startup analytics and figuring out your engine for growth

Growth Hacking Startup analytics and figuringout your engine for growth

Because here’s what usually happens..

You spend months and months building a great product.

Anticipate a huge launch..

But, when you actually do, nothing happens.

Let’s say you end up with a feature in TechCrunch.

Which gets you 10,000 new signups.

day 1 day 25 users

10,000users

Awesome right?

Not if no one comes back..

day 1 day 25 users

day 30

10users

10,000users

What happened?

I’m Conrad Wadowski, a Partner at GrowHack which works with venture backed companies.

I also run an online school which brings together leading practitioners and resources to teach your team user growth.

Some background

So, what the heck is

GROWTH HACKING?

A “growth hack” is a meaningful spike to a metric.

day 1 day 2

5 users

10,000users

50,000users

What really matters is making it repeatable.

day 1 day 2 day 30

5 users

10,000users

Growth hacking is the tactics and best practices for growth.

Think of it like you’re assembling an engine.

..but you’re missing the instruction manual.

?the manual

How do you put together the pieces?

Email Marketing

UX

SEO

Behavioral Psychology

PPC

PR

Try a bunch of stuff?

Try a bunch of stuff?Ask other people?!

Try a bunch of stuff?Ask other people?!The interwebs?!?

Try a bunch of stuff?Ask other people?!The interwebs?!?Build more features?!?!

All places to find ideas but..

SEO

Behavioral Psychology

Email Marketing PPC

UX Analytics

Analytics brings things together

PR

It’s a skillset many companies don’t start with.

And helps you be systematic about learning what’s happening.

There are actually are a few engines to build and tune.

#1Product Engine #2 Growth Engine

+

Without a “product engine” to create value, it’s hard to grow.

For more here see Eric Reis, Steve Blank and Lean Startup Machine.

#1Product Engine

Let’s take HubSpot as an example

#1Product Engine #2 Growth Engine

+

Marketing Automation Tools Inbound Marketing and Sales

Sometimes you build within a distribution channel

#1Product Engine #2 Growth Engine

iOS App Apple App Store

=

Each approach carries its own risks and rewards.

A practical frameworkfor growth.

(adapted from Dave McClure’s AARRR metrics)

Pick one of these areas to focus on at a time.

Acquisitionsource person comes from Search, Social, WOM, Viral

Acquisitionsource person comes from

Search, Social, WOM, Viral

Activationgetting someone quickly to a “must have experience” Your happy event

Acquisitionsource person comes from

Search, Social, WOM, Viral

Activationgetting someone to a “must have experience”

Your happy event

RetentionGetting someone back to the experience

Email, push notifs, messaging, user generating content

Discover your one point of highest leverage.

It looks like this..

Free channels

Acquisitionsource a person

comes from

Let’s say one of your friends told you absolutely had to download SnapChat.

Acquisition Source: Word of Mouth

Free channels

Activation getting someone to

an “must have experience”

After you downloaded SnapChat you got to see the stupid video they sent you.

Activation Event: Watching a video

Free channels

RetentionGetting someone back to the core experience

You then get a SnapChat push notification and the cycles continues.

Retention Event: Push Notification

Retention is important

otherwise you’ll get

A growth engine without a product engine is hard to sustain.

Other user states to consider are revenue and referral.

Free channels

Referralgetting one of

your users to refer another user

After you’ve starting using SnapChat you then feel comfortable inviting a friend.

Referral Event: Messaging a friend

Free channels

Revenuemonetizing people

SnapChat currently doesn’t make money. They’re optimizing for user growth, which a monetization step would slow down. If SnapChat started sending disappearing ads, advertisers would pay.

Revenue Event: N/A

Say your product was a simple quiz website.

But only 1 out of 118 completed it.

One approach could be to acquire more users.

You’d probably have to bring in another 118 to get only 1 more user to activate.

That’s really hard.

More likely your bottleneck is a landing page.

image credit: iacquire

Clear headline

Short copy, graphic or visual

Call to action

And can lead to a much better result if you focused there..

In this case your bottleneck was activation.

InsightTo build your engine, focus on your point of highest leverage.

Choosing a metric you’d like to move may be the hardest thing. It’s changes and is tough to prescribe.

”

Metrics are merely a reflection of the product strategy that you already have in place and are limited because they’re based on what you’ve already built, which is based on your current audience and how your current product behaves.

Andrew Chen

“

It helps you prioritize, which may be the hardest thing to do.

Text

Start with an in depth

study of your users.

Be them.

Talk to them.

Where do your most engaged users come from or hang out?

I say, take as many angles as you can to figure this out.

In person interviews

Craiglist to find people in your target market

Meetups

Surveys

Usertesting.com

“If you were to recommend [product name] to a friend, how would you

convince them to use it?”

