How I'm going to work on my Growth skills
Why I want to work on my Growth skills
"Growth" tends to be a term that leads to a lot of confusion, especially when brought up in the context of a role or job function. A lot of this confusion comes from the fact that growth is still relatively new as a field. For example, if you asked the question: "What's the difference between a growth marketer, growth hacker, or a growth product manager?", you'd probably get 20 different answers.
I view growth from a product perspective and define it as discovering and scaling profitable distribution channels through changes in acquisition all the way to retention. This not only includes internal changes within the product (e.g. referrals, viral loops) but almost always also includes external channels (e.g. paid ads).
The reason I want to work on my growth skills is because I've come to the realisation that as software becomes easier to build, the difference between success and failure in most software businesses isn’t the complexity or uniqueness of the software, but the effectiveness of growth or distribution channels.
This thinking is evident in recent trends, such as Product-led Growth. Ultimately, I believe that software companies without compounding growth loops will be beaten by those that do (Reforge has written a lot of great content on this point and growth loops more broadly).
How I plan to work on my Growth skills
To work on my growth skills, I want to launch a new product so I can practically apply, experiment, and learn in the real world. While I have existing products like Thumblytics, I had a number of specific criteria that I wanted for my growth project:
Simple to build from technical standpoint so I can focus on the Growth side (e.g. building an UI for an API, simple CRUD app, etc.)
Simple business model and self-service - many of my current products are creating new markets or have higher friction in onboarding. While I could apply my growth skills to my existing products, I find that I tend to be distracted by other issues around needing to educate the market, pricing, etc instead of being able to focus on growth.
Recurring revenue - I believe it's easier to build growth loops on more frequent or recurring use cases. Hopefully, this will allow for greater creativity in applying growth methods. This is also beneficial if I decide to sell in future.
Inherent virality - It would be super interesting to work on a product that is inherently viral (has a compounding growth loop).
Taking these criteria into account, I've started to lean quite heavily towards building a product in the virtual group cards space, similar to Kudoboard or GroupGreeting. While this space is extremely crowded with tens if not hundreds of existing competitors, it meets all of my criteria above and is in a growing market. I'm still in the exploratory phase with this idea, but perhaps I will have some more concrete details to share in my next blog post!