*Notes – How to Get Users and Grow

How to Get Users and Grow – Gustaf Alstromer

• Facebook grew rapidly in 2008 by implementing translations into 100’s of languages.
• Facebook grew rapidly again in 2010-2011 to transition to mobile
• Facebook grew rapidly again in 2013-2014. They hit a ceiling with people online so they created internet.org. They got more people online.

Product market fit

• Formula to find product market fit
  • Identify the metrics that represent the value my users get from my product (Airbnb: Bookings/Stays)(Facebook: Active users)
  • Measure the repeat usage of those metrics (Airbnb Ideal frequency: Annual)(Facebook: Daily/Monthly)
  • You can find out if you have strong market/product fit if you graph out your metric over time. It should flatten out over time and not taper off.
  • Customer retention is an important metric. If you aren’t retaining your customers and you focus on growth, you’re just burning through market.
  • It’s important to find product/market fit before you start scaling your customer acquisition growth strategies.

Growth and marketing

• It used to work where there was a product team and a product marketing team
• Things don’t work this way anymore.

Three ways to grow at scale:

1. Product Growth Engineering
   1. Product managers, engineers, data scientist, and sometimes marketers driving growth from technology implementation. They are changing the product to drive higher usage.
   2. Conversation rate optimization – Your product is a funnel. Every step in the funnel has a drop-off
   3. Funnel can start from SEO, SMM, or virality.
   4. Tips for conversion rate optimization
      1. Internationalization (Translation)
      2. Authentication (Signing up and login in – Must be easy and smooth)
      3. Onboarding – What do I experience when I start using your product and how does it move me along towards the value of your product.
      4. Purchase conversion
2. Performance Marketing
   1. Google and Facebook marketing
   2. Engineers should sit with performance marketing
3. Brand Marketing
   1. Hardest to measure the effectiveness
   2. Startup shouldn’t be doing this until later on because it’s hard to measure.

Growth Channels to Explore

Referrals – Engineered Word-of-mouth

• Make it easier to share
• Financial incentive
• Move through referral funnel

1. 1. Weekly Active Users who saw entry point – # of people that saw the referral program.

Paid Marketing

• Shouldn’t do it unless you have revenues
• CAC: Customer Acquisition Cost
• LTV: LifeTime Value of customer
• If CAC is lower than LTV than you have a positive payback
• Attribution
• Channels to manage scale: Facebook, Google, Youtube, Instagram
• Free channels of growth are reducing and paid are increasing

SEO

• SEO still matters
• Google is one of the largest websites in the world
• On-page optimization
  • Every optimization starts with keyword research
  • Which page am I trying to rank for what keyword?
  • SEO Experimentation
• Off-page optimization
  • Who is linking to you? Are they authoritative?
  • People writing about you is a good thing

Growth Teams

• Who works on growth teams?
  • Engineers, data scientists, designers, project managers
• How do you organize the team?
• How do you decide what to work on?
  • Measure potential impact
  • Effort it takes and MVP

Making Decisions

• Experiment and use data. If you don’t use data you’ll either be wrong or lucky.
• A/B test/Counter-factual
• Framework to make decisions through A/B test
• Experimentor view