Currently founder of Suto, working on social commerce products.
ex-Head of Product at Taplytics. ex-Head of Mobile & Retail @ Frank & Oak. Ex-CTO of Venio. Ex-PivotalLabs.
Expertise: Growth, product and engineering.
I've been in e-commerce companies for a while, I run tests on a daily basis on both the web and native devices. I'm a PM, CRO and copy writer at the same time.
I've been helping setup Product management as a role within Frank & Oak as well as launched multiple B2C products to the market in the past few years.
We just started doing this properly. To start, I think it's important to define a structure for setting expectations and estimating tasks.
We use Pivotal Tracker's linear point system and aim for a certain velocity within our teams.
On each project, we meet with everyone who will be invoked to try to estimate the efforts using that point system. As the project goes along, it's the product manager's (or head engineer's, or boss man's) job to keep track of how the team is doing to execute and either estimate the timeline or de-scope features that are low priority and can be pushed for the next release.
Your job is to lead the team into a rhythm of shipping product as fast as they can with a high quality of integrity.
Happy to chat further about this stuff we recently went through it :)
It looks like you're not looking for someone who can scale and become a full fledged CTO (or you might not even need one), so try to look at it as a founding engineer hire instead.
With early founding engineers, you can sell them on things like:
- opportunity for learning - understanding business practices and models - opportunity for leadership down the road
And the equity structure should be something around 1-5% of the business vested over a few years. You'll have to sit down and explain it to them as some people either aren't educated or they want to be assured of exactly what they're being given.
I did this a few times last year and if done well, you can get some solid work out of them :)
Feel free to call me up and chat about it more.
I've tested nearly 10-20 common ones in the past few months, but what I've realized about growth hacking in general (other than the fact that the phrase itself is rather misleading) is that it should be a lot less about techniques and more around a mindset. You can significantly hurt your business if you just try things others have tried and gain traction that just isn't real and sustainable. I think that's why no one has really answered your question here for a few days to begin with.
Good luck! More than happy to chat about the specific tests I've ran in the past if you're still interested.
We initially had our own A/B testing system at Frank & Oak. It wasn't very robust.
We've been using Taplytics for about a year or so now – they're pretty awesome. They have a visual editor that works just like Optimizely does – but for the web and you basically have to just drop the SDK in.
Having worked closely with Nima for over a year, I was taken aback at how remarkably adept he is as a supervisor, developer and product manager. As most know, startups are a constant barrage of new challenges and seeing Nima's ability to adapt to and overcome these challenges (whether technical or business-related) time and again was absolutely impressive. His ability to distil seemingly complex problems into manageable solutions rivals that of people much later into their career.
I would be happy to work alongside Nima again and unreservedly recommend him to any team that earnestly seeks to push forward the frontier of consumer software.
Nima is an amazing technical talent and someone whom I have a great amount of respect for. Working with him at Koge has been a delight and I continue to find new hidden talents that he possesses. I have always chosen to surround myself with amazingly smart people and Nima is no exception. He continues to shine a fresh light on our overall direction. Especially, in the areas of customer acquisition, mobile strategy and overall strategic technical decision making. I would welcome Nima into any future endeavor and look forward to building a continued friendship and business relationship with him. He is truly what people refer to when they use the word "asset". I would recommend him in a heartbeat.
I worked with Nima very closely for over a year at Venio. During that period of time, one of the things that amazed me the most was his ability to transition seamlessly between the high-level co-founder role that was mindful of business objectives, and the day-to-day executional CTO role that lead a large team of engineers and designers to build an initially complex product that was later used by tens of thousands of consumers.
As someone who's eye is always on the business objectives, everything he builds has a very strong sense of purpose - I've never seen him build for the sake of building. Not only was he able to communicate plans and objectives very clearly to the rest of the team, but he was able to make everyone much better communicators with each others without him being there.
What I value the most though - from a personal standpoint - I became better at my job as a marketer by adopting his measurable way of approaching problems, and thought-processes, and I've seen him do the same to many others. I look forward to the next time we work together.
