Kieran Flanagan - VP Marketing, Hubspot at SaaStock on Tour, London, March 2018

2. Did you know?

3. Over 1.35 million tech startups launch annually!

4. If a software company
grows at 20% annually,
it has a 92% chance of
ceasing to exist within
a few years.

5. Competition for new
users is fierce.

6. And that competition
is increasingly being
controlled by a small
set of algorithms.

7. Facebook now has more monthly
active users than the internet had in
2010.

8. Changes made to
improve their user
experience impact
others growth.

9. Google’s algorithm is updated
hundreds of times a year.

10. One in four searches
now contains a
featured snippet; those
snippets decrease
traffic to websites
listed on the first page
of Google results by up
to 30%.

11. Less channel + More competition =
Channel Saturation

12. Our competitors
are also getting
smarter, faster,
and have better
tools.
Source: http://bit.ly/2tdBiTu
@andrewchen

13. The bar to growth is getting higher

14. The future of growth belongs to
product-driven companies.

15. At HubSpot, over the past 24 months, we've made
freemium an integral part of our go-to-market.
CRM Free
FreePaid
Marketing Hub Sales Hub Customer Hub

17. Phase 1
Product/Market fit
Goal: Product retention flattens &
NPS is positive
Phase 2
Product/Channel fit
Goal: Find 1-2 scalable and quality
acquisition channels
35% Activate 3% Upgrade
8% Activate 1% Upgrade
Phase 3
MRR + NPS
Goal: Paying teams with high NPS
$50k MRR NPS = 40
$50k MRR NPS = 3

18. Products are built
to fit with
channels.
Channels do not
mold to products.
Source: http://bit.ly/2tW8oVM
@bbalfour

19. How can your product
attract new customers
by making the
algorithms happy 

20. RapGenius was not the first website to
publish hip-hop lyrics, so how did they
manage to grow so fast and become
the third largest lyric site on the
internet.

21. Their product allowed users to add comments to
the lyrics of their favorite rap song.

22. Helping them to dominate Google

23. Google is now one of
their biggest
competitors.

24. 0
5000
10000
15000
20000
25000
30000
35000
40000
2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017
SearchVolume Rap Lyrics Search Volume
But, people are searching for their product!

25. What if the number of people directly searching for
your product isn't enough to sustain your growth.

26. Get Creative

27. PandaDoc provides
users with all-in-one
document management
software

28. Oh, just Google taking over the software
space

29. PandaDoc added free business templates to their product
so they could generate sustainable demand from Google, in
a space where their competitors weren't active.

30. And those templates have created a LOT of
organic traffic from Google that signs up directly for
their product.

31. Providing more opportunities
to scale that tactic

32. Zapier have a product
that allows one app to
connect to others.

33. R
A
N
K
S
1
They dominate Google
by creatively listing
those apps under
categories that people
are searching for.
Keyword -> 'best note taking app’
Keyword -> ‘cloud convert review’
Keyword -> ‘how to use google sheets’

34. Even when not ranked
first, they're able to
dominate the first page
of Google through
structured data.

35. Integrations can also be
used to attract people
from other popular
platforms.

36. A lot of Pinterest's early
growth came from their
integration with Facebook,
helping more of their
content to appear in
Facebook users
newsfeeds.

37. Products like Grammarly and Loom have grown
through integrations with popular apps.
400k+ teams6.9 million DAU’s

38. But, product-driven companies aren’t just reliant on
other platforms for growth.

39. ->> Connect with me on LinkedIn  <<-

40. Oh, hello Grammarly 

41. At this point of a presentation on 'product growth,' I
have to bring up the obligatory examples of Dropbox
and Slack.
9 million WAUs500 million registered users

42. They're obviously outliers.

43. But virality can help to grow a SaaS business over
the long-term for businesses with user facing
features.

44. EchoSign started to see the impact of their low viral
coefficient in year 3 when their customer base had
grown large enough.
“But it’s no short term magic
card. Epic in the long run, but
potentially immaterial in the early
days. Just plan around that for your
so-called “viral” SaaS app.”
https://www.saastr.com/the-low-viral-coefficient-of-saas-and-why-it-thats-just-fine/
@jasonlk

45. We always look to both
the short-term and long-
term when prioritizing
acquisition.

46. You can also incentivize word of mouth through
referral mechanisms.

47. Loom incentivize users to refer two friends in order to gain
access to limited features.

49. For product-driven companies each user who signs
up for their free products is valuable.

50. For product-driven companies each user who signs
up for their free products is valuable.
They use a north star metric to measure
sustainable growth based on value.

51. For product-driven companies each user who signs
up for their free products is valuable.
They use a north star metric to measure sustainable
growth based on value.
For example, at HubSpot it’s weekly active
teams, at Facebook it’s daily active users, at
Lyft it’s weekly rides.

52. The growth of WATs is
a long-term goal. It's an
output metric and is a
lagging indicator of
success.

53. We break the output
metric into inputs. These
make it easier to run
experiments and see
immediate success or
failure.

54. Output MetricInputsInputs
WATS
Import
Data
Close
Deal
Gmail
Sync
Import
Tutorials
Email
Templates
Booked
Meeting
https://www.reforge.com/blog/north-star-metric-growth

55. Airtable rewards users for taking high-value actions, which
*probably* are inputs to their primary output metric.

56. But, you need to focus on more than NSM. We also focus a lot
of time and energy on monetization.

57. At HubSpot, we spent a lot
of time and energy
optimizing our product
qualified lead playbook.
Example data I mocked up
Try before you buy works
best

58. We categorized them into different buckets and found the best
opportunities to make an immediate impact.
Example data I mocked up

59. A hand raise PQL experiment for users who
previously used a spreadsheet as their CRM. It
generated a lot of demand and became a
popular upgrade point.
We initially focused on hand raise PQLs because they had
good potential and were easy for us to iterate on.

60. We moved on to run more complex tests. We increased our
CVR by 50% by experimenting with our in-app communication
channels.

61. Allowing users to book time in a sales reps calendar without
leaving the app improved CVR by a further 20%.

62. Using previous learnings, we started to experiment with our
GTM. We added user coach availability in-app.
Coaches can help users with high-value usage
actions. Coaches provide a continual feedback
loop to the product team.

63. That continual feedback loop
should mean we see more
people onboard via touchless
overtime.