Let’s play a game.

I got on the London Underground this week and saw this ad - it resonated with me.

I’ve included it below but I’ve blurred out the product.

Now guess:

1. What company are they referring to?

2. What product are they selling?

Answers at the bottom of the email…

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This ad resonated because:

They found a common enemy and aimed at it.

Specifically: a large multi-national that has influenced the way we shop for certain items and the behaviours around it.

These are things that are synonymous with pain for anyone who has shopped there before.

Even though they mischaracterise their Swedish meatballs (which are sensational), the point hits home.

So if you’ve felt this pain before, you really felt it.

When you market like this, you don’t need exotic product descriptions or the most beautiful language.

You just need to be the opposite of the problem.

When you fight an enemy, your message connects harder.

Loom made their enemy meetings and long-written emails.

DuckDuckGo picked a fight with Google and their endless tracking.

Wise wanted a scrap with banks over hidden fees and started running around London naked to prove they were serious.

Creating an enemy can be hard.

Especially if you’re a nice person who enjoys good vibes and avoids confrontation.

Generally, I don’t like to pick fights with people either. (Unless we’re playing sports or any type of game. Then I’ll argue until I win)

So there are a couple of frameworks I use to make sure my product/marketing has an enemy.

One is strategic.

One is tactical.

1. Start with Unlike

For core strategic elements of your business, pit yourself against your enemy or enemies.

It’s simple, open a document and for different areas of your business, start each sentence with unlike.

Target audience

Unlike X, we serve…

Problem

Unlike X, we focus on…

Features

Unlike X, we have… 

And so on. You can do this with values, pricing, team and more.

After you do that exercise, you can put the result straight onto your website.

I usually put it into the FAQs. I did it last week when I soft-launched a new website for a service around customer acquisition I’ve been working on for a while.

Otherwise, use it as a living document that outlines how you’re different.

2. Leverage the PAS Copywriting Framework

This is one of my favourite ways to structure copy:

• Problem/Pain (P)- Outline the main issue your audience is having

• Agitate (A) - Help the reader understand the realities of not fixing this problem/pain.

• Solution (S)- Position your product as the relief to their problem/pain.

In a clever way, like the ad above did.

So folks, be brave - pick your enemy and be prepared to fight it.

And for those looking for answers:

The answer was:

1. IKEA (of course)

2. Furniture / Homeware

Full Ad:

Bravo to Vinterior.

At Christmas, I offered a free 30-minute strategy call to you all. 7 of you took up the offer.

Here’s what, Jacob, one of the 7 and co-founder of a fitness app, said about our call:

I genuinely love taking calls with founders like these:

They ask good questions. They listen. They action. They update on progress.

I’ll happily give up time in my day to speak to people like this.

So if you’re a founder like this, I’ve left some time in my calendar over the next two weeks.

Cheers,

Theo

First impressions matter.

In life, yes. With software products, hell yes.

Users rarely give you a second chance if their first interaction with you was negative.

That’s why activation (and activation rate) is one of the most important metrics in the user journey.

Most people define Activation as the "aha moment" for the product. i.e. when a user finally gets it and they get some value in your product.

Improving it can have a massive impact on retention, revenue and referrals.

I recently did a workshop for Amazon AWS for Startups on Activation where I outlined my framework for improving this key metric.

I’m sharing it with you today, as well as access to the 60-minute training (free).

Let’s get into it:

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When I work with teams, I use a simple framework to increase activation:

1. Understanding user goals and value

2. Articulating that value

3. Getting users to value by:

   1. Reducing friction

   2. Increasing Motivation

   3. Personalising the experience

4. Helping the user to create habits around the value

Doing these steps provides a strong strategic footing to improve activation.

Here’s a quick low down on what an activation rate is:

Now here’s why activation matters so much:

Tech companies lose 69% of their users after the first week.

Fintechs lose 73% of their users in the first week. (Source: Mixpanel)

The first week is critical.

Most of your churn happens during this period. This is because most users haven’t even activated.

If you can’t ‘activate’ these users, you’ll never get them to your ultimate business goal: revenue. 

So if you’re not laser-focused on helping new users reach their goals within the first 7 days, you’re likely leaving money on the table.

Here’s my approach to improving activation:

1) Understand User Goals and Value

You need to understand what users want to achieve and what their goals are.

You need to know what they define as value.

Then you can tailor your product to get them to that value. Here’s how you can learn this:

You can do this from basic customer research:

• Talking to users

• Surveys

• Analysing competitor reviews

Then you want to ask yourself questions such as:

• What was the context that brought them to you?

• What was the barrier they had before?

• What goals do they want to achieve?

• What is their desired outcome?

2) Articulating Value

You need a clear value proposition that shows how your product helps users to achieve a goal.

Explain how your product solves customers’ problems or makes their life better.

Create messaging that outlines specific benefits the customer cares about.

3) Getting Users to Value

“The first mile of a product's user experience needs to be obsessively crafted to make new users succeed.” Scott Belsky - Founder of Behance.

It’s all about your user onboarding. You need to guide users to the value in your onboarding flow.

I love testing out new prdocust and checking out their user onboarding flows. You can read some of my onboarding breakdowns here. Or hire me to run an onboarding audit for you.

You need to be working to get users to the best of your product quickly, but with as much necessary context as possible.

You can do this by:

i) Reducing Friction

The user has decided to sign up for your product.

They're excited.

Don't bore them with unnecessary questions.

Only ask what you need so they get to the product faster. Adding some friction is fine. (Actually, I recommend it in some cases)

But reducing friction isn’t enough. You need to also:

ii) Increase Motivation

To get a user to complete a product action or upgrade, you need to motivate them.

You must excite or articulate value first.

Otherwise, users won't take the next step.

Kajabi increases motivation by using:

• Clear positioning

• Different types of social proof (Customer + revenue numbers, testimonials, imagery of the customer)

• Visual aspects of the product

• Messaging that aligns themselves with the audience

• A money-back guarantee to overcome objections

Keep motivating users throughout the onboarding journey.

iii) Personalising the experience

Your goal is to find out what users want to achieve.

Then help them get there.

Personalisation can help in a big way. One-size fits all doesn’t work well - especially in an era of AI.

So during onboarding, ask about specific jobs to be done. (If you have insights from the earlier customer research great, you can ask better questions around this.)

This helps you to tailor the user experience based on the desired outcome.

One of my favourite approaches to this is using templates based on answers they gave.

Miro does this beautifully:

Doing that you can get users to start engaging with the product quickly but in the right way.

Then you want to:

4) Help users create a habit around the value

Get your users trained on key actions you want them to do regularly.

Get them ingrained on using the tool so it becomes hard to leave. This leads to longer term retention and maybe they stick around past the first week.

You want to be fully within their workflow.

If you build this habit, you're more likely to come back.

Tip: Read Hooked

Onboarding, Engagement and summary emails are a great way to do this.

Applying this framework will take you far.

But to improve it over time, you need to measure and analyse performance. To do this, you need to use product analytic tools such as Amplitude, Mixpanel or June.so.

Create funnels and look out for drop-off. Then it’s about running experiments and optimising parts the weakest parts of the customer journey.

You can watch the activation workshop here.

And get my free onboarding checklist here.

When you’re ready, here’s I can help you grow:

Get the Startup Growth Roadmap - my playbook of 25+ templates that's helped 300+ founders and marketers to scale their startups.

Hire me to audit your onboarding flow.

Book a free 30 min strategy session to solve your most pressing marketing challenges

Cheers,

Theo

The best marketers think like investors.

They don’t just try a channel. They invest in a channel.

If they see returns, they invest more.

Their North Star is usually Return on Investment. They understand that each investment they make into a channel has a cost.

To make sure you pick the right marketing channel in 2024, think like an investor.

Here’s how:

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Inflection.io has another gem, this time an Ultimate Guide to PLG Communication which is a huge 70-page guide on all things PLG email.

It's full of examples on everything from onboarding to adoption to expansion.

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Acquisition Channels

There are 4 main ways to get traffic and awareness of your product.

Most fall under these categories:

1. Content

2. Virality

3. Sales

4. Performance Marketing

Main Acquisition channels

Some are better suited for companies than others.

Now we are clear on this, here’s how to apply the mindset of an investor to picking a channel:

1. Forecast Potential Outcomes

The best investors look at historical performance to help inform what to invest in going forward.

Whilst past performance doesn’t guarantee future results, it’s a great indicator.

You should do the same to think through your marketing channels.

If you can’t hit your goals on a spreadsheet, you definitely won’t in real life.

