Weâre excited to help you get users.
This doc gives you some advice, walks you through your responsibilities, and leaves you with first steps to get started.
The first few weeks will feel like drinking from a firehouse. Youâre drowning in new concepts, docs, experiments, and so forth.
It will feel overwhelming. This is normal.
Because of this, thereâs a risk your startup will feel youâre moving slowly â even when youâre not.
To keep them happy, youâll need to communicate a few things over and over:
#1: Things take longer when you do them for the first time.
This is especially important if your boss has never done growth work before. Some people (especially first-time founders) have unrealistic expectations for how much work you can get done.
For example, founders may think you can âtest cold emailâ in a day. No.
It takes a few hours to learn the principles of good emailing, up to 2 days to research a good targeting strategy, 30 minutes to write your first email, another 30 minutes to fix it up based on feedback, and then 5-10 minutes of research per email to personalize it â across 50 emails.
So a proper test of 50 cold emails could take the better part of a week.
If you donât know how long something is âsupposedâ to take, you can always ask your mentor and they can help you ballpark it.
Most projects you do will take 2-5 drafts to end up with a final version.
#2: There are things you do every day that take time away from experiments.
These are meetings, Slacks with other team members, user interviews, customer support, prepping learnings for your call, etc.
#3: If someone wants you to do an âurgentâ task thatâs not in the backlog, explain the consequence to them: the next task in the backlog wonât get done.
Priorities change, but you donât want them coming to you later asking why you didnât make progress on the backlog. It helps to explain this ahead of time.