What does that optimal onboarding process look like? To me, month one is about getting to know the people, the product, and the kind of processes. When I really look for when I'm onboarding someone is an exponential growth trajectory for themselves as being the person that role. And so in that first month, the thing that I'm really trying to get them in is all the context that we can possibly have.

32:37Do they have the right relationships? Do they understand the problem in the customer journey and do they understand how they can get stuff shipped? And that first month, actually, you may not see much progress. But by month three, when I expect to someone to be starting to form opinions and starting to make changes that are having clear input into a successful trajectory. And so what I'm looking for there is are they finding unique insights? Are they making changes and helping ship things that wouldn't have otherwise been shipped? Are they bringing clarity with strategy and kind of the tactics that we're building and helping bring people along in the communication of what they're doing.

33:10And that's all I think about it is that one month and then three month timeframes and I think that it varies by the person, but that's essentially the path. What are the biggest red flags for you if you have someone join at first 30 to 60 days where you're like, it's not working out. What are the big red flags as to why that would be? Three things that I really love for is red flags. One is high -not team. Are they thinking more about themselves in their position than how the team operates? And the broader kind of mission of the company, you really want to see someone that is adopting and adapting to the company that you're working on?

33:42Second, are they thinking about sustainability and systems? If someone's just coming in and launching a new notification in their first month, you're probably looking for the quick wins that kind of show that they're making progress, but not things that are actually going to lead to long -term success. And what's the sustainability of what they're doing? And will it be something that is a repeatable pattern? or is it kind of behaviors that are quick wins that may be annoying to customers, but you may not see that annoyance early on. And the last one is ignoring feedback. I think early in this kind of first month to three month period, the thing that you want to do is have a really good feedback cycle with the leadership and cross -functional peers.

34:15And if someone is not taking feedback about, hey, you might want to focus on this rather than this. That's a huge red flag to me and something that we've got to act on super quick, because being a leader means that you take feedback. You said act on super quick there. I think we're both recognized that people are generally too slow to let people go if it's not working out well If it's not going to plan how long should we give a head of growth and a growth higher and they may be different there to Prove their worth and prove their value. I think in most cases you can understand Three to six months if someone is working out or not and that doesn't mean that they have to be totally changing the directory of your company in in three to six months.

34:51But the question is, are they leading to a quality of work that is the kind of understanding, choosing of smart bets and showing that they can execute on problems that is leading to any success? It is it has to be focused on the inputs and the quality of those inputs. And sometimes the output takes a while. For some of the roles that I've taken and taken me six months to 12 months to actually see a win. But that kind of early inputs of how they're interacting with the team, how they're coming to conclusions and then what they're building is, I think enough to be able to tell This is going to be successful or it's not.

35:21And then you have to have a hard conversation and understand can they change that trajectory? And if they can't, then it's time to let it go. But the thing I found about letting people go is that you're always happier when you do than you ever would expect. What are the biggest fuck -ups you've made in hiring? Mine's like I've hired logos that give me confidence and then actually they weren't very good and they didn't play the role I thought they did. And it was like, ah, what do you think yours are? I remember once we hired someone that in the interview the thing that we felt that was that they were super -heared They just presented themselves as like the expert and the perfect person for the job and we all picked up on it in the interview But we decided oh this person's got a bunch of skills and so we should do it The thing is that people show you who they are in the interviews and the things that you see that our red flags are the on tend to be Problems that kind of grow over time and people don't kind of change their core behavior And so the red flags for me are one taking the red flags I saw in the interview process seriously and two thinking about Did we hire someone because the system around them at their previous company made it to they were successful or were they uniquely successful?

36:22Ultimately, in a higher thing I'm looking for is can they drive an incremental difference in a new scenario and they should have some example of being able to do that previously. Speaking of determining levels of success, on a project basis, how often do you do post mortems as a growth team? How do you structure them? Who's in vices? How do you think through post mortems effectively? Maybe a controversy will take, but I don't really believe much in doing plus mortems for growth change. I think that there should be a process in which you understand what you're going to do, you understand how that went, and why you made the decisions you made, and where you should go from there.

