Growth Gems

Growth Gems experts

Albert Cheng

· LinkedIn

11 insights on Data, Onboarding and Activation and Retention from one talk or podcast, each with the quote and a link to the moment it was said.

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Data

Data

Set realistic expectations for experiment win rates at 30-50%, not higher. Win rates vary by funnel maturity - new areas with low-hanging fruit will have higher success rates than mature, optimized parts of the user journey.

"I think it tends to be lower than most people think. Um, I I have generally seen it more kind of like a 30 to 50% type of range. I think it depends a little bit on, like, again, the maturity of, like, the part of the user journey that you're working on. Sometimes it can be a little bit more obvious."

How Chess.com Became the World’s Top Chess App at 34:23 · Featured in Growth Gems #132

Sylvain's take:

Different companies have different comfort level with what they consider a win (e.g., rolling out something flat because you have confidence/intuition it’s the right move).

Data

Experimentation velocity is a major part of growth. To increase this, data infrastructure and culture need to be great, but you also need to:

  • Invest in no-code experiments/tooling
  • Run lifecycle marketing experiments
  • Get engineers to be able to run their experiment ideas
  • Be able to analyze experiments quickly
"The bridge from this point forward is leaning into the product-led growth stuff, right, which is really around experimentation and around continuing to refine both the product and marketing experience. So, we're just always, like, every day, improving our user retention and our conversion. I'm challenging the team to get to a rate of around a thousand experiments per year."

How Chess.com Became the World’s Top Chess App at 39:49 · Featured in Growth Gems #132

Sylvain's take:

He’s challenging the team to the ambitious target rate of 1,000 experiments per year 😯.

Data

Invest in proper infrastructure (event tracking, experimentation systems, growth models, key metrics) before pushing for high experimentation velocity. Without this foundation, experiments won't compound into meaningful growth.

"If you don't have the event tracking right, if you don't have an experimentation system, if you don't have like a growth model and a set of key metrics that you're tracking, sure you can tell people to make up experiments, but it's not going to, it's not going to work very well. You're not going to see that compound, right? And so that needs to be the foundation."

How Chess.com Became the World’s Top Chess App at 31:09 · Featured in Growth Gems #132

Sylvain's take:

This is a good reminder…But you also need to get started.

Crazy to think that prior to 2023 they were not running experiments (Albert joined in Oct 2024).

Onboarding and Activation

Onboarding and Activation

Create a culture of experimentation by establishing regular show-and-tell sessions where teams share experiment results, learnings, and business impact. This transparency and knowledge sharing accelerates organizational learning and experimentation adoption.

"I think when you can actually show with real data that hey, moving like X metric up this percentage right, can do this to this, like our revenue or active user base, and building these norms via, like, Slack or some other way where you have these kind of show-and-tell, right? Like, I had this hypothesis, I ran this experiment, this actually gave me a different result than I expected, this is the impact, this is the learning."

How Chess.com Became the World’s Top Chess App at 31:39 · Featured in Growth Gems #132

Sylvain's take:

This might be obvious but in bigger companies it’s sometimes not that common.

Onboarding and Activation

Attract newcomers/"category-curious" users (e.g., chess-curious people) and make sure they have a great initial onboarding experience. Example: for Chess.com, part of this is having social media presence be mainstream and not just tailored to experts so they can grow the entire category/trend.

How Chess.com Became the World’s Top Chess App at 40:50 · Featured in Growth Gems #132

Retention

Retention

Recognize when your team's expertise creates blind spots about new user experience. Power users on your team may not realize how intimidating or frustrating your product is for beginners, making positivity and encouragement crucial for retention.

"A theme that continues to win here is around positivity. So, what I mean here is that like I I think as employees of chess.com, we probably skew into people that actually play quite a lot of chess. And sometimes you may have a blind spot that chess is just really kind of frustrating and intimidating for the vast majority of like newer users."

How Chess.com Became the World’s Top Chess App at 36:59 · Featured in Growth Gems #133

Sylvain's take:

This is something I’ve seen time and time again, and emphasizes the need to “dogfood” your own app (and onboarding!) with beginner eyes, but also to talk to new users.

They actually started a slack channel where people can call out the things that make the experience “cold” or could make people feel bad.

Albert mentioned trying to tweak things like:

  • Not being encouraging enough after a loss

  • Calling out mistakes in red

  • Low success rates on puzzles and adapting it to the player level

Strategy

Strategy

Build a strong foundation through product excellence and brand positioning before growth inflection points occur: companies that become market leaders through quality execution are best positioned to capitalize when external tailwinds arrive.

"I think the decade kind of leading up to the pandemic, there was such an intense focus on like product experience community, like just trying to build the best product combined with having the obviously the domain and the brand, right? So I already felt like it was well positioned, and obviously chess.com had nothing to do with the pandemic, right? So really like I think that proved out where becoming a market leader in online chess prior to the pandemic really helped it ride its wave successfully."

How Chess.com Became the World’s Top Chess App at 7:58 · Featured in Growth Gems #132

Sylvain's take:

It’s easy: crush it before the tailwinds ;)

Jokes aside, it does emphasize the importance of branding as you scale.

Strategy

When you own a category-defining domain, focus marketing efforts on growing the overall category rather than your specific brand. Your organic search dominance means category growth most likely translates to your growth.

"Because we own the domain chess.com, we tend to rank just, like, organically very high on both SEO and ASO anyway. And so we tend that we don't necessarily need to market like chess.com. We just need to make chess in the ethos, right? And I think the Google Trends results for chess by itself, right, is probably a pretty good proxy for, like, the demand that we get as a company and as a product."

How Chess.com Became the World’s Top Chess App at 16:44 · Featured in Growth Gems #132

Sylvain's take:

Albert mentioned the Google Trends results for chess are a pretty good proxy for the demand they get as a company/product.

Influencer Marketing

Influencer Marketing

Track attribution through onboarding surveys to identify your most effective organic channels. When content partnerships drive both acquisition and retention, they create growth loops that compound over time.

"We actually ask, um, new users in onboarding. We sample the "how did you hear about us" question, and YouTube is like a top three channel for us actually. And so, like, it's no doubt that this has done a lot both for user acquisition but also user engagement, user resurrection. And it's that kind of content and product play together that make for a really like retentive, uh, loop for us."

How Chess.com Became the World’s Top Chess App at 13:11 · Featured in Growth Gems #132

Sylvain's take:

Chess.com has invested a lot into creative partnerships in the chess community, chess masters etc., which makes YouTube a top 3 channel for them.

They also do cross-over tournaments like PogChamps with celebrities/influencers (e.g., Mr Beast). This has apparently worked really well for them.

Albert also mentioned the company’s investment in high-end tournaments (champion chess tour, speed chess championship, etc.) with a world-class broadcast team. They have scaled back recently.

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