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Elena Verna (Amplitude, Miro, Dropbox, SurveyMonkey)19 January 2025

10 growth tactics that never work

9Frameworks
15Insights

Frameworks in this episode

Strategy3 steps

Growth Can't Reverse a Decline

A growth team can't fix a slowing business; stop the decline first, then add growth to amplify.

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Strategy4 steps

Inspiration, Not Imitation

Use competitor teardowns as an input to ideation, never as the finished destination.

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Marketing3 steps

Rebrand Eyes-Wide-Open

A homepage redesign or rebrand won't drive growth; budget 3-6 months to claw performance back after launch.

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Strategy4 steps

The 18-Month Growth Model Overlay

Spend ~20-25% of growth time annually seeding new loops so your S-curve never flattens with no successor.

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Marketing4 steps

The Earned Channel Priority

Make building an owned/earned acquisition channel your growth team's number one priority over rented ones.

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Entrepreneurship4 steps

The Founder-Led Growth Prerequisite

Don't hire a growth team until you have proven PMF and enough data to run experiments.

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Productivity4 steps

The One-Month Experimentation Rule

If you can't collect the sample size in a month, don't A/B test it; ship it and measure pre vs. post.

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Leadership4 steps

Workshop-First Advisor Hiring

Vet an advisor with a paid working session on a real problem, then re-evaluate their value every month.

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Productivity4 steps

Your Problem Isn't Unique

Never start from scratch; find who already solved your problem and patternize the solution.

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Insights & moments

The myth-busts, hot takes, explainers, and tools worth keeping.

Myth Buster· 3

Myth Buster09:00

You Don't Need a Growth Team Until You Have PMF and Data

Elena Verna's most common hiring mistake is startups hiring for growth far too early, believing a head of growth will unlock growth for them. Her position is that the first wave of growth must be founder led, because product market fit and distribution cannot be outsourced. Two preconditions gate the hire: solid PMF with real retention, and enough user volume to actually run experiments on.

  • Founders and the founding team should drive growth to roughly $1M-$10M ARR themselves
  • Some companies don't create growth teams until $100M-$200M ARR
  • Precondition one: solid product market fit with retention (Sean Ellis score as one gauge)
  • Precondition two: enough data to analyze, hypothesize and experiment on
  • The longer you wait, the more the whole company is trained to own growth rather than one isolated island
  • Sales-led companies should hire sales well before growth; self-serve monetization flips the order

“there is a huge misconception in the field that in order to get growth going, you need a growth team. It's like absolutely not true.”

Elena Verna · 09:00

“So, if you have 10 users or 10 customers, that's not data. That's a G sheet with your customers and you don't need a growth…”

Elena Verna · 11:00
#hiring#growth teams#product market fit#founder led growth
Myth Buster15:00

A Head of Growth Cannot Reverse a Declining Business

The mature-company mirror of the first mistake: when growth slows, companies hire a shiny growth head or stand up a growth team and expect re-acceleration. Verna argues the decline has a deeper cause — core product or go-to-market — and growth can only optimize on top of it. Fix the underlying problem and at least plateau the decline before adding growth.

  • A growth team might lift results 10-15% at the upper end, not reverse a trajectory
  • If PMF is degrading or being eaten by a competitor, growth is helpless to fix it
  • At that company size the growth team is a huge expense with maybe 1:1 ROI
  • Wait until core product and marketing have stopped the decline and you see signs of life
  • Growth amplifies great product market fit; it does not create it

“If you have the overall business slowing down, your head of growth is destined to fail”

Elena Verna · 15:30

“But if you're on a decline, just just just don't just don't do it because there's going to be very disappointing results in a year…”

Elena Verna · 19:00
#growth teams#decline#product market fit#hiring
Myth Buster25:00

Copying Competitors Is the Fastest Way to Mediocrity

Verna tears down competitors constantly — thousands of Gmail accounts, mirror boards of onboarding flows and pricing pages — so she is pro-research. What fails is ripping their flows wholesale as a shortcut around ideation, user research and testing. You don't even know if what you're seeing is a test cell or a personalized experience, and every experience is unique to that company's customer and channel.

  • Blindly copying competitor tactics fails 95% of the time
  • Use competitors for inspiration and as an input to ideation, never as the destination
  • Web archives are useful for seeing how logged-out pages and pricing evolved
  • Repeating elements across many teardowns are a signal of winning patterns worth adapting
  • Benchmarks are dangerous because metric definitions differ wildly company to company
  • Never skip ideation, design, user research, customer interviews or experimentation

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

Elena Verna · 28:00

“I use it as an input into ideation, but I never use it as a destination for the result.”

