For Subscription League Podcast Episode 13, we invited Hannah Parvaz, an award-winning app marketer and the Co-founder of a London-based growth agency, Aperture, to talk about some of the most valuable growth lessons she learned throughout years of research and experience growing numerous brands to ten-figure yearly revenues.

What is a growth mindset and why it's important

A growth mindset is a way of viewing challenges and obstacles. People with a growth mindset use feedback and mistakes as opportunities to improve while actively engaging in the process of learning and trying again until reaching their goals. Hannah believes a growth mindset enables a company's continuous and profitable growth, and that it's not up to one person but to everybody to drive it. Hannah said, "any person who works in growth, their whole career is built on a series of failures."

How companies can shift to a growth mindset

Be constantly curious, together: when curiosity is cultivated at a collective level, colleagues can stimulate the thirst for ideas to improve and learn from each other. Break down the walls between teams: it takes understanding that no one team is more important than others, and that everyone is working on the exact same goal and metric. Learn quick, improve quick: Hannah's suggestion is to target low-hanging fruits first, which involve fewer ambiguities, resources, and less time, using them as stepping stones toward bigger goals within a long-term plan.

Finding the right North Star Metric

Many commonly cited metrics, like reviews gained or paying users per day, are actually vanity metrics rather than true North Stars. Hannah defines the North Star metric as one representing both the customer and the company, such as time spent or active users, and recommends setting up multiple key metrics early on as levers to impact the North Star.

How to understand customers the right way

Hannah believes understanding customers is the No. 1 job of any business. Many product and marketing teams focus on how customers use their product, but Hannah points out the focus has to be on why, who the customers are, and what jobs they're trying to get done. She suggests having conversations, not interviews, stripping formalities from the process so teams can reach real fears, anxieties, hopes, and dreams.

Episode 13 sneak peek

• On growth mindset: "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." "The growth mindset is about learning as quickly as possible so that you can improve your metrics as quickly as possible."
• On North Star Metric: "A North Star metric is something that represents both the customer and the company." "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."
• On understanding customers: "When we're having an interview with a user, it always, to me, feels very clinical and it feels very scripted." "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." "There's a theoretical framework called Jobs to be Done. This theory says that everybody has something to achieve."

More about Hannah Parvaz

Hannah Parvaz is the Co-Founder of Aperture. A multi-award-winning marketer, coach and mentor, Hannah was named App Marketer of the Year in 2019 and has spoken internationally on the future of app growth, privacy, and leveraging data analytics. Having worked with more than 200 companies, Hannah mentors on Google Launchpad and coaches for Startup Core Strengths.