Aperture - Tips for Creating the Right Mindset for Business Growth by Hannah Parvaz

[00:00:22.480] - Olivier Destrebecq
Well, welcome, everybody. Nicolas, I'd like to welcome you back from San Francisco because from what I heard, you just travelled over there. How are you doing now?

[00:00:29.830] - Nicolas Tissier
I'm fine. Not jetlagged anymore. It was a great event at the Promotion Summit. San Francisco edition was only about subscription apps. Really, we loved it. We had a lot of very good discussions over there. That was a great moment.

[00:00:46.120] - Olivier Destrebecq
Perfect. Well, today we have Hannah Parvaz with us who is a multi-award winning marketer, including App Marketer of the Year in 2019. Since then she founded Aperture London, where she focused on helping early to mid-stage startup grow. Before that, she also spent many years at Curio and Uptime.

[00:01:03.250] - Olivier Destrebecq
We're lucky enough that she joins us today on the podcast. From what I heard, she's traveling, so she might be a little jetlagged. But anyway, how are you doing today, Hannah? Is there anything you want to add to the intro?

[00:01:13.240] - Hannah Parvaz
Hi, Olivier. Hi, Nicolas. It's really great to see you. Yes, I am traveling today. I've actually switched places with Nicolas. I'm in San Francisco. I'm here for the App Growth Summit, which is taking place this week. I'm really, really looking forward to that. But, yeah, I think you've done a great job with the intro there. How are you doing today, Olivier?

[00:01:31.510] - Olivier Destrebecq
I'm doing awesome. We talked a few weeks back to get ready for the interview, and one of the things that struck me when we talked is that you have a very holistic approach to growth. You recommend that everyone in the company be aligned with the growth goal. Can you tell us more about your vision and why it's so important?

[00:01:48.640] - Hannah Parvaz
Absolutely. Diving straight in there, I think that the important thing to note about growth is that it's a structure that rolls into a theoretical mindset. You've probably heard of the growth mindset, which is a phrase that was coined by Carol Dweck. She's a psychologist, she's amazing. It basically suggests that we can cultivate the ability to learn.

[00:02:11.440] - Hannah Parvaz
That's exactly what growth is about. It's a process which is focused on learning. One thing you've probably heard people saying before in the industry is growth is a team sport. Have you heard that? That basically means that it's not just one person's job to gain all of the learnings in the company. It's up to everybody to learn and to drive this mindset.

[00:02:32.110] - Hannah Parvaz
A head of growth or a growth professional in its true sense is more like a conductor. They're the one that's keeping everything going, they're evaluating the biggest opportunities, they're validating them through learning and through experimenting. In terms of challenges, I'd say that one of the biggest challenges that companies face is destruction.

[00:02:55.420] - Hannah Parvaz
As a small company, there are so many things to do; and I speak to a lot of companies about this. They're like, "If everything's hygiene, where do we start?" Because it is hygiene to send out e-mails, to send out push notifications, to have a social media channel, but it's like how do we prioritize these things? That's what growth is all about; how do you prioritize these channels? How do you prioritize these different endeavors?

[00:03:14.860] - Hannah Parvaz
The further along a company is, the harder it can be to get them to align with this as well. The reason for this is that lots of people have come from different, let's say, organizational structures where they're not used to interdepartmental collaboration. That makes them sometimes, to think that their teams are the most important ones within the company.

[00:03:38.350] - Hannah Parvaz
It's true that a lot of teams also have elements of growth and elements of learning within them, but it's not until the whole company unifies around it and everyone starts to collaborate more. I know I sound a bit like the person at the end of Mean Girls. It's like, "Why can't everyone just get on?" But that's what it's all about. It's about everyone just getting on and working together with the same direction. And it's especially important in small companies that everyone is working on the exact same goal and the exact same metric.

[00:04:06.520] - Nicolas Tissier
You mean that the growth mindset is more about learning that actually improving some specific KPIs, is it the case?

[00:04:16.030] - Hannah Parvaz
The growth mindset is about learning as quickly as possible so that you can improve your metrics as quickly as possible. It's about uniting everybody around a framework for experimentation so that you can zero in on specific elements and then maximize that growth.

