How Heja grew to 130,000+ teams with 13 people

Andreas Quensel, Growth Product Manager at Heja, joins Datadrivet to explain how a 13-person team built a sports-team communication app used by more than 130,000 teams, mostly in the US and the UK.

The method starts higher up than most growth talk. Heja begins with company strategy and asks which metric, if it moved, would matter most: revenue per paying team, conversion to paid, or activation. They then define activation precisely as the share of teams that reach at least six members within seven days, a number that tells them whether a new team has really taken hold.

To see how the pieces fit, the team runs an end-to-end growth model (a spreadsheet they share with listeners) that takes retention, acquisition channels, and monetization, and shows how moving one input ripples through the rest.

Ideas become hypotheses with a fixed template: “Because we observed [data or insight], we believe this change will produce [effect].” Each one is ranked by potential, learning value, ease, and confidence, then run through build, measure, learn, sometimes starting with a survey or user interviews before anything gets built.

What stands out is the culture. Andreas describes data-driven work at Heja as almost a non-issue: the data infrastructure was already there when he arrived, the team had been through Reforge’s growth curriculum so they shared a vocabulary, and results and insights go out to the whole company every week.

The takeaway: a small team can grow far when it picks one clear activation metric, models how growth actually compounds, and makes the data everyone’s shared language.

Listen to the full episode of Datadrivet for Andreas’s walkthrough. To see how an activation rate like Heja’s compares for your own model, the benchmark tool is here: https://benchmark.scilla.studio