Surprisingly, it can be hard to figure out if you’re at Product/Market Fit or not, and one of the big reasons is that comparable numbers are difficult or impossible to come by. You have to look at comps for products in a similar or equal product category, and sometimes they just … | Continue reading
The rise of the Growth Hacker The new job title of “Growth Hacker” is integrating itself into Silicon Valley’s culture, emphasizing that coding and technical chops are now an essential part of being a great marketer. Growth hackers are a hybrid of marketer and coder, one who look … | Continue reading
[Andrew: Paid marketing remains an integral part of many products’ acquisition channels, and one of the key metrics is Cost of Customer Acquisition, which is a nuanced calculation with lots of gotchas. My good friend Brian Balfour (ex-vp growth at Hubspot) put together this incre … | Continue reading
Guest Post by Bangaly Kaba (EIR @ Reforge, Former VP Growth @ Instacart, Instagram) The following was written by Bangaly with contributions by other Reforge EIR’s Elena Verna (Miro, MongoDB, SurveyMonkey) and Fareed Mosavat (Slack, Instacart, Zynga). Reforge is a comm … | Continue reading
☝️Above: Michelle Rial (follow her at @TheRialMichelle), then working at Buzzfeed, posted this hilarious infographic with all the “X for Y” ideas. Here’s the original article. I had a quick laugh, of course. But then seeing this infographic made me think through some deeper thing … | Continue reading
The first banner ad ever, on HotWired in 1994, debuted with a clickthrough rate of 78% (thanks @ottotimmons) First it works, and then it doesn’t After months of iterating on different marketing strategies, you finally find something that works. However, the moment you start to sc … | Continue reading
Hi readers, The growth teams at Uber and Airbnb occasionally met over the years to share best practices, brainstorm ideas, and share observations on the startup world. I’ve had folks over to 1455 Market St, the headquarters of Uber, and I’ve reciprocated with visits to the Airbnb … | Continue reading
Dear readers, I’m happy to announce I’ve completed my first year in my new role at a16z, and it’s been a blast! I will write more about it coming up, but in the meantime, it’s very timely that my colleague Scott Kupor has written a new book, Secrets of Sand Hill Road, with the fu … | Continue reading
Am I just getting old?When I encounter a new product idea for the first time, I find myself asking: Is this idea dumb? Or I just getting old? Early on, there’s often not much to judge it on besides the idea. Sometimes the idea sounds either dumb or trivial. But over the years, I’ … | Continue reading
What’s a minimum “test” of your product? And what are you testing? A hypothesis-driven approach to product development dictates that you build as much as you need to test our your product, but not more and not less. But what are you “testing” your product for? One possibility, as … | Continue reading
Benedict Evans at a16z recently tweeted the following: There’s so much truth in this tweet. And it resonates so much, I think it deserves a name: The Bad Product Fallacy Your personal use cases and opinion are a shitty predictor of a product’s future success. I’ve been in the Bay … | Continue reading
Above: New technology has always captivated consumers! Dear readers, I’m often asked- so what kind of startups are you investing in at Andreessen Horowitz? And since I’m focused mostly on consumer companies – is there anything exciting happening? After all, if we’re “between” pla … | Continue reading
[Dear readers, this essay is on the future of marketplaces. Is there still room for marketplace startups to innovate? We answer, emphatically, yes! Am excited to share a vision on the past and future of the service economy, in a collaboration by my a16z colleague Li Jin. From “Un … | Continue reading
Dear readers, Building a new growth team is hard. You have to figure out the macro organizational issues – how it fits in with marketing, product, and other functions – as well as the micro, like how to measure the success of these teams. It’s a tricky topic and something that a … | Continue reading
Growing startups and evaluating startups share common skills Earlier this year, I joined Andreessen Horowitz as a General Partner, where I focus on a broad spectrum of consumer startups: marketplaces, entertainment/media, and social platforms. This was a big moment for me, and th … | Continue reading
The consumerization and developerization of B2B Dropbox is the fastest SaaS company to $1B in revenue run rate with 600+ million users. This is just an example showing that companies are adopting software in a completely different way in recent years – we have individual users/de … | Continue reading
A few weeks ago, I read this tweet, and found myself nodding my head in vigorous agreement. The Next Feature Fallacy: the fallacy that the next feature you add will suddenly make people want to use the entire product. — Joshua Porter (@bokardo) May 14, 2015 For people who love to … | Continue reading
Remember all the “Uber for x” startups? A few years ago a ton of “Uber for x” startups got funded, but very few of them – maybe none? – worked out. It sounds good but ultimately most failed on the supply side. Let’s explore why. Rideshare has better economics, at the same acquisi … | Continue reading
[Today we have an essay on one of the common frameworks we use to analyze investments at Andreessen Horowitz: The Power User Curve. I worked closely with Li Jin, a partner on the investing team, to collect our ideas into this essay which she wrote. You can follow @ljin18 on Twitt … | Continue reading
How DAU/MAU got popular DAU/MAU is a popular metric for user engagement – it’s the ratio of your daily active users over your monthly active users, expressed as a percentage. Usually apps over 20% are said to be good, and 50%+ is world class. How did this metric come into use? DA … | Continue reading
The “Ultimate Driving Machine” is a classic slogan that makes BMW compete based on position, not features. It’s hard to keep things simple, especially when adding so many new features In my recent post on the virtues of marketing simple products, a couple readers wrote in to writ … | Continue reading
The current generation of marketplace startups has been incredibly successful. Airbnb, Lime, Uber, Lyft, Instacart, etc. I’ve been doing a broad survey of the best writing on this topic and wanted to share my list of 20 best links I’ve seen. Marketplaces at Andreessen Horowitz We … | Continue reading
Social products need mass before scaling growth I often write on the topic of how social products can scale growth, resulting in inbound emails to the effect of “how do I get my product to go viral?” The problem is, until you have a strong baseline of engagement, it’s nearly impo … | Continue reading
Zero to traction de Andrew Chen (If you can’t see the embedded slides above, you can also download the PDF here) A few months ago, I spoke to a group of entrepreneurs at Stanford whose seed stage companies were still struggling to get product/market fit. I wrote down a few though … | Continue reading
When a +10% isn’t really a +10% OK, this is an infuriating startup experience: You ship an experiment that’s +10% in your conversion funnel. Then your revenue/installs/whatever goes up by +10% right? Wrong :( Turns out usually it goes up a little bit, or maybe not at all. Why is … | Continue reading
(📷 lime) The scooter startups are way more important than you think, or in emoji-speak: 🛴+📱=🤖🚗🚁. Let me explain. Right now, scooters are a lot of things – fun, cute, adventurous – but here’s a couple words I rarely hear about them: … | Continue reading
[Originally tweetstormed at @andrewchen, Follow me for more!] Many of the biggest implosions in recent history – especially ecommerce – have been due to startups getting addicted to paid marketing while fooling themselves on Customer Acqusition Costs. As spend scales, it always g … | Continue reading