[00:04:30.820] - Nicolas Tissier
Very clear. Is there any core values that a startup must really embrace to favor this growth mindset?

[00:04:39.760] - Hannah Parvaz
I think the main things are just humility. I think the other thing is just being constantly curious. I know that everyone at the moment is always talking about curiosity, but it's so important that you don't think that you're coming from a position where you're right. When you have a growth structure in place, it's all about getting everyone on the same level, it's about getting everybody's ideas, it's about prioritizing everybody's ideas together so that it's not just one person shouting things and saying, "This is what needs to be done because I've had an opinion."

[00:05:10.330] - Hannah Parvaz
It's about actually validating and going through this process. Next time, if you have this process in place and you have a founder come over and say, "I've had this idea, let's do it." What you say back is, "Cool. Let's add it to the backlog. Let's prioritize it. If it becomes the biggest priority element, then we will do that next. But if it's not, then we will wait until we've got to that stage." That can be a hard thing for people to have to communicate to.

[00:05:36.880] - Olivier Destrebecq
It can also be hard… I'm working on a project right now where basically when we say, "Let's put it into backlog," it's a synonym for bye-bye feature because there's just so much thing that goes into backlog that it's hard to get things back to the top. I'm curious actually how you balance that, too.

[00:05:51.280] - Hannah Parvaz
Great question. The head of growth, as I mentioned, is like this conductor. They're the person that's in charge of the backlog for the company. If they haven't done this a lot before, they will usually have input from a product person or a technical person on complexity levels. They'll have input from different team members on complexity levels on different items.

[00:06:08.530] - Hannah Parvaz
But it's important to note that this backlog includes everything that everybody is working on. It's not just the product team, it's not just the marketing team; it's everybody's work that's defined by this. Actually, what happens when you have this kind of velocity is that oftentimes what'll happen is people will be saying, "I need more to work on." Because people are moving through things so quickly and all in the same direction.

[00:06:31.270] - Hannah Parvaz
One analogy that came to me last week was that we have to all become the juggernaut and everyone is working together to last through as many roles in the same direction as possible. We might say that the biggest thing that we're trying to impact at the moment is a specific metric, and so everyone aligns to that specific metric for that time period and then experiments around that.

[00:06:52.660] - Olivier Destrebecq
Nice. You've talk generic and I know you focus on the early to mid-stage startup. Can you tell us a bit more? What should they focus on? What do you tell them to focus on to help them grow their subscription business?

[00:07:06.760] - Hannah Parvaz
I think one of the most important things to bear in mind is that ultimately, a subscription business is the same as any other business. Every business is the same when it comes down to it. This greengrocer's goal is the same as Amazon's goal, is to sell items, is to create revenue. With business as a whole, the number one thing that you can do is talk to your customers. I always say that this is the main focus.

[00:07:30.940] - Hannah Parvaz
I've heard many, many, many times that product designers or teams sometimes will say—if they're not following a growth structure—they will say that, "The most important thing to talk to your customers about is to find out how they use the product." That's something that I disagree with. I don't think that the most important thing is how someone is using a product. It's about why someone is using your product or service and it's about understanding really deep down who these people are, not in a personal way, but who are they at their core.

[00:08:00.430] - Hannah Parvaz
We want to find out exactly that—customer psychology. Then after that, there are a few different routes that we usually work through, which are around metrics, tracking, goal setting, and then we work on the growth process itself, so around experimentation and as I keep saying, learning.

[00:08:17.440] - Olivier Destrebecq
Nice. You touched a little bit on keeping the right metrics to track. I'm curious, a lot of people are talking about North Star metrics. Can you give us some tips on how to pick the right one for mid-stage startup and what mistake to avoid?

[00:08:32.890] - Hannah Parvaz
Absolutely. Yeah, you're right. Everyone is talking about North Star metrics at the moment. As a part of that, the more that things get spoken about, the more misinformation there is around a specific element. I think that's very true of North Star metrics. A lot of people think that Facebook's North Star metric is 10 friends in seven days. Have you heard that metric?

[00:08:51.250] - Olivier Destrebecq
I did, at least in the early days. I don't know if it still is, but.

