For those of you that couldn't make it to the Growth Hacker Conference last week in SF, I've written up my notes to share here.
Speakers were divided up by stages of growth: Pre- Product/Market Fit, Transition to Growth, and Scaling Growth.
My notes are focused generally around what was most useful to our company, which is very early stage. Because of this, many of the partnership and deep dives into business development from the 3rd section are glossed over here.
Keynotes:
Keith Rabois (Investor at Khosla Ventures, former COO of Square)
- Growth hacking is not growth
- Some famous growth hacks include:
- LinkedIn -- indexed professional profiles
- when you searched for someone on google, their linkedin came up first
- Paypal -- pay with paypal button
- Seen on websites all over
- So much easier to implement, button press and you get paid
- Watched what people on eBay were doing to get the idea
- most sellers were asking to be paid through paypal, but very clunky to have to give the details of how and where to pay them in their ads
- took this feedback and made it dead simple to get paid
- YouTube - embeddable videos
- Video is hard
- Got news orgs, and other websites who needed/wanted videos but didn’t have the $ or time to do it right to use them
- Was fast, simple to grab the video with YouTube then quickly embed on their website to create content
- ALL of these only worked because the company had a lot of content that was valuable beforehand
- content 1st, then implement the growth hack
- Growth hacking is an observational science
- Have to watch everything that users do and then work based off it
- Feature design is the new marketing
- Build great products or features and get traction and virality from them
- Traditional “marketing” doesn’t get as much traction as this
- Ex: the best performing email for LinkedIn had a grammatical error in it
- Were a/b testing emails and this email performed several x better than all the others
“Understanding the Stages of Growth” by Sean Ellis (CEO Qualroo)
- Pyramid of growth (N/A for network effect businesses like chat):
- Growth (top tier)
- Possible, but rarely easy
- Need a company growth culture where everyone is focused on this
- Have the right team skills
- designer, copywriter, data, ideally a developer
- Transition to Growth (middle tier)
- All about execution
- Key transition to growth activities:
- implement user analytics
- identify “must have” benefits to product
- map benefit to effective hooks within the app
- optimize your business model
- optimize conversions
- hire growth team
- Tools:
- Kissmetrics
- Clicatale
- usertesting.com
- optimizely
- unbounce
- Example: A company who had very slow growth
- Paused their growth efforts completely
- mapped the funnel in onboarding
- diagnosed the causes of user friction in the funnel
- A/B tested the funnel
- landing pages
- messaging
- trial process
- installers
- flows
- Conversion rate = desire - friction
- PMF (bottom, biggest, tier)
- Pre PMF key things:
- responsiveness to feedback -- learn from all the users and act on it
- Inspiration -- find inspiration from competitors, user trends, etc
- NETWORK EFFECT BUSINESS EXCEPTION
- businesses like chat
- have to optimize every piece on the fly
- can’t test, then grow
- have to grow as you test to get enough users on board to build value and grow more
- track everything
- User feelings survey:
- “How would you feel if you could no longer use Product X”
- Target getting 40% of user responses to be “very disappointed”
- Complexity, not price, is the barrier to entry
Stage I. Pre product/market fit
"Growth v Engagement: Pre Product/market fit" Greg Tseng (CEO and cofounder of Tagged)
- Tagged timeline
- Launch 2004
- social network for US teens
- Dec 2005
- 1mm registered
- $7mm series B
- Oct 2006
- Opened to all countries & ages 13+
- Dec 2006
- 12mm registered
- 0.4B pageviews monthly
- Oct 2007
- Pivoted to social discovery
- Dec 2007
- 60mm registered
- 0.8B monthly pageviews
- Learnings from Tagged
- sustainable value only comes from real user engagement
- a startup’s first goal is to prove PMF
- The ONLY case where you should do growth to help achieve PMF is:
- when you need a big enough sample size to A/B test against
- your product is your users
- Messaging apps -- need more people to have more convos
- Viral marketing is a tactic, not a religion
- don’t get too obsessed with it as it won’t give you everything you need
- When launching a new app
- How does onboarding look?
- which pieces can you optimize to increase engagement?
- How do you re-engage churned users?
- push notifications on mobile are powerful
- user either a specific experience for reactivating users OR
- just use the new user experience (if they’ve been gone for a while they are really just like a new user for your purposes)
"How to make your 1st dollar" Noah Kagan (CEO & founder AppSumo, VP Marketing Mint.com)
- If your product sucks, marketing and growth won’t matter at all
- Objective: start hustling today
- appsumo.com/coffee
- To validate your product, take 48 hours to find out:
- “Will a user pay me for this product?”
- airbnb example:
- how would you build and validate the product from scratch within the next 48 hours?
- Answer: email friends that you are going out of town today -- who will pay me to stay at my place?
- Square example
- how would you validate idea in next 48?
