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

Andreas Quensel is Growth Product Manager at Heja, a sports-team communication app. On Datadrivet he explains how 13 people grew it past 130,000 teams, mostly in the US and the UK. They picked one clear activation metric, modelled how growth compounds, and made data the whole team’s shared language.

The team asks which metric would matter most if it moved: revenue per paying team, conversion to paid, or activation. Activation means the share of teams that reach at least six members within seven days.

The team also runs an end-to-end growth model, a spreadsheet they share with listeners. It takes retention, acquisition channels, and monetization, and shows how moving one input moves the rest.

Every idea becomes a hypothesis in a fixed template:

“Because we observed [data or insight], we believe this change will produce [effect].”

The team ranks each hypothesis by potential, learning value, ease, and confidence. Each one then goes through build, measure, learn. Sometimes a survey or user interviews come first.

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. Results and insights go out to the whole company every week.

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