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a huge disadvantage at a time where people were rapidly migrating away from their desktops to their smartphones.
Yet upon conducting some customer research—which included both customer surveys and analysis of the company’s data on user behavior—
making the most of the customers they already had.
So the team prioritized adding a highly visual button to the app’s home screen encouraging users to upgrade, and, almost incredibly, that one simple change resulted in an instant 92 percent increase in revenue per day from upgrades.
Looking into user data to try to identify the drivers of increases and decreases in the number of downloads of the app day to day,
how to access your various customer and business data sources and connect them to one another in order to draw insights into user behavior; and how to quickly compile the results of experiments and provide insights into them.
such as from sales and from customer service, and limited ability to delve into that data to make discoveries.
LinkedIn and Pinterest, which has four teams dedicated to new user acquisition, viral growth, engagement of users, and activation of newly
The process is a continuous cycle comprising four key steps: (1) data analysis and insight gathering; (2) idea generation; (3) experiment prioritization; and (4) running the experiments,
So, for example, an in-depth analysis of customer churn (meaning identifying those who recently abandoned the product) might reveal that the people who are defecting haven’t made use of a particular feature of the product that is popular with avid users.
He would not entertain any ideas outside of growing the total number of users on Facebook.
health of its core customer base is what creates the opportunity to invest in the future.
customer acquisition and retention
search engine optimization to rank its home listing data higher than Zillow’s in Google search results.
activating new users of an online learning software by optimizing the onboarding process, the term for orienting new users on how to use a product.
testing the frequency, content, and calls to action in the email messages and mobile push notifications aimed at getting users to come back more frequently.
from helping to optimize existing products and features, such as improving the sign-up flow for new users, to even building some of its own products, such as Facebook Lite, which was designed to run on a globe with poor data connectivity.
Marketers can become focused on vanity
metrics such as the number of website visitors or leads and lose sight of the need to drive up the performance indicators in other parts of the funnel (such as user retention).
Chamath Palihapitiya,
When data analysis provides a strong rationale for trying a hack, dissent is much easier to counter.
The results of well-crafted experiments are also extremely difficult to disagree with, which helps to defang the emotional commitment people often feel to their particular vision or strategy.
Once people see the power of the data-driven approach to experimentation—and the growth ideas that come out of it—enthusiasm for the process tends to be infectious.
working on just one product, and perhaps even just one important aspect of how it is being adopted,
company’s customer acquisition in a single channel, such as Facebook, or improving the readership of the company’s blog, or the performance of the company’s email marketing.
how the team can use customer feedback, rigorous experimentation and testing, and a deep dive into data to evaluate if a product has in fact achieved product/market fit.
ALL FAST-GROWTH companies share one thing in common. Regardless of who their customers are, their business model, and the type of product, industry, or region of the globe they’re operating in, they all make a product that a large group of people love.
While creating a must-have product alone is not sufficient for breakout success, it is the baseline requirement for rapid and sustainable growth.
One of the cardinal rules of growth hacking is that you must not move into the high-tempo growth experimentation push until you know your product is must-have, why it’s must-have, and to whom it is a must-have: in other words, what is its core value, to which customers, and why.
And as this pressure mounts, the belief that growth can be forced, usually by increasing spending on marketing, becomes increasingly alluring.
But the hard truth is that no amount of marketing and advertising—no matter how clever—can make people love a substandard product. If you haven’t created and identified core value before you make your growth push, you’ll either end up with illusory growth at best or market rejection at worst.
A pernicious misconception about growth hacking is that it is primarily about building virality into products. That is indeed one of the key tactics, but like other growth efforts, it must only be deployed after the product has been determined a must-have.
Growth teams need to adopt rigorous methods for probing into user behavior in order to discover the core value of their product or service, and we’ll introduce these methods shortly.
growth teams need to recognize that sometimes establishing what the core value is, or should be, isn’t about the features of the product or service itself, but rather a matter of connecting with the right core market,
Sometimes it’s a feature or user experience that was built into the product that is quite different from what was hypothesized in the original product vision as the core value; other times it’s one that was built into the product somewhere along the way as almost an afterthought.
Don’t be an episodic utility, be a community. And now we’ve got to make that shift.”7
“love creates growth, not the other way around.” And for there to be love, there needs to be that aha moment.9
This is the moment that the utility of the product really clicks for the users; when the users really get the core value—what the product is for, why they need it, and what benefit they derive from using it. Or in other words, why that product is a “must-have.”
This experience is what turns early adopters into power users and evangelists.
An aha experience is a necessary ingredient of sustainable growth because it is one that is simply too remarkable not to value, to return to often, and to share.
Can you identify an aha moment that users love?
New products are generally built on the premise of delivering an aha experience that customers will find irresistible and that fills a meaningful need for a big audience.
Often, people have to use a product a certain amount of time before they truly have this experience with it, or perhaps they have to use a certain feature to really get the full-force aha hit.
So a vital step in determining whether your product has the aha potential is to seek out truly avid fans by mining user data and feedback, and then to search for any similarities in the ways these people use the product for hints about what value they get from your product that less enthused users perhaps aren’t.
How disappointed would you be if this product no longer existed tomorrow?
Many products won’t hit the 40 percent threshold, however, and in that event, the growth team’s first efforts must be focused on determining why the product isn’t getting a better response.
If 25 to 40 percent of respondents answer “very disappointed,” then often what’s needed are tweaks either to the product or to the language used to describe the product and how to use it. If less than 25 percent answer “very disappointed,” it’s likely that either the audience you’ve attracted is the wrong fit for your product, or the product itself needs more substantial development before it’s ready for a growth push.
What would you likely use as an alternative to [name of product] if it were no longer available?
The question about alternative products can help identify your chief competition for customers, and often point to features or aspects of the experience those products are offering that lead those customers to prefer them over others.
More important, the language they use to describe the product to their friends can unearth benefits, features, and language to use in your own product promotion.