You need to at least model out different possible scenarios.

Think of best case, medium case and worse case scenarios. Plan accordingly.

Here is a Notion doc I use to model out different potential channels. Feel free to use and model out different scenarios.

Start with:

Benchmark data

You can get benchmark data on Conversion rates, Growth rates, Activation and more.

This data can help you know where you stand in the market.

It’s a good start, but it can be a little misleading as it’s not specific to your product. So focus on getting your own historical data.

Your historical data

This is the best type of data for your model.

Look back at last year. Do you have accurate data to fill out your model?

If you don’t, part of your focus should be on running short, time-bound experiments to get this data.

2. Move with conviction

Be very confident in decisions and small channels you invest in Vs investing in channels you are unsure about.

Pause ones that don’t see results quickly. Reallocate the budget into ones that do.

To do this, ask yourself questions:

• What channels or marketing activities had the highest return on Investment?

• What activities showed promise and positive signals?

• Where did we spend the most time with the lowest returns?

Rule of thumb: If you can pause a marketing channel or activity and there would be near 0 impact on revenue, traffic or conversion, stop working on it.

3. Remove emotion

Emotion causes people to buy high and sell low.

It causes us to stop running paid ads because of one week of bad performance.

It causes us to persist with creating blog content no-reads.

Remove emotion from your decision-making.

Don’t discard a channel because of a short-term blip in performance.

And you don’t have to waste on initiatives that don’t lead to results just because you’ve already invested in them.

4. Invest in one boring channel that compounds

Don’t always try and beat the market.

Often the best move is just to invest in one safe asset that you know will compound over time.

Smart investors tell you to patiently invest in index funds.

Smart marketers tell you to patiently build your email list.

If you keep adding to your email list, you will slowly accumulate a large base of relevant people you can reach out to with offers.

Over time, you won’t have to rely on new marketing channels when your list is big enough.

Nurture your asset.

5. Make small bets on emerging trends

Many of you know that some people are “crushing it on Tiktok” or “Tiktok isn’t just for kids” but most of us haven’t even:

1. Downloaded it

2. Posted on it

3. Ran an ad on it

Tiktok isn’t exactly emerging anymore but many of us haven’t got any Skin in the Game.

You don’t have to go all on new channels all the time - that’s not wise.

But you should allocate a small amount of time into testing emerging channels with a small budget so you understand the platform, nuances and any potential opportunities.

You won’t see exponential gains without any risk.

Finding the right channel isn’t a perfect science - nor is investing. But if you apply the right principles, you can ensure you get better return on investment from the channels you pick.

If you want more help thinking through your marketing channels for 2024, book a call for a free strategy session.

Cheers,

Theo

I usually go long. Today I go short.

Here are some reflections and learnings I’ve had over the past year.

I hope you find reading them as valuable as I found writing them:

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It's full of examples on everything from onboarding to adoption to expansion.

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It’s better to be data-informed vs data-driven. You can miss the bigger picture if you rely purely on data to make your decisions.

The VC funding game is stacked against you. Empower yourself with revenue and traction.

Build distribution and game design into your product from the start.

Adding the right amount of friction is powerful.

Content creation rewards you for being prolific or extremely thoughtful. Most people fail because they are neither.

Too little research and you make poor decisions. Too much and you’re just procrastinating. Do enough research to take the first step.

What you focus your work on is more important than how hard you work.

Taking one day to talk to a few of your customers will save you more time than 99% of productivity apps.

If you resist AI, you are ignoring some of the most valuable parts of the internet and technology.

Think hard about how you position your product. Think harder about what market you position your product in.

If your user experience design is bad, you will lose B2B customers slowly and B2C customers instantly.

Do the things that matter most in the morning.

Principles I’m looking to implement in 2024:

• Use frameworks for thinking clearly

• Be a high-agency person

• Say more with less

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you and your families. 🎄🎅🏾

2023 wasn’t the easiest year for us all. Here’s to a bright 2024.

Cheers,

Theo

P.S. I’d love to put a face to some of the names on my list and say thank you for reading my content this year.

So if you want to connect on a (video) call where I can provide some free guidance on your marketing strategy for 2024, please find a time. I’ve left some spaces open in my calendar for the start of Jan.

No strings attached - hopefully, just pure value.

If you ever wanted to make your product go viral, you’re not alone.

But you are thinking about it the wrong way.

Don’t look for virality and a one-off hit of growth.

Instead, look for a more sustainable to drive word-of-mouth growth.

 Julian Shapiro calls it “Product-led Acquisition”. He defines it as:

Product-led acquisition might also be termed as:

Network effects. Growth Loops. Flywheels. Viral Loops.

Whether you wish to call it, it’s word-of-mouth on steroids.

And to drive this type of growth, you need to engineer it.

Over the past 10+ years, I’ve gone deep on this topic. I’ve worked with several companies where the growth was based around this channel.

I’ve optimised tons of these flows and seen some companies who are best in -class at Product-Led Acquisition.

Here’s 6 ways to make Product-Led Acquisition work for your business:

This newsletter is kindly sponsored by - Inflection.io. A big thanks to them.

My friends over at Inflection.io launched a massive guide about onboarding called the Ultimate Guide to Product Onboarding.

For all my onboarding and product growth enthusiasts, there are tons of tips, examples, and best practices that are really well done.

I’ve already added lots of examples to my swipe file after reading it.

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1) Make users invite other users to achieve an outcome

This is the most common form of product-led acquisition.

It is when users invite others just to use the product.

Here’s the reality though: You need to build it in from the start.

If your product is not “inherently viral”, it’s going to be hard to build this in later.

Don’t worry if you’re product isn’t built like this already - there are other ways to drive product-led acquisition ( I will show you later).

Products that are built like this are buy-one-get-one-free machines that help you scale much faster.

I was once Head of Growth at a shared financial management and bill-splitting app called acasa, which was later acquired.

It was focused on people living in shared homes i.e. people with roommates mates (or flatmates to keep it real British).

Product-led acquisition worked like this:

1. We’d acquire one customer via organic traffic or ads

2. That one user would then invite their housemates to manage their shared costs.

3. One user would bring in at least 1, but usually 2 new users.

This was very powerful for us.

It led to the product becoming a Top 20 finance app in the UK.

The strategy was focused on nailing activation and retention first.

Once we got activation to a strong place, we increased spend on customer acquisition knowing this channel could scale.

A key component was also to optimise the inviting process and inviting email.

Here’s how Loom, a video recording company recently acquired for $975m uses social proof and psychology to get users to share.

For your product, can you make your product more collaborative?

Are there ways to build in invitations from the start?

And can you make it easier to invite and more enticing to an invitee?

2) Make your product public and highly visible

To make your product drive growth, it needs to be visible.

People need to see it and be able to talk about it.

The more public it is, the more it triggers people to take action.

When challenger bank Monzo first launched in 2015, they wanted to stand out.

So they created bright Floral pink cards.

When customers were out spending in public, these cards drew attention.

I was one of those early adopters of Monzo.

I’m not in the American Express Black Card range, so flexing at the bar was usually kept to a minimum.

But for a short period when Monzo was still early, I had serious clout at the bar.

As I would be buying a drink, people in the bar or the bar staff would ask me what my card was.

I would tell them about Monzo and the other features within the product, which likely drove users back to the product.

Word of mouth was a big part of their growth and although it is only 8 years old, Monzo is now the 7th largest bank in the UK worth £4B.

So think about your product, can you make it stand out and make noise?

Can you be bold with your marketing or your messaging?

Boring doesn’t get people talking.

3) Watermark your products

When your product is being used, you need to proudly brand it so others will see it.

Apple understands this.

When you send an email on an iPhone it says, “Sent from an iPhone”.

This branding makes others aware of the iPhone. You have to actively take it off.

I recently worked with a company called Graphy.

They help teams quickly create beautiful interactive graphs and dashboards.

Because most charts and dashboards look so boring, when I share a chart with a client or another team member, they immediately want to know how I made it.

They see the ‘Made with Graphy’ branding and will often sign up and make a chart as a result.

This approach can work so well, that companies will often make this branding a part of the product on free plans.

But to take off the branding, users will have to pay.

So think about ways to brand your product and leave a “watermark”.

Make it easy to remove if it’s in communication like email.

But if you have a SaaS product and it you will get lots of eyeballs or potential users, make taking off the watermark /logo a paid feature.

4) Make the product part of someone’s identity

Reforge, the company that coined the term Growth Loop also created their own powerful growth loop.

(Of course they did)

And this one leverages online identity and status.

