My First Month of Growth
I got to San Francisco a four weeks ago from today. Crazy how quickly time moves. Thus far into my work with Siftery, I have learned a good deal, especially about growth.
Growth
The term has become a cliché in SF, but to me, growth means helping a company grow to both new users/customers and increase those users’/customers’ engagement.
Coming into the summer I knew nothing about how to approach this process of bringing on users, marketing across various channels, testing assumptions and moving quickly. I think I’m finally starting to get the hang of things out here, and, while I have still just touched the surface, for anybody relatively foreign to growth, below are some of the things that have helped me understand how this all works.
It’s actually not that hard
When you look at a company like Facebook, Slack, etc. that have experienced huge strides in their users through different channels, marketing strategies and ‘growth hacks,’ there can be a sense of awe. What I’m realizing, though, is that a lot of their strategies are relatively simple. There is a framework of thought towards growth that can be applied to any business or idea. Of course the channels, target audience, and opportunities for creativity vary across industry and niche, but the gist is the same.
I’ll talk about that framework below, but the most important part is that the product is stellar. No matter how many hacks or how effectively you can market a product, if it’s not an order of magnitude better than anything that exists, the impact that it is going to have will be short lived, no matter how much $, effort and time are spent on growth.
That being said, growth can be used to improve the product. As an example, at Siftery on the Growth team we are constantly talking to our users and learning about how they interact with our platform. In the process of doing that, when a user has a pain point, or a suggestion, those things can be implemented into the product to make for a better experience. The process of building something, getting mass adoption, etc. isn’t what I want to dive into here, but before jumping into growth, it’s worth emphasizing the importance of the product.
Use data
Using data is the other thing that I have realized is so special. We can send out an email campaign with two versions to 1000 potential users and see exactly how many of them open the email, click on the link, and subsequently sign up as users. Then we can go back to the drawing board, alter the messaging in the email and narrow down on the best approach. Being able to make decisions based on data is incredibly important because we don’t have to guess. We can see exactly what’s working and what isn’t.
This is part of what makes it so fun to be around today. Ten years ago, they didn’t have the tools to collect information in real time the same way.
There’s this idea in a video from Alex Schultz who does growth at Facebook that I link to below that stuck out to me regarding data. Instead of sitting down for an hour to determine the best course of action between two ideas, you can just test them both and see what happens. If you have limited resources and time that might be a little trickier, but I’d bet in most cases there’s still a way to test things in small and cheap batches.
Learning from others
How I Grew Mint.com from Zero to 1 Million Users
Peek inside Intercom’s Multi-million Dollar SaaS Growth Strategy
How to Get Users and Grow
One of the biggest things I realized is that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. There are some amazing companies (in The Bay and out of it) that have grown really quickly through some brilliant growth strategies. Instead of starting at square one, learning about these companies and their strategies can give a strong baseline understanding. Above are two articles that have great information about growth. Then there’s the video I mentioned above by Alex Schultz who breaks down the basics of growth. Then I included a link to Mattermark. I’m subscribed to their newsletter and they frequently send out great ideas, stories and info.
If you’re interested in learning a lot about this stuff, I’d highly recommend the two articles and the video. Well worth it.
Nevertheless, I’ll touch on a few ideas out of these articles that I found notable.
First, Schultz breaks down growth into four categories, in order.
- Channel
- Targeting
- Creative
- Conversion
The channel is the way in which you reach people. He talks about SEO, Search Engine Marketing, Email/text/notifications/physical mail, onsite merchandising, paid and organic social. Those are the main channels that breakdown into specific channels (like Facebook, keyword SEO, etc), and it’s basically many ways to reach people. The channels we use are most important.
Then he talks about targeting. We have to see who our target audience is and which channels we need to use to reach them.
Then there’s creative, which is exactly how it sounds. A great example is Airbnb’s Obama-O and Captain McCain story. Typically creative is 3rd in importance because the traditional methods work well. If there’s an amazing creative idea, though, it can become more of a priority.
The last place Schultz looks is conversion. We picked our channel and got someone in our target audience to the site. Now how do we get them to sign up? A lot of that comes from subtle changes in the words we use. Calls to Action and so on. Understanding psychology (and behavioral econ I personally think) can help make those choices, but a lot of that is also practice, seeing how others do it, and testing.
In practice
When you put all this together, you begin to understand, as I am, how companies grow. The people that are good at this get lots of recognition and make huge impacts for a company. While the framework is relatively easy to understand, having a great understanding of how the channels, like SEO, work can be much more challenging. Nevertheless, I have begun to realize that spending time reading and talking/listening to people who are good at this stuff can accelerate the speed at which I learn about growth.
I find this fascinating. At its core, the most important thing is the product, but if there’s a great product, taking it from that stage to a company with users is in reach.
Thank for reading.
Year 1, Article 8.
Cheers :)
N.B.A
If you ever want to discuss this more or get in touch, don’t hesitate to reach out. My email is noadelstein@gmail.com