Elena Verna · 31:00
#competition#benchmarks#teardowns#growth tactics

Hot Take· 3

Hot Take19:30

A Rebrand or Homepage Redesign Has Never Driven Growth

Verna's spiciest take: she has never once seen a rebrand or marketing-site redesign produce good performance results. The pattern is a new CMO arriving and redesigning the brand to their personal taste while promising acquisition lift that never materializes. If you do it, go in eyes wide open and budget months of post-launch optimization just to claw back to where you were.

  • Best case she has seen is net neutral results, plus a better base to optimize from
  • Typical cost: agency spend often a million dollars plus, and 8-10 months minimum of development
  • A redesign is a step back in performance that then gets treated as a fire drill
  • Valid reasons exist (new market, new category, evolved product) — driving acquisition isn't one
  • Bake in 3-6 months of optimization work after launch; most teams move straight to the next project
  • Same pattern applies to product redesigns and logo/color changes

“never ever once have I seen a rebrand or redesign, especially of your key marketing site produce good performance results”

Elena Verna · 19:30

“The best I've ever seen is that it produced net neutral results.”

Elena Verna · 24:00
#rebrand#redesign#marketing site#cmo
Hot Take1:05:30

If Everything Is an Experiment, You Have a Paralyzing Disease

Counterintuitively for a growth leader, Verna says over-testing is one of the worst states a growth team can fall into — a risk aversion that slows velocity, learning and output, and is very hard to escape once teams refuse to change anything untested. Her rule of thumb is a one-month sample-size test: if you can't collect it in a month, don't test it. Use pre versus post instead, and trust intuition more.

  • Rule of thumb: if you can't collect the sample size in a month, don't test it
  • Pre versus post is powerful, assesses impact, and still lets you roll back
  • Reserve rigorous testing for big strategic pivots and very high-traffic real estate where 0.1% means millions
  • Not testing isn't 'release and move on' — do 24-hour, 7-day and 28-day readouts, revisit a year later
  • Statistics are directional; 95% significance still means it might not be there
  • In the age of data, people don't rely enough on their own intuition

“If every single one of your initiatives that you're doing on growth is an experiment, uh that's a problem.”

Elena Verna · 1:06:00

“My rule of thumb, if we cannot collect the sample size in a month, we shouldn't test it. Period.”

Elena Verna · 1:08:00
#experimentation#ab testing#data#velocity
Hot Take1:19:00

Contrarian Corner: Full-Time Jobs Aren't the Best Way to Monetize Your Skill

Verna's contrarian opinion is personal rather than professional: a full-time job is only one package for monetizing your skill, yet almost everyone defaults to it blindly without evaluating alternatives. She isn't dismissing full-time roles — they're often necessary to build expertise — but argues you should design your own monetization model the way you would for a business.

  • Full-time roles box you into one company's culture, ambitions and fit
  • Alternatives: freelancing, contracting, advising, consulting, interim, fractional, courses, newsletters
  • Verna prefers going horizontal across many companies to pattern match, with occasional vertical engagements
  • Fear of instability paralyzes people, but diversification can itself create stability
  • Full-time roles are often necessary early to earn the right to unlock optionality
  • It's not a one-way door — you can move between full-time, advising and interim work

“And my contrarian opinion is that full-time jobs are not the best way to monetize the skill that you have.”

Elena Verna · 1:19:00

“There's interim engagements where there's a predetermined end date to your agreement.”

Elena Verna · 1:21:30
#career#contrarian#advising#fractional work

Explainer· 2

Explainer44:00

Why Prioritizing SEO and SEM Is a Growth Team's Biggest Mistake

Verna's view is that a growth team's number one priority should be building an owned or earned channel nobody else can compete in — virality, word of mouth, user-generated content. SEO, SEM and paid social all rent someone else's distribution and live at the mercy of an algorithm that can take it away. With AI reshaping search into a new UI, she argues the urgency has gone up sharply.

  • Paid and organic search means paying for access to Google's distribution
  • Algorithms can give and take away — you have no control over channels you don't own
  • Earned channels come from product-led acquisition: virality, word of mouth, UGC
  • AI is becoming the new UI over content, giving you even less control than Google did
  • Earned channels cost product, engineering and marketing people — not ad budget
  • Don't stop SEO/SEM/social — diversify so you aren't dependent on one landlord

“When you're doing organic search or paid search, you're making Google rich richer.”

