When I talk to startups about user growth, one topic that comes up is that there’s an overwhelming amount of noise out there on the topic. And on top of that, there’s a huge emphasis on the tactics – little tricks like turning buttons orange, or what cool new Facebook integration to try. These tactics are helpful, but without a broader framework to tie it all together, it can get easy to make 10-20% improvements but lack the approach to really substantially grow a product to the millions of users.
Below is my attempt to do a better job, and describe the mindset and experimentation needed to get to growth.
About a year ago, I participated in a series of interviews that would try and provide an intro text on the subject. The idea is just to provide a basic intro to thinking about user growth from an analytical standpoint. These interviews got turned into a PDF, sponsored by AppSumo, but then sat in my email inbox for months until I had the time to read through and approve it.
I’m happy to make it available here on my blog.
Outline of the PDF:
- Introduction
- Visual to spreadsheet based models
- Your signup flow
- Example of DailyDiary website
- Brainstorming about growth
- Shortening the signup flow of the DailyDiary site
- SaaS example with “TeamShare”
- Convert Now versus Free Trial
- Other random things to try
- Conclusion
