09- How will you grow?
Last updated
Last updated
Foreword by Ben McRedmond, Senior Director of Growth
Two years into Intercom’s life as a company, we didn’t have a marketing team or a sales team. e only marketing we had done was around content, which has always been really important to us. Growth was going up and to the right, but we asked ourselves: What if our growth stops? We’d built this machine that we had very little control over. 作为公司的Intercom生命两年，我们没有营销团队或销售团队。只有我们做的营销才是围绕内容，这对我们来说一直非常重要。增长正在向上，但我们问自己：如果我们的增长停止了怎么办？我们建造了这台机器，我们很少控制。
The question we faced was how to be deliberate about our growth. We were getting more and more customers, but nobody was thinking about how to convert customers, how to get them setup, etc. That’s how the growth team started at Intercom: an attempt to be intentional about how we were growing. 我们面临的问题是如何仔细考虑我们的增长。我们越来越多的客户，但没有人在考虑如何转换客户，如何让他们的设置等等，增长团队如何开始在Intercom：试图有意地说明我们如何成长。
We probably could have built a team earlier, but we were conscious of the fact that growth tactics can be a distraction if you focus on them before you’ve found product-market t. e greatest products will always have some sort of natural growth early on. 我们可能早些时候已经建立了一个团队，但是我们意识到，如果您在找到产品市场之前关注他们，增长策略可能会分散注意力。最好的产品将会在早期有一定的自然增长。
What’s not to say that the customers just come – they certainly don’t. But no amount of growth tactics can grow a product that has yet to nd product- market t. It can bring you short term success, but you’ll hit a ceiling sooner or later. You need to validate your product first, and once you’ve successfully done that, then you can start a growth team. 什么不说客户刚刚来 - 他们肯定不会。但是，没有增长的策略可以增长一个尚未发现产品市场的产品。它可以带给你短期的成功，但是你会迟早要上一个天花板。您需要首先验证您的产品，一旦您成功完成，那么您可以启动增长团队。
Many of our early tactics were based on opinions and intuition, rather than on quantitative data. In fact, a common mistake other startups make in the early days is relying too much on quantitative data. 我们许多早期的策略是基于意见和直觉，而不是定量数据。事实上，其他初创公司在早期所犯的一个常见错误是太多依赖于定量数据。
If you’re Facebook, and you have several hundred million users, you can test something in minutes or hours. But a startup with a few hundred users could take 12 weeks to get useful data. Our growth tactics were simply our opinion about how software should be built, rather than looking at what other companies were doing. 如果您是Facebook，并且您有数亿用户，您可以在几分钟或几个小时内测试一下。但是，有几百位用户的创业公司可能需要12周才能获得有用的数据。我们的增长策略只是我们对软件应该如何构建的看法，而不是看其他公司在做什么。
We looked for plenty of inspiration outside software. What’s the purchase experience in your local co ee shop like? If you’re buying an Apple product in an Apple store, what happens before, during, and after you buy a product? We’ve always used real world examples to inform how we sell Intercom. 我们在软件外面寻找灵感。您当地的商店如何购买？如果您在苹果商店购买苹果产品，购买产品之前，之中和之后会发生什么？我们一直使用真实世界的例子来告知我们如何销售Intercom。
Looking outside software is a good reminder that there’s no such thing as a growth playbook. It drives me crazy when I see lists of “ e Top 10 Growth Tactics”. ere’s no secret recipe to success, and basically anyone who is successful has found their own path. 看外面的软件是一个很好的提醒，没有像增长剧本这样的事情。当我看到“十大增长战术”的名单时，它让我疯狂。没有成功的秘诀，基本上任何成功的人都找到了自己的道路。
How to grow your startup is one of the questions founders must address in the early stages of starting a company. Growth is the lifeblood of startups, and it’s what di erentiates Snapchat from the co ee house on the corner – it’s exponential.
如何发展创业公司是创始人在创业公司的早期阶段必须解决的问题之一。成长是初创公司的命脉，而这正是从同事们的角落脱颖而出的Snapchat - 这是指数级的。
The majority of advice out there is based around the following formula:
大多数建议是基于以下公式：
Build a product 建立产品
Release a product 发布产品
Growth hack your way to success GrowthHack 到成功
Smells like bullshit, or at least some sort of “get rich quick” scheme, right? e Faustian bargain of the internet is that at any time you like, you can swap your credibility for attention. It’s not hard to elevate the pro le of your product, but ensuring it’s for the right reasons is a di erent challenge.
