How Every Executes: two tweaks that generated ~54% more paid subscribers

The big idea behind last week’s post was “execution matters a lot.” 

If you want to get fancy about it, you could go further and say “marginal improvements to each step in a process (like raising money, launching products, onboarding users, recruiting, etc) can compound into exponentially better outcomes.” 

The example I used was a fundraising process that had a 12x better outcome given good execution, but it came from a bunch of smaller improvements made to each step along the way, like getting intros, converting them into meetings, and getting meetings to a “yes.”

This week, we’re going to go even deeper into the topic of execution and explore three big follow-up questions:

1. Can we go through a real example with real numbers? Yes, we can! I’m excited about this one. In this post I share two real improvements we made to our funnel last year that compounded together to generate roughly 54% more paid subscribers for the same volume of traffic. It took our engineers like three days to ship these two things, and now for every million visits we probably generate an additional $100k of revenue! In this post I will go through all the numbers, what the experiments were, how the math works, and what important caveats you need to know before you do this in your own business.
2. Given limited focus and resources, how can a company determine where improved execution will be most impactful? One smart piece of pushback I got last week was that improved execution in some areas is obviously much more valuable than others. For example startups probably shouldn’t spend much time making sure internal IT is perfected, and should focus more on product and sales. But within these obvious broad areas there are many possible choices for where to focus. In this post I use the classic book “The Goal” to give you a framework for finding the most valuable use of your energy.
3. Does improved execution in one area of a business really spill over into improved execution in other parts of the business? What about businesses that are famously good at some things and terrible at others? For example, Dropbox had an amazing product but was terrible at enterprise sales and lost the B2B market to Microsoft, Google, and Box.

I’m most excited about the first bullet point here. It’s (relatively) easy to be the hand-wavy guy who spouts frameworks and abstract mathematics—generating real results and showing real data is what matters. We did this previously with my post on bundling, but it’s been awhile, so I’m excited to get back to it. 

Read this (paid) post if you want to know an easy way to utilize the power of execution and how to know where to apply it.

1. How we execute at Every — a real example

One of our most critical business processes is converting people from looking at an article on the website to joining our email list. The way our article pages are designed can be executed better or worse to achieve this goal. 

Here’s three versions we recently tested. All had the same design, only the words were changed.

Version 1

(We stole this copy from The Atlantic) 

Version 2

(Focus on what the product actually is)

Version 3

(Focus on the larger purpose / benefit. Kinda shames people though, which I don’t love! lol)

And here are the results: