Andrew Chen

JULY 10, 2017

I wanted to do a quick roundup of my essays over the last year, in case you’ve missed any of them. I’ve published a number of guest essays and original writing on topics like growth metrics, consumer psych, the startup ecosystem in the Bay Area, push notifications, and much more. Original essays.

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Andrew Chen

DECEMBER 18, 2017

I want to cross-pollinate a tweetstorm on lessons I’ve learned from a decade of professional writing. It has to be an compelling opinion or important learning. Titles become essays. Publishing ideas, learnings, opinions, for years & years is a great way to give. Andrew Chen (@andrewchen) July 26, 2017.

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Userpilot

JULY 26, 2021

It’s because of something called product-led growth (or product growth for short.). It’s how companies like Slack, Notion, Calendly, and Loom have achieved such viral growth. Product growth specifically makes the product available for free. What is product growth? They use their product as the selling point.

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Analytic Tools Feedback Software Onboarding KPIs User Testing 98

Intercom, Inc.

MARCH 7, 2018

From our perspective, urbanization offers plenty of lessons that are applicable to the growth of technological platforms. As a recent New York Times essay pointed out, smaller cities cannot compete with these behemoths and either stop growing or go into decline. In other words, cities are a technology that maximize connections.

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Sachin Rekhi

FEBRUARY 16, 2020

Much of the literature that defines the role as the intersection of business, technology, and user experience isn't particularly helpful for practitioners who are left wondering what skills they need to learn versus the fine people they work closely with in actual business, technology, and user experience roles. Vision: Vision Narrative.

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Gainsight

MAY 7, 2019

Learn more about this exciting event for product managers here. SC Moatti will share best practices for accelerating growth in her session, “How to Unlock New Sources of Business Growth.”. Dan Olsen will teach you a simple but effective process in his session, “How to Achieve Market Fit.”. Learn from this influencer!

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The Product Coalition

DECEMBER 8, 2019

Market Competence ????? understanding your market, industry, competition) 3. business models, your product/business, finance, sales, marketing, scaling) 4. Action 1: Continuous Focused Learning If you’re lucky, you’ll have a coach or mentor and proper training in your company. Craft Competence ?? Business Competence ? ??(business

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Weak Development Team Development Analytic Tools User Testing 93

Radical Product

MAY 5, 2020

They’ve since had to lower their expectations, having learned that being successful and changing the world (for the better) are mostly mutually exclusive. In his essay, It’s Time to Build , Marc Andreessen proposes that building products “is how we reboot the American dream”. You can also download the free toolkit here.

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Userpilot

JULY 29, 2021

Let's look at 5 customer engagement solutions you can set up today and drive growth right off the bat. Duolingo, an app that helps users learn new languages, tracks the number of new words you have learned, the time spent on the app, and the lessons completed. Don’t write an essay. Higher customer retention.

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Mixpanel

OCTOBER 25, 2021

Read on to learn how to put the pieces together. Having a well-structured self-serve support enables you to onboard users with a smooth and delightful flow, give them time and space to learn on their own, motivate them to explore and play with advanced features, and nudge them towards the “aha!” for self-serve.

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The Product Coalition

FEBRUARY 5, 2019

He is very involved in content marketing discussions on his blog. In particular, he is interested in successful launch strategies and growth hacking visibility across the key marketing platforms. He is also very interested in the future of automation for marketers and overall product practitioners.

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The Product Coalition

MARCH 2, 2018

You need hunger, luck and you need to know how to market yourself The famous Venn diagram shows product management at the intersection of tech , design and business. You just need to market them. My own story: I studied philosophy for my undergraduate degree and then spent four years working in financial markets.

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Usersnap

APRIL 2, 2019

Send guides – they might not know how to use your product properly so you should send guides and help them learn. This means that ignoring the non-responders would mean ignoring 60-80% of your market, which is not a good idea. Harry Conley is a marketing manager at Lucky Assignments and Gum Essays.