Reforge is a high-quality membership and training for growth and product people usually working at leading startups.

Those going through the program are exposed to top-tier educational content.

As a result, companies will look to hire people who have completed it.

Upon completion, people put Reforge in their bios.

Now if you look through Linkedin, you’ll find tons of people with Reforge in their bio similar to “Ex-Oxford, Ex-Google” or whatever credibility signals people use these days.

People will see people they admire on Linkedin with Reforge in their bio.

This encourages people who haven’t done it to want to take the program.

Prestige around Reforge increases.

Reforge drives more acquisition.

And when thinking about your product, can you make your product connect to prestige or a cause that people will align their identity around?

5) Encourage Users to Create Shareable Content 

We live in a social age where lots of our time and attention is spent on social channels.

When our users - sometimes ones with huge audiences - are using our products and sharing them online, this can be a huge growth driver for the product.

I first discovered this in my first role working at an e-commerce site.

The company had a feature where you could take pictures of your home and find products to put into your home from 1000s of online stores. All using a cool 3D technology.

To promote the technology, we allowed people to use the tech to create pictures of ideal virtual homes and share them online.

Users would create their dream homes and make collections on the site.

Big Interior designers would share their work with their audiences - usually on Pinterest - and people would come back to the site to see their collections.

People would also come back to the site to get inspired by other people’s work.

Some people became mini-influencers on the site and built reputations.

So as you build out your product, can you encourage your users to create user-generated content that comes back to your site?

6) Make your product remarkable

There are tons of ways to make your product remarkable. Solve a problem. Great User experience.

But here is an example outside of tech:

One of my favourite books on this network effects and virality is called Contagious by Jonah Berger.

He breaks down the science of going viral and one of the steps is about making the product remarkable.

He says that by making your product, people are way more likely to spread the word about it.

After reading the book, the late Grammy-award artist Nipsey Hussle, came up with a genius plan.

(Note: Nipsey is a top-ten Rapper of all time. Don’t @ me)

When selling his mixtape Crenshaw, he made a bold move that went down in music marketing history.

He sold it for $100.

As part of his “Proud To Pay” movement, he allowed fans to download it for free or to pay $100.

By paying $100, they would get unique benefits like early access and an invitation to a private listening party.

But by pricing it so high, it became a topic of conversation and the album went viral.

Fans who loved his music bought it.

Jay Z bought 100 copies.

The album became more than music.

It represented an artist properly valuing their art and being different.

But Nipsey couldn’t have pulled off such a move if the music wasn’t good.

It’s definitely a great piece of music - but the remarkable marketing of it drove lots of word of mouth.

One final thing on this topic that I think Julian Shapiro articulated well:

I love this take. It really hits home for me.

Most of the experts thinking about network effects or “product-led growth” focus purely B2B SaaS.

I don’t. Over the past 10 years, many of the companies I helped were consumer apps, fintech and marketplaces. Not all of them were B2B SaaS.

I’ve gone really deep on product-led acquisition and love helping companies with this channel.

So if you’re interested in driving more word-of-mouth growth, REPLY to this message and I’ll see how I can help.

When you’re ready, here’s how I can help you grow:

Get the Startup Growth Roadmap - my playbook of 25+ templates that's helped 300+ founders and marketers scale their startups.

Hire me to audit your onboarding flow.

Work with me 1-1 to solve your most pressing marketing challenges and help you set up a high-converting onboarding sequence.

Cheers,

The

The best founders and marketers I know are deep thinkers.

Not because they read Nietzsche and listen to jazz.

Because they think through second-level consequences.

Most founders are great at first-level thinking.

Not so many second-level.

First-level thinking is the initial reaction, the first thing that comes to mind. It's straightforward and focused on immediate outcomes.

Second-level thinking is deeper. It considers the long-term impact and underlying effects.

By applying second-level thinking, you can make better strategic decisions about your business.

In this post, I’m going to share a simple framework to help you make better decisions - especially in the context of growth.

This newsletter is kindly sponsored by - Inflection.io. A big thanks to them.

My friends over at Inflection.io launched a massive guide about onboarding called the Ultimate Guide to Product Onboarding.

For all my onboarding and product growth enthusiasts, there are tons of tips, examples, and best practices that are really well done.

I’ve already added lots of examples to my swipe file after reading it.

Download the guide

When making a decision, you must start with the problem.

We’re going to pick a common issue founders and marketers struggle with:

Problem: Your startup is struggling to grow.

First, you need to think through some ways to solve the problem.

Usually, founders solve this problem in a few ways:

1. Focus on customer acquisition and top-line growth

2. Focus on retention and more efficiency

3. Hire a full-time head of marketing

4. Hire a marketing agency

First-Level Thinking

Here are how founders think through the immediate outcomes of these options:

Customer Acquisition and top-line growth: Focusing on this could mean more spending on paid marketing. This would mean less money to spend on other channels and staff.

Retention and Efficiency: Focusing on this could mean more time optimising the product and less focus on topline growth. There would be fewer new customers but more engaged ones. Possibly a new designer required.

Full-time Head of Marketing: Hiring a Head of Marketing could mean someone focusing on these types of decisions full-time. This would mean allocating budget to making the hire which may mean less money to spend on marketing and product.

Marketing agency: Hiring a marketing agency could mean immediate growth. But it would come at a cost and would likely be focused on paid marketing to get ROI.

But this is only first-level thinking. We need to get deeper to come to a better outcome. We need to ask “And then what”?

In his book, Clear Thinking - which inspired this post, Shane Parrish outlined the Bad Outcome Principle.

When making decisions, we need to think about not if things go well, but if things go poorly also.

So you want to go through all the options and consider:

1. If it goes well

2. If it goes badly

Let’s apply this to our problem:

1) Focus on Customer Acquisition

If it goes well:

• Better top-line numbers of new signups, visits and customers.

• Clear validation and strong positioning in the market

• Investors will be impressed and we will be able to get to the next round of funding.

• Greater brand exposure as more people learn about the brand

If it goes poorly:

• Lower conversion rates because the site isn’t yet optimised

• More users churn because the product isn’t good enough

• There will be an unhealthy reliance on paid ads to keep the growth up

• Savvy investors ask about the unit economics and not just the top-line growth. They question whether it’s a good investment.

After going through this, you may need more information to decide whether to focus on customer acquisition. That’s a good sign - there’s usually more to think about.

So you have a third thing to think about: Any more information required.

Here are some of the questions you may ask to make the best decision.

More information required:

• What are the chances of succeeding on these paid channels?

• Is there a way to run ads sustainably?

• Can you focus on improving churn at the same time?

So thinking through an option, write down:

1. If it goes well

2. If it goes badly

3. More information needed

Do this for each option. We’re going to do this now.

2) Focus on retention and more efficiency

If it goes well:

• A sticky product with an engaged userbase and high lifetime value

• Customers spread the word about the product through their networks, leading to viral growth

• Lower customer acquisition costs and more predictive revenue over time

• Investors see strong sustainable growth and investment potential

If it goes badly:

• Growth is much slower as the focus is on engagement and not growth

• Word-of-mouth growth doesn’t happen as fast as desired

• Takes longer to run experiments and get meaningful data

• Increased resources to invest in product improvement and user experience

More information needed:

• How much slower would growth be if focusing on retention?

• How much data is needed to run experiments?

• What resources would be needed to improve the product?

3) Hire a full-time head of marketing

If it goes well:

• They get the company growing quickly

• They’re hands-on and provide strong leadership

• They help define the strategy and find the right channel to focus on

• Can quickly execute and get results

If it goes badly:

• There’s a large financial commitment which is hard to get out of.

• Their skillset only matches a particular channel so they focus on this vs the one most suitable for the company.

• They’re poor at execution and require further hires to execute for you

More information needed:

• How long will it take to hire a head of marketing?

• What skill sets are available in the market right now?

• What channels do I need a head of marketing to focus on?

• Who else would I need to support my marketing leader?

4) Hire a marketing agency

If it goes well:

• They succeed at growing a channel and the company gets a positive return on investment

• They work as an extension of the team and provide strategic guidance

• They work closely with a senior leader who helps with strategy

If it goes badly:

• They don’t deliver and the results aren’t as good as advertised

• They focus only on one channel and don’t provide any strategic help

• They hand you off to a junior team member to manage your growth

• They don’t build any systems so you become reliant on them.

More information needed:

• Who will be managing my account?

• What steps will be taken to hold them accountable?

• Do they provide strategic help or will the be account passed to junior staff?

• Do they have expertise in more than one area?

