Lesson: Scaling User Growth with Maud Pasturaud

Step #6 Hypergrowth: How to hit hyper-speed

So hypergrowth is this week of a week or month of a month growth rate, when that happens. And you're seeing this incremental, it just doesn't stop, and it's starting to be exponential.

It can be engineered to some extent. So it can be engineered in a way that you're setting up all of your product and your initiative to optimize all of the channels. So an example is I'm getting all the channels that we talked about. The way to engineer growth is to make sure that all of them are set up and delivering well and you're constantly optimizing them, so that's going to bring more and more growth. But that's happening across all the channels, or continuing to experiment in new channels. So in that way you're engineering it. Look at the opportunity and you continue to optimize it.

Where it cannot be engineered is the assumption behind hypergrowth is that your product continues to deliver value even at this growth stage. And so that cannot be engineered. It could be engineered in a way that you're implementing retention mechanics, but underlying is really good product value. So that itself won't change. But you can engineer acquisition and retention to some extent with all of the core principles that we talked about.

An example of a product that explodes and everything and everything is talking about it is Yo, the app that went super viral and everyone tried it out. Did they get as much value? A lot of them still use it, but my belief is you probably saw this crazy hockey stick growth and then retention curve that would go down. And if they managed to keep it that way, then it's going to be a great business. And they're talking about how to apply that particular concept to more channels, per se, for the Yo app.

But it's typically the case of an app that goes super viral and probably is not going to get as much retention. It's not a Snapchat. So a Snapchat is very different where people adopt it and then they stick around. Right now Snapchat has I believe between 60%-70% of users who use it monthly. They use it actually daily. So they come back every day to Snapchat, so this is an amazing retention. And there's a way to go at in some basic metrics spreads.

But you have a bunch of products of sites that just blew up. An example is Fab. Fab spent a lot of money. There was a lot of discussion around that company that was valued at close to a billion dollars. And they spent a lot of money on customer acquisition and gotten a lot of people in the door, but they were not able to retain them. On top of the basics of the basic, they would not figure it out, so it was a very costly business to one. So the whole funnel didn't seem to make sense, and so that hurt the performance of the company.