Lessons from Guillaume Cabane, co-founder of Hypergrowth Partners

On Growth, Hypergrowth, and Strategy

On the nature of hypergrowth: "Hypergrowth is about creating scaling effects, scaling economies. So that as you go beyond that series A quickly, as you go beyond those first couple million revenue, your CAC per customer goes down. And so you can create this momentum where every new customer is cheaper, while your ACV is stable or goes up and your margins improve.” [1]
The core of growth: “The thing that matters is how you can grow faster and more efficiently than everyone in your market”. [2]
The unfair advantage: "The real way to win at marketing today is by building your own machine that maximizes different tools that are available on the market. In a highly competitive market, if you're using the same tools and methods as your competitors, you can't win." [3]
Focus on the underserved: "A common mistake founders make is trying to do everything for everyone. Your business should focus on an under-served part of the market." [2]
Start at the bottom of the funnel: "You start at the bottom of the funnel – activation, sign up, looking at who drops off. If you've got people who sign up but then stop, get that house in order by nurturing them and driving your conversion numbers up. Then you take another step up your funnel." [3]
Growth's valuable stage: "Growth is extremely valuable during the teen years of a company... you need to build like a competitive mode and that growth can take you from like those those couple million to like you know 50 70 million in revenue." [4]
Compete on experience, not just price or product: In a market where price competition erodes margins and product innovation is costly, a seamless and hassle-free customer experience can be the key differentiator. [2]
The goal is less, but better, interaction: "My goal is to help you, help my customers be successful at bringing in more revenue by doing less. That's my goal." [5]
You can't accelerate the buying cycle: "You can't accelerate the buying cycle, but you can put them on a timeline and provide useful content for 100% coverage on those people when they come in market." [6]
When to build a growth team: "You don't need a growth team until after you have product market fit. If you can't get someone to pay for your product, there's no need to try and scale that." [7]

On Experimentation and Failure

The essence of a growth team: "If you're succeeding like 70% of the time, 90% of the time, you're not a growth team, you're a product team... The point of growth is that you're here to fail. You're here to fail. And if you fail fast you can move on and you can try something else." [5]
The power of many bets: “Growth is about being able to place a lot of bets... if you run 50 experiments across your funnel, something's going to work.” [1]
Lowering the cost of experiments is key: "The key to success is in lowering the cost of each experiment." [8]
The VC mindset for growth: "When you're a growth person you're like a VC. what it means is that you are doing a lot of experiments. where you're trying to reduce the cost. most will fail. and some will pay back the entire effort." [8]
Don't just replicate, innovate: "Do it your way. Learn from others, but don't replicate. Do your own stuff. What works for someone else will not work for you. If you do what others do how can you win over them?" [5]
Embrace failure from the top: Leaders must create a safe space for the high rate of failure inherent in growth experimentation, understanding the value of placing many small bets to discover successful strategies. [1]
Launch without a finished product: "You don't always need a finished product to have a launch." [2] Frequent launches create an impression of rapid growth. [2]
The risk of not experimenting: An early-stage investor needs to operate differently than a marketing team that can't afford to fail. A growth team needs to take risks and look for outlier effects. [6][7]
The experimental nature of growth: "Unlike product and marketing, which are more about executing well-understood plans, growth is more experimental and accepts a higher rate of failure in search of successful strategies." [1]
Analyze your failures: "It's critical for me like. you can't you can't succeed. if you don't learn like there's just no way. if if you are successful. but you haven't learned then you've. been lucky." [9]