There is a less spoken-about 5th option that more experienced founders take.

Usually, it’s because they’ve seen the consequences of making bad decisions and so leverage others to prevent them from making them again.

These founders will nearly always have an advisor or a coach to help them talk through their key decisions.

I might be slightly biased, but I see this as the best option for startups yet to fully build their growth engine:

5) Hire a growth advisor

Immediate outcomes: Hiring a growth advisor could mean working with an experienced leader who helps you to make better decisions. They help you think through your “blindspots” and avoid common mistakes.

If it goes well:

• Sustainable long-term growth as they help you make the right strategic decisions around areas of focus and channels.

• Cost-savings vs hiring a full-time hire or expensive agency can be allocated to marketing or product

• They empower the team and leverage their network to help make the right hire around the execution

• Build foundational systems around growth so the team executes fast and effectively

If it goes badly:

• They’re not as involved in day-to-day execution so the advice might be implemented as quickly

• Become overdependent on external advice and don’t build the right strategic skills in-house.

• Although more cost-effective than a full-time hire, they don’t get tangible results or drive a return on investment

More information needed:

• How much day-to-day oversight would be needed?

• What relevant experience, perspectives and insights do they have that I may need?

• Do they help to have a strong network or will they be able to support me in finding a team?

You should now have a framework to make better decisions and be a better strategic thinker - especially around growth.

You may still need some help to think through some of your next steps.

So if you’ve gone through this and felt like hiring a Growth Advisor might be a good option for you, let’s talk.

I have a couple of spaces for Q1 2024, where I want to work closely with a few teams to help take them from startup to scaleup in 2024.

You can book a free intro call or just reply to this email and we can discuss what advising looks like in more depth.

Here’s what some founders and marketing leaders have said about working with me:

You can find out more details and see more testimonials here.

Cheers,

Theo

If you create and grow products, you must understand design.

When I first got started in marketing, I never used to care for design.

It didn’t matter when I was running search ads or sending emails. It felt far away from any KPIs I had.

But as I got closer to the product, I realised how much it affects growth metrics.

Good design helps users get through the user journey smoothly and adopt the product.

Bad design causes users to get frustrated and confused so they leave the product.

Understanding what makes good design made me a better marketer and product manager.

It helped me build empathy with users and quickly spot glaring errors that harm conversion.

Angelo, the first designer I worked closely with, shared with me 10 design principles that I still reference today.

When I audit onboarding flows for startups, I go through each heuristic (rule of thumb) to see if the product breaks any of these rules.

Sometimes, small fixes to the design can have a material impact on conversion.

In this newsletter, I’m going to share these principles with you and show you some examples so you can quickly see how to level up your product’s design.

Let’s get into it.

This newsletter is kindly sponsored by - Inflection.io. A big thanks to them.

My friends over at Inflection.io launched a massive guide about onboarding called the Ultimate Guide to Product Onboarding.

For all my onboarding and product growth enthusiasts, there are tons of tips, examples, and best practices that are really well done.

I’ve already added lots of examples to my swipe file after reading it.

Download the guide

Based on the 10 Usability Heuristics created by Jakob Nielsen, here are the principles you need to know:

1) Viability of system status

The user should always be informed about what is going on.

Give feedback to the user as soon as possible.

Be clear about where they are and what they need to do.

2) Match between system and the real world

The design should speak the user's language.

Use words and terms that they actually use.

Avoid jargon or insider talk.

Tip: use Hemingway app to keep your writing simple

3) User control and freedom

Sometimes users make mistakes.

Always give users an out or an exit.

Use undo, back or skip buttons.

Without them, they could just get frustrated and leave.

You may never see them again after.

4) Consistency and standards

Jakob’s law says that users spend most of their time not using your app.

They are used to how other products work.

So don’t reinvent the wheel for no reason.

Don't make the user think.

Use conventions.

Break the rules where necessary.

5) Error prevention

It’s nice to have good error messages.

But it’s better if errors don’t happen at all.

Help users not to make slips or mistakes.

And ask for confirmation if they are making a big decision that may be a mistake.

6) Recognition rather than recall

Reduce the cognitive load on users by making elements and actions visible.

The user shouldn’t have to remember information in their journey.

So don’t use out-of-context product tours.

Use walkthroughs & provide helpful information in context.

7) Flexibility and efficiency of use

Shortcuts and personalisation can make the experience better for an expert user.

All without harming the experience for a novice user.

Use personalisation to create better experiences for all users.

And allow customisation.

8) Aesthetic and minimalist design

Interfaces should not contain information that is rarely used or irrelevant.

It distracts the user and takes them away from their primary goals.

This is especially important during signup and onboarding flows.

Use design to focus attention.

9) Help users recognise, diagnose and recover from errors

Use common error message visuals and colours like red text/ backgrounds.

Don't use technical jargon.

And always provide the user with a solution.

Don't just tell the user what they did wrong.

Help them resolve it.

10) Help and documentation

Your design alone may not be enough.

Sometimes users need more help.

Provide docs and useful prompts to help users understand how to complete their tasks.

Help centres and FAQs let users get the answers they need.

Use these principles to evaluate your product.

But note: they are broad rules of thumb.

They are not specific usability guidelines. So feel free to break the 'rules' where necessary.

Design in whatever way that is best for the user.

Resources

I learnt tons about design from going from this Hack Design years back. It might be a bit dated but it still has tons of nuggets to help you learn design.

When you’re ready, here’s how I can help you:

If you’re an early-stage startup struggling with growth, you can book a strategy session

Get the Startup Growth Roadmap - my playbook of 25+ templates that's helped 300+ founders and markes to scale their startups.

Hire me to audit your onboarding flow.

Cheers,

Theo

Startups can't afford to spend weeks on campaigns that have 0 impact.

The best teams spend days on tests that increase conversion and get insights that move their business forward.

You grow faster when you learn:

• What works

• What doesn’t work

for your audience and then make changes based on the insights.

And the more experiments you run, the quicker you learn.

So when I advise teams, I walk them through a simple framework, where we break down the test they want to run into 6 steps.

Today, I’m going to walk you through the same process and share with you the framework and the experiment doc I use to make sure:

1. Your tests are less likely to fail

2. You make sure you learn from the experiment.

This newsletter is kindly sponsored by - Inflection.io. A big thanks to them.

My friends over at Inflection.io launched a massive guide about onboarding called the Ultimate Guide to Product Onboarding.

For all my onboarding and product growth enthusiasts, there are tons of tips, examples, and best practices that are really well done.

I’ve already added lots of examples to my swipe file after reading it.

Download the guide

So when you want to run an experiment, I suggest you break down the test into 6 steps. Use this experiment doc for each test you run.

Steps:

1. Set an objective

2. Create a hypothesis

3. Outline the method

4. Record the results

5. Digest the learnings

6. Have clear next steps

Do:

Steps 1-3: Before the test

Steps 4-6: After the test

Growth Experiment Cheat Sheet

Let’s get into detail for each of these steps:

Before the test:

1) Set an objective

Ask yourself:

What are you trying to achieve and learn?

What metric do you want to move?

Your objective should be focused on one area and be core to your business.

This needs to be:

• Clear

• Measurable

• High impact

Here I wish to "I want to increase the conversion rate on the sign-up page"

2) Create a hypothesis

This is your belief as to why the test will be successful.

Just like in science class, we use hypotheses to make sure we get a definitive answer to our tests. No sitting on the fence.

You also want to use data/user feedback to make your hypothesis stronger.

Now it doesn’t matter whether your hypothesis is right or wrong.

This isn’t about how smart you are. It’s about getting the answer.

3) Outline the method

How will you run the test?

You want to validate as fast as possible. Don't waste time making the 'perfect' test. Your goal is to learn fast.

Quick and dirty is fine.

You want to run the Minimum Viable Test (MVT).

To do so, ask yourself questions like:

• Is this the quickest way to get my answer?

• Is this the most high-impact thing to learn?

• What audience are we targeting?

• Can we run this without code?

• What do I need to know to successfully run this test?

Go right to what you want to learn and work backwards.

Think of all the things less friction could mean:

E.g.

1. Remove the entire signup page

2. Remove every field but the email field

3. Remove the 'verify email' field

Rank in order of:

• Highest impact

• Quickest to test.

Run the highest score first.

After the Test:

4) Record the results

Record the performance of the experiment.

Did the metric move closer to the goal or not?

Was the experiment a 'success' or 'failure'?

Spend 5-10 minutes getting all the important data.

5) Digest the learnings

This is the most critical area.