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ProductPlan

AUGUST 27, 2019

Who is she: She’s a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners and the former Head of Product, Growth at Slack. She said it: “I’ve seen so many really beautiful, useful products with exactly the same use case and target market. It’s evident that past that bar, only go-to-market matters.”. Merci Victoria Grace @merci.

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Andrew Chen

NOVEMBER 15, 2021

Amid the vast, monochromatic corridors of Uber’s San Francisco headquarters at 1455 Market Street – two football fields worth of gleaming LED lights, light woods, concrete, and steel – the office was still mostly occupied at 8PM. The Cold Start Problem. Introduction. Too much surge, and riders would switch to competitors.

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Books Research Software Reporting Tools Technical Review 63

Brian Balfour

JANUARY 12, 2017

Quick note: We recently announced the next Growth Series , an 8-week program for designed for experienced practitioners in growth (past participants came from Dropbox, Google, LinkedIn, Evernote, Airbnb, Soundcloud, Facebook, and many other companies). It's by application only, and if interested, you can learn more here.

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Andrew Chen

JUNE 21, 2017

This pic is from two years ago, taken at Uber’s HQ on 11th and Market. It didn’t take me long to learn that if a random rider or driver emails Travis on his @uber.com email, he’ll read it and often forward it to the teams to fix ASAP. This essay came out of me reading these notes and getting inspired to write my own.

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Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 18, 2019

In the past 12 months on Inside Intercom, we’ve published nearly 200 blog posts covering everything from product launches to product strategy ; from growth stories to goal setting ; from building teams to bot skills ; from sales insights to stand-up comedy. Evelyn Clinton, Content Marketing Manager. Stand in the spotlight.

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Brian Balfour

FEBRUARY 7, 2017

I recently spoke with Andy as part of a 1 hour interview covering: How he brought a web-first product to mobile Activity notifications, rich push, and other techniques for driving mobile growth and retention Andy’s “Mobile Growth Stack” for 2017 You can watch the full interview here, and check out the truncated text version below.

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Onboarding KPIs Feedback Software Customer Experience User Testing 62

The Product Coalition

AUGUST 6, 2019

Why am I focussing on the word “business” here is because the PMs need to absolutely understand how the business works and how the Product (the experience, the tech behind it) is facilitating business growth? What is equally important is how they prioritize their daily tasks and it is often a hard-learned skill. 2Take them to meetings.

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Arpit Rai

DECEMBER 18, 2019

The underlying assumption is that if it is able to deliver a lot of value to its users, then there would be a significant impact on its business growth. Slack is used by people across varied job functions such as engineering, design, sales, marketing etc. marketing group, design group etc.) to communicate and collaborate.

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Feedback Software Customer Experience User Testing Document 52

Arpit Rai

DECEMBER 18, 2019

The underlying assumption is that if it is able to deliver a lot of value to its users, then there would be a significant impact on its business growth. Slack is used by people across varied job functions such as engineering, design, sales, marketing etc. marketing group, design group etc.) to communicate and collaborate.

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Feedback Software Customer Experience User Testing Document 52

Arpit Rai

DECEMBER 18, 2019

The underlying assumption is that if it is able to deliver a lot of value to its users, then there would be a significant impact on its business growth. Slack is used by people across varied job functions such as engineering, design, sales, marketing etc. marketing group, design group etc.) to communicate and collaborate.

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Feedback Software Customer Experience User Testing Document 52

Business of Software Conference

JUNE 19, 2020

I started ProfitWell about seven years ago – a little bit of background on us we basically help subscription and SaaS companies with the hard parts of subscription growth; and what I mean by that is we have a couple of different tools that basically help with kind of the gnarly areas of trying to grow a business. And we were like f*ck.

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Analytic Tools Data Visualization Research Software User Testing 52

Andrew Chen

NOVEMBER 1, 2021

One of the most frequent questions that founders ask is – I’ve read all about the importance of user growth, so now, how do I hire a Head of Growth? However, it’s rarely easy to hire a Head of Growth. It’s asked often for good reason. “It depends” is the right place to start.