[00:08:54.070] - Hannah Parvaz
But that's not the North Star metric. A North Star metric is something that represents both the customer and the company. I often like to include some cadence in there as well, especially with subscription products. Facebook's actual North Star metric is daily active users, which is simple enough. With a subscription business, we like to include that cadence there, like, is it daily? Is it weekly? Is it monthly? It depends on the kind of business that you're having.

[00:09:21.040] - Hannah Parvaz
But the other thing to bear in mind is that an awesome metric is not something that you can manipulate very easily. A company that I actually worked with previously, when I joined, their North Star metric that they had outlined and agreed on together was content consumed over daily active users. This is objectively not a great North Star metric because do you know, either of it was the easiest way that I can drive that up versus content consumed over daily active users.

[00:09:50.420] - Olivier Destrebecq
Over daily active users. If you reduce the number of users, then the ratio will go up.

[00:09:57.220] - Hannah Parvaz
Exactly.

[00:09:57.850] - Olivier Destrebecq
And then you win.

[00:09:58.990] - Hannah Parvaz
Yes.

[00:09:59.320] - Olivier Destrebecq
So fire all the users.

[00:10:00.490] - Hannah Parvaz
Exactly.

[00:10:01.250] - Olivier Destrebecq
Get a Promotion.

[00:10:02.080] - Hannah Parvaz
Just stop acquiring anyone. I won't get anyone new. I'll just focus on driving up the content consumed by existing users. Exactly. That's exactly what we don't want from a North Star metric. We want something that grows with our user base, we want something that's representative of customer success. What we changed the North Star metric to was then weekly learning subscribers.

[00:10:23.010] - Hannah Parvaz
You take in that cadence element, which is weekly, we need them to come back every week. If you put the wrong cadence element there, then you can find yourself a bit disillusioned. Some products just don't have a daily frequency and you can work towards that. But it's important to not outline too hard a task right from the beginning.

[00:10:39.900] - Hannah Parvaz
Then we've got that learning element. Someone is actually coming in and gaining value. Then you've got the subscription element too, which is showing that people are paying and that they're happy and we're retaining them. The reason that subscribers, as on its own, isn't necessarily a great North Star metric is because that means that you're only focusing on getting people to pay you and you're not focusing on what happens after that.

[00:11:02.820] - Hannah Parvaz
Actually, I've spoken to lots of companies who are whispering, really. There's companies that will say, "Can we stop recording?" While you're in a call. They'll say, "We…" Actually, one of our tactics is to not remind people that they're paying. That's the companies that have subscribers as North Star metric. It's not providing customer value necessarily.

[00:11:22.770] - Olivier Destrebecq
Interesting. I really like your example of how to gain that metric by firing all users, if you count it that way. I'm sure there's other ways. It was very good.

[00:11:30.630] - Hannah Parvaz
Thank you.

[00:11:31.980] - Nicolas Tissier
Yes. To grow a subscription business, you actually need to experiment. But of course, if you experiment blindly without having an actual framework, it's not a very efficient because you don't really capitalize on knowledge and learnings. Could you please describe what is a typical experimentation, how it works, and how you go from identifying the problem to analyzing the results?

[00:11:57.330] - Hannah Parvaz
Absolutely. I can give some examples later on as well, but I'll speak about it right from the very beginning. We touched on this a little bit before, but first of all, it's important that this beginning stage follows the identification of some key metrics. We work out which areas can have the biggest impact on your North Star metric. We can think about these as levers. I know everyone is always talking about levers, but bear with me.

[00:12:22.470] - Hannah Parvaz
Let's say you're running an app and presumably a lot of your listeners will be running apps. A lever for growing your app could be getting more installs. Let's say that that's the lever we're wanting to push up to drive up on your installs metric, installs or acquisitions. It could also be the lever that we're trying to impact, or the metric that we're trying to impact could be getting people to do more actions in your app, to buy more things, to subscribe, to refer. There could be so many different things that you're outlining. But just to make it super simple, we're going to say installs as the lever.

[00:12:51.360] - Hannah Parvaz
Once we've identified all of the channels, the levers were all there, we say, "If we drive up one of these, which will have the biggest impact or which will have the most room for improvement? Which of these can we impact the most easily?" After that, we get everybody together. And when I say everybody, I don't just want marketers, I don't just want product people. I want designers, I want developers, I want customer service people, I want salespeople, everyone to come into the room together.