Spend time digesting the results. Analyse by asking yourself questions like:

• What went well or didn't?

• Did you get your answer?

• Do you have enough data?

• Why did you think the results happened like that?

This is where your insights from come. Don’t skip this step.

6) Have clear next steps

We want to use what we learned to gain momentum.

And inform our roadmap.

• Based on your learnings, what would you test next?

• What would you change next time?

• Should we do more tests in the same area?

This means we are always moving forward.

As any good growth marketer will tell you, most of your experiments will fail. This means you're taking big swings.

But working on an experiment that fails and you don't learn anything valuable is terrible.

This framework helps you to not waste time on small experiments that don't deliver insights.

Here’s a link to the simple experiment doc I use with clients.

When you’re ready, here’s how I can help you grow:

If you run an early-stage startup and want me to help your team run more effective experiments, you can book a call here

Get the Startup Growth Roadmap - my playbook of 25+ templates that's helped 300+ founders and marketers to scale their startups.

Hire me to audit your onboarding flow.

Cheers,

Theo

One of your biggest enemies as a startup is a lack of focus.

As a founder or marketer, there's shiny object syndrome hitting you in the face every day.

"Should I be adding AI to my product?"

"Should we test that new hot channel"

There is a way to defend yourself against this - a North Star Metric.

It's a top-line metric that the entire company can be focused around.

Companies such as Wise, Airbnb and Dropbox have used it to help them grow.

In this newsletter, I’m going to break down some examples, what makes a good North Star Metric and a way to help you pick yours.

A big thank you to this newsletter’s sponsor 🎉 - Inflection.io.

They are the first marketing automation solution built for product-led growth, including onboarding and triggering campaigns based on product usage.

Perfect for sending the right message at the right time.

They just released a new product update.

Check them out: Inflection.io

This meme is most startup teams I talk to.

Ultimately they end up tracking everything - and don’t achieve the goals they set out to.

The more you can simplify what you're focused on to the things that matter, the more likely you are to get success.

That's why the North Star Metric is so great.

It guides what direction to go in, what strategy to take and what experiments to run.

It helps you from overcomplicating, procrastinating and working on things that have no material effect on your success.

Here are some examples of North Star Metrics:

A good North Star Metric should:

1. Express product value

2. Be related to the strategy

3. Be a leading indicator of success

Let’s take Coinbase and how they picked a good North Star Metric.

Coinbase’s North Star Metric is: Monthly Transacting Users

1. Express product value

Businesses exist to create value for people.

Your product is how you give people that value.

So any North Star Metric needs to represent the product value of your business.

A core value of Coinbase is to allow people to buy and sell crypto. So their North Star Metric should and does express this.

Rather than just having monthly users - which wouldn’t equate to the product value, they track monthly users who make a transaction.

Every time a user transacts on the platform, they give users the value the business was supposed to.

2. Be related to the strategy

Coinbase’s mission is to increase economic freedom in the world.

They believe by helping more people to transact in crypto, they will achieve this goal.

A big part of their strategy will therefore be to add features that make buying and selling crypto easier.

With their North Star as monthly transacting users, they focus on adding features that helps more people get on the platform.

They build integrations so more users transact, add more accessible coins to the platform and find ways to attract a wider audience.

Picking a different metric might have not been aligned with their mission and sent the company in the wrong direction.

3. Is a leading indicator of success

Your North Star Metric needs to connect to business success i.e. improving the metric will lead to better unit economics, higher retention and more revenue.

It should be a leading indicator of success.

And so that’s why revenue isn’t a good North Star Metric.

Revenue is a lagging indicator of success.

Revenue is a byproduct of the value that you create with your product.

In the case of Coinbase:

• By increasing the number of monthly transacting users on their platform, they will increase revenue.

• By retaining more customers who then make more transactions, they will increase revenue.

• By creating a better product so more users transact, they will increase revenue.

But if you focus on pure revenue, you can create the wrong type of incentives.

If you optimise for revenue only, you might build a feature that drives more revenue but makes the product worse or pisses off customers.

So when thinking about your North Star, don’t just use MRR or revenue. Pick the value metric one below it that represents business value.

The North Star Metric is different for every company.

Picking one is the cause of much debate and long meetings. To make it easier, it helps to understand common types of North Star metrics for different industries.

When to Use Engagement-based North Star Metrics:

You have a subscription SaaS, mobile app or social platform driven by ads.

For most types of companies, an engagement or customer growth metric works.

Specifically, an engagement metric would work well if you are a subscription SaaS or mobile app. Slack and Coda would fit in this category.

This is because the business model is largely based on free users converting to paid ones. In order to do that, they need engaged users who have seen value in the product before they upgrade.

For social platforms and products that monetise based on ads, engagement also works. The more users that return to use the product daily, weekly or monthly, the more ads will be sold.

When to use a Consumption-based North Star Metric:

You have a marketplace, platform or let companies access your API

For marketplaces, platforms or APIs, generally, the focus is on number of . As these businesses take a cut of each transaction, optimising for this will lead to greater business success. Airbnb uses nights booked and Uber uses # of trips.

When to use a User experience-based North Star Metric:

You have a product focused on being unique or inherently viral /sharable product

When I was head of growth at acasa, a product to help shared houses track and make payments, the product was inherently viral - meaning that product gets better when others join. Although engagement was important, because of the social dynamics of the product we felt we needed to optimise differently.

So we picked Net Promoter Score:

It was helpful in a number of ways:

• It expressed product value - those who rated highly had a good experience

• It was related to strategy - It quantified how shareable the product was - those who gave a good score would share it

• It was a leading indicator of success - those who were happy users were more likely to turn to customers

Leading Fintech Wise picked a similar metric to scale their company. As ~80% of their new customers came from word of mouth, it made sense for them to optimise this.

When to use an Efficiency-based North Star Metric:

You have a product-driven by paid growth

The North Star metric you optimise for needs to fit your business model. If your business is driven by paid ads, then you need to optimise for a metric that creates efficiencies so the company can be sustainable.

Companies such as Emma, HelloFresh and focus on efficiency: LTV: CAC ratios or Payback Periods.

So a simple way to start picking yours is by thinking about where you sit and starting from there.

You can also analyse the 80+ companies and their North Star as a starting point.

But are you really just tracking one metric?

No.

North Star Metric is a company-wide metric everyone should know.

Product. Customer Support. Engineers. Everyone.

But you should also have team-specific metrics you optimise for.

When working with clients, I help to define a North Star metric for them.

We then create team-specific KPIs.

For example, the product team might have team-specific KPIs around improving retention, user engagement and user satisfaction.

The marketing team had metrics such as Sign-up conversion rate, number of signups and traffic.

Having the North Star metric aligns the company because the marketing team doesn’t drive signups that don’t convert.

The product team don’t spend ages on features that increase engagement but don’t drive more e.g. transactions.

The key to making this work is to make sure everyone knows about the North Star.

Every feature added, marketing campaign created or experiment ran should look to affect the North Star metric in some way long term.

Tip: create a dashboard that everyone can see / easily access. Keep people updated in weekly meetings and make it the bedrock of how you make decisions.

The North Star metric can help you align your teams and keep you focused.

Having one keeps you on the right track.

Resources:

Choosing Your North Star Metric

80+ North Star Metric Examples

When you’re ready, here’s I can help you grow:

Get the Startup Growth Roadmap - my playbook of 25+ templates that's helped 300+ founders and marketers to scale their startups.

Hire me to audit your onboarding flow.

Work with me 1-1 to solve your most pressing marketing challenges and help you set up a high-converting onboarding sequence.

Cheers,

Theo

5 seconds.

If a visitor can’t tell what your startup does in 5 seconds, you’ve probably lost them.

I look at lots of startup websites each week.

Often, I come away confused.

These sites have weak positioning.

Honestly, I didn’t know what positioning was for a long time. I thought it had to do with the brand.

To have clear positioning, you must quickly articulate a couple of these:

1. What your product does

2. Who it’s for

3. What problem it solves

4. Why it’s different

For startups, you communicate your positioning on your website.

More specifically: the top half of the page which we call "Above the Fold".

If you don’t nail this section, you will confuse potential customers and your conversion will be lower than it should be.

Here’s my simple approach to creating clear positioning for your product:

A big thank you to this newsletter’s sponsor - Inflection.io.

They are the first marketing automation solution built for product-led growth, including onboarding and triggering campaigns based on product usage.

Perfect for sending the right email at the right time.

They just released a new product update.

Check them out: Inflection.io

1) Speak to a target audience

Good messaging speaks to specific segments.