闻起来像胡说八道，还是至少有些“快速富裕”的方案吧？ e互联网的福斯特交易是在任何时候你喜欢，你可以交换你的信誉注意。提升产品质量并不困难，但确保正确的原因是一个不同的挑战。
One of the easiest mistakes to make when growing a company is focusing on the wrong metric for delivering growth. When someone in the company decides that “accounts created” is the metric for success, for example, the team works out ways to hack that number. Over time people lose sight of what’s actually important for the business, and the entire company veers in the wrong direction.
成长公司时最容易犯的错误之一就是重点放在提高增长率的错误指标上。当公司中的某人决定“创建帐户”是成功的指标时，例如，该团队制定出了一些方法来劫持这一数字。随着时间的推移，人们忽视了对企业至关重要的事情，整个公司走向错误的方向。
Let’s say you hire an analytics consultancy for your project management app.They'll dig into your data and come out with a metric like this: “Users who have invited two or more teammates and posted three updates will upgrade to convert to paying users.”
假设您聘请了您的项目管理应用程序的分析咨询。你会看到你的数据，并按照这样的指标出来：“邀请了两位或更多队友并发布了三个更新的用户将升级，以转换为付费用户。”
Your “growth hacker” hears this and thinks, “Let’s get everyone doing this!” So, you put a big button in the app that forces every user to invite two teammates, create a project and post three messages before they can do anything else.
您的“成长黑客”听到这个观点，并认为：“让大家做这个！”所以，你在应用程序中放了一个大按钮，迫使每个用户邀请两个队友，创建一个项目并发布三个消息，然后才能做任何事情。
What happens? Well, users click the button, metrics go up...and upgrades don’t follow. Ultimately, lots of things correlate with
怎么了？那么用户点击按钮，指标就会上升...并且升级不会跟着。最终，很多事情相关 your users upgrading, but trying to force that trigger doesn’t actually do anything. If it did, res would spontaneously break out near groups of remen.
您的用户升级，但试图强制该触发器实际上没有做任何事情。如果这样做的话，res会自发地在附近的一些人的阵地中脱颖而出。 Tricking your users in order to hit your metrics causes long term, if not permanent, damage. Any growth you see will be arti cial. Trying to get potential customers to do something prematurely – be it creating an account, tweeting or just completing a task – has a similar e ect.They're likely to try it once, leave, and never even remember you exist.
为了达到您的指标，您的用户将会导致长期的损害（如果不是永久性的）。你所看到的任何增长都将是人为的。尝试让潜在客户过早地做某些事情 - 无论是创建帐户，推送还是完成任务 - 也有类似的功能。你可能会尝试一次，离开，永远不会记得你存在。
> “Focus on high-effort, high-impact work. It’s very easy for growth teams to gravitate towards easy, small tweaks that don’t have that much impact. We did a bunch small things early on, but none of it paid off a huge amount in anything but the very immediate short term. The things that have had the bi est impact have been the high effort, strategic work.” ，高效的工作。增长团队很容易倾向于没有太大影响的简单，小的调整。我们早些时候做了一些小事情，但是除了短期内，还没有任何一个东西能够付出巨额代价。有双重影响的事情是高度的，战略性的工作。 – BEN (FIRST HIRE)
Homejoy was a good example of why you need to focus on the right metrics. Despite touting “enormous top-of-funnel growth curves” in the press, seemingly out of nowhere, the house cleaning service closed completely, even with $40 million in the bank.
Homejoy是一个很好的例子，为什么你需要专注于正确的指标。尽管在新闻界兜售了“巨大的渠道增长曲线”，但似乎没有任何地方，房屋清洁服务完全关闭，即使在银行也有4000万美元。
It turns out that even though that top-level growth number looked really good for a while, it wasn’t real growth, because none of those users stuck around after the introductory offer expired. As founders, it’s easy to choose a vanity metric. We usually choose the biggest number to get press coverage, but it tends to be meaningless, like views, downloads or registrations. Brian Balfour, CEO of Reforge, calls it the wheel of meaningless growth.
事实证明，尽管顶级增长数字看起来真的很好，但并不是真正的增长，因为在介绍性报价过期之后，这些用户都不会停留在其中。作为创始人，很容易选择虚荣指标。我们通常选择最大的数字来获得新闻报道，但它往往是无意义的，如视图，下载或注册。Reforge首席执行官Brian Balfour称之为无意义增长之轮。
When you put that number in the press, you’re celebrating it externally and it becomes a trap. Now you have to keep coming up with a bigger and bigger version of that number, so that you’re following it into oblivion before you even realize it.
