Growth

Alex Schultz gives an overview of growth in the business.  Everyone nowadays talks about growth, growth hacking or growth marketing.

Retention is the most important thing for growth. You need to look for all of your users who have been on your product one day. What percentage of them are monthly active. Retention comes from having a great idea and a great product to back up that idea, and great product market fit. Startups should not have growth teams. The whole company should be the growth team and the CEO should be the head of growth. You need someone to set a North star for you about where the company wants to go. For example, Mark Zuckerberg put out monthly active users. WhatsApp published send numbers. In  Airbnb, they talk about ‘nights booked’ they always benchmark how many nights booked they have compared to the largest hotel chains in the world. They have at each of these companies, a different north star. The north star doesn’t have to be the number of active users for every different vertical. For eBay, it was gross merchandise volume. However, when you are operating for growth it is critical that you have that North star.

The magic moment that gets people hooked on your service. On Facebook The magic moment as simple as when you see the first picture of one of your friends on Facebook, you go ‘Oh my God, this is what this site is about!’ getting people to 10 friends in 14 days; that is why we focus on this metric.  The number one most important thing in a social media site is connecting to your friends, because without that, there was completely empty newsfeed, and clearly you’re not going to come back. When you think about Airbnb or eBay, it’s about finding that unique item, that you really really cared about and want to get it. Like when you see that collectible that you are missing, that is the real magic moment on eBay. When you look on Airbnb and you find that first listing, that cool house you can stay in, that’s a magic moment. The magic moment can increase the percentage of retention.

These are 3 tacticcs

• Virality,
•  SEO, 
• ESPN,
• SEM,
• Affiliates/referral programs.

The first, virality is payload – so how many people can you hit with any given viral blast. Second, is conversion rate, and third is frequency. This gives you a fundamental idea of how viral a product is. There’s a great book by Adam L. Penenberg called the Viral Loop that goes through a bunch of case studies of companies that have grown through viral marketing. Hotmail is the example of viral marketing. The interesting thing was that it meant that the payload was low: You email one person at a time, you’re not necessarily going to have a big payload. The frequency is high though, because you’re emailing the same people over and over. The conversion rate was also really high because people didn’t like being tied to their ISP email.

In SEO, there are three things you need to think about.

• keyword research – Research consists of, what do people search for that’s related to your site. There are many great tools but the best one is Google AdWords keyword planner tool.
• Links – The most important thing is to get valuable links from high authority websites for you to rank in Google.
• XML sitemaps -Making sure you have the right headers; it’s all covered really well online for you.

Emails today aren’t actual, WhatsApp, SMS, SnapChat, Facebook are popular nowadays. If you’re targeting an older audience, email is still pretty successful. You should be get your email, SMS, or Push Notification delivered. The most effective email you can do is notifications.

Everyone should believe in opportunities, work really-really hard and execute fast. Growth is optional.