Recently, I was re-watching the Y-Combinator talks, on how to start a Startup. ( If you didn´t see them, I strongly suggest you to go and see them, instead of reading this article =), and I found this excellent class of Alex Shultz the VP of Facebook. Worth to share.

Although his conception of growth/users/monetization is highly to big for any mortal (he is working on facebook), he gives very interesting insights.

Great Quotes

“[The] number one problem I’ve seen for startups I’ve advised has been [that] they don’t actually have product/market fit when they think they do.”

“If you don’t have a great product there’s no point in executing well on growing it because it won’t grow.”

“The way we look at, whether a product has great retention or not, is whether or not the users who install it, actually stay on it long-term, when you normalize on a cohort basis, and I think that’s a really good methodology for looking at your product and say ‘okay the first 100, the first 1,000, the first 10,000 people I get on this, will they be retained in the long-run?”

“If you’re a startup, you shouldn’t have a growth team. Startups should not have growth teams. The whole company should be the growth team. The CEO should be the head of growth.”

“If you can run more experiments than the next guy, if you can be hungry for growth, if you can fight and die for every extra user and you stay up late at night to get those extra users, to run those experiments, to get the data, and do it over and over and over again, you will grow faster. Mark has said he thinks we won because we wanted it more, and I really believe that. We just worked really hard. It’s not like we’re crazy smart, or we’ve all done these crazy things before. We just worked really really hard, and we executed fast. I strongly encourage you to do that. Growth is optional.”