startups & growth - learn early. learn often
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Startups & GrowthLearn Early. Learn Often.
Most of the startups go through the same
phase and face the same set of problems.
You create a product which you think is the best solution to a problem already existing in the market.
You launch the product expecting virality
and exponential user adoption.
It’s important for us to remember that
every product will not be an Instagram.
99% of time, the traffic falls off after a initial spike.
You’re in a stage of your startup called as The Trough of Sorrow
Source: @andrewchen
You fall into the Trough of Sorrow because you launch your product hoping that the market would accept it and not because the market wanted it.
It’s important for a startup to understand
the different phases in it’s growth cycle and realize when to launch.
3 Stages of Product Growth Cycle
Finding First Set of Customers
Validating Your
Product
Exponenti
al Growt
h
Each stage in the product growth cycle
has got certain success end goals.
Finding First Set of Customers • Problem/Solution Fit
Validating Your Product • Product/Market Fit
Exponential Growth • Scale Exponentially
Finding First Set of Customers
Validating Your
Product
Exponenti
al Growt
h
Focus on Learning& PivotFocus on Growth & Optimize
Measure.Measure.Measure.
Reference: Dave Mcclure’s pirate metrics
Identify metrics that matter during each stage.
Problem/Solution Fit Qualitative – Interviews/ Surveys for understanding Problem/Solution Fit.
Product/Market Fit Activation & Retention
Scaling Exponentially Acquisition, Referral
Maximize for speed, learning.
Build
MeasureLearn
Iterate.
Optimize/ Pivot.
Always find your Product/Market fit before scaling.Else
You Fail.
What Product/Market fit looks like.
Source : @andrewchen
Pre P/M Fit Post P/M Fit
Tract
ion
This is what you should aim for.
How to scale after P/M Fit?
Distribute cheaply to as many people as possible.
Use a mix of Paid and Non-Paid Strategies to distribute and acquire.
Use the power of Social Media
Get your Viral Loops right : k>1(k=invites/user*invite acceptance)
Leverage Platforms that work for your product
Blog
• Establish end goal and identify your target audience.
• Churn out world-class content your target audience would be interested in.
• Guest-Blog:
• Builds natural links• Increases your online authority• Builds Relationship• Opens up your product/ service to a large audience quickly
“Solely through guest blogging we've acquired around 100,000 users within the first 9 months of running Buffer.” – Leo Wildrich, Co-founder, Buffer
Take a leaf out of Kissmetrics & Moz’s Book.
Remember this takes time & effort.
Create & Distribute Infographics
“KISSmetrics was able to generate 2,512,596 visitors and 41,142 back links from 47 infographics. This strategy helped take the KISSmetrics blog from 56,380 to 146,197 visits per month.” – Neil Patel
Search & Connect with Influencers in your niche.
Leverage their reach.
E-books, Guides and White papers
Presentations & Slideshare ( Traffic, SEO)
SEO done right.
Run Contests & Give-aways
Use Paid Channels
Keep a check, @LTV = 3*CPA
What do I do after acquisition?
Build your conversion funnels.
Measure.
Optimize for conversions in each stage.
Acqusition Activation Retention Revenue
5000
800300 50
16%
Get this fixed first.
If conversions from visits to sign up is low. Fix that first.
A small landing page tweak helped cloudspongeincrease conversion by 33%
If Activation is low, work on user onboarding.
Twitter has a step-by-step onboarding Process. Makes you
follow 5 people. Users tend to be more active.
40% of Twitter users use the platform without publishing.4x number of monthly visitors who don’t login. Just read the stream.
If retention is less focus on getting users to come back to the platform.
Use both transactional emails and auto-responders to get people back in.
LinkedIn was successful in increasing engagement & retention using the double viral loop.
Prompting users to connect/ invite during onboarding led to 16% increase in invitations sent & 41% increase in page views.
Source: http://www.slideshare.net/joshelman/josh-elman-threegrowthhacksgrowconf81413
Not all hypothesis & the resulting experiments
result in a better conversion.
So A/B Test
Version b is better than a. Roll out version b.
Source: Smashingmagazine
Not just the landing pages and calls to action,
but A/B Test product features as well.
Iterate on features and use cohort analysis to track engagement/ retention/ revenue/ referral
Fig Above : Twitter’s cohort shows how the product improvements resulted in an increase in the percentage of engaged users in the
second month.
Find your AHA Moment!Turn a visitor to a engaged user.
Facebook : 7 friends in 10 days.
Twitter : Follow 30 people.
Zynga : Day 1 retention.
Drop Box : Atleast one file in dropbox folder.
Remember the mantra : Learn early, Learn often.
