2. WHO AM I
Grew Qmee’s first 1,000 active users using a referral scheme/influencer outreach
Helped Evaluagent gain their first high value B2B leads with inbound marketing
Developed Fatsoma’s growth strategy using geo segmentation and improving data
relevancy
4 months into Formisimo.
andrewallsop OR growthmcr
allsop.andrew@gmail.com
3. WHAT THIS IS
A practical process to...
Prioritise
Execute
Learn
...how to help MORE PEOPLE experience MORE VALUE of
your product.
25. MODEL
Dave McClure’s Pirate Metrics*
The Lean Marketing Funnel
Signups, Data In, Subscribed, Churned
Spreadsheets, Mixpanel or Amplitude
*my favourite
26.
27.
28. Fill up the backlog in your growth Trello Board
29. PRIORITISE
ICE score
IMPACT - WHAT WILL THE IMPACT BE IF THIS WORKS?
CONFIDENCE - HOW CONFIDENT AM I THIS WILL WORK?
EFFORT - HOW MUCH RESOURCES ARE REQUIRED?
Use your growth documents to write up
your hypothesis
30. HYPOTHESIS
BECAUSE WE SAW (DATA/FEEDBACK), WE
EXPECT THAT (CHANGE) WILL CAUSE
(IMPACT). WE WILL MEASURE THIS USING
(METRIC)
31. TEST
What is the least resource intensive way to gather data about the
hypothesis?
Use your growth documents to write up
your design so anyone can understand
the context and improve learnings
41. RECOMMENDED STARTER STACK
Google Tag Manager
Google Analytics
Segment.com**
Mixpanel/Amplitude
Optimizely
AdWords/Facebook/Twitter
42. TO DO by Next Month
Install the starter stack or equivalent
Build a quantified model of your company
Choose one area of the AARRR funnel that you think is causing the biggest
bottleneck for your users
Brainstorm 20 ideas that could help improve it and include them in your
experiments backlog in Trello or Projects.GrowthHackers.com
Follow me on twitter at your own risk
I don’t tend to stay on topic
But if you like bad jokes interjected with the odd piece of useful content do feel free to follow
Otherwise follow GrowthMCR which is basically the 2 or 3 best pieces of content I find each day
Or y’know email me
The end goal is to build a self-perpetuating marketing machine that reaches millions by it’s self;
however, growth is a process, not a secret book of ideas.
Growth strategies cannot be easily copied and pasted from product to product.
Growth is never instantaneous.
It is never overnight. It is a mindset at which you approach problems.
It isn’t about making flash in the pan hacks that burn out before you get any value
It is simply a set of tools, processes and skills that let you over come things like
Whether your product has a market
Being able to communicate the value of your product to that market in a competitive space
Being able to uncover WHAT the value of your product is
A growth practitioner finds a strategy within the parameters of a scalable and repeatable method for growth, driven by product and inspired by data.
Growth goals are based in marketing but driven by product instincts.
You will live at the intersection of data, product, and marketing. You will lives within the product team You will have the technical vocabulary that allows you to implement what you want.
1
The rate at which you’re expected to reach 1million active users and 0 to 1million ARR is accelerating
The time to get from here to here has reduced and will impact your ability to raise funding
You’ll have to forgive me for using funding stages as a benchmark for startups but funding and high growth companies tend to go hand in hand
You might not take on funding, but if you can convince an investor you’ve mastered each stage there’s no doubt they’ll be willing to give you the funds to grow faster, gain a bigger market share and outmuscle any would be competitors
You will notice the values on the axis are time and users
Because these are the two biggest things your startup will need
Where would the majority of you say you are on this curve?
This talk is mainly focussed around the angel/seed stage
You have a few dozen users and enough resource to begin trying ways to find more. People you don’t know are starting to use your product
The second biggest reason why we use the growth metholodgy is that
It’s difficult to compete against businesses with bigger resources
The rate at which channels appear and disappear on scales of effectiveness is getting more and more hectic
How do you know which one is going to offer scaleable, repeatable results without good data skills?
