While studying product analytics, I came across a lecture by Alex Schultz on growth for startups, which I find insightful. Alex Schultz was (and still is) a VP Product Growth at Facebook in 2014, at the time he gave the lecture.

Here are my notes.

On Product and Growth

You need a good product before even discussing growth.

Startups must not have a growth team. Instead everyone in the startup should be working on the growth.

When looking at the retention, if your graph slopes down to the x-axis, then you don’t need to be hacking the growth. It’s the product that needs fixing.

If you have a plateau in the second month retention graph, that’s when you found a product-market fit on a subset of a market.

Your product must have a North Star, i.e. one specific metric that is important and guide any action taken. For example, for Facebook it’s the number of active users, for Whatsapp — the messages sent, for Airbnb — nights booked.

Know the magic moment (aha moment) of your product. For example, for Facebook it’s the friends’ news or the first like received, for Whatsapp — friends using Whatsapp, for Airbnb — a beautiful place to stay.

Focus on the marginal user when thinking about the growth. Not yourself. It’s also not the power user who you need to be thinking about when you want to grow. Power users already use your product.