These segments generally have similar pains and goals.

When you’re looking for a solution, you want to know that the product serves you.

So you can quickly help people decide whether the product is for them just by calling out this segment.

This removes confusion.

Vercel is an example of a company who does this well.

Vercel Home Page

They position the product for Developers.

Within seconds, I know who the product is for.

Being specific to an audience allows them to use language and action-based CTAs that connects directly to your audience's goals.

E.g. "Start Deploying"

It can be a little scary to speak to one audience and sometimes teams resist it so they don’t lose out on potential other segments.

Understandable - but the effect of this is your website isn’t as clear and so people leave.

It pays to be specific.

2) Make it clear what category your product is in

Say what your product is.

This is the simplest way to position a product. Give it a category so people know what it is.

Doing this means your visitors aren't confused and can quickly figure out what it is you do.

I’ve never used a time tracking tool before so if Toggl just spoke about the benefit of boosting performance in an easy, powerful and frictionless way, I’d have no idea what it does.

But by clearly stating it’s time tracking software - it’s clear to me.

Toggl Home Page

Tip: Don't try to invent a Category

I was recently working with a chat app.

When I audited the product, the main issue I had was I didn’t understand it.

They were trying to ‘invent’ a category by using jargon.

They were making up a category and expecting the visitor to know what it was.

Rather than having it in a 'new category' we just mentioned it was a specific type of chat app. This was a category people related to and understood.

We edited the category and made some small changes to the headline and subheadline.

Result: We doubled the number of trial signups.

Putting the product in an obvious category meant that visitors didn’t have to guess whether it was right for them.

All the other tests around sign-up, onboarding and in-app didn't have an effect on metrics.

But changing a few sentences on the homepage did.

Clarity is powerful.

3) Focus on the problem

Sometimes you don’t know who your audience is.

Or what category your product sits in.

So instead don’t focus on this - especially if your product is in a new area without a clear category.

Instead, address the problem.

People connect with that.

Slite

Slite addresses the pain of creating and managing company information.

“Free up your team from the burdens of creating, managing and finding trusted company information”

Even if a visitor hasn’t heard of a ‘knowledge base’ (category), they would be able to connect with that problem.

That would be enough for them to realise this product might be for them.

4) Have a unique functional benefit

Your product needs to be different in some way to stand out.

The best way to do this is to take a specific feature or attribute of your product and tie it to a benefit.

I call this a “functional benefit”.

A functional benefit works because features by themselves don’t help.

Benefits by themselves are too fluffy.

The functional benefit leverages both to make a realistic claim based on what your product really offers.

Here Tango directly outlines what you can do with the product (feature) and how quickly you do it (benefit).

Tango Home Page

The websites with the clearest positioning will use a number of these elements together.

Here’s an example of Grain - who leverages 3 out 4 of these elements Above the Fold. 

(Below the fold they mention the problem too)

Early-stage companies won’t have all 4. But as you get to product/market fit and beyond, you will.

Before then, your goal is to figure out the elements you have a good grasp on.

Grain Home Page

When you're thinking about your positioning, it doesn't need to be complex.

But it does need to be clear.

So before being clever, be clear.

Resources on Positioning:

April Dunford’s Introduction to Positioning (Get her book Obviously Awesome for a more detailed look into positioning)

Minimum Viable Positioning by Anthony Pierri

A big segment of companies with a product-led motion target developers.

They are an audience who definitely don’t want to talk to sales before using a product.

They want self-serve.

I recently came across a great resource to help product-led companies do developer-focused marketing.

It’s a detailed guide on Developer Marketing by Jakub Czakon. Worth checking out.

When you’re ready, here’s I can help you grow:

Get the Startup Growth Roadmap - my playbook of 25+ templates that's helped 300+ founders and marketers to scale their startups.

Hire me to audit your onboarding flow.

Work with me 1-1 to solve your most pressing marketing challenges and help you set up a high-converting onboarding sequence.

Cheers,

Theo

“How do you sell a $2,000 watch?"

“Put it next to a $10,000 watch.”

That quote is an old advertising phrase that refers to Anchoring.

It’s based on pricing psychology - a fascinating topic that is also very useful for driving more sales.

Today, we are going to look at Annual pricing and how to use pricing psychology to drive more revenue.

I’m going to show 7 actionable tips to get annual pricing working on your pricing pages + 1 tactic you can apply today to get you more cashflow tomorrow.

A big thank you to this newsletter’s first sponsor 🎉 - Inflection.io.

They are the first marketing automation solution built for product-led growth, including onboarding and triggering campaigns based on product usage.

Perfect for sending the right message at the right time.

They just released a new product update.

Check them out: Inflection.io

According to Profitwell, 1 in 5 SaaS companies offer annual pricing.

That's a big missed opportunity.

Annual pricing helps companies to:

• Increase cash flow

• Reduce churn

• Have Predictable Billing

• Increased Lifetime Value (LTV)

‍Increased Cashflow

With annual billing, you get paid upfront.

Having cash flow is never a bad thing.

With monthly, you are waiting months to recoup what you spent to acquire that customer.

Sometimes never if they churn.

With annual billing, you get paid back instantly.‍

Reduced Churn

On monthly subscriptions, customers can churn at any time.

If they pay yearly, they churn after a long period.

You get longer-term customers.

You get more time to deliver in that timeframe.

Predictable Billing

One bill per year.

No regular credit card failures.

No extra processing charges.

Predictable billing allows you to plan and model out your future.

This is crucial for strategy and getting to that next level of growth.

Increased Lifetime Value

They are around for a minimum of 12 months.

Life-time has gone up.

You have way more opportunities to upsell and cross-sell.

Let me be real for a second:

The market is tough.

Lots of teams right now are struggling to hit revenue targets.

If you’re a Founder, you are probably worried about cash flow.

A simple way to bring some extra long-term revenue in the door is to:

1. Segment some of your most engaged customers who are on monthly plans

2. Send them an email offering them a time-bound discount on an annual plan (See urgency later on)

3. Follow up on the final day of the discount

This approach can help lock in some of your best customers long-term and give you that extra boost we could all do with right now.

Now, here are 7 ways you can effectively use annual pricing.

1) Actually offer annual pricing

Crisp doesn't offer annual pricing.

They miss out on lower churn, upfront cashflow.

Adding annual pricing could make a huge difference to their business.

Unless your pricing is very complex, you should offer annual pricing.

Crisp Pricing Page

2) Show the biggest discount offered

Figma shows the user it’s $3 cheaper each month.

That feels like a small saving.

Instead, they should show the discount annually.

By doing this, 20% feels big.

Pick the largest number you can when describing the savings.

Figma’s Pricing Page with Discount Added in

3) Show the savings in time, not %

Github shows me I get one month free.

This is rather than getting a percentage off.

1 free month is a more tangible discount.

Don't make the user think.

Do the maths for them.

This forces me to work less to see how much I get.

Github Pricing Page

Free Webinar: Leveling up product onboarding with personalisation

I’m running a webinar with Dave Rigotti from Inflection.io where we’re going to look at onboarding from Loom, Notion, Mural and more to show how personalisation can lead to better onboarding and adoption.

I’ll be sharing my approaches in more depth, so if you’d like some actionable tactics to apply to your flows, you won’t want to miss this.

It's happening Wednesday, Sept 13th at 5pm GMT / 12pm EST.

You can register and confirm your seat below:

Register Now

4) Default to annual pricing

You want your customers to go annual.

Teachable defaults to the annual pricing.

This uses a cognitive bias called Anchoring.

The user is anchored to this price vs the monthly price.

The monthly appears more expensive as a result.

As a result, you will get more annual buys.

Teachable Pricing Page

5) Show the more expensive price crossed out

Again this uses anchoring.

It makes it clear to me the savings I'm making.

I see the old price and the price I will get.

It reinforces how I'm making my savings.

Aha’s Old Pricing Page

6) Go big with the discount

In general, offer 15-20% off annual pricing.

But if your unit economics work, go big with the discount.

PandaDoc offers up to 46% off.

That's an appealing offer to go annual.

Don’t be afraid to go big with an annual discount if you can make it work.

PandaDoc Pricing Page

7) Use urgency

Urgency is one of the most powerful psychological drivers.

Getting annual deals is still a deal.

Typeform uses urgency to show it is a deal.

And it might not be around forever.

This likely causes an uptick in conversion.

Typeform’s Old Pricing Page

When you’re ready, here’s how I can help you grow:

Get the Startup Growth Roadmap - my playbook of 25+ templates that's helped 300+ founders and marketers to scale their startups.

