@Growthhackasia (Growth Hacking Asia)
Why you shouldn't focus on user acquisition (yet)
Natalija Snapkauskaite
@growthhackasia #letshackasia
FLIP THE SUCCESS RATE OF ASIAN STARTUPS FROM 1/10 TO 9/10
THE MYTHS
GROWTH HACKING: DIGITAL MARKETING or PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT?
Growth hackers see their product / service as a growth driver
THE TRUE AND ONLY GROWTH DRIVER
To get the healthy growth curve,
work towards getting the product experience and engagement right
and achieve the hockey stick as a result of it
THE TRUE AND ONLY GROWTH DRIVER
GROWTH HACKING FUNNEL
Optimize
Optimize
Optimize
Optimize Optimize
RESULT: GROWTH ENGINE
GROWTH HACKING FUNNEL: ACQUISITION
Acquisition = getting people to come to your site
EXAMPLE: AIRBNB
GROWTH HACKING FUNNEL: ACTIVATION
Activation = getting people to take the required action, e.g. purchase, sign up
EXAMPLE: AIRBNB
Listings with high quality photos received 2-3x more bookings→ AirBnB invested in professional photography
GROWTH HACKING FUNNEL: RETENTION
Retention = getting users to come back to your site
EXAMPLE: AIRBNB
GROWTH HACKING FUNNEL: REFERRAL
Referral = getting active users to refer others
EXAMPLE: AIRBNB
→ Referrals increased bookings by 25% in some markets
GROWTH HACKING FUNNEL: REVENUE
Revenue = monetising active users
GROWTH HACKING FUNNEL
Optimize
Optimize
Optimize
Optimize Optimize
RESULT: GROWTH ENGINE
GROWTH HACKING = USER ACQUISITION?
ALL MONEY INTO ACQUISITION?
EXAMPLE: VIDDY
Viddy is a social video application that enables its users to capture, edit, and share videos, photos, and collages with friends.
EXAMPLE: VIDDY
‘The Instagram For Video’Celebrity users like Mark Zuckerberg, Justin Bieber, Snoop Dogg, and T-Pain
FundingRaised $30 million in May 2012Valued at $370 millionInvestors like Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, Shakira, and Jay-Z's Roc Nation
EXAMPLE: VIDDY
Returned $18 million of its big funding round to investorsBought out by Fullscreen
Don’t over-focus on growth / virality
ACTIVATION and RETENTION are much more challenging than user acquisition
WAIT, WHAT?
EXAMPLE
Visitors:
30,000
500 300
1,000
EXAMPLE
600
Visitors:
30,000
500
1,000
QUICKLY GET FROM VALIDATION TO 1 MILLION
PHASES OF GROWTH
Product-market fit Growth stage
PHASES OF GROWTH
A BIG JUMP
Product-market fit Growth stage
THERE IS MORE TO THAT...
Product-market fit
Initial user acquisition
Product calibration Growth stage
Initial qualitative data
Initial quantitative data
Improve VPs, UI/UX,
activation, retention
PEOPLE UNDERSTAND THE VALUE OF YOUR PRODUCT RIGHT AWAY
YOU + CUSTOMER
The Aha! moment
Many leading tech companies have promoted “aha moments”—the instant a user understands the value of their product—as a key to growth.
Credit: Chamath Palihapitiya and Facebook’s “aha moment”
The Aha! moment
Chamath Palihapitiya, who ran Facebook’s growth team, said that the Aha!
moment they used was a user reaching 7 friends in 10 days.
The Aha! moment
Josh Elman, Twitter’s product lead for growth and relevance until 2011, took a
look at their usage numbers and realized that once a user follows 30 people,
they’re more or less active forever. If Twitter couldn’t get a person to follow 30
other people, that person was very unlikely to ever come back.
The Aha! moment
Nabeel Hyatt, former GM at Zynga, realized in their case that if someone came
back the next day after signing up for a game, they were much more likely to
become an engaged and paying user. So they focused on what they called “day 1
retention”.
The Aha! moment
ChenLi Wang, who runs growth at Dropbox, has noted that the best indicator of
whether someone will continue using Dropbox is when they put at least one file
in one Dropbox folder.
The Aha! moment
For Slack, the number is 2,000 — 2,000 messages. “Based on experience of
which companies stuck with us and which didn't, we decided that any team that
has exchanged 2,000 messages in its history has tried Slack — really tried it,”
Butterfield says. For a typical team of 10 people, that’s maybe a week’s worth of
messages. But it hit us that, regardless of any other factor, after 2,000 messages,
93% of those customers are still using Slack today.”
Find your Aha! moment
As Richard Price notes, Aha! moments tend to fit into three categories:
■ Network density: X friends or connections made in Y days
■ Content added: X bits of content added
■ Visit frequency: Visiting again within X day
How?
Look at different cohorts of users that became engaged and cohorts of users that didn’t.You could also look at power users, your super fans, scrutinize their usage history and their usage activity and the channels where they come from.
The Aha! moment
RECAP
1. Don’t focus on big growth & virality right away
2. Work with the whole Growth Hacking funnel
3. Get user experience and engagement right
4. Calibrate your product
5. Find your aha moment
THE GROWTH MYTHBUSTER CHECKLIST