Great question after someone’s first tried your product

Net Promoter Score

“I ask existing users of a product how they would feel if they could no longer use the product. In my experience, achieving product/market fit requires at least 40% of users saying they would be “very disappointed” without your product.” - Sean Ellis

Question to assess Product/Market Fit

Challenges: Bias and Speed

SolutionMeasure what they

actually do.

Measure from Day One

Philosophy.

Get users into groups.

Predict how your people react to changes you make.

Being savvy with analytics applies to

large and smaller user bases.

For larger sets of users it’s helpful to segment people and

find patterns.

For smaller sets, you’ll get to see patterns develop.

Even without much data, you’re getting

into the habit of learning.

Are people doing what you expect? Who and why are they behaving

that way?

Some characteristics of good metricsAnswer an important question in your user lifecycle.Are actionable.

How well are we retaining users?

We look into the % of first time users who login the next day.

If we weren’t retaining users, maybe they think our product isn’t valuable. Easy and quick to measure.

What’s the most efficient use of marketing resources?To answer this question, we could look into sources of traffic, and analyze what % of users from a particular source ended up converting into being engaged with our product or paying, and how much would it cost to acquire this particular user.

Helps you focus your resources on the channel with the most impact.

An easy way to make your metrics more actionable would be to try to make it a %.

Divide an important number you have over a period of time to give you a growth rate, or over an earlier step in your funnel to give you a conversion rate.

What’s not actionable?Anything topline - like pageviews, revenue or users. We want to increase your total users, but this number will go up no matter what you do.

Time on Site - can help measure engagement, but maybe your users are just confused?

Benchmarking isn’t exact but can be a place to start if you’re having trouble identifying a weak metric.

Is your sign up rate way below 8 to 30%?

Is your email open rate way below 30% or click through consistently below 3%?

Email marketing benchmarks 2013 - Mailchimp

Drawing board

Weak Average Okay Strong

<12% 12-16% 20% 25% 50%+

Day One (D1) Mobile Gaming Retention Benchmarks

Credit: Nabeel Hyatt

More Mobile Retention

Benchmarks

App engagement benchmarks 2012 - Flurry

Ideally you can find a leading indicator to tell you when activation happens.

How do you know users reached the “aha moment?”

A user is engaged if they reach 7 friends in 10 days.

-Chamath Palihapitiya

An active user has visited 7 times in the last month.

-Josh Elman

If someone came back the day after they signed up for a game, they were

likely to become an engaged user.-Nabeel Hyatt

Once you feel comfortable with

focusing on a metric.

Hypothesize improvement

to that metric.

Make valid, quick tests to improve

it.

Without your left brain, you wouldn’t know which of your

ideas are good.

Without your right brain, you wouldn’t have

any good ideas.

Some places to find good ideas about a bottleneck include

other great products.

Lot’s of tools available to identify your bottleneck

Help you figure out who your valuable users are and why others are getting stuck.

MixPanel

CautionFirst chose what question you’d like to answer, then focus on measuring it.

More information isn’t necessarily better.

Retention Report

Create a definition for retention, such as those who sign up and log back in.

Weekly Cohorts

Define Properties

Answer more specific questions comparing groups such as returning vs. new visitors or those acquired through facebook vs. twitter.

You can do the same in the funnel and revenue reports

Learn about valuable users

Message based on activity

Segment.io

Easily switch between services

Optimizely.com

Easy a/b testing

Intercom.io

Targeted messaging

Bill Murray

Kid Rock

Brittany Spears

Brad Pitt

Aaron Arnold

Juliana James

John Johnson

Bobby Boulder

Nick Newman

Sandy Sue

Carly Charleston

Paul Porter

350k

1M

78

253k 87

27.2M 93

344

25

576

333

-

988

3

1,345

30

24

31

51

44

-

-

0

Targeted messaging

Bill Murray

Kid Rock

Brittany Spears

Brad Pitt

Aaron Arnold

Juliana James

John Johnson

Bobby Boulder

Nick Newman

Sandy Sue

Carly Charleston

Paul Porter

350k

1M

78

253k 87

27.2M 93

344

25

576

333

-

988

3

1,345

30

24

31

51

44

-

-

0

You might want to say hello

Google Analytics

Database + SQL + Excel

Collect Data Query Analyze

OKR FrameworkStands for “Objectives” and “Key Results” and used by a lot of folks like Google and Zynga.

Objective: Improve Engagement

Key Result: Get 30% of students to post weekly progress updates by the end of the week.

Experiment(s) this week:Set up class segments in intercom.io and email students on with link to Lecture.Create a Facebook group for the class.

OKR Framework

What’s your metric?

click here to learn more about our online school

Thanks!

or find me @conradwa