It’s impossible
Ad spend is skyrocketing Startups are priced out of the market
We’ll come onto an example that illustrates this perfectly later soon
3
Growing in the world of software has massively changed. the line between marketing and product don’t really exist
Mad men skills are no longer important, data is more accessible and the ability to get insight from it is what sets you apart
what we've called marketing in the past has become way more technical and quantitative in the world of software.
What I would call "Mad Men skills," that qualitative soft side of branding skills are becoming less important in the day and age of software.
the quantitative and technical piece has become a much larger piece of the pie.
The other thing is growth does not equal acquisition.
This is the biggest mistake I see people make, is that they think they can grow just by driving at the top of the funnel.
But I can increase activation rate, retention rate, our revenue and referral,
our overall growth as a company will increase.
For me, this is the big one
Without users, your product is meaningless
And I see startups focussing on perfect code, perfect UI
But what you need is a market
A large group of people who find your product indispensible
And when you’ve found that, you can start cleaning up
Hire a CTO from Google
But never put perfection before traction when you’re early stage
The example I mentioned earlier and one you’re probably familiar with
is Dropbox
They’re worth over $10billion dollars now
When they first started, this was their strategy
You can see it in their YCombinator application
It’s not something they’ve gone back and dramatised for publicity
What’s the problem with that?
They tried Google and they were paying over £300 to acquire customers
Their product is only £79 a year
Do those economic work out?
They’re paying way more than the customer is paying them
Customers weren’t staying around for long enough
Those costs don’t include support, development, everything else
So what did Dropbox do?
They realised paid ads don’t work for them
But they realised they could develop their way to growing
So they did this thing, a distribution tactic
They said: Want more space on dropbox?
Invite more friends
Tweet it out
Connect it to your iphone
For months later, 4million users
55% of those coming from these viral features
This is a great example of a distribution tactic
By looking at your data, by understanding the psychology behind reciprocity and maybe even frugality
You can increase the distribution of your product without spending money on ads
But remember growth isn’t only about distribution and acquisition, we’re focussing on the whole funnel,
MORE people
and MORE value
So twitter looked at their data
And they found once a user follows a certain number of people and a certain number of people follow them back within a certain time
You are likely to become a highly engaged user
So twitter’s suggested follows aren’t just people they think you should follow
But people who are likely to follow you back
This part of the process doesn’t get twitter any more users - but it improves their activation and retention
This is probably where marketing skills begin to fall short
All of these companies that you’d associate with rapid growth have departments dedicated towards it
Facebook has Alex Schultz
An englishman
Pinterest has John Egan
Very focussed on engineering and complicated statistics
Uber has Andrew Chen
Recently joined
Super good at mobile stuff
Hubspot has Brian Balfour
These are all names I urge you to dig out
consume every piece of content they’ve put out there
It’s no coincidence
They all have a similar approach
Their companies are all redefining scale
And with time in mind,
This is what they do
Growth is more about a change into how we think about our team structures,
people, methodologies and processes.
It's not so much about tactics or hacks,
This is where most people tend to spend the majority of their time learning
what works for others is not going to work for you.
At the end of the day, your audience is different. Your product is different.
Your business model is different. Your customer journey is different.
Your business is different, plain and simple
You can draw some analogies, but at the end of the day, what makes a really successful business is combining a unique set of variables together.
To start, we need a quantified model of your business. This is why growth works a lot easier for software businesses, because a lot of your data is already in your database
There’s a number of frameworks you can use to help guide this
Dave McClure’s pirate metrics being my favourite and the one I’m referring to when I say funnel
We build that Excel spreadsheet to basically look at things a year to two years out.
This allows us to evaluate three things:
The baseline: where are we now?
The ceiling: Where do we think we can get that number to if we worked on it?
The sensitivity: Will this have impact over time, the next six months to a year?
This is just a small part of the sheet we use to work off at Formisimo
The thing is a behemoth
The one on the left is a mini model that we use to estimate the impact of a specific growth tactic
What you need to do is highlight bottle necks in your model, or areas that when you change them have a huge impact
You need to think of your business in terms of the steps that people take and where the most amount of people stop continuing to the next step
So we look at these three things to, once again, go back and answer that question.
What is the highest impact area that I can focus on right now given limited resources?
After we identify that area, we set some goals.