Hire me to audit your onboarding flow.

Work with me 1-1 to solve your most pressing marketing challenges and help you set up a high-converting onboarding sequence.

Cheers,

Theo

There are many underrated things in life:

Apricot jam, nice long walks and onboarding emails.

Not everyone sends welcome emails and the people that do, usually set them up quickly at the start and then forget about them.

Like people who only use strawberry on their toast, and don’t like walking, if you’re not leveraging onboarding emails, you’re missing out.

Over the years, I’ve set up onboarding email flows for a number of companies.

These emails typically have the highest open rates.

They are automated so investing one day to set them up can often lead to outsized returns over a long period.

I’ve created welcome emails that have helped drive millions in revenue from one flow. No joke.

Your onboarding emails are a powerful way to educate users about your product, move them through the customer journey and build relationships.

For today’s newsletter, I analysed 30+ onboarding emails from leading companies and broke down the 7 main approaches of great onboarding emails.

Read on to see what companies like Coda, Memberstack and Zapier do in their welcome emails and get access to my Onboarding Email Series Template + Swipe File for free.

A big thank you to this newsletter’s first sponsor 🎉 - Inflection.io.

They are the first marketing automation solution built for product-led growth, including onboarding and triggering campaigns based on product usage.

Perfect for sending the right email at the right time.

They just released a new product update.

Check them out: Inflection.io

Before I share the key ingredients, here are two major tips for onboarding emails.:

Your onboarding emails should match your trial period or period of the highest engagement.

If you offer a free trial that is 7 days, your onboarding sequence needs to be timed within this period.

If you don’t have a fixed trial period, you need to see when your new users engage most at the start.

Likely this will be the first 7-14 days. But if it takes 30 days to activate users, then you should spread the emails over that time.

Simple email designs work

You don’t need to have an HTML email that takes you weeks to design. They look good but don’t actually convert as well in a lot of cases.

Although I’m sharing some nicely designed emails below, they aren’t necessary.

Plain text emails often have better deliverability - meaning they don’t end up in spam - and they’re easier to create.

So stick to simple layout emails when getting started.

Now here are 7 ways to make your onboarding emails valuable (for you and your users):

1) Ask for Feedback

Before you use your emails to sell or convert, you should use them to seek feedback.

Your welcome email is a great way to build relationships with your new users and learn what they want.

Especially important when looking to figure out your product’s core value or if you’re a pre-product-market fit product.

You can use it to collect key user feedback that you can use later on to make the product better.

You can use these emails to get feedback on autopilot. 

After a few weeks of responses, you will have a clear idea of the Jobs To Be Done and what content to send in future emails.

This email is most effective on Day 1 as the first email.

As a user testing platform, it’s no surprise Userbrain asked for feedback in their onboarding emails.

Userbrain Email

2) Explain the product

Onboarding is about helping users to hit their goals using your product.

Some education is involved.

Your emails should teach your users how to use the product in the most effective way.

This is especially important if your product is complex or in a space where education is needed.

When I was working with Republic, it was important to explain how the platform worked and the steps required to invest.

Many users coming to the platform were new to startup investing so it was important to break down the process and give them the confidence to get started.

Below is an email I built to help do this:

Republic Onboarding Email

3) Offer Resources/templates

While email is a great place to educate - it’s not perfect.

Especially as people don’t love reading much these days.

So don’t try educating solely on email.

Send them to a resource on your site instead.

The companies that activate users the fastest don’t just rely on in-product onboarding and a landing page.

They have guides, videos and templates.

And if you don’t have these already, start building them today.

Every help desk article you write is providing your user base with a quicker route to value.

That template is having your new user get started on their project faster.

Make these and link out to them in your emails.

In Zapier’s email, in explaining ‘Zaps’ they link to a video and a couple of pre-made zaps.

Zapier Email

4) Invite users to community / social

Often your power users will know your product deeper than you.

They also use creative ways to get value.

So connect them with your new users.

This becomes a win-win for all parties.

The power-user strengthens their learning by sharing with others. (They may also become an influencer in your community)

The new user finds unique ways to learn about the problem and potentially gets peer support.

You build an ecosystem around your product.

Memberstack understands this.

They invite new users to their community so they can meet others in a similar situation to them.

These users can also find new workflows, examples and templates so they become power users fast.

Memberstack Email

5) Prompt Key actions

The goal of these emails should be to activate users and help them form habits.

The best onboarding flows personalise the experience.

They will separate based on whether a user has activated or not.

• If a new user hasn’t activated, they will get a flow focused on getting them to do so.

• If a new user has activated, they will get a flow focused on building a habit.

Leading products provide an experience that is focused on getting the user to the next step.

So whether you have one flow or separate them out, you need to get users to take that next key action.

In this example, Coda wants you to build your first doc.

Their content is around this.

In your business, you may want a user to integrate or send their first message.

Whatever your goal, make sure your emails will focus on them.

Coda Welcome Email

6) Manual Onboarding

Sometimes we need a helping hand.

Your users don’t need to do it all alone.

Offer manual onboarding help for the user to get set up.

This is a great way to reduce friction for the user.

It’s ideal for early-stage companies and products that are hard to use right off the bat.

Openview found that reaching out to new users is one of the major ways to increase free-to-paid conversion rates.

They found that:

“Both free trial and freemium products see higher conversion rates when reaching out to >50% of free signups.”

Manually reaching out to free users and offering ways to get more value has a clear correlation with users converting to customers.

Fomo sends a nice personal email offering help to get started with a video call.

Fomo Email

7) Make an offer

A mistake many freemium or companies with free trials make:

They never ask a user to become a customer.

So when you get to the end of your onboarding sequence, make your users an offer.

If have a free trial, your offer can tie in nicely to the length of the trial.

If you don’t, you can make it one of the final emails in the series.

Slack reminds the user when the trial is ending and then suggests they upgrade.

Slack Email

Your onboarding emails are powerful - they help to get your users further into the product and educate them on its value.

Some of the tools that help you to send these automated emails are highlighted in this vendor report - the customer communication and marketing automation categories are relevant. (Especially for more mature startups)

As promised, here’s my Onboarding Email Series Template. It has examples from 30+ companies and some copy templates to help you write effective onboarding emails.

Enjoy!

When you’re ready, here’s I can help you grow:

Get the Startup Growth Roadmap - my playbook of 25+ templates that's helped 300+ founders and marketers to scale their startups.

Hire me to audit your onboarding flow.

Work with me 1-1 to solve your most pressing marketing challenges and help you set up a high-converting onboarding sequence.

Cheers,

Theo

Stripe is now valued at $50B. It's one of the fastest-growing companies of all time.

The company provides software and APIs for businesses to accept payments over the Internet.

Founded by John Collison and his brother Patrick, the product is now used on over 3.1 million websites.

But it cost $0 to get the first 100 customers.

Here's 7 low-cost growth strategies from Stripe and how they got their early customers:

Before we get to it…

Google Analytics has changed forever.

The old Google Analytics is gone.

Google Analytics 4 is now here.

But most founders and marketers have no idea how to:

1) Use it

2) Set it up for your business

I can help on both:

1) Take my Google Analytics 4 course and quickly get up to speed. 353+ have taken it so far. Use code: LEARN to get 10% off:

Learn GA4

2) My team will help set up and migrate you over to Google Analytics 4. Send me a message if you want me to set this up for your product.

1) Build and Validate Quickly

In 2010, they created the first version of Stripe.

It was very manual.

There wasn’t a financial infrastructure.

The front end looked like a normal website you'd sign up for.

The backend was much different.

It was a "Wizard of OZ MVP".

Patrick Collison would call up his friend at a payments gateway company.

His friend would set up a merchant account for them.

He would then give the customer the code to install on their site.

Minimal code.

Maximum validation.

Your first version doesn't need to be perfect.

2) Leverage your network

Stripe's first 20 customers were all members of their Y-Combinator batch (S-09).

YC is filled with founders, most technical, building online products.

Stripe had their target market right there.

They went directly to their audience who were close to them.

Tip: Your friends and network can be your early customers.

If they suffer from the problem, don’t be afraid to get them to use your product.

3) Remove Friction

When getting their first customers onboard, they eliminated all friction.

If someone agreed to sign up for their beta, they asked for their computer.

They would then install Stripe on the spot.

Paul Graham called this the "Collison Installation".

They didn't send a link to the site.

They did it for them.

No friction.

No ‘I’ll do this later’.

You will always get drop-off.

