Date post: | 24-Jan-2017 |
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Internet |
Upload: | conrad-wadowski |
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Minimum Viable Tests to 2X Your Growth (without Paid or Sales)
@conradwa
Is it possible to progress in a smallish, but growing market
with 20+ competitors?
Teachable MRR curve
Yep…
$3M+ ARR, without paid or sales.
Your situation will be different.
…your product, market, contract value, messaging,
sales process, resources, business model, etc. is unique.
And it’s all changing…
What this means is most supposed “expert” advice is
probably bullshit.
@conradwa
Here’s what’s worked for me when experimenting with
product-led growth…
Co-Founder & Advisor
3 years growth consulting
An email list of 17,000 founders and practitioners.
Built a repeatable growth machine through 1M users and $3M ARR.
Right now, I’m bringing together thoughts on product-led growth on: http://growhack.com before
launching my next product in 2017.
Repeatable growth happens when you have a core metric and a model.
That’s step 1
Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 Step 4 Step 5
We started starting at
Weekly Active User (WAU) as our initial value
metric in product development.
Although the product was still
buggy, users surveyed said it
was a “must have…”
Which is when we transitioned to Monthly Recurring Revenue
(MRR) as core metric.
For the next year, we hit an aggressive 20%+ MRR MoM
growth (net of churn).
Actually it was more like 30-40% MoM, but shut down all growth
activities in December and January due to support overload.
MRR works for us because it took into account all parts of our
business like churn and retention.
Your metric is likely different. Not an easy answer, so it’s
okay to spend time thinking it through.
Find yours, then make all decisions from the context of what will move that north star
number 20% every month.
Step 2: have good ideas and prioritize them.
Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 Step 4 Step 5
Early on, you care mostly about prioritizing for impact and effort.
Pop Quiz: Where will a growth experiment have the most impact?
The deeper it is in your funnel
Step 3 is about actually running tests, quickly.
Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 Step 4 Step 5
Fun Fact: most of your experiments will
probably fail.
To improve your odds of success, increase the rate
and quality of your growth experiments.
One great way to do this?
Run smaller growth experiments.
Acquisition Experiment
We found out that a post Noah Kagan did within his Facebook group led to 40
Teachable sign ups.
So we guest blogged with SumoMe.
And spent time creating a deal with AppSumo
Activation Experiment
Should we spend 3 weeks creating an email automation
sequence?
Instead, we started with a 7-day email sequence that took two
days to implement.
From this we learned there were many use cases for Teachable.
So we tested a survey after sign up to segment
users.
And tailored messaging to each group that would significantly
improve our onboarding.
Referral Experiment
Each referral improvement is a multiplier on
your funnel.
To test our referral program, we just asked for users to email their
audiences.
When that seemed to work…
We co-hosted one webinar with user Mariah Coz generated
$100,000 which we split. Mariah’s now trained hundreds of
Teachable users.
Practical takeaways in running minimum viable tests
It’s rare that any test should go longer than 1 month.
I’m personally skeptical of any test longer than 3-7 days.
My challenge to you is: When you’re looking at your list of growth experiments to help, how can you
launch each in 1 day?
Then over time and you bring
on more resources you can focus on
larger experiments.
Notorious projects that fit this category include:
• Site redesigns • Metrics overhauls • Marketing automation builds
What would happen if we failed with an experiment?
I created an email course called
profitable course idea designed to
improve engagement.
The 6-email course averaged 60% open rates which was great
but…
The challenge is we just transitioned to an MRR goal…
…but I didn’t build for a process to upsell was tacked on later
and conversion to our new MRR goal was low :(
So we tested sending
users who’d joined to a webinar.
The webinar was a small test. It was a simple product demo, and took almost no
time to prepare for.
But yet, our attendee to paid conversion was
~10% on our first demo. Woah..
Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 Step 4 Step 5
Optimize and THEN figure out how to automate.
Today, we convert 30% of anyone who attends a Teachable
webinar.
Then we turned THAT content and optimized it for SEO on our
blog…
Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 Step 4 Step 5
And automation you ask?
We now have a team to run webinars with our Head of Growth Andrew
Guttormsen leading up the effort. We also our own webinar software on top of
YouTube and hired a full team to run them.
We took this to the next step with the Teachable Summit, which is a series of 7 live online events that brought an audience of 20,000
people and generates $250k/event.
How much time are you spending on your growth tests?