Elena Verna · 44:30

“An algorithm can give it, but algorithm can also take it away at any point and you have no control because you don't own those…”

Elena Verna · 45:00
#earned channels#seo#paid acquisition#virality#ugc
Explainer51:00

Every Growth Model Expires — Overlay a New One Every 18 Months

Companies land on one growth model (product-led, marketing-led or sales-led) and ride it until it stops working. Verna argues PMF has a second horizon and so does growth: you must overlay other growth models before the slowdown, because loops take six months to 18 months to produce visible revenue. She allocates 20-25% of the growth team's annual time to trying new loops, without metric goals attached too early.

  • Most growth loops stop producing meaningful results within roughly five to seven years
  • Andrew Chen's 'law of shitty click-throughs': over-optimizing the same thing has minimal returns
  • Introduce something new roughly every 18 months; every ~5 years something big must take real volume
  • Devote 20-25% of the growth team's annual time to new loops and channels
  • Don't goal new loops on acquisition or monetization immediately — you'll cut them at the knees
  • Once growth slows and you have no second horizon, recovery is effectively impossible

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

Elena Verna · 53:00

“it took us probably 18 months until we started putting metrics expectations on it.”

Elena Verna · 57:00
#growth loops#growth models#miro#diversification

Story· 3

Story32:30

Someone Wanted to Copy a Dropbox Page Untouched for 10 Years

A concrete reason not to assume big companies have it figured out. Someone reached out to Verna praising a Dropbox activation-flow page and said they were taking it back to their own company. In reality the page hadn't been touched in a decade, was visible only to a small cohort, and performed badly. Lenny adds the mirror case from Airbnb, where much of the flow people admired was guesswork the team disliked.

  • The admired Dropbox page hadn't been touched in 10 years and only reached a small cohort
  • Being live doesn't mean anyone thoughtfully put it there
  • Lenny: much of the Airbnb flow people copied was guesswork the team hated
  • Fancy companies are not diligent about every pixel — there's far more chaos than outsiders assume

“I we haven't touched it in 10 years. Like this this page is like only visible for like small cohort of people. Like please don't…”

Elena Verna · 33:00

“Oh, if people only knew of how much craziness is happening in those big companies and how much chaos uh there is.”

Elena Verna · 33:30
#dropbox#airbnb#competition#onboarding
Story37:30

The Miro Community Question That Blew Elena's Mind

Tasked with standing up community at Miro with no prior experience and roughly a year before it would be shut down, Verna started talking to people who had done it. Kara Luton from Atlassian asked whether she meant a user, agency or partner community — an angle Verna hadn't considered at all — and advised starting with agency or partner communities for results. Verna later hired her as an advisor and reached a better outcome months earlier than she would have alone.

  • Verna had never built a community and had ~1 year before the initiative would be cut
  • Kara Luton (Atlassian) reframed it as user vs agency vs partner community
  • Advice: don't necessarily start with a user community if you want results
  • The conversation saved roughly six to eight months of flailing
  • She was interim CMO at the time — the title didn't stop her from admitting she didn't know
  • Admitting you need help earns more credit than people expect

“I remember talking to Kara Luton from Atlassian who has set up community.”

Elena Verna · 38:30

“you need to really put your ego aside and get some help faster than trying to hit every single failure point along the way.”

Elena Verna · 39:30
#miro#community#advisors#humility
Story49:30

Dropbox: Over 50% of Acquisition Comes From Sharing

Verna's canonical example of an earned channel. At Dropbox, over half of acquisition comes through people sharing files — for signature, transfer, or client delivery. The recipient gets brand awareness and is effectively activated by the act of receiving, and a share of them sign up. Dropbox ran a dedicated growth pod on both the sender and recipient side of that loop.

  • Over 50% of Dropbox acquisition comes through sharing
  • The sharing action solves brand awareness and near-activates the recipient at once
  • A dedicated growth pod optimized both sender and recipient experiences
  • It's a stable earned channel no competitor can buy their way into — only Dropbox's to lose
  • The sharing loop is 17 years in the making and still firing, which Verna calls an anomaly
  • Every business should attempt at least one loop like this

“Now, for example, a Dropbox, over 50% of acquisition comes through sharing.”

