10 growth tactics that never work | Elena Verna (Amplitude, Miro, Dropbox, SurveyMonkey)
Elena Verna, a renowned B2B growth expert from Miro, Amplitude, and Dropbox, shares 10 ineffective growth tactics and three powerful growth frameworks. She also discusses non-traditional career paths.
Deep Dive Analysis
14 Topic Outline
Introduction to Growth Tactics That Never Work
Growth Tactic #1: Hiring Growth Roles Too Soon
Growth Tactic #2: Hiring Head of Growth to Fix Decline
Growth Tactic #3: Rebranding or Redesigning for Growth
Growth Tactic #4: Obsessing Over and Copying Competition
Growth Tactic #5: Believing Your Problems Are Unique
Growth Tactic #6: Prioritizing Rented Channels Over Earned Channels
Growth Tactic #7: Failing to Evolve Growth Models
Growth Tactic #8: Not Hiring External Advisors
Growth Tactic #9: Over-Experimenting and Risk Aversion
Growth Tactic #10: Quick Fire Round of Ineffective Tactics
Elena’s Favorite Growth Frameworks
Contrarian Corner: Rethinking Full-Time Jobs and Career Optionality
Lightning Round and Final Thoughts
5 Key Concepts
Founder-led growth
This is the initial phase where the founder and founding team are responsible for figuring out product-market fit and distribution. It typically occurs until the company reaches a certain revenue milestone (e.g., $1M-$10M ARR) and has sufficient user data for experimentation, before a dedicated growth team is needed.
Earned Channels
These are acquisition channels that a company builds and owns, such as virality, word-of-mouth, or user-generated content. Unlike 'rented' channels like paid search or social media ads, earned channels are difficult for competitors to replicate or buy access to, providing a sustainable growth engine.
Career Optionality
A professional goal focused on increasing the number of choices one has in their career path, rather than aiming for specific titles. It involves making decisions that expand one's options for roles, companies, and work arrangements, ensuring alignment with personal interests, skills, and happiness.
Growth Loops
A self-contained flywheel where an action generates a reaction, which in turn generates another action, creating a sustainable engine for growth. This framework emphasizes understanding the continuous cycles of user behavior that drive growth, moving beyond linear funnels.
Adjacent User Theory
A framework for growth evolution that focuses on bringing in users outside of the ideal customer profile (ICP) or core user base. Growth teams can optimize experiences for these 'adjacent users' to expand the product's reach and total addressable market (TAM) without necessarily expanding the core product-market fit.
10 Questions Answered
A startup should not hire a growth team until it has solid product-market fit, good retention, and enough user data to run experiments, typically after reaching $1 million to $10 million in ARR. The initial growth should be founder-led.
No, if a business is slowing down or declining, a head of growth is unlikely to fix the problem because the issues are usually deeper, related to core product or go-to-market strategy. Growth teams amplify existing growth, they don't reverse fundamental business declines.
Elena Verna has never seen a rebrand or redesign, especially of a marketing site, produce good performance results for growth. While it might be necessary for other strategic reasons, it typically leads to a temporary step back in performance that requires significant optimization to recover.
While it's important to know what competitors are doing and use it for inspiration, blindly copying their tactics is a 'fastest way to mediocrity' and often fails because every experience is unique to its customer and context. Companies should innovate and not skip ideation, user research, and experimentation.
No, most growth problems are not unique and have been encountered and often solved by others in the industry. Companies should seek out people who have solved similar problems and learn from existing patterns and frameworks rather than trying to re-engineer solutions from scratch.
Growth teams should prioritize building earned channels (like virality, word-of-mouth, user-generated content) because these are owned, sustainable, and less susceptible to algorithm changes or increasing competition and costs in paid channels.
Growth models, like product-market fit, have a limited lifespan and will eventually slow down. Companies need to continuously overlay new growth models (product-led, marketing-led, sales-led) and explore new channels every 18 months to five years to ensure diversified, sustained growth and avoid leaving market gaps.
Yes, not hiring advisors is considered a huge mistake because advisors provide access to a network of people with diverse data points and patterns, offering a fast way to learn and propel a team forward. They serve as valuable inputs into decision-making, even if not setting the strategy.
No, over-experimenting and requiring precise scientific measurement for every initiative can paralyze growth teams, slow down progress, and hinder learning. While crucial for big strategic pivots or high-traffic areas, teams should also trust intuition, use pre-versus-post analysis for smaller changes, and focus on velocity.
Ineffective tactics include color optimizations (testing shades of blue), adding third-party sign-ups (unless it's a developer product like GitHub), relying on 'one-email wonders' (single emails rarely drive significant lift), and blindly removing friction without understanding the underlying problem.
18 Actionable Insights
1. Prioritize Career Optionality
View career optionality as your ultimate professional North Star, actively exploring diverse monetization models beyond traditional full-time roles (e.g., freelancing, advising, fractional work) to find opportunities best suited to your skills, interests, and life stage.
2. Embrace Progress Over Perfection
Prioritize continuous progress and learning over striving for immediate perfection, as the velocity of information and iterative improvement are more crucial for growth than a flawless initial outcome.