We set a timeframe no shorter than 30 days, no longer than 90 days.
Then we set three quantitative metrics that basically tell us whether or not we're achieving that objective.
Then we use our insight and a healthy dose of intuition to build a backlog of ideas
We brainstorm across departments ways that could shift the number we’re focussing on
Feel free to take inspiration from what other people have done
But don’t ever feel that you’ll get a garunteed success by copying someone else
Add all of these ideas to your Experiments backlog in Trello
Never write off an idea, it’s basic brainstorming etiquette
Look at your backlog
We use a framework called the ICE Score
We make a subjective evaluation on three areas and give them a score of 10
The impact - what is the scale this change will make for our business
Confidence - do we feel this is something that will work
Effort - how much resources are needed to execute this - marketing, engineering, design
Get your growth document
Write up a hypothesis
A hypothesis is basically this
Because we saw x we expect that y will cause z. we will measure this using, and the metric you’re trying to shift
Then we execute
Where possible, use the most resource efficient way possible to execute our ideas
If we’re doing a new webpage, we use frameworks to speed up our build
Bootstrap, foundation for example
You can even build a button and track how many people would click it if you had a certain feature
If you really want to test the waters
We write up the experiment design so anyone can understand the context and to improve learnigs
I found this difficult at first so don’t beat yourself up if they’re kinda shitty at the start
After we run the experiment, it's all about how to extract the most learnings out of this as we possibly can.
The first thing we'll look at is, "Was this a success or a failure?
Did it improve or not improve the thing that we were targeting?"
The second is impact. By how much, how close to our prediction were we? And then third, and most importantly, is, "Why?"
It helps us generate not new learnings, new experiment ideas that we can then go and run.
We log that in the experiment document
Last but not least, we take the successes and we systemize them.
There are two ways we can systemize.
We try to systemize as much as we can with technology and automate things.
Certain things we can't automate.
Certainly things in content marketing and stuff just require a human involved, and for those things we write playbooks.
And what we’re trying to do is reduce the amount of luck that’s needed in moving forward
You know, businesses have been built on luck
But as you saw from the examples earlier, there’s ways to reduce your reliance on lady luck grasping your business and throwing it into a success
and what we end up with is something looking more like this
If you have enough creativity, the right resources and enough time, your startup can be successful using this framework, or any framework that’s focussed on optimising learnings
Although this process is no guarantee
I suppose it’s like an infinite number of monkeys typing would at some point write shakespearean play
But you know, this is a way of working that’s worked for me
That’s worked for others
And provides a solution to a number of problems startups face
So the next bit, tools
I’m going to go over this really quickly because we’re low on time
There’s basically tons of tools you can use
For each stage of the funnel there will be something
I’d definitely recommend taking a look at these and thinking how they fit with your business
I’m not going to go over each one, but they’re all links and you can click on them when you get the slides
Like I said - tons of tools
But I can recommend each of these as something that scales well and has good support
Feedback to get ideas and prioritise them is also important
If you were at David’s talk last night you will have got a lot better insight into this than I can give
Qualitative tools give you unstructured customer feedback — think surveys, livechat, heat mapping, and even session recording tools. These tools are great because they allow you to talk to your users, or get a deeper understanding of how a user is using your product.
on the other hand, quantitative tools give you hard data about how folks are using your product.
These are great for helping you understand higher level trends in product usage, and they do the heavy lifting when it comes to calculating sums, cohorts, and funnels.
If you want to see an overview of customer behavior, then these are the tools to use.
So just to narrow that down for you, I put together a starter stack
These all have generous free tiers or are really cheap
They are difficult to out grow
Mixpanel handles your analytics and customer communications
Optimizely allows you to easily AB test without being a brilliant front end developer and without having to deploy new pages everytime you want to test something
Segment.com is the great enabler. Instead of writing unique tracking codes for each tool you might use, write just one for segment and it reformats for over 100 integrations.
Hotjar has a ton of useful features at a low price for beginners, as you get more advanced you may want to use more specialist tools like Formisimo
And finally, some todos for next month
Lean on me
This is where I get my kicks from
I don’t consult, I’m not going to charge you
I just want to learn and grow
and I want to help Manchester get it’s first series A
