The Best of Brian Balfour

All growth is not created equal.  Yet the industry has resorted to inauthentic ways to drive growth for just for the sake of growth.  

If you have a weekly one hour team meeting, it better have high ROI.  The dollar cost of that meeting for a team of five is about $13K per year.  A team of ten is $26K per year. (w/ conservative assumption of $100K average salary+benefits+office+etc per team member)  That isn't including the opportunity cost and cost of disrupting someone.  So reality is likely much higher.  How do you run a meeting that gets results?

I started my career out as a “product guy.”  But about 4 years ago I realized that product was a small piece of the startup puzzle.  I became fascinated with how products were growing.  Thus, my journey on learning growth and customer acquisition began. Here is the step by step guide I wish I had when I started to learn customer acquisition.  

There are key differences between the traction phase and the growth phase  of a company.   Understanding what stage you are at, helps you focus on the right goals, metrics, channels, and team structure.  But how do you know when you are ready to transition from one phase to the other?

SEO, SEM, Facebook Ads, content marketing, affiliates, partnerships, email marketing, app stores…the list goes on. With so many marketing channels to choose from, a common question is “where do I…

Andy Carvell joined SoundCloud in 2012, when the company was just over 80 employees and 10 million monthly active users. The service now boasts over 150 million registered users, and monthly actives in the high tens of millions. I recently spoke with Andy as part of a 1 hour interview covering: * How he brought a web-first product to mobile * Activity notifications, rich push, and other techniques for driving mobile growth and retention * Andy’s “Mobile Growth Stack” for 2

A friend in VC recently emailed me to get my take if I thought CAC would increase/decrease/trend over time for a specific product and business. The question isn't if it will increase? It is when, by…

A 40 post series detailing the step by step system used by the former VP of Growth @ HubSpot.

When I joined HubSpot in January 2014 the mission was clear. One, help build the foundation for a new $100M line of business. Two, do it with a freemium and touchless model. The journey was one with…