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Customer Experience User Testing Technical Review Onboarding KPIs 82

Intercom, Inc.

MAY 10, 2018

All have benefited from the sage advice of growth expert and Andreessen Horowitz general partner Andrew Chen. Andrew’s been an angel investor and advisor for a slew of name-brand startups; however, he’s most widely known for his invaluable essays on growth. Andrew: That’s right. This is your competitive advantage.

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User Testing Customer Experience Onboarding KPIs Customer Feedback 224

Andrew Chen

JANUARY 9, 2020

In the interim, I’ve stayed pretty active on Twitter, writing tweetstorms that sometimes turn themselves into essays on here. For a quick summary of the essays that did make it onto here, including a couple guest collaborations, here’s an easy set of links: The Passion Economy (guest essay by Li Jin, a16z).

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Andrew Chen

AUGUST 21, 2023

Now that a few years have passed, what have we learned about the dynamics of this sector? Below is a graph of creator earnings, which show a similar curve – via API scraping in the essay The Economics of OnlyFans – showing that while some creators earn up to $100,000/month, the median is closer to $180/month.

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Research Software User Testing Startups Customer Experience 88

Andrew Chen

JUNE 25, 2019

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 offices too. It’s fantastic, and I hope you enjoy it.

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Andrew Chen

NOVEMBER 1, 2018

The reason for this is that the steps for starting and scaling a new startup share many of the same skills as investing in a new startup: 1) First, we seek to understand the existing state of customer growth – including growth loops, the quality of acquisition, engagement, churn, and monetization. There was a lot to learn.

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Onboarding KPIs Feedback Software User Testing Data Visualization 111

Andrew Chen

JANUARY 9, 2020

In the interim, I’ve stayed pretty active on Twitter, writing tweetstorms that sometimes turn themselves into essays on here. For a quick summary of the essays that did make it onto here, including a couple guest collaborations, here’s an easy set of links: The Passion Economy (guest essay by Li Jin, a16z).

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User Testing Data Visualization Product Marketing Marketing 52

Andrew Chen

NOVEMBER 3, 2021

This is the type of spikey, bad viral growth you don’t want! Hello readers, Viral growth — specifically the type baked into product features, in the form of invites, sharing, and collaboration — is a topic I’ve been endlessly fascinated by. Viral growth and retention are inextricably linked.

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User Testing Onboarding KPIs Customer Experience Reference 72

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 25, 2018

That’s what I’ve learned most in the past 7 years at Intercom. If people aren’t signing up, if the marketing page isn’t working, if no one is sharing the product on Twitter, we just assume it will be fixed with a better product. That’s what this talk (now essay) is about: people. Short on time?

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Business of Software Conference

MAY 21, 2020

You will learn how maximising culture, impact, and opportunities for personal development enable Simprints to hire effectively and stand out from the crowd, and that those lessons are applicable to all businesses. We’re continually refining our approach and would like to share some lessons we’ve learned along the way.

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Technical Review Feedback Software Software Review Analytic Tools 52

Andrew Chen

JUNE 25, 2019

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 offices too. It’s fantastic, and I hope you enjoy it.

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User Testing Customer Experience Research Software Feedback Software 48

Andrew Chen

MAY 14, 2018

[Hi readers: I wanted to share a podcast interview I did with Adam Risman of Intercom, who interviewed me on a wide array of topics including Dropbox’s viral growth methods, my time at Uber, and future growth strategies. Those working in growth and retention must continually seek “fresh powder.”. Hope you enjoy! -A].

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User Testing Customer Experience Onboarding KPIs Data Visualization 71

Brian Balfour

JANUARY 4, 2017

I recently wrote about the most common mistakes with CAC (customer acquisition cost) that can derail growth efforts before you even get started because CAC is a metric that's foundational to growth strategy. Standard $25/month – Likely targeted at Mid Market companies. Average marketing/sales cycle is less than 30 days.

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