Elena Verna on how B2B growth is changing, product-led growth, product-led sales, why you should go freemium not trial, what features to make free, and much more

Elena Verna, a longtime growth leader who has worked at Dropbox and Miro-adjacent companies and advised many startups, walks through growth tactics that waste time and the frameworks she relies on. The conversation covers premature growth hiring, growth in declining businesses, redesigns, copying competitors, owned/earned acquisition channels, advisors, over-experimentation, and career optionality.

01Key learnings

• Founders should drive the first stage of growth themselves; hire a growth leader only after product-market fit, strong retention, and enough user data to run experiments.
• A growth team cannot fix a declining core product or go-to-market; stabilize the core issues first before adding growth resources.
• Homepage and brand redesigns rarely lift acquisition immediately; plan for three to six months of post-launch optimization or expect a performance dip.
• Use competitors for inspiration and pattern-matching, but never copy their flows blindly, since their experiences are often untested, personalized, or outdated.
• Before solving a problem from scratch, talk to people who have solved it; most growth problems have recognizable patterns that can shortcut your solution.
• Prioritize earned channels such as virality, referrals, and user-generated content, which competitors cannot buy, while still using paid and SEO channels as supplements.
• Keep layering new growth models, reserving roughly 20-25% of team time annually to test new loops, since most growth loops plateau within several years.
• Hire paid advisors via a workshop first, then evaluate them monthly on whether they add real value.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.