There are a few things that we believe as a growth team at Superpower, that average companies do not.
Most of what has come to be known as ‘growth’ in the world of tech is about driving incremental improvements through a process of A/B testing. Except, many of the greatest companies of the past 20 years did the opposite of this — Apple, Nike, Figma, AirBnb, Netflix, and even Facebook (despite what most people think). The reason these companies succeeded is they focused on the ‘10x’ initiatives rather than the 10% initiatives.
When I was speaking with one of the first hires at Facebook, they said that “we didn’t even need a growth team. All of the A/B testing data-driven stuff we spoke about hardly mattered. Just about all that mattered was the fact that the product had inherent PMF because Mark deeply understood consumer psychology from first principles.
When I was chatting with my friend who scaled A2 Milk form $60m revenue to $1b revenue (as CMO and CSO), she said that she hardly even thought about ‘growth’ in the typical sense. All she cared about was finding the one channel (or product) that would make every other channel irrelevant.
Our job is similar, which is to find the one thing that makes everything else irrelevant.
When most people talking about product as an input into growth, they think about listening to use feedback to ship incremental changes that makes the product ever so more delightful. That’s not what I’m talking about here. What I mean here is that the best way to grow is discovering some sort of new product or version of the product that can inflect growth.
For Hims, this was moving from ED to GLP1s; it wasn’t through optimizing the ED onboarding flow. For Apple, this was launching the iPhone; it wasn’t through optimizing the iPod. For Amazon, it was introducing AWS. For Neko, it was moving away from full stack primary care into just diagnostic testing.
The problem with testing too often is that it frankensteins the core message. The approach we take is using intuition, logic, our understanding of customers, and our own reasoning to define our core brand beliefs, our opinion on messaging, and what we want to stand for. The best brands are mightily consistent in their messaging, rather than flipping to the flavour de jour.
Seed has had the exact same narrative since inception. Same with Function. Same with Neko. When you do something consistently for a long time, you start to create a category because of the law of effective frequency.
Function Health does this well. They have stood for the same thing right from the start: (a) 100+ lab tests, (b) to own your health, (c) as a membership for life. They keep hammering home these key messages. As a result, I feel in my body the urge to sign up for Function. Meanwhile, Superpower stands for a million different things. Every creator mentions something different about Superpower. I don’t even know what Superpower does when watching all these videos. I’m so confused a don’t want to sign up. And now there’s pressure for even more testing and iteration rather than having the conviction and opinionation to stick to what we know.
I was chatting with my friend who was the VP of marketing at Netflix, head of marketing / SVP at Hulu, CMO at Nickelodeon and Video Amp for how she approaches marketing. She says her core job is to define the core brand beliefs, and then maniacally stick to them. She said that testing should occur within the confines of the core brand beliefs, but consistency and opinionation matters.
In a similar way, at Superpower, we test within the constraints of our core beliefs rather than constantly bend to the whims of the market. In other words, intuition brings us to the mountain, data helps us climb it.
Take for example, our new landing page. The way we want to solve for this is to think from first principles about what makes a landing page great. We want to modify this with our own understanding of customers (not their understanding of themselves), as well as our understanding of the market and our beliefs around our product, brand and mission. This allows us to get 80% of the way to shipping the landing page we want. From there, testing can get us the remaining 20%, but it matters far less than honing our judgment, obsessing over our core brand beliefs, and using that to define our approach.
We need to resist the temptation to follow what works for ‘most companies’. Our job is to obsess over getting the the fundamental first principles truth, and then to learn from the greats — companies that are worth over $100 billion — rather than reasoning from tiny things we have personally built in the past.
Opinionation, intuition, taste, conviction, being non-consensus are high variance strategies. Our job is to choose the high variance strategy, which is nearly always non-consensus. I yet to see a single thing great has ever been created from consensus thinking. The risk we run right now as an org is that we are moving to consensus thinking that results in average outcomes.