Make sure there are as few ways for potential customers to drop off as possible.

Make things frictionless.

4) Get Hard Feedback

Stripe priced high.

Why?

They wanted to get real feedback.

They wanted people who suffered from the pain.

And were willing to pay more to have it solved.

This is unlike many startups who want to give you everything for free to get you using it.

Price is the ultimate validation test.

"Does this product solve a big enough problem that people are willing to pay for it?"

So charge for your product.

And don’t be scared to charge a premium.

It shows your product is useful & forces you to provide value to back up the cost.

5) Go to where your community is

To get some early customers, they got another founder to post about them on Hacker News(cc Alexis Ohanian)

Hacker News was mainly YC founders and developers in the space.

This post got them their ideal customers wanting to use their product.

Find where your community is online:

• Producthunt

• Indiehackers

• Discord

• Telegram

• FB Groups

• Reddit Groups

Then engage with that community.

And Golden rules of community:

Give. Give. Give. Give.

Then you can ask.

6) Build community

Every month, they hosted Capture The Flag events at their office.

This helped build community and get the founders to know their early customers.

They provided free value (and free pizza and beer).

They built relationships with their early customers.

They had fun together.

The founders likely knew them by name.

That is how to make a customer love you and not just like your product.

We buy from people.

Build human relationships with your early customers.

7) Help Your Community with Content

Stripe placed a big emphasis on helping & empowering their community.

Good, clear documentation for developers.

They also created tons of amazing resources for early founders.

A great example: Stripe Atlas Guides.

They’re so good I’ve shared them with tons of people over the years. I’m actually sharing my favourite ones with you now no:

• Pitching your early-stage Startup

• Writing Copy for Landing Pages

• Networking for Founders

Create helpful, relevant content and it will pay dividends for years.

Whether you are a VC-backed or bootstrapped startup, there lots to be learnt from Stripe.

Focus on unscalable tactics.

Care about community.

Solve a real problem.

Sources:

• First 1000

• Fast-growing B2B startups got early customers

• Stripe Teardown

When you’re ready, here’s I can help you grow:

Get the Startup Growth Roadmap - my playbook of low cost growth tactics to help you grow your startup. Used by over 300 founders + marketers.

Hire me to audit your onboarding flow.

Book an Intro call to see how we can solve your most pressing growth challenges.

Cheers,

Theo

Welcome to all the founders, growth marketers, and Product Managers who joined recently.

The sun is shining in London. It’s 28C degrees (82F for those stateside) and we’re talking brilliant user onboarding.

It’s a happy day for me.

I wanted to share this breakdown because the company, Productboard, does a lot of things right. It’s as close to best practice as I’ve seen in a while.

And it’s no surprise that the tool is for Product Managers.

So let’s get into it:

Productboard is a product management tool founded in 2014. They’ve raised $261.7M and over 6,000 companies use them.

The product aims to help companies bring the right products to market faster by understanding user needs, prioritising what to build, and aligning the team.

Here’s a breakdown of what they do to make it great:

I may have something for you…

If you’re using AI in your workflow and you enjoy my templates, you’re going to love what I’ve been working on.

If you want early access, reply “EARLY” and I’ll get in touch.

Every user's path to value is different.

We don't all take in information in the same way.

And so the best onboarding doesn't rely on one sole method to get users to value.

They combine different approaches.

Productboard does that masterfully.

Here's how they create experiences to get users to see value fast:

1) Create trust and excitement

To increase motivation for a visitor, Productboard has a clear value proposition they reinforce.

They use social proof with testimonials so a user can imagine outcomes.

Logos from leading companies to increase trust.

And they help overcome objections.

One of the most compelling sign-up pages I've seen in a while.

Sign up page

2) Bringing Personality To Email

Verification emails are the most boring emails around.

No Sauce. No personality. No useful information.

Wasted real estate when users are very motivated to try the product.

Productboard has a friendly welcome and introduces their mission.

Create the right environment for users to come into.

Make every touchpoint valuable for the user.

Activation Email

3) Contextual Walkthroughs

The best user onboarding gets you to a goal.

And by making you learn the product by doing.

They help you create something of value during your first use of the product.

That's what Productboard does here.

And they show the output in real-time

Contextual Walkthrough

4) Tooltips

You don't need a tooltip just to point to a button.

You need to know why that button is valuable and what it helps you to do.

The tooltips they use are useful and the copy for them is actionable.

Tooltips

5) Actionable Checklists

Checklists help you to see the next steps.

Throughout the onboarding experience, they use checklists to help users get deeper into the product.

They use checklists to help you complete tasks.

They also have videos as part of the checklist. This is another way people like to learn about products.

Checklist

6) Easy to import data

Having ways to import data reduces friction and allows a user to do valuable outcomes as soon as possible.

It also makes the 'switch' from an alternative less painful.

Even if it's not the first thing you surface in the new user experience, give users an option to import that data over.

Importing Data

7) Clear upgrade prompts

Through some subtle elements, Productboard shows the user how they can become a customer.

They show how long the trial has left.

It's important to remember:

Although your product may be free or a trial, you must it clear that a user can upgrade.

Clear Upgrade Prompts

Productboard blends a range of approaches to help you get to value quicker.

But it’s not overwhelming.

Review your onboarding experience and ask:

1) Have you provided clear steps on how to get to your product value?

2) Could you give context about your product in a different way?

You can always use my free onboarding checklist to audit your own flow.

When you’re ready, here’s I can help you grow:

Get the Startup Growth Roadmap - my playbook of 25+ templates that's helped 300+ founders and marketers to scale their startups.

Google Analytics UA is going away very soon. Take my course to get up to speed with Google Analytics 4 fast.

Hire me to audit your onboarding flow.

Book an Intro call to see how we can solve your most pressing growth challenges.

Cheers,

Theo

Are you finding your new users dropping off and not converting to customers?

There are plenty of reasons for this.

Often, it’s because it takes too long to get to the product’s core value and the new users decide to leave.

As a result, most marketers and consultants will just suggest you remove friction.

I say: add it instead.

Here's how adding the right friction can lead to lower drop-off (and more revenue):

Before we get into it, here’s a newsletter I’ve been reading recently.

Drew is a Senior Growth Lead at Netlify. He writes an insightful newsletter on Product Led Growth.

He curates the best product growth posts on Linkedin (he’s featured me a few times 🙏🏾 - add me btw) and shares them in his newsletter. He provides commentary on these posts and makes them specific to a part of the user journey.

Worth a read!

TheProductLed

TheProductLed will deliver, curate, and demystify growth straight to your inbox. Learn from personal stories and strategies of being a growth operator.

Subscribe

Less friction alone isn't enough.

To get a user to complete a product action or upgrade, you need to motivate them.

You must excite or articulate value first.

Otherwise, users won't take the next step.

Adding some friction can give you the room to provide context and a reason for users to say yes.

Here are some ways you can add the right type of friction to motivate and increase your conversion rate:

1) Provide relevant data

Data doesn't lie.

So when a user is looking to achieve a goal and sees data about how to get there faster, it's compelling.

Especially if a user is considering whether to pay and become a customer.

Here Drops shows interesting data that learning a language happens faster if you are a customer.

I’ve provided examples below that show what the flows look like with and without extra friction.

You’ll see that adding more context can be helpful in these instances.

Less context

More context

2) Provide insight related to the goal

MyFitnessPal shows a clear goal at the end of sign-up.

Rather than just asking the user to upgrade, they first provide a clear date that the user could hit their goals.

Then they ask a user to upgrade. This lets the user know what they would need to do to hit that goal:

Upgrade and find out.

Less context

More context

3) Explain how it makes the experience better

During onboarding, you will likely want a user to fill in data so they are more likely to get product success.

Hinge could just ask you to add photos and videos.

But they know incomplete profiles don't see enough value and will likely churn.

So they let users know they'll have more success using the app if they fill out their profiles.

Less context

More context

4) Use Social Proof

Calm breaks up their lengthy onboarding flow with social proof related to the goal.

They show someone who benefitted from the product in a way the user cares about.

This provides some motivation for a user to keep filling out details.

And then hopefully for them, upgrade.

Less context

More context

5) Make it clear they will miss out

Notifications are your main way to communicate with an app user.

You get one chance for a user to agree to native Apple notifications.

Add an extra screen like Etsy does to get permission first.

If they say no, you get another chance.

Less context

More context

Adding friction for the sake of adding friction is bad.

For the most part, seek to remove it.

But when you are asking a user to do something important or make a costly decision, make sure you have motivated them enough.

If you