10 growth tactics that never work

Just removing steps or yanking or simplifying things to an oblivion where you lose an identity of what you even do or what you're capable of doing is a completely failed growth tactic.

If every single one of your initiatives that you're doing on growth is an experiment that's a problem. It's almost like a disease, like a paralyzing disease.

My goal professional is actually to have options so I can choose what I want to do. So I can choose what fits my life right now that I can choose what fits my skills and that fits my personality and that makes me happy.

Full-time jobs are not the best way to monetize the skill that you have. It's one of the packages that everybody should evaluate and take advantage of, but too many people blindly default to that package.

You can never skip the ideation, the design, the user research, the customer interview, the experimentation step. And you should always balance it with actually innovating yourself in your product.

To figure out your product market fit and how to distribute it, it's not something that you can outsource to somebody.

Growth team can optimize, growth can maybe lift it by 10, 15%. Maybe that's enough for you. Even that is on the upper end of what growth team will be able to do if there is a slow-down trajectory.

If you have core product and core marketing issues, growth team will not be able to fix them for you. You're going to have to address the big elephant in the room as to why business is slowing down in the first place.

Elena is advising against website rebrands and redesigns, which she says consistently hurt performance metrics despite expectations of growth.

Just don't do it if you expect immediate results out of it, or at least educate the team on how long it's going to take to get to the point where you think that there's going to be upside away from your original brand.

Most of growth loops spin out their ability to produce meaningful results for you within the first five to six to seven years.

Your number one priority is to create your own or your earned channel. So channel that you've earned and that nobody else can compete in but you.

When you're doing organic search or paid search, you're making Google richer. Great for Google. Google is an incredible company, but by dumping money into paid marketing, you are paying them and you're paying for their distribution and access to their distribution.

Algorithm can giveth, but algorithm can also taketh away at any point. And you have no control because you don't own those channels.

"Them" refers to earned channels like referrals, virality, and user-generated content that companies own versus rented channels like paid ads.

If you don't have them on your growth roadmap, you are going to be in some really big trouble over the next year to two years because your cost of acquisition is only going to go up.

Being inspired by some aspects of what your competition is doing in their experience is a wonderful place to originate an ideation or potentially try to implement into your product as well. But blatantly saying, 'Hey, we're going to copy all of these best tactics or all of these flows because, hey, they're doing better than us. Let's just rip them and do exactly the same' - that's where things really go wrong.

One email will never do anything. If you're going to go into email, please think about it as a series about communication, about how it interacts with product communication.

Experimentation cannot be the way that people make decisions in the company. There's still so much about knowing your user, understanding the market for your brain to connect all of those dots.

I'm very sorry to break it to all of you, but 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 has a huge opportunity cost.

To figure out your product market fit and how to distribute it, it's not something that you can outsource to somebody.

Growth team can optimize, growth can maybe lift it by 10, 15%. Maybe that's enough for you. Even that is on the upper end of what growth team will be able to do if there is a slow-down trajectory.

If you have core product and core marketing issues, growth team will not be able to fix them for you. You're going to have to address the big elephant in the room as to why business is slowing down in the first place.

My rule of thumb, if we cannot collect the sample size in the month, we shouldn't test it, period. Because it's just then it's not fast enough.

Copying competition is like the fastest way to mediocrity because you'll never be a leader if you copied somebody else.

Every 18 months you need to introduce something new in order for it to continue evolving.

Elena is discussing how growth teams should continuously layer different growth models (product-led, marketing-led, sales-led) rather than over-optimizing single approaches.

Not overlaying every single way that you can grow through product, through marketing and through sales as an evolution. Is a huge mistake that a lot of growth teams fail to iterate on and innovate on.

You have to fail to learn. You can't just constantly succeed. Success is an output of a lot of failures, but the question is, how much time do you have to fail?