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The podcast episode emphasizes the importance of VC-funded companies having effective unit economics that can reach profitability. This is seen as a net positive for the indie startup ecosystem and the world ecosystem as it builds a stronger foundation and robust business model.
The purpose of a growth function in a business is to work across different levers and be the shadow of the business model. The growth team's core mandate is to increase the ratio of money out over money in, which is crucial for investability and long-term profitability. The specific function of a growth team can vary depending on the business, but ultimately, it focuses on improving the financial health of the company.
The podcast episode highlights the importance of experimentation in driving growth. The speaker shares examples of how they implemented split tests and iterative processes to improve the conversion rates and overall performance of the business. By analyzing metrics and experimenting with changes in product development and user experience, they were able to make data-driven decisions and achieve significant improvements.
As the company grew and added more people, scaling challenges emerged, particularly related to onboarding and maintaining a cohesive culture. The episode emphasizes the importance of being coachable and continuously seeking feedback from leaders and colleagues. It also highlights the need to let go of certain responsibilities to allow for personal growth and the opportunity to take on new challenges.
Creating integrated teams that combine different functions and provide transparency in the decision-making process is crucial for success. This allows for a stronger feedback loop and encourages a hungry and coachable mindset within the team. By integrating feedback loops and eliminating the need for external approvals, teams can be more agile, hungry, and coachable, leading to growth and success.
Having a growth function in every business is essential. It ensures that there is a dedicated team responsible for optimizing and improving key business metrics. This team can focus on tweaking and optimizing campaigns, analytics, and other growth levers to drive efficiency and contribute to the overall success of the business.
The value of time is often overlooked when making decisions and setting priorities. Every month that a business operates incurs a cost, and delays in decision-making and experimentation can result in tangible financial consequences. Prioritizing time and considering the costs associated with waiting can help businesses make efficient decisions and maximize value generation. It is crucial to balance de-risking decision-making with the need for timely outcomes and consider the impact of time on the business's financial performance and growth.
Today’s episode is special. It marks a new era for Wild Hearts, where we will shine a light on world-class operators.
The goal is to reveal the lessons, tools, benchmarks and metrics that have surfaced from building and scaling world-class companies. And today’s episode will be all about growth from a company synonymous with it, Eucalyptus, a healthcare technology company building digital experiences for patients. Joe Harris started at Euc as the first growth lead hire, he became the head of growth and now he’s the Chief Commercial Officer.
Eucalyptus builds higher touch, higher quality healthcare experiences for the world. They’re one of the fastest-growing companies that Blackbird has ever funded. Within their first few years, the team has launched and grown four brands reaching over 700,000 people in Australia, UK and Germany.
Behind this, quite frankly, insane growth is a team of some of Australia’s most talented, creative and driven operators, and one of those is Joe Harris. Joe started at Euc in 2020 as a Growth Engineer, quickly moving up the ranks to the Head of Growth and then finally as the Chief Commercial Officer. This rapid progression happened in less than three years, as Joe described it:
“If you had said, I will give you a million dollars. If you can get within like 20% of the correct answer of what's gonna happen to you over the next three years, I would somehow owe you money”
In this episode of Wild Hearts, Joe walks us through what exactly a growth team is, the step-by-step framework for building your own growth function, how to become a great leader (and coach people around you to become one too), Also quick lessons learned about ineffective solutions that were not going to have the expected impact, and how to address such situations.
“When we first launched software, it was the most complex personalization journey that we had at the business at the time. Because it's an individually compounded treatment per patient, that is a much harder proposition to have people understand, especially coming from a cold start of never even having heard of it before.”
“The most important thing is the broadening of the mind or the breaking of barriers. And that is the final kind of frontier for a leader.”
“I think there is nothing more profoundly impactful than being hungry, being coachable like it's a compounding engine that you're building with that”
“If I sum [leadership] up, it's to bring clarity, derive the process, coach the next generation of process builders or leaders, and then breaking the barriers and, and helping people expand their, their solution.”
“When I think about setting out metrics to do a split test, honestly it can be done on any metric because a split test is a mechanism to test the change in a metric. So in these examples, we would be looking at basic completion rates of things.”
“The team needs to be accountable for the work that they do, but they must have agency over the thing they're accountable for.What the violation of that looks like is a team who's accountable for the conversion rate of like this part of the experience, but they actually can't push code or change the service or change anything about it.”
“And don't get me wrong, like those are not my wins. Those are the team's wins. I'm there as a facilitator. I'm there to like be a mechanic, like with the wrench and fix when there's a blockage, right? But ultimately, like they're doing the heavy lifting now.
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