💎 Growth Gems #132 - Strategy, Branding, and Onboarding
Gems from Albert Cheng (Chief Growth Officer at Chess.com) and Phil Carter (Founder and CEO at Elemental Growth) in How Chess.com Became the World’s Top Chess App on the Subversive podcast.
Hi, fellow growth practitioner!
This week, I’m bringing you insights on Strategy, Branding, and Onboarding.
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I’ve been seeing Chess.com around for a while, and knew they had impressive growth during the pandemic.
With Duolingo getting into chess (!), I was curious to see how a more “serious” chess product was tackling growth.
Response: with an ex-Duolingo Chief Growth Officer and a similar experiment playbook.
stage: growth / scaled
💎 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.
(07:58) by Albert
It’s easy: crush it before the tailwinds ;)
Jokes aside, it does emphasize the importance of branding as you scale.
💎 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.
(13:11) by Albert
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.
stage: scaled
💎 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.
(16:44) by Albert
Albert mentioned the Google Trends results for chess are a pretty good proxy for the demand they get as a company/product.
stage: growth / scaled
💎 When you have strong organic channels and domain authority, avoid “generic” paid advertising. Focus paid efforts on specific, targeted use cases like retargeting or new market entry rather than broad acquisition campaigns.
(17:22) by Albert
Well that sounds nice...Phil mentioned that companies like Chess.com, Duolingo, or Quizlet are good examples of doing this…BUT there are also strong arguments on starting paid acquisition early.
I always keep in mind the gem below from Eric Seufert, shared in Growth Gems #61 - Best Of Growth Gems 👇
💎 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.
(31:09) by Albert
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).
💎 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.
(31:39) by Albert
This might be obvious but in bigger companies it’s sometimes not that common.
💎 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. Set realistic expectations for experiment win rates at 30-50%, not higher.
(34:23) by Albert
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).
💎 There’s an “accordion” between:
Finding new growth opportunities with low-hanging fruits leading to a high experiment win rate
Not being able to get as many winning experiments and being in the “micro-optimization” zone which indicates you need to find new growth opportunities/areas
(35:40) by Phil
This reminded me of the gem below by Sviat Hnizdovskyi (Co-founder at Applica), shared in Growth Gems #92 👇
💎 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.
(36:59) by Albert
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
💎 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
Enable engineers to run their own experiment ideas
Be able to analyze experiments quickly
Run lifecycle marketing experiments
(39:47) by Albert
He’s challenging the team to the ambitious target rate of 1,000 experiments per year 😯.
💎 A personalized virtual coach experience can be a key component of driving retention growth. AI/LLMs now make this more accessible and closer to having a human coach.
(40:15) by Albert
💎 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.
(40:50) by Albert
See you next time.
Stay curious!
— Sylvain
Chief Insights Miner at Growth Gems ⛏️
(Fractional) Head of Growth at Reading.com
Growth Consultant/Advisor for high-potential subscription apps
🔗 Source:
How Chess.com Became the World’s Top Chess App on the Subversive podcast