It takes big changes to create big growth. If you’re looking for that one simple trick to achieve big growth, like planting magic beans, you’re not gonna get there.
I’ve worked at a lot of startups and worked on a lot of products that struggled to grow. At one company, our growth had stalled, and our top goal was “double our growth in the next 6 months.”
I was leading the product effort, and I was struggling because there was no clear path forward with our current products. My coworkers disagreed. They insisted there’s a simple solution to our product problems.
“You’ve gotta do [feature X],” my coworkers would explain. ” What’s so hard about adding [feature X] to the product? Lots of people are asking for it. Just do that, and problem solved.”
If it was only that simple…
People outside product management imagine that creating growth is like planting magic beans. Simply put the magic seed in the ground, and *BAM* instant stratospheric growth. Build this one feature and *BAM* instant revenue.
Magic beans growth never works.
You are not “one feature away” from stratospheric growth. If growth was as easy as one simple thing, then every startup would succeed. And remember, 90% of startups fail.
If you want big growth, you have to make big changes. And nobody likes making big changes.
Revisionist Airbnb history
Whenever I try to explain why a single feature will not fix our problems, people often retort with the myth of Airbnb’s photos.
The story goes like this. In 2010, the people at Airbnb noticed how listings with high quality photos did better than listings with poor photos. So the Airbnb team rented a professional camera, took high quality photos of a bunch of listings, and published them online. Suddenly those spaces saw a huge uptick in bookings.
Growth hackers and product managers love that story. “See? One feature can lead to huge growth.” Sadly, reality is more complicated than that.
Let me tell you a different version of that story.
Airbnb had explosive growth right from the start — from their first 3 visitors in 2007 to 21,000 visitors in 2009 — and that was long before they added these new photos in 2010.
What triggered their growth after 2009? Airbnb got $7 million in funding in 2010, and they spent that money well. They turned that money into new features — adding deep hooks into Craigslist to draw people into the product (2010), a wishlist feature so travelers can track places they’d like to visit (2010), and integrating social features with Facebook (2011). They changed their policies so renters could book an entire place instead of a single room (and no longer required the host to serve breakfast). They made a big marketing pushes. And yes, they also published high quality photos of listings. Together, these changes helped them grow even larger.
It wasn’t “one feature.” It was all of them. The photos were not magic beans that propelled Airbnb’s growth.
People love to point at this picture of Airbnb’s growth. It’s a graph that appears to show how the company grew SO MUCH after they added high quality photos — but it’s misleading. Beside leaving out their early growth (from 3 to 21k users), it also doesn’t explain how any single change caused that growth. Remember — they made a lot of changes around the same time. How much growth was due to better photos versus anything else?
So please stop using Airbnb as your go-to story for how a single feature can change the fate of a company. There’s no magic beans growth here.
Big growth needs big change
The reason I’m picking on Airbnb so much is because people take the wrong lesson from that story. They learned the incorrect lesson of: “We need a growth feature like Airbnb’s photos because one simple change can trigger huge growth.”
When people say that, what I hear is, “we need magic beans that instantly sprout and grow to the sky.”
Today’s magic beans is AI. “We need to add AI to our product.” “We’re now an AI-first company.” “We’re gonna track everyone’s AI use.” As if you can plant AI beans and suddenly *poof* instant, incredible growth.
There’s no such thing as magic beans. There’s no such thing as one change that will instantly grow your product or transform your company. Why? Because when you make small changes, you get small results.
If you want big growth, you have to make big changes. Take big swings. Pivot. Rethink your whole product and target audience and overall strategy. Imagine you’re the competition, and launch the product that puts your own company out of business.
You are not “one feature away” from huge growth. You are far away from huge growth, and getting there will take huge changes.
The problem is — nobody likes making big changes. It’s risky, difficult, time consuming, and expensive. Why take a chance on big changes when you can instead find that one cool trick to get on track?
Back to my story… I told my peers that our current product wasn’t going to get us from here to there. “We need to pivot.” No amount of features or changes would get our current product to that next level of growth. Our product had stalled because we hit the limits of this product’s market.
I pitched my idea. We pivot and make a new product that serves a subset of our audience. These people need specific features to do their jobs faster and better, and they’d pay for it too. I knew because I talked to those people, and they were desperate for help. We could leverage parts of our existing product to do it, but we’ll need to add a lot more. It will take time though — probably a year of work to get to a full product with some crappy MVPs along the way — but in the long run, this new market could eclipse our old one. It’s big, it’s risky, and it’s what we need.
We did not pivot. Why not? Because we needed magic beans growth now.
Oh well.
If your trajectory sucks, one simple change will not trigger exponential growth.
Instead, ask yourself — what are we going to do differently? What assumptions did we make about our product, users, or success that failed? What problems or desires do our users have that our product can’t solve? Which parts of our product are working for our users? Which parts are creating more problems than solutions for our users?
Bad companies assume they’re just one step away from achieving success.
The companies who succeed are the ones that take big swings when things are going awry. They go back to basics — understand the technology, understand the users and their problems, understand the market, figure out how to alleviate burdens, and find a way to create delight. They make big changes that get them on track.
It takes big changes to get big results.
So don’t buy magic beans, and don’t expect to find any magic beans lying around. The magic beans are a lie. The sooner you realize that, the sooner you can start doing the hard work of making big changes.