3. Seek Existing Solutions
Recognize that most growth problems are not unique; instead of re-engineering solutions from scratch, seek out people who have solved similar problems and learn from their experiences to patternize solutions and avoid wasting time.
4. Engage Growth Advisors
Hire advisors to accelerate your career and business growth by leveraging their network, data points, and pattern recognition; vet potential advisors through a paid workshop to assess their practical contribution before committing to a retainer.
5. Utilize Growth Loops Framework
Adopt the ‘growth loops’ framework to understand how actions generate reactions that create self-contained, sustainable flywheels for growth, moving beyond a linear funnel mindset.
6. Apply Race Car Framework
Use the ‘Race Car’ framework to categorize growth initiatives into engines (loops), fuel (paid marketing), turbo boosts (big events), and lubrication (optimizations) to better understand and manage their impact and timeline.
7. Explore Adjacent User Theory
Employ ‘Adjacent User Theory’ to identify and attract users outside your core ideal customer profile (ICP), optimizing their experiences to expand your product’s reach and growth without necessarily expanding product-market fit.
8. Delay Growth Team Hiring
Avoid hiring a growth team too early; founders should drive initial growth until solid product-market fit (PMF) and sufficient user data for experimentation are established, ideally beyond $1M ARR, to ensure the whole company owns growth.
9. Growth Teams Can’t Reverse Decline
Do not hire a growth team to fix a declining business; growth teams amplify existing product-market fit, but cannot solve fundamental issues with core product, go-to-market strategy, or a disappearing PMF. First, stabilize or reverse the decline with core product/marketing efforts.
10. Invest in Owned/Earned Channels
Prioritize developing owned or earned acquisition channels (e.g., virality, word-of-mouth, user-generated content) over solely relying on paid or organic search, as these channels are defensible, reduce long-term acquisition costs, and provide more control over your growth future.
11. Continuously Layer New Growth Models
Don’t rely on a single growth model; continuously evolve your growth strategy by layering new models (e.g., product-led, marketing-led, sales-led) to diversify, prevent slowdowns, and ensure long-term sustainable growth. Allocate 20-25% of growth team time annually to exploring new loops or channels.
12. Limit Growth Experimentation
Avoid testing every growth initiative, as excessive experimentation can paralyze teams and slow progress; trust intuition more, use pre-versus-post analysis for changes that can’t gather sufficient data within a month, and reserve rigorous testing for high-impact strategic pivots or high-traffic areas.
13. Avoid Rebrands for Growth
Do not undertake a rebrand or marketing site redesign with the expectation of immediate growth; these initiatives often lead to a temporary performance hit, requiring 3-6 months of optimization to potentially outperform previous results.
14. Don’t Copy Competitors Blindly
Avoid directly copying competitor tactics or flows, as each product’s experience is unique to its customer and channel; instead, use competitors for inspiration and as an input for ideation, but always follow with your own design, research, and experimentation.
15. Skip Color Optimizations
Do not waste time testing different shades of colors or color palettes; choose an accessible and bright color and move on, as these optimizations rarely drive meaningful growth results.
16. Third-Party Signups Not Growth
Adding third-party sign-up options (e.g., Google, Facebook) typically does not drive incremental acquisition, activation, or retention; it’s a customer experience improvement, not a primary growth tactic (unless for specific user types like developers needing GitHub auth).
17. Avoid One-Off Emails
Do not expect significant growth lift from a single email; instead, approach email as a strategic series of communications that interact with product messaging, as one-off emails have low open and click rates.
18. Don’t Just “Simplify Onboarding”
Avoid ‘simplifying onboarding’ as a roadmap item; instead, identify the root problem (e.g., confusion, users getting lost, lack of education), and then simplifying might be a solution, but it’s not a problem in itself.
7 Key Quotes
My North Star metric is insights per minute.
Elena Verna
Never, ever once have I seen a rebrand or redesign, especially of your marketing site, produce good performance results.
Elena Verna
Growth can amplify great product market fit and growth can help you grow faster once you're already growing. But if you're slowing down and you have issues with either your go-to-market strategy or your core product strategy with your core product market fit, growth is going to be absolutely helpless to do anything.
Elena Verna
Copying competition is like the fastest way to mediocrity because you'll never be a leader if you copied somebody else.
Elena Verna
Your problem is not unique. I am 99% sure of that. Your problem has been felt by somebody somewhere in probably many many places and you trying to re-engineer solution is time lost to market and up to you has a huge opportunity cost.
Elena Verna
Humor is the best way to disarm people and to point out very painful situations that we're facing with every single day or conundrums without putting anybody on defense because we can all laugh at the absurdity of the lives that we live in every single day.
Elena Verna
Progress over perfection.
Elena Verna
1 Protocols
Evaluating Potential Advisors
Elena Verna- Conduct a workshop with the potential advisor on a specific problem the team is experiencing.
- Pay them for the workshop to see them in action and assess their ability to provide useful information, have hard conversations, and connect thoughts.
- If the workshop is successful, hire them on an ongoing retainer basis.
- Evaluate monthly whether the advisor is adding value (not necessarily monetary attribution, but valuable conversations and insights).
- Be prepared for some advisors to stay for only a few months, while others might stick for years.