Archie Abrams

The technical architecture determines strategy in a technology company even more than the what and who we're building for. If you build the right technical how and set yourself up to have a platform that can be adaptable, flexible, that is incredibly valuable over the long term.

I would encourage everyone, if you can, look at some of the experiments that you thought were your biggest winners. Look at the downstream metrics for a year, two years on that experiment. And I'll bet you'd be surprised how many times the metric is different than what you thought it would be after a year.

I think there's probably two things that have been very common. And I would say in quite a few cases, you get a lift on a metric up front, a more short-term metric... And then you look a year later, and there's actually no incremental lift on GMV from that cohort.

It's in the 30 to 40% range.

The amount of impact by just nailing those flows has never ceased to amaze me and setting up that person for long-term success. So monetary friction. Then just really good onboarding, personalization, a well of opportunities there.

I think it needs to have a very opinionated founder set of people who are driving what good looks like. If you have one of those two, you can make it work, but the worst case is let's just go build a bunch of cool stuff in kind of a haphazard way. That I don't think would work.

Everyone is thinking about absolute number of people who made it through their 'stage' of the funnel. So instead of I'm trying to convert a bunch of people, a conversion rate, I just want more people to get activated. And then once you start thinking that way, you realize actually the best way to get more people to get to a step sometimes, and often they just get more people in the door in the first place.

When you have teams naturally break up the world into different funnel stages or different points in the journey, it gets very seductive to look at my part of the funnel and what's my conversion rate through that part of the funnel, right? And then the team starts to optimize for that conversion rate as their north star. But in practice, it's actually almost always easier to just make it harder to do the thing right before your step in the funnel to increase your conversion rate.

The easiest way to increase my signup to activated thing is just make it harder to sign up. Nuts and bolts, that will always happen is when you have teams on that local conversion rates, you get all these weird team incentives, because they're optimizing to basically implicitly make it harder to do the step before them.

If I give you a little monetary boost and reduce that monetary friction, I can actually causally change your ability to become successful, because I've given you a little bit more time to try that idea a little bit longer.

You usually want to collect more information than most people think you do in your sign up flow. If you can then leverage that to personalize the guidance. And this is for SaaS product, the guidance that someone can get when they onboard into Shopify.