It's never too early to build your growth model

This post was originally published on October 17, 2022 for the Angular Ventures newsletter. Subscribe here to receive all new Angular blog posts, data reports, and newsletters directly to your inbox.

Perhaps it’s because of my background in growth, but a topic that I always enjoy discussing with early stage teams is how they think their product will grow.

I don’t mean will it be “product-led” or “bottoms-up” or “top-down.” Those are motions. I’m looking for the overall growth model. What are the specific mechanisms by which one user turns into many, and an initial investment turns into revenue?

To some early stage teams, this question may seem a bit premature. But I’ve found that it’s useful to discuss early because it reveals the underlying assumptions founders are making about what needs to work for their business to ultimately succeed, and it provides a framework for decision-making and analysis.

Let me show you what I mean. I’ll use Airtable, where I used to lead growth, as an example.

For a customer-built product like Airtable, the growth model looks something like this:

1. User signs up.
2. User identifies a use case for Airtable and begins building.
3. User successfully activates and becomes a “builder.”
4. User launches a solution built using Airtable and invites users to collaborate with them.

There are two things I hope you notice about this model:

First, there’s nothing too complicated here. I bet you can build a similarly simple model for your product today.

Second, even a simple model like this one makes the underlying growth assumptions immediately apparent.

Namely, at Airtable, we needed to be able to:

• Acquire users and help them find relevant use cases
• Turn users into “builders” (that is, power users who could build valuable solutions themselves) at a sufficiently high rate
• Encourage builders to invite and collaborate with new users at a sufficiently high rate

The model gave us our marching orders. We needed to build a default collaborative product with a dead simple collaborator invite flow. And if we couldn’t help users find a problem to solve and become “builders” at a sufficiently high rate, the model would break before it even got started. So we prioritized identifying collaborative use cases, tracked the “collaborator invite” rate closely, and rallied the entire organization (product, marketing, support, success, education) to move the needle on onboarding and activation.

By the way, Airtable just announced its “Connected Apps Platform.” Take a look at the underlying features, and you’ll notice they fit clearly into a few categories:

• Speed up activation: use case-specific apps
• Give “builders” superpowers: verified data, data map
• Enable collaboration at scale: Interface Designer, permissions, two-way sync

That simple growth model is still guiding Airtable today.

This is why I always argue that it’s never too early to build your growth model. Even a simple model will help you identify the core risks that your business faces, as well as the metrics that matter most.

So, if you’re feeling inspired and you want to build a growth model of your own, give this classic piece on growth loops from Reforge a read. And feel free to send the model you draft my way. If you can’t tell, I love talking about this kind of thing!