36:55And that should be a regular process, even something that happens monthly. But I think that it's very toxic for a growth team to get in naval gazing of micro -managing basically every small change that happens. If something breaks, you should evaluate it and figure out where to go forward. But it's constantly about that evaluation of what should we change, and where should Should we go forward and what are the themes of what we're learning? Rather than, oh no, we launched this thing and it didn't work, but it's like spend a full day on it or even a couple of hours on it. I think that you have to be able to make a lot of changes and see what the themes of those are, evaluate what happened, and then figure out where you go from there.

37:27And I think that's a model that I'm really looking for rather than a media postmortem, which to me speaks to like, taking mid -step assessment of how things are. I have to ask on review when you think about growth decisions that you've made. It told me about a growth decision you made without data to back it up. How did it go and what was some takeaways for you? Mercury, there were a ton of these, especially early on because we were a pretty small company at the time and we didn't have a ton of data to inform what we were doing. But one example of this is the experience that I had when I joined Mercury was the product is the differentiated experience.

37:57And so one idea we had was maybe we should build a product demo so people can see our product. But we thought about how to do that in a Mercury way. And we went and booked out at other demos they either didn't exist or they think about the value for the company They tried to extract an email they tried to walk you through these really annoying steps You can't actually explore the product and so what we built was a product demo where we just remove all the friction You can see the product you can go to demo .mercury .com And we added a little open account button at the top and we just put it out We didn't know if it would work, but it was found an experiment let people see the product to play around with it And if they want they can decide to use it the reception has been like wild from them over a thousand accounts have signed up we've had some huge deposits, basically sales -sized deposits have come in without talking to anyone.

38:39It's become a huge growth lever and it even helps with things like recruiting because employees see that and they're like, oh, that's a really cool product. I want to go work there. That to me is the classic example of part of the lead growth and doing that explore versus exploit mindset was that we just launched something, put it out quickly, tried to see what would happen, and then we've gone back to that for a bunch of wins, and it's turned out to be something that's hugely successful, but at that precipice, It was really just a hypothesis that like people want to see a product before they sign up for it Let's do it in the way that we think we should do it and it turned out to be hugely successful To talk to me about a b -testing WhatsApp.

39:11What's the story there? I got told I had to ask this one So one of the craziest funbacks about WhatsApp is that WhatsApp got to a billion and a half users without running any a b -test They didn't even have a framework that could run a b -test But when I joined a 2017 we were starting to think about some business features that we were going to have And in particular, one of the things that the team was most concerned about was the negative impacts of those business features. That if someone starts to get business messages, they might react negatively and turn off the app. But at WhatsApp scale, it's very hard to see that.

39:39And because it's a network effects product, that if you do start to see it, it's actually too late. And so one of the things that we decided to do was to build an A .B. testing system to understand the negative impacts of some of the features we were introducing. We ran that. We built that. Worked with some great engineers to build it in a privacy safe way. We built that, we ran the experiments, and we found that there were no negative impacts we didn't prove that no hypothesis. And we were able to launch that product and feel good about what we launched. And that A .B. testing framework has become thin for all that is run for a lot of other things in WhatsApp.

40:07But so interesting to me that so much of WhatsApp had been built without that, and then when it does get introduced, it's more to think about the downsides rather than the upsides of the kind of quick wins that often A .B. testing is thought about. What about Cori Thinfrance? Well, story there. For what's after some markets where what's up is not the main messaging app that exists in the market and it comes down to a lot of Competition in the places in France is one of those and we were looking at the growth of what we could do to grow what's up consumer We thought about what are the markets in which we can help accelerate towards true network effect that becomes the main messaging app and so in France What we did was we basically took that playbook of finding the product Marketing and partnerships that we could build to go accelerate our growth and we execute that playbook over the course of a year where we worked on things like inviting in the product to make it so that people had the people that they wanted to talk to.