当你把这个数字放在新闻中时，你在外面庆祝它，成为陷阱。现在你必须不断地提出一个更大更大的版本的数字，这样你才能把它遗忘，才能意识到这一点。
If you choose a vanity metric, you set your entire company up to pursue one thing: growing that number at all costs. Instead of delivering real value for your users, your team is laser-focused on doing anything
如果你选择一个虚荣指标，你可以让整个公司追求一件事：不惜一切代价增加这个数字。您的团队不会为您的用户提供真正的价值，而是以激光为重点做任何事情 that grows that number, likely at a cost to the experience of the people actually using your product.
这增加了这个数字，这可能是实际使用您的产品的人的经验的代价。 A great example of this exact problem is Twitter. For years, Twitter has been xated on a single metric: monthly active users. It de ned it early on as a number for success, following in Facebook’s footsteps, and now that it’s a public company, that’s all investors care about.
这个确切问题的一个很好的例子是Twitter。多年来，Twitter已经以单一指标为准：每月活跃用户。早在Facebook的脚步声中，它成为一个成功的数字，现在它是一家上市公司，这就是投资者关心的一切。
As a result, Twitter has spent the better part of the last three years doing everything it can to in ate that number, at the peril of its 313 million existing users. Instead of making Twitter better for the people who are already using it, it alienated its core user base by introducing features designed to help beginners across the board – like hiding @mentions for everyone – dumbing down the proposition for more experienced users.
结果，Twitter在过去三年中花费了更多的时间来尽可能多地利用这一数字，在3.13亿现有用户的风险下。而不是为已经使用Twitter的用户提供更好的Twitter，它通过引入旨在帮助初学者的功能来疏远其核心用户群，比如为所有人隐藏@mentions，为更有经验的用户奠定了基础。
“Growth teams focus way too much on optimization early on. Optimizing implies that your starting point is correct. But every startup inherits things that don’t really make sense or weren’t really thought through. The much more important thing is to gure out the absolute best experience for new customers and build that from scratch.” 增长团队早日关注优化过程。优化意味着您的出发点是正确的。但是，每一个创业者都会继承那些真正没有意义或者没有真正思考的东西。更重要的是要为新客户确定最佳体验，并从头开始构建。 – BEN (FIRST HIRE)
Because Twitter focused on that growth metric so early on, it’s committed to growing it, and when it doesn’t, the stock market punishes the company. It de ned its own success by that number, and now it’s beholden to it for the long term.
由于Twitter早日关注这一增长指标，它致力于增长，而如果没有，股票市场就会对公司进行惩罚。它取决于它自己的成功数量，现在它是长期的。
Paul Graham in his canonical essay, Startup = Growth, described a startup like so: 保罗·格雷厄姆（Paul Graham）在他的经典作品“Startup = Growth”中描述了一个这样的创业公司：
“A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to work on technology, or take venture funding, or have some sort of exit.” 一家创业公司是一家旨在快速增长的公司。新成立的本身并不构成公司创业。初创公司也不需要从事技术工作，或者采取风险投资或有某种退出。
By this definition, everyone in a startup is, or should be, working on growth. Engineering teams don’t exist to write code. Engineering teams exist to apply science to build products to grow the company. Marketing teams don’t exist to make landing pages. Marketing teams exist to communicate the value of a product, service or brand to grow the company.
根据这一定义，一家创业公司的每一个人都应该是或应该成长的。工程团队不存在编写代码。工程团队存在应用科学来建立产品来扩大公司。营销团队不存在来建立目标网页。营销团队存在来传达产品，服务或品牌的价值，以发展公司。
The only difference between product teams and marketing teams at a startup is that one is focused on long term growth, and the other is focused on immediately measurable growth. When a product team releases a feature, they don’t expect signups or revenue to jump overnight. But when a marketing team starts a new campaign, immediate results are expected.
创业公司的产品团队和营销团队之间的唯一区别就是专注于长期增长，另一个则集中于即时可衡量的增长。当产品团队发布功能时，他们不希望注册或收入过夜。但是当营销团队开始新的活动时，预期会立即取得成效。
Ultimately, both teams work on growth. e biggest di erence is the period in which results can be measured. For near term growth oriented product teams (often called “growth teams”) and marketing teams, focusing on immediately measurable results should not translate to focusing on trivial changes – the sizes of the changes you’re willing to make will directly correlate with the size of your returns.