Elena Verna · 49:30

“That is a stable, earned channel that nobody can compete with.”

Elena Verna · 50:00
#dropbox#growth loops#earned channels#virality

Takeaway· 4

Takeaway34:00

Your Problem Is Not Unique — Never Start From Scratch

Teams love to believe their growth problem is novel and re-engineer a solution from the ground up. Verna is 99% sure it isn't: someone somewhere has solved it or failed at it publicly, and rebuilding costs time-to-market and enormous opportunity cost. Her prescription is to look at how others solved it, go talk to people who have done it, and turn solutions into reusable patterns.

  • Never start from scratch on an initiative or a metric you need to move
  • Find people who have solved it and ask them — people love talking about what they do
  • LinkedIn, X and your own network make this a genuine shortcut
  • Solving each problem uniquely is extremely inefficient — patternize your solutions
  • Patterns get you ~60% of the way, then do your own authentic implementation
  • Growth problems in particular are far more systematized than teams expect

“but your problem is not unique. I'm 99% sure of that.”

Elena Verna · 34:30

“do not start from scratch ever. Do not start from scratch.”

Elena Verna · 35:00
#patterns#problem solving#growth strategy#networking
Takeaway1:01:00

Any Growth Team Without an Advisor Is Underperforming

Verna considers not hiring advisors one of the biggest missed opportunities in growth, given how much information asymmetry exists in the field. For roughly an hour a week of paid time you can access someone who has lived through your exact problem. Her vetting tip: never hire an advisor before running a paid workshop with them on a real problem, then re-evaluate monthly.

  • You can get access to almost anyone for about an hour a week — expect to pay for it
  • Advisors are an input to your decision-making, not the strategy setter
  • Verna hires advisors for herself every time she takes an operator role
  • Run a paid workshop on a real problem before signing anyone — see them in action
  • An advisor who is cagey about what they know is the wrong advisor
  • Re-evaluate every month whether they added value; 3 months or 5 years are both fine outcomes

“I think any growth team that does not have an advisor is a growth team that is underperforming”

Elena Verna · 1:02:30

“I think that you should not hire an advisor until you do some sort of workshop with them on the problem that you're experiencing.”

Elena Verna · 1:04:00
#advisors#hiring#growth teams#vetting
Takeaway1:10:30

Fire Round: Four Growth Tactics That Waste Everyone's Time

Verna's rapid-fire list of small things teams burn time on that will never move a metric: testing shades of a color, adding third-party auth to boost acquisition, agonizing over a single email, and obsessing over removing friction. The last one gets the strongest warning — 'simplify onboarding' is an action, not a problem, and doesn't belong on a roadmap.

  • Color optimization: pick an accessible, bright color and move on — an early-2000s tactic
  • Third-party auth (Google, Facebook, Slack, Microsoft) causes a mix shift, not incrementality
  • Exception: developer products should offer GitHub auth, since devs already have the account
  • One-off emails never lift anything — 25% open rate average, 40-50% at best; never test a change in a single email
  • Fix friction that creates cognitive load; don't yank steps until you lose your product identity
  • 'Simplify onboarding' is a solution masquerading as a problem — cross it off the roadmap

“For the love of God, a blue is a blue is a blue.”

Elena Verna · 1:11:00
#growth tactics#onboarding#email#authentication#friction
Takeaway1:22:30

Make Career Optionality Your North Star, Not a Title

Verna argues that setting a title as your professional goal is the wrong frame: plenty of people reach their perceived corporate-ladder North Star and find themselves dissatisfied or depressed by the job itself. Optimizing for optionality instead changes the question from 'what gets me the next title?' to 'what increases my option pool next year?' — and it changes how you evaluate staying at a company.

  • People manager is a terrible job if you don't enjoy it — and you can't know until you do it
  • Titles as goals lead to dissatisfaction; options let you choose what fits your life and personality
  • Reframe progression around what expands your option pool next year
  • Evaluate staying at a company by whether it increases, holds, or decreases your options
  • Lenny's balance: build real depth first, or you have nothing to base advice on
  • You earn the right to optionality, usually inside full-time jobs

“a lot of people when they get to their perceived corporate ladder North Stars, find themselves extremely dissatisfied, depressed even, by how terrible that job…”

Elena Verna · 1:23:00

“You start thinking about what will can I do next year that will increase my option pool.”

Elena Verna · 1:24:00
#career#optionality#titles#professional growth