The Whole Company Is the Growth Team
Schultz: Startups should not have growth teams. The whole company should be the growth team. The CEO should be the head of growth.
You need someone to set a north star for where the company wants to go, and that person needs to be the person leading the company.
Startups should not have growth teams. The whole company should be the growth team.
The North Star Examples
Schultz: Mark put out monthly active users as the number. He made the whole world hold Facebook to that number.
Look at what Jan has done with WhatsApp — he always published send numbers. If you're a messaging application, sends is probably the single most important number. If people use you once a day, you're not really their primary messaging mechanism.
Inside Airbnb, they talk about nights booked. They always benchmark themselves against the largest hotel chains in the world.
Mark put out monthly active users as the number. He made the whole world hold Facebook to that.
Why One Metric Matters
Schultz: The second you have more than one person working on anything, you cannot control what everyone else is doing. It's not clear to everybody what the most important thing is.
Inside eBay, it would be very easy for people to say we should focus on revenue, or the number of buyers, or the number of listings. Pierre and Meg and John as leaders always said no — it's the amount of gross merchandise volume. That's what really matters.
When people are having a conversation you're not in, or sitting in front of their screen thinking about how to build a feature, it's going to be clear to them — it's not about revenue, it's about GMV. It's not about registrations — registrations don't matter unless they become long-term active users.
It's not about getting more registrations. Registrations don't matter unless they become long-term active users.
Pick One and Stick With It
Schultz: What is the one metric where if everyone in the company is thinking about it and driving their actions towards moving that metric up, in the long run your company will be successful?
By the way, they're probably all correlated to each other. Daily active users is fairly correlated to monthly active users. Content shared is correlated to how many users there are — you add a user, they share content.
Pick the one that fits with you, that aligns with your mission and values, and that you know you're going to stick with for a long time. But have a north star.
Pick the one that fits with you and that you know you're going to stick with for a long time. But have a north star.