最终，两个团队都在努力实现增长。最大的差距是衡量结果的时期。对于近期增长导向的产品团队（通常称为“增长团队”）和营销团队，重点关注立即可衡量的结果不应该转化为专注于微不足道的变化 - 您愿意做出的变更的大小将直接与大小相关的回报。
In simpler terms: a billion dollar company was never built from better button colors.
简单来说，一个十亿美元的公司从来没有建立起更好的按钮颜色。
The key for any businesses is learning to focus on the hard stu . We’re talking about the high-e ort, but high-impact work. Hunter Walk, Partner at Homebrew VC, taught us that most people automatically opt for the low-e ort work, which is a little like snacking.
任何企业的关键都是学习着力于坚强的脚步。我们在谈论高效率但是影响很大的工作。Homebrew VC的合作伙伴Hunter Walk告诉我们，大多数人自动选择低成本的工作，这有点像吃零食。
Walk said that you can eat snacks when you’re hungry and it helps, but if you only ever ate snacks you’d eventually die.
步行说，当你饿了，你可以吃零食，它有帮助，但如果你只吃过零食，你最终会死亡。If you know something is better and it’s hard to implement, you don’t need to A/B test it. Too many startups slow down their roadmaps at the start because they’re overly concerned with measuring every single detail. At some point you might be a Facebook or a Twitter and you can measure things quickly. In that case do it, but don’t obsess over it.
如果你知道一些更好的东西，很难实现，你不需要A / B测试。一开始，太多的初创公司放慢了路线图，因为他们过分关心测量每一个细节。在某些时候，您可能是Facebook或Twitter，您可以快速测量。在这种情况下，这样做，但不要迷恋它。 For example, when we redesigned our signup ow in the early days of Intercom, there was very little numerical justi cation up front for doing so. It took us six months to complete, but it was one of the most impactful changes for our business. If we were obsessing over numbers it might not have ever happened.
例如，当我们在Intercom的早期重新设计了我们的注册时，这样做很少有数字正义。我们花了六个月的时间来完成，但这是我们业务中最有影响力的变化之一。如果我们痴迷于数字，可能根本就没有发生过。
To avoid the pitfalls of smaller, “snack” metrics, it’s important to pair every single metric with an appropriate counter metric: signups with activations, new paid customers with churn or new paid customers with total revenue. is achieves two things:
为了避免较小的“小吃”指标陷入困境，重要的是将每个单一指标与适当的计数器指标进行配对：与激活注册，新的付费客户或新的付费客户，总收入。实现了两件事情：
It recognizes that your product is a system of metrics, highlighting that focusing on any metric in isolation is incorrect. 它认识到您的产品是一个衡量指标系统，突出表明专注于任何度量标准都是不正确的。
By recognizing and forcing focus on the system, it encourages a more holistic approach to growth. 通过认识和强调对系统的重视，它鼓励采取更加全面的增长方式。
Encouraging this kind of holistic approach naturally moves you away from trivial button colors or headline tweaking. It also leads you to some more impactful questions that will help you grow: 鼓励这种整体方法自然会使您摆脱琐碎的按钮颜色或标题调整。它还带给您一些更有影响力的问题，这将有助于您发展壮大：
Are you describing your product in the same language and terms that prospective customers use to articulate their problems? If questions are where answers ㄑit, this is critical to prospective customers nding a place for your product in their head. 您是否以与潜在客户用于表达自己的问题的相同语言和术语来描述您的产品？如果问题是答案t，这对于潜在客户在您的产品中占有一席之地至关重要。
When did you last sign up for your product? Does anyone in your company own the signup flows? You’ll likely be embarrassed by the assumptions you made early on, and quite possibly no one has worked on signup since. 你最近什么时候注册你的产品？贵公司的任何人是否负责注册流程？您很可能会因为您早期所做的假设而感到尴尬，很可能没有人会因为注册而工作。
How do you teach customers about your product? Are you helping them solve their problems? Or are you merely describing the mechanics of your product? (“ The message button is over there, good luck!”). 您如何教客户您的产品？你帮助他们解决问题吗？或者你只是描述你的产品的机制？ （“消息按钮在那边，祝你好运！”）。
These are the types of questions from which real, sustainable growth originates. It’s not as easy as changing a button color and hoping for 80% more conversions. But then again, nobody said growing a startup was easy.
这些是真正可持续发展的问题类型。它不像更改按钮颜色那样容易，希望转化80％。但是再一次，没有人说增长一个创业公司很容易。