- Answer: go to the farmer’s market with a credit card reader. Process payments right there for customers
- appsumo.com/tacos
- howtomakeyourfirstdollar.com
"Habits: From Inception to Adoption" Josh Elman (founded Twitter Growth Team, Principal at Greylock)
- Growth Key Questions:
- Purpose: What do you need to solve?
- Inception: How can you make users aware of your product?
- Viral invites
- “Come join me because of this value”
- SMS growth in mobile (untapped medium)
- VIne: download links below videos in FB etc
- Adoption: How can you teach users to use it?
- Make a good 1st impression - don’t just rush through onboarding
- Teach the important product pieces in onboarding so they “get” it
- Habits: How can we keep them using it?
- How do you knw if users are visitors or regulars?
- Visitors:
- use once
- come via a prompt
- don’t remember the name
- Regulars
- come back at some significant frequency
- come on their own
- remember the name and tell others
- How many people are really using your product?
- Log in at frequency you expect
- you have confidence they’ll come back
- you’re comfortable that they will eventually pay you for it
Stage II. Transition to growth
Elliot Shmukler (VP Product & Growth for Wealthfront, Senior Director of LinkedIn Growth)
- Set a goal for your product. Then Optimize by:
- Reduce friction
- if the flow is complicated, use microquestions (LinkedIn optimize profile)
- Increase Incentive
- Give people a rating of product vs something else (before sign up) so they can compare and understand your value
- social proof
- show me people i know that use it
- At LinkedIn this doubled growth
- Increase Exposure
- ask me to do it more often
- ask me to di it more prominenetly
- ask me to do it in more places
- keep asking in places that make sense
- LinkedIn pops up a box to endorse a friend on their profile - after you endorse, they show you more people ot endorse
- If you can’t immediately learn from your experiment, try AGAIN in the future
"Email Engagement" Mike Greenfield (Co-founder Circle of Moms & TeamRankings, Analytics at LinkedIn)
- Nov 2010 -- grew on FB ads to 6mm users, but then channels closed and users dropped by 50%, only 1mm active
- Steps to email success
- Inbox delivery
- SendGrid - good, but can’t guarantee delivery and $$$$
- ReturnPath: certifies emails, painful setup, cheaper, more effective
- One Item Focus
- 1 piece of content you focus on
- can have other content, but deprioritize it
- A/B test “from” name
- Quality
- Subject Optimization
- Winners & Losers
- Personalization
- Frequency
"Why BD Matters" Alison Rosenthal (former Director BD at Facebook, Executive in Residence at Greylock)
- Emergence of mobile at FB
- Look at the data
- Where is demand?
- Where are new users?
- What are easy wins?
- You can really grow in mobile by leveraging BD
"Hyper-Growth" Gagan Biyani (CEO & Cofounder of Fresh, Co-founder of Udemy)
- Lyft example:
- worked on the brand first
- making women feel more comfortable in taxis
- personally interviewed every driver to fit that brand
- growing lyft in LA
- met with users
- went out as street team in santa monica and convinced people to use lyft at the bars
- created mobile ads based on what convinced people and what phrases were used, etc
- User thought cycle
- I hate change
- what is this?
- what was name again?
- oh dude, try this
- User life cycle
- advertising
- conversion
- retention
- virality
- Most startups don’t have the volume to do A/B tests well
- talk to customers to make A & B better in the first place
- if both suck you’ll waste 2 weeks
- talk to users at all stages in lifecycle
- don’t use service
- conversion
- retention
- virality
- Growth hackers strength is understanding your users at all levels, then doing stuff for them
- Build brand; understand users; apply ideas for growth hacks
Stage III. Scaling growth
"Growth at Scale" Akash Garg (Director of Engineering for Twitter Growth Team, Co-founder & CTO Hi5)
- Early on
- optimize sign up and conversion flow
- look at user actions within this
- optimize out from there
- make short term, local changes
- specific actions
- specific flows
- Later
- long-term, sustainable changes
- “Ideal” user should be mapped
- retains month to month
- generate high value actions
- generate revenue
- identify your “growth driver” metrics
- what converts a user from casual to core?
- When you make a change dont just look at results 1 week out, check back in 2-3 months & over time
- Best Practices
- Multi channel growth (UI, Email, Push, etc)
- Quality metric
- Holdbacks
- Growth engineers are:
- full stack
- problem solvers
- metrics driven
- #shipit
Matt Hudson (Product Manager for Quantitative Analytics at YouTube)
- 3 principles for growth
- choosing the right metrics matter
- culture change starts with great questions
- align yourself around the user
"Growth is not" Stan Chudnovsky (Co-founder of IronPearl, now Paypal head of growth)
- advises wanelo, poshmark, path, goodreads
- “3 things that growth is not”
- not about complexity
- great product built on simple insight into human psychology
- Goodreads: surface friends reviews to top of list
- increased review writing by 5x