40:55We worked on marketing campaigns that WhatsApp had never run to bring in consumers to WhatsApp. And it turns out that people responded really well to that. We found some pretty novel partnerships as well in that space. And through that kind of combination of those three tactics, we were able to accelerate growth in France and see that we were actually increasing our market share of WhatsApp and put that on a trajectory to start to win. And it was one of the best successes we saw and growing the WhatsApp consumer up. And the interesting thing was that it wasn't about trying to grow in India, that market is already one, but trying to find the right markets in the right places and that classic Playbook of growth is something that you can kind of pull from.

41:30Ryan, I want to dive into a quick fire. I've basically just pelted you with questions for most of the show, but I'm going to do a quick fire where it's 60 seconds per one, and then we rock and roll through them. How does that sound? Sounds great. What type of texting growth have not changed over the last five years? Building an experience that connects users with key actions that are going to make it so they stick around in your product is something that hasn't changed and is never going to change. It's something that is going to always work and I think it's going to mean that I always have some sort of job in the space.

41:59What tactics have died a death on the flip side? I think that email and push notifications are something that has been so overused that it actually has led to channel blindness. No one's excited about them. They die a quick death and win someone, you actually like annoy someone to the degree that they turn it off. You lose a channel forever. And so I think that the tactics of let's just send another notification on its way out and hopefully that is the case but something that I don't take work so well. What would you say the biggest mistakes found is make when hiring growth themes? I think it's just one thing that I think a growth team has to be a system and a sustained investment.

42:35Just because you try once doesn't mean that it's going to work. You have to actually go at it and you have to understand the problems, making incremental progress and see that it's working, and then when it's working, you double down, but you can't just expect someone's going to come in, run the best marketing campaign, heaven, history, and that it's just going to take off. It has to be a lot more than that. What would you buy something to change about the world of growth? I think people need to talk to more customers. One of the things that I came up in was that a lot of growth people think about data and they think about the experience without actually putting products in front of people and asking them what the problems they experience are or what they feel about the growth tech of this being introduced.

43:10And so I think talking to customers is something that I would love to see growth, the growth practice, spend a lot more time on. How do you see the function of growth evolving over time? Does it look different in five or 10 years? I think it's about building a better product experience. I think that it just comes back to that fundamental of what is sustainable for a product and what is native to that product. And I think that that tactic is going to be something that I see continuing to evolve and be important. But I think on the flip side, the thing that I see is ad platforms are always getting more expensive.

43:39They're always more constrained. And if you particularly look at some of the trends that are happening with moving to richer formats like TikTok, it's just more expensive to create basic content. And so I think that it's always going to be more expensive to run ads. But if you can think about what are the sustainable kind of product experiences, that's really where you find a lot of graph die. Final one, my friend, when you look at the landscape of great product experiences, other than mercury, what one product to experience company, growth strategy have even most impressed by recently. One that I really love is SubStack.

44:08SubStack is a product that has built an incredible platform for a very targeted customer subset and provided a ton of value with them. But then as they've gone through the journey of building that initial product that provides value to writers, they started to add on things that they can uniquely do because they have a network. They've added ways to recommend newsletters between different writers. They've added a mobile app that is quite compelling and has these features. They just launched a new kind of network effects product. And I think to me, the interesting thing about Substack is they're lining their incentives behind their core customer.

44:41And when you see that happen, the world is their oyster. And it's something I'm really stoked about and really excited to see how they've taken all. Ryan, as I said, I had so many good things before. I love the blend of WhatsApp code stories. I love the blend of Mercury's Day. And then also Super -Ash will advise. Thank you so much for joining me and also for putting up with me, moving slightly off schedule. Thanks, Harry, really presented. The thing I love about these shows is just how tactical and granular they are and if you want to see the full video you can check it out on YouTube by searching for 20BC but before we leave you today, I'm really excited about this net sponsor because a few of my portfolio companies use it and love it so do you know the impact of your marketing efforts?

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