18th November 2022
Okay, before we jump in there's a distinction to be made: the available advice is definitely not useless if you work for a very large SaaS startup. In that case, you have so much hands-on advice available that you could basically not know anything about growth beforehand and still do fine if you learn fast and have a hands-on attitude.
And even then, there are good pieces written about Growth, they are just not that tactical. This article by Kevin Kwok is a good example of that - it almost feels academic in comparison to most growth-related articles out there. If it had at least 50 more citations and hundreds of unnecessary complex words, you would probably find it in a business journal. It focuses on underlying principles, the why behind things. No promises of tactics or anything. And I'm still pretty sure it's more useful for Growth people than 90% of other articles out there.
Kevin is amazing at both writing and drawing. A true renaissance man.
This problem also applies to most of the growth courses out there. I've been through Reforge courses - the course material is hit or miss (they are definitely better at Growth than they are at Product, I can tell you that much), but for the most part it is useful. As long as you work in a Series A+ SaaS startup.
They gatekeep applicants that work at early-stage startups - this makes sense if you consider who Reforge can help. This feels paradoxical - when you reach this stage, there's so much advice already available on the internet that you can get by just fine. Reforge content has been repurposed as blog posts by themselves and alumni. Demand Curve used to have a “Traction Course” aimed at early-stage startups, but it doesn't seem to exist anymore. Their Growth course only focuses on paid acquisition channels.
If you are working on a product that just launched, it will be a long time until you have statically relevant A/B test results. And if you work in anything other than SaaS, cadence is completely different. At some point, I worked at a YC-backed EdTech that specialized in cohort-based courses in technology. Our feedback loops were way longer and more complex than your regular SaaS app - one cohort + job search helping period could go up to 9 months. Some changes would impact the whole cohort - is there even a way to test out such a thing without having to wait 9 months to find out about the results? There is, but I had to figure it out by myself.
And as in every early-stage startup, job descriptions don't really exist. Sometimes the best thing you can do to help your startup grow is to source candidates for a very important executive position. I fondly call myself "The Janitor" because I clean the shit nobody wants to.
Real picture of me at work, circa 2020.
But this "whatever it takes to make things grow" mentality has its downsides. Your work doesn't have clear boundaries, so it's harder to prove your work has reproducible impacts. And being honest, it probably doesn't. You have to keep figuring shit out constantly, and nothing guarantees you will always be successful. This was a very scary thought for me at first, but once you overcome this initial fear and start moving, you realize that if you think long and hard enough about most things, you will figure them out eventually.
Another downside of this mindset is that if you are not completely aligned with the company you are working for and they don't have a lot of trust in you, it's harder to justify your position, and impostor syndrome might start to show up. You NEED them to believe that you are doing what's best for the company at that moment, even if it sounds absurd at first glance.
The good thing is that by being a growth person in non-traditional environments, you become an expert at figuring shit out. And this goes a long way in a world where the only advice you get for early-stage growth is “do things that don't scale”.
Acquiring your first 1000 users is a lot harder than running A/B tests, simply because there is no playbook. All that is left is trying things out.