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Comment by charlierguo | Hacker News Reader

> Gut Check: Especially if you’re off by quite a bit, this is a chance to take a step back and ask whether the company has reached growth scale or not. It could be that there are plenty of obvious 0-1 tactics left. Not everything has to be an experiment.

This is a key point, imo. I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of companies are running "growth teams" that don't have the scale where it actually makes sense to do so.

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Everything has to be a test early on, but not every test has to rely on random-split-based statistical significance to make a decision. “Would you pay $20 for this?” is a classic way to judge whether your service has product-market fit, and it’s not about sample sizes, not initially.

Some growth teams are trying more exploratory approaches to find something that resonates with simpler approaches. Others rely on A/B tests. Different profiles, but both are “Growth teams”.

How are A/B tests for non-logged-in users doing these days with all the cookie banners, privacy and ad blockers etc. Is this stuff still working even?

Yes, but it is _rough_. What actually hurts is "browse on mobile, buy on desktop" type behavior.

Still worth doing, but you end up needing more black magic than you'd like (IP-based assignment, Ad Network-sourced assignment, CDN proxies for Analytics tools, etc).

Working on a separate post about that.

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