[00:13:16.470] - Hannah Parvaz
We basically get our heads together and jot down every single possible idea that we could have to impact that metric. It needs to be multidisciplinary because everyone is coming from a different mindset and a different perspective and a different analysis of the goal. Everyone shares all of their ideas, it's very democratic.

[00:13:33.390] - Hannah Parvaz
Then what happens next is probably the most important bit to stick to, and that's where the challenges come. It's really easy to get ideas out of people, but it's what comes after, which is the hard way. Let's say the three of us have got together and we now have a hundred ideas. What we start to do-

[00:13:49.320] - Nicolas Tissier
We're pretty productive.

[00:13:50.190] - Hannah Parvaz
We're very productive people. We're very smart. What we need to start to do is prioritize them. What we're going to do is prioritize them into low-hanging fruit, quick fixes. There are going to be some items that need validation because they're going to be really, really complex elements. What we don't want to do is just say, "You go away and you start building this huge referral feature. It has to be completely special."

[00:14:14.850] - Hannah Parvaz
It's like, how do we start to validate referral or impact on downloads, definitely. But how do we validate? Do we send out an e-mail, first of all, to 20 people and say, "We've generated a unique code for you. You're very special. We've generated a code for you. Share it and we'll pay you $10 per person who subscribes"? You can try out very light like that, track it manually.

[00:14:38.220] - Hannah Parvaz
If you're seeing uplift, great. Take it to the next stage where you might send out e-mails to a larger batch of people. You might start to build out something on your website. If you have a discount… If you have web payments as an option for your subscription, which is very common nowadays, you can create a coupon for your web payment gateway, much easier than you can through building it all in your app. That could be the next stage of experimentation.

[00:15:02.490] - Hannah Parvaz
We just take it up like one stage to another, because what we don't want to do is annoy our developers with things that we might not even keep in the app. But when we bring stuff to them, we know how precious their time is so we want to be like, "This is 100% the thing that is going to work." Work on this. This is the priority.

[00:15:19.560] - Hannah Parvaz
Whilst we're in the stage, it's really important to just trust the process because some of these ideas that you're going to be trying to validate are just not going to work. You're going to send out an e-mail and no one's going to open up. You're going to send out another e-mail, and might be just an optimization of it, some people are going to open it, no one's going to click on.

[00:15:35.920] - Hannah Parvaz
What we're doing is trying to learn about how our customers are responding to the things that we're saying. We're going to find other problems along the way, like our e-mails aren't being delivered or this language doesn't work well. This is why it's very important to start with talking to our customers and friends so we understand the language that they're using.

[00:15:51.910] - Hannah Parvaz
But when you're not hitting a win for several weeks or there's just micro improvements, we just have to remember that we're making mistakes and we're learning from them. If you want to have a growth culture in your company, please everybody ever who's listening to this, remember that growth is a mindset and to have a growth culture, that means that there has to be a culture celebrating mistakes too, as long as those mistakes only happen once.

[00:16:18.910] - Nicolas Tissier
Yes. And as long as you learn something, actually.

[00:16:22.060] - Hannah Parvaz
Exactly. That's why the mistakes are only happening once, hopefully.

[00:16:28.330] - Olivier Destrebecq
That's great. You just told us a lot about the process and how to get there. Is there a startup you've been working with or you're working with, either way, that you could tell us the success that you've reached with them so we can get some feeling of how great it can be?

[00:16:43.600] - Hannah Parvaz
Absolutely. Yeah, of course. One of the first companies that I rolled this process out with was Nightlife app. The promise of the app was getting free drinks in bars around London, around Manchester, Liverpool. As you can understand, that was very easy to market. You download a free app, you go and get free drinks. But people were not using this app at all.

[00:17:06.340] - Olivier Destrebecq
Sound too good to be true.

[00:17:08.470] - Hannah Parvaz
It sounds too good to be true. Actually, talking to our customers, that's one thing that we found. People thought it was too good to be true. There was a lack of trust around it. What we started to find was that the more we spoke to our customers, the more that we'd understand where their issues were. Once we started to implement some of these things…

[00:17:26.770] - Hannah Parvaz
For example, one of the biggest things that we learned was we had on this app all of these bars that were giving out free drinks. These free drinks were only available at certain times, like Tuesday afternoons, Thursday evenings, They weren't necessarily always bars that were giving out free drinks on a Friday night. But what we would always see was that there were huge spikes of traffic on a Friday night and we were like, "Will people know that there aren't drinks available?"

[00:17:49.340] - Hannah Parvaz
So we started to speak to people. We would say, "Why are you on the app? Why are you using this app when there's nothing you can do on it on a Friday night?" They started to tell us, "I don't just want to get free drinks. I want to find out places I should go, and this is a place that I go to find out, places I should go.' From that, we understood a completely new use case that we'd never heard before.

[00:18:09.460] - Hannah Parvaz
Then we started to validate this. We started to send lists by e-mail of other types of bars that weren't on the app, just as recommendations. We started to get amazing feedback from this. We started to introduce some of those. Actually, what it resulted in was a rebuild of that, a redesign of the app entirely to start with loading on a map page rather than a list page so that people could see the closest bars around them.

[00:18:32.050] - Hannah Parvaz
Then there was a filter to show if there are free drinks or not, and you could turn that on if you wanted that. But also we went and manually curated all of the best bars around London, Manchester, Liverpool, Brighton, all around the UK. Then after that, things really took off. When I joined till when I left, one and a half years later, we had increased the redemptions of the free drinks by 100X.

[00:18:56.170] - Nicolas Tissier
That's good.

[00:18:57.430] - Hannah Parvaz
Not 100%.

[00:18:58.540] - Olivier Destrebecq
That's pretty good.

[00:18:59.380] - Hannah Parvaz
Not 100%.

[00:19:02.520] - Olivier Destrebecq
You keep saying, "Talk to your customer," and a lot of us, including me, would refer to those as user interview. But when we talked, you told me you don't like the term user interview, you have another term that you want to use. I'll let you tell what term you want to use and you can explain why you don't like the initial term.

[00:19:22.390] - Hannah Parvaz
I love this question. The term that I prefer to use is customer conversation. I think this is a really great question because for me, it's about the mental positioning of the two different phrases. The information and the positioning that we're taking into the conversation that we're having when we're having an interview with a user, it always, to me, feels very clinical and it feels very scripted. I feel like I'm taking in a bunch of different questions about, how did you find the onboarding? And things like this.

[00:19:50.350] - Hannah Parvaz
It feels very transactional. When we're having a customer conversation, it feels a lot looser. I do not take your questions to my conversations when I'm talking to my customers. We're usually bouncing ideas around, we're getting much deeper than we would in a normal user interview. We're talking about our fears, we're talking about our anxieties, our hopes and our dreams. We reach places that we wouldn't normally reach in just something that we think of as an interview.

[00:20:17.110] - Hannah Parvaz
But of course, we can think of some great interviewers as good conversationalists. Oprah is probably both, but at this stage, a lot of people who are going into this process just won't be armed with those tools. Going into these things, going into these discussions with customers, it's really important to know that it's a conversation that you should be having, not a rigorous list of questions. I just want to talk a bit about what the difference for those two things are for me as well.

[00:20:44.660] - Olivier Destrebecq
Please, please.

[00:20:45.620] - Hannah Parvaz
If we have time. Because-

[00:20:48.680] - Olivier Destrebecq
We do.

[00:20:48.890] - Hannah Parvaz
Okay, perfect. Whenever we're thinking about how we're talking to them about what they're trying to achieve deep down by using the product, I'd like to tell you an example from a company that I worked with called Curio, which is an audio journalism app. Basically, when I joined that company, they had a tagline which was, "Intelligent audio for busy people." And it makes sense. That's how it works. The audio is smart and the people are busy. Good.

[00:21:14.660] - Hannah Parvaz
When I started talking to people and having these conversations, I said, "Why do you use this app?" And they said, "Because I want to learn and I'm busy." I'd say, "Cool. That makes sense. Why are you so busy?" And they say, "I'm working a lot. I only listen while I'm commuting." I then say, "Well, if you're so busy, why do you want to keep learning? You're always working." And they would say, "Oh, I want to understand the world a bit better."

