This presentation goes in depth into the funnel (and growth loops). It was presented as part of a workshop for Skillful. It covers acquisition, activation, retention, referral, and revenue and goes in depth on examples of each.
2. About me
Growth marketer with 6+ years of experience
Lover of all things marketing (especially SaaS!)
Worked at Autodesk, Kujiale (2021 IPO), now at Houzz
4. Marketers in tech
generally sit
within one of
these teams
Product
1 Creating core value and
optimizing time to value
Product Marketing
2 Positioning the product against
competitors, developing
personas and pricing
Growth
3 Building brand, owning
acquisition and engagement
channels, analytics
5. Andy Johns
Partner, Unusual Ventures
Previously growth leader at Facebook, Twitter, Quora, Wealthfront
Finance owns the flow of
cash in and out of a
company. Growth owns the
flow of customers in and
out of a product.
Source
6. Chamath Palihapitiya
SPAC King, Founder of Social Capital
Previously growth leader at Facebook
How do you get people in the front door?
How do you get them to an aha moment as
quickly as possible?
How do you deliver core product value as
often as possible?
Three most difficult problems any
consumer product has to deal with:
1.
2.
3.
Source
7. Growth marketers
work across the
whole customer
journey
Acquisition
Create and capture demand
Activation
Get to an aha moment
Retention
Continued engagement
Revenue
Monetize
Referral
Tell others
9. How do customers find you?
CHANNELS
Family and friends
Referrals
Email
Customer community
Watercooler communities
Reseller/Partners
Search engine optimization/content
Outbound
Search engine marketing
Online advertising
Offline advertising
Events
Podcasts
EXPLANATION
People you know
Word of mouth and referral programs
Welcome emails, onboarding emails, campaigns
Slack channels, Facebook groups
ProductHunt, HackerNews, Reddit, vertical specific communities
Third party integrations, resellers, affiliates
Keyword optimized content
Sales team
Paid search
Targeted ads across web properties
Out of home advertising like billboards
Trade shows and offline events
Hosting a podcast
10. Channels come and go... what works today may not work tomorrow
Source
11. Start-ups don't need every channel to work for
them, but if they can't get one to work, they fail
Justin Kan
Founder of Socialcam (acq. by Autodesk), Twitch (acq. by
Amazon) and Atrium (failed)
12. Case study: Zapier is an automation company. They help
people to seamlessly connect web apps.
13. Case study:
People are already searching for integrations. Just need to build landing pages for the integrations
and continue expanding their app library.
Source
14. Case study:
New app
partners
New integrations
and landing
pages
SEO drives
new users
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This demonstrates the concept of a growth loop.
16. When a user understands your
core product value.
Uber
DoorDash
Notion
Canva
Hinge
First ride taken
First meal ordered
First page created
Editing a photo
First conversation
Company Aha moment
17. Many ways to activate users
Homepage/landing page
messaging and creative
New user product
experience
Email, SMS, push
nurture flows
18. Case study:
Twitter is a social networking site
with the mission to give everyone
the power to create and share ideas
and information instantly, without
barriers.
Imagine joining a social network and
having no connections, followers, and
a blank feed. It'd be hard to
understand the value of it.
Source
19. Case study: Follow 5 people in onboarding through
suggestions. Now when they onboard into the
platform, their feed is filled with content.
21. Retention is the ability
of a company to retain
its customers over a
given period of time
22. Retention is the most important
strategy related to growth
It's 5 to 25 times more expensive to acquire a
new customer than it is to retain an existing one.
5% lift in retention increases profits by 25-95%.
Source
23. Tom Tunguz
VC, Redpoint
Churn is a limiting factor on the business. Like
fiction, at some scale, churn will prevent the
business from growing. To maintain the
subscription revenue from the existing customer
base requires ever greater mountains of cash.
A $20 million ARR business losing 50% of its
customers every year will have to replace $10
million worth of customers each year to achieve
0% growth. Assuming 18 month payback, that’s
$15M in sales and marketing spend. That means
the business will be fundraising constantly.
Source
24. Higher retention rates leads to higher lifetime value, acquisition
budgets, virality, and lower payback periods
Source
26. Case study:
SketchBook is a digital sketching
application for creative artists.
Goal was to drive repeat
usage, which would improve
retention rate.
32. Case study:
The Economist is a longstanding digital
newspaper that focuses on current affairs,
international business, politics, and
technology.
The economist used
price anchoring to get
people to buy their
preferred subscription.
Book source
34. Case study:
Dan Ariely ran this variant by 100 different MIT students
An inferior choice makes a similar but superior choice
look better even when other options are cheaper.
36. When people love
your product,
they'll refer
others.
Growth marketers
create referral
programs to
incentivize this.
37. Case study:
Robinhood is a stock trading app that aims
to democratize finance for all.
Double sided reward - referrer and referee
Like playing the lottery - get up to a $500 stock
80% of new accounts come organically
Acquisition cost payback period improved from 13
months in 2019 to now <5 months in 2020
Robinhood's referral program:
39. Full funnel view Run experiments
Optimize time to value Many different functions
Work across and think about
the entire funnel
Come up with ideas, run tests
to validate them
Figure out how to connect user
to value as soon as possible
Can work across different
functions, depending on the
size of the company
Summary
40. I'm leading a Skillful sprint!
how to pick the right acquisition channel for the business
how to break down competitor strategies to inform your own
how to think like a growth marketer
If you want to learn:
Join me :)