Metrics. Types. Tactics. Retention.
Startups live on growth.
First you needed to make a product users love (PUFI). Now you need more users. Growth is the only indicator of a great product. Growth is the gap between conversion rate and churn rate. Pick a North Star metric and never take your eyes off it.
Lecture 05 of 08 · Taught by Ali Sina
"The whole company should be a growth team — with the CEO as the head of growth."
METRICS — Pick your North Star: sign-ups, activations, MAU, DAU, user engagement, NPS, CAC, CLV, MRR, ARPU, churn. The North Star is the metric every employee should think about and drive toward.
TYPES — Three types of growth: STICKY (existing users keep paying — measure CLV + retention cohort), VIRAL (word of mouth — focus on referral mechanics + customer touchpoints), PAID (CLV must be greater than CAC).
TACTICS — Internationalization. Virality (payload × conversion × frequency). SEO (keywords, links from high-authority sites, XML sitemaps). Don't do newsletters — segment your audience.
RETENTION — Don't fool yourself with vanity metrics. Retention depends on your vertical: social media needs ~80% retention to grow, ecommerce 20–30% MAU. Long-term retention comes from product-market fit.
Take these to heart.
- Don't be tempted to try lots of things. Choose one channel and execute for a week.
- Track your honesty curve — paid customers are more honest than free ones.
- Pick singularity. One market will be better than all others. One distribution strategy usually dominates.
Your homework.
- Pick your North Star metric
- Pick a growth tactic and execute one channel at a time
- Track growth weekly
Insolar — organic growth via Teams
North Star: PROPOSALS — keeps the door open for both transaction-fee + SaaS model. Type: Organic, word-of-mouth. We offered 50% split (highest in industry) because we cut all the costs. Then introduced TEAMS — an extra 10% override for affiliates building their own teams. Everyone started recruiting. Applications, users, proposals exploded. We spent zero dollars marketing — just put the product in users' hands and watched the metrics go berserk.
Lecture 05 of 08 · Back to curriculum