[00:21:35.210] - Hannah Parvaz
When I started to dive into that, understand the world a bit better, they started to tell me these stories about, "My mom's new partner. I'm always going out to her house for dinner, and she's always talking about politics. I have absolutely no idea what he's saying and I want to connect better with him." Or it would be a professor not being able to connect with the students.

[00:21:51.530] - Hannah Parvaz
All of these stories about lack of connection started to come out and this kind of thing wouldn't happen in a normal interview; having a proper conversation with someone. Then I would say to them, "Well, why is that important for you? Why is it so important for you to connect with these people?" What they would say again and again and again was, "I want to seem more interesting." They'd use the word seem and the word seem alone informed this line of copy that I wrote for them which says, "Become the most interesting person in the room."

[00:22:20.750] - Hannah Parvaz
That line of copy is so egocentric and it transcends the globe, really. That line of copy is still being run now, five, six years later. It's scaled their metrics dramatically. It cut CPI by 80%. Just that one line which we got from those conversations. Actually, the ads that we do run based on that inform the entire brand on the entire product as a whole, too. Just from these conversations, it changed the whole course of that company. That's why I think it's very important.

[00:22:51.110] - Nicolas Tissier
That's very fun because I saw it yesterday on Twitter, I think. I confirm, it's still used; the, "Become the most clever person in the room." It's great catch line. You want to understand the why behind the why behind the why and so on?

[00:23:12.740] - Hannah Parvaz
Exactly, yeah. The why beneath the why. It's really important to get there, to really understand who our customers are on the inside. You've probably seen this meme going around which I love to talk about now, which is, when we're thinking about personas, we think, "There's a man. He's 73. He lives in a castle. He's got dogs. He's married. He's a millionaire. Who is that?" That could be King Charles or it could be Ozzy Osbourne. They have completely different objectives for a night out.

[00:23:41.120] - Hannah Parvaz
How do you how do you define that with a persona? You have to understand who they are deep down to understand what they're trying to achieve with that night out.

[00:23:48.590] - Olivier Destrebecq
One of the goals of the personas is also to be able to share with the rest of the company who we're working for. I'm curious, how do you replace personas in a way that's maybe more… Give a fuller picture, because you seem you're saying personas are very limited in the data that they enclose. What's the alternative there?

[00:24:06.590] - Hannah Parvaz
Absolutely. There's a framework called Jobs to be Done, which you might have heard of, which is… Well, again, it's a theory. There's a theoretical framework called Jobs to be Done. This theory says that everybody has something to achieve. This is a really hard one to wrap your head around actually.

[00:24:22.130] - Hannah Parvaz
When I started working about my life up, I was like, "Well, the job to be done of the customer is to go and have a night out, obviously." When I started talking to them more and more and more, I was like, "Oh, their job to be done isn't to have a night out, is to get a promotion. They want to go out with their boss or they want to build a connection with their friends." These are the real jobs to be done, so what is underneath all of that.

[00:24:44.090] - Hannah Parvaz
As we start to talk to customers, we start to pull out specific quotes that they've said and tie them to jobs to be done, and then we start to rank them. 86% of people have this thread running through them, and then that's the data that we share. We say, "80% of people are trying to seem more interesting. What can we do to help them get that? How can we can be that messaging?" And so on.

[00:25:07.850] - Olivier Destrebecq
Nice. Is there a good book, a good intro, to that framework that you can recommend on top of your head, or? I know it's a trick question.

[00:25:15.890] - Hannah Parvaz
Yeah, a good question. I'm mostly reading articles on Medium about it, but I would say one of the best books to read in terms of psychology and understanding how to extract that information is called The Mom Test. You might have read it. It's a very short book. It's like 110 pages. You can read it in an hour if you're really fast.

[00:25:35.580] - Olivier Destrebecq
No.

[00:25:38.220] - Hannah Parvaz
It teaches you all of the signals to look out for; so when someone is pausing or when someone is showing some anxiety. It tells you techniques of how to dig into those things a little bit better. I'd say that that's probably the number one book to read. Then for jobs theory, I would say just search on Medium. There's a lot of interesting articles on there for that.

[00:25:58.110] - Olivier Destrebecq
It's funny that you mentioned The Mom Test because I actually finished reading last week. It took me about two weeks to read it, 20 minutes at a time. But when you were talking about the conversation, one of the things that I really enjoyed in this book was the keep it informal, as in don't make it a big thing. Just go get a cup of coffee and talk about them.

[00:26:18.120] - Hannah Parvaz
100%. We don't want the customers to feel pressure or anything. It's super informal, super chatty. It's their time, as well, that we're honoring.

[00:26:28.170] - Olivier Destrebecq
Definitely. Well, we're way over time. So unless Nicolas, you have one last question.

[00:26:33.220] - Nicolas Tissier
Yeah, actually, I have. But we will see if we include it maybe when we make the aggregation of-

[00:26:45.510] - Hannah Parvaz
[inaudible 00:26:44] content.

[00:26:45.840] - Nicolas Tissier
[inaudible 00:26:45] content. But I was curious, you mentioned about success that you could reach. On the other hand, would you have a failure where you learned something very valuable to share?

[00:27:00.330] - Hannah Parvaz
Great question. I would say that any person who works in growth, their whole career is built on a series of failures-

[00:27:07.810] - Nicolas Tissier
Sure.

[00:27:08.310] - Hannah Parvaz
-first of all. The majority of all of the work that I've done has been a failure. But fortunately, that means I've only done those things once so they can be as minor as not authenticating servers and learning that that's something that we need to do to using a partnership opportunity incorrectly. But I'd say the thing that most stands out for me is just… Oh, this is getting very deep, isn't it?

[00:27:36.540] - Olivier Destrebecq
It's a conversation.

[00:27:37.440] - Hannah Parvaz
I'm going to think of a tactical failure instead of an emotional one. I'd say some of the biggest failures come from not understanding the time at which some things need to be automated. After you've validated these things, what you don't want to do is try to operationalize them in a non-scalable way. An example of this is that when I was at my first mobile app, it was a live music discovery app.

[00:28:01.350] - Hannah Parvaz
When I joined this app we had a Remind Me feature. That meant that every morning before tickets would go on sale, we would send them an SMS reminder. And guess what? It was not an algorithm. It was not a machine sending all of those SMS notifications, it was me. My biggest failure is probably at the time, which is now alerting, this was about 10 years ago, I was not adamant enough that these kind of things needed to be created in a more scalable way because this was a feature that I worked on building.

[00:28:32.460] - Hannah Parvaz
I was like, "I don't mind. I'll just use this code to send out these push notifications programmatically." Then it turned into a button that we could press eventually. Then finally, after two and a half years, it turned into something that was created and automated for the machine.

[00:28:48.510] - Hannah Parvaz
For me, I'd say the biggest learnings I've had are around understanding when things need to be created scalably and also that these processes do not need to take so long, so about moving faster and the cadence of work, too.

[00:29:02.070] - Nicolas Tissier
Great. Thank you for sharing that.

[00:29:05.460] - Olivier Destrebecq
Cool. Now we're really way over time.

[00:29:07.170] - Hannah Parvaz
I think there's some bits that you can cut out of that one and edit.

[00:29:10.050] - Nicolas Tissier
Yeah, we'll see. We'll see during the edit.

[00:29:12.390] - Olivier Destrebecq
We'll see. It was great. Well, I really want to thank you a lot because I know it's early in San Francisco because it's like end of afternoon for me, so I know it was tough for you to get up this morning and join us and gave us some great answers. It was really awesome. Thank you very much Hannah.

[00:29:25.950] - Nicolas Tissier
Thank you very, very much, Hannah. We really appreciate it.

[00:29:29.130] - Hannah Parvaz
Thank you so much for having me. It's been great to be here and great to chat with you.

[00:29:34.050] - Olivier Destrebecq
Enjoy your stay in San Francisco.

[00:29:35.490] - Nicolas Tissier
Have fun. Bye-bye. See you soon.

[00:29:37.320] - Hannah Parvaz
Perfect. See you soon. Bye.

[00:29:41.030] - Olivier Destrebecq
On behalf of the Purchasely team, thank you for listening to the Subscription League podcast. If you've enjoyed what you heard, leave us a five-star review on iTunes or other audio platforms. To find out more about Purchasely and how we can improve your subscription business, visit purchasely.com. Please, hit subscribe in your podcast player and don't miss any future episodes. You can also listen to previous episodes at subscriptionleague.com. See you soon.