Crystal W

The worst growth hire is someone who measures things wrong and then focuses on the wrong areas — confidently. Stats intuition matters more than growth experience.

Super apps emerged in Asia partly because phone storage is scarce. When your phone is full, you delete apps — not photos of your kids. One app that does enough beats five apps that do it perfectly.

The only thing better than knowing what customers are doing is having tested it. If you can't think of a way to run an experiment, the idea is pretty useless.

I know if a team has good instrumentation just by looking at the spec. Bad sign: tons of events, each with zero or one property tracked. You're missing all the context that explains *why* users do anything.

When users churn because they 'have too much product,' a pause button beats a cancellation flow every time. Canceling is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Match the fix to the actual constraint.

For a free product, week-1 retention should be at least 60% — then flatten. That's what we saw at Gojek in the early days. If you're still with friends and family, it should be close to 80%.

The step right before conversion is usually where retention problems live — not in the product itself. Fix the setup moment, not just the conversion moment.

When conversion is poor and users haven't experienced the product yet, it's almost certainly a copy problem. Change the copy to reflect the pain, not the solution — so users can see themselves in the use case.

Run experiments even with 30 users. The underlying trends you get won't change much at larger scale — only the precision does. Zero data points is always worse than 30.