On Data, Technology, and AI

The future marketer is a technologist: Marketers will need to become more like technologists, focusing on plugging in new data sets and cleaning them up, while AI generates the copy and imagery for advertising. [10]
The synergy of creativity and data: "Creativity and data analysis should work hand in hand to create effective marketing campaigns." [10]
Data analysis is fundamental: "Data analysis is critical for understanding user behavior and creating effective marketing strategies. He explains that data analysis should be integrated into every aspect of growth marketing, from creating user personas to optimizing landing pages and email campaigns." [10]
Automate value creation: Instead of just pitching a product, build automated tools that provide genuine value to potential customers, like a web scraper that finds and flags unanswered negative comments for a brand on social media. [8]
AI is changing the CAC game: "The AI change is shifting the CAC of many channels and opening channels to marketers they hadn't considered for those audiences." [11]
The evolution of marketing tools: Legacy marketing tools are often inflexible and push marketers towards mass-scale, low-value communication. [5]
Leverage emerging tech for an edge: "Keep your eye on emerging go-to-market tech which can hand you a competitive advantage." [1]
The death of traditional A/B testing: "AB testing is dead... it started in a world where you had very little data and very little personalization capabilities." [4]
AI-assisted outbound: "Automate lead list building and scoring with LLM-assisted intent signals." [12]
The power of data-driven personalization: Move beyond sending the same message to everyone in the same stage and create a more personalized experience by learning about the customer. [5]

On Marketing, Sales, and the Customer

Marketing is about psychology: "I got into digital marketing because I love both technology and human psychology, and those two fields are still at the heart of what I do." [3]
The marketer's incentive problem: "If you give me any metric, but retain revenue, like LTV, I can cheat, right? I can push people to sign up... there is an incentive to overpromise." [13]
Don't ignore the customer experience in the pursuit of growth: "Any and every experiment you're running needs to deliver an exceptional experience to your customers." [1]
Measure what matters for customer experience: "Focus on measurable metrics like response time, resolution time and repeat rate." [2]
The importance of response time: "Quicker response time reduces cost of doing business." [2]
Marketing's role in churn: "It's not the customers fault. It's your fault. Really? Because you bought the people in." [13] If you attract the wrong audience with your content, change the content. [13]
The intersection of functions: "Growth marketing is a combination of engineering skills, talent, a sales revenue focus, and a marketing service area." [10]
The problem with over-promising: Marketers can easily bring in leads by over-promising, but this leads to unhappy customers who will churn. [13]
Value creation over product pushing: "You are going to build quasi products... something that gives more value to the future customer. than just the core message which is like hey this is our product this is what we do please sign up." [8]
Aligning marketing incentives with business health: The primary incentive for marketing should be aligned with the long-term health of the business, such as retained revenue (LTV). [13]

On Management and Mindset

The manager's role is to build systems: "Management is about handling humans and humans are unpredictable... you need to be really good at Building Systems. that include people and processes okay and need to be able to be so good at them that those systems work on their own." [9]
The "mad scientist" approach: Don't follow the playbook; rewrite it with original and out-of-the-box experiments. [14]
The growth mindset: "I don't think there's a 10x marketer in most companies, so you need a different mindset using different resources and tools... You want a mindset of an angel investor, an early-stage investor." [7]
Be data-driven to call bullshit: "Effective leadership is also about being data driven actually and understanding analytics. and understanding the systems call bullshit on a lot of things." [9]
The opposite of focus can be a strength: "I just try to have multiple project open at the same time. It's the opposite of being focused... because otherwise I'm not going to go fast enough." [5]
Growing people is more important than growing businesses: "For me more growing people for me has been more important than growing businesses." [4]
Management as a necessity: "The only reason I'm a manager is because I don't have a choice." [9] This reflects a focus on building self-sufficient systems rather than direct oversight. [9]
Remove yourself from the process: "You've got to be really good at being being able to remove yourself from the process." [9]
The power of being a part-time VP: By setting up the right processes and pushing people to do their best, it's possible to achieve significant revenue growth without being involved in day-to-day execution. [9]
The continuous learning mindset: To stay ahead, one must constantly learn and adapt, especially in the rapidly evolving field of growth marketing. [10]

Learn more:

Lessons from Guillaume Cabane, co-founder of Hypergrowth Partners

On Growth, Hypergrowth, and Strategy

On Experimentation and Failure

On Data, Technology, and AI

On Marketing, Sales, and the Customer

On Management and Mindset

Written by Antoine Buteau

Lessons from Nan Yu, Head of Product at Linear

Lessons from Martin Gonto, GP of Hypergrowth Partners