Mobile Growth Hacking - How to Grow Your Mobile App

@morganb growthhackers.com 1
Building a Mobile Growth Engine
February 18, 2015

Growth is Everything

Growth Is Everything
Gabriel Weinberg – 
DuckDuckGo
“Most startups don’t fail at building a
product.They fail at acquiring customers.”

Growth Is Everything
McKinsey & Co. studied 3,000 software companies with different
growth rates
High-growth companies deliver 5x greater returns than medium
growth companies
Supergrowers (CAGR > 60% at $100m mark) were 8x more
likely to reach $1B
Increase in growth rates drive 2x the market capitalization as
margin reduction in companies < $4B
No correlation between cost & growth rates

About Me
•15 year startup growth veteran
•Wrote Startup Growth Engines with Sean Ellis
•My hobby is studying fast growing companies

The Startup Pyramid
Great product is the table stakes for growth
Product/market ﬁt determines your
opportunity
Don’t try to scale until you have solid
retention metrics and/or qualitative feedback
Product/Market Fit
Stack the Odds
Grow
Source: Sean Ellis

@stuartkhall
•Maker of 7 Minute Workout
•2.3 million downloads
•$72k in proﬁt

Get the Model Right
Penny Gap is even greater in mobile
Top downloaded apps are all free with in-app
purchases (except for Minecraft)
Stuart Hall’s 7 Minute Workout saw a 3x
revenue bump going from paid to IAP

Growth is a Process
ideas
prioritize
test
analyze
optimize

Cadence = Growth

Ideas
watch your users
Path found a 50x increase in DAU simply
by watching the behavior of their users in
the app and then opening up the app to
other services.
get the team involved
Growth is a team sport. Don’t try to
figure out growth on your own. Growth
is inclusive. Get everyone onboard and
ideating.
feedback
User feedback can be critical to finding
the next ideas for your application. Read
reviews, survey via email, do lots of
customer development.
find your magic number
Understand what actions turn users into
long-term retained and profitable users.
Drive new users toward those behaviors.

Ideas
Ideate across all aspects of funnel:AARRR
Get full team involved in “unbridled ideation”
Create hypothesis behind the idea
Keep full pipeline — ideas are fuel for growth

Prioritize
impact. conﬁdence. ease.

Test Constantly
Brian Balfour –  
Hubspot
The Sidekick growth team has run 1015
experiments since June 2014 and our
experiment throughput is accelerating. Each
experiment produces learnings

Analyze
Discover the why can lead to breakthroughs in growth
HotelTonight found poor data connections drove
conversion rates UP.
WHY?

Optimize
Find the Golden Motion / Magic Number
Optimize experience to get users to those milestones
Continually back test to ensure assumptions hold

Learning Drives Growth
Tamara Steffans – 
Accompli
“Our whole team understands what app
store optimization is, what the right
keywords are, what has worked for us and
what hasn’t. No matter what their role,
they’re invested in understanding these
strategies themselves.”

Mobile Growth

Mobile Growth Stack
Andy Carvell – 
SoundCloud

Organic Mobile Growth
Organic Levers
ASO
Mobile SEO
Press
Partnerships
Email
Inﬂection Points
Localization
Virality

ASO - HowVisible areYou Really?

ASO - Understand the System
bitly.com/asocheatsheet
App Name, Keywords, Icon, Screenshots, Updates, Rating
Search phrases ≠ keywords
Download velocity
More: https://growthhackers.com/slides/mobile-growth-best-strategies-tools-tactics/ & 
http://www.slideshare.net/kolinko/appcodes-app-store-marketing-toolbox-11535165

ASO - Driving Positive Reviews
Don’t nag for reviews - ask at golden moments
Run down negative reviews and turn around
Use Helpshift / Apptentive to address customer service issues
Ask for reviews after great CS experiences
https://medium.com/circa/the-right-way-to-ask-users-to-review-your-app-9a32fd604fca

Mobile SEO
Don’t forget mobile web trafﬁc
Optimize for high-intent searches
Test calls to action
Lower CPI

Virality - User Referral Programs
Integrate with existing sharing behaviors (FB,Twitter, etc.)
Create dynamic sharing images
Tap the address book
Personalize the loop

Virality - User Referral Programs
Test where the ‘ask’ occurs
Optimize touchpoints
Measure everything
http://apptimize.com/blog/2014/05/conversion-funnels/

Virality - Net Promoters
28
On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to refer your friends?
1
Detractors Neutral Promoters
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 100
Promoters Detractors—
Total
= NPS

Virality - Net Promoter Score
Nilan Peiris – 
Transferwise
“Every app on your phone has an insanely
high NPS.”
More: https://growthhackers.com/slides/slides-nps-driven-growth-by-nilan-peiris/

Net Promoter Works Both Ways

Virality - One to Many
From one-to-one to one-to-many
Brand ambassadors can be powerful acquisition source
Need to balance acquisition with quality
More: fusion.net/story/36462/lyft-brand-ambassadors-made-bank/

Inﬂection Points
Be a good ecosystem partner
Leverage short-term windows for boosts in growth
Operating system launches
Newsjacking

Double Down

Relentless ExecutionThrough Loop
ideas
prioritize
test
analyze
optimize

HelpfulTools
ASO
AppAnnie, SenorTower, AppTweak,
Helpshit,Apptentive, StoreMaven,
AppCodes, MobileAction.co
Virality / Personalization
Branch.io,Yozio
Testing
Leanplum,Apptimize, Optimizely,
TestFlight, Diawi, LookBack.io
Analytics
Branch.io,Yozio, Looker, Mixpanel,  
Google Analytics

ThankYou!

Get in touch
daily growth newsletter:
http://morganbrown.co
twitter.com/morganb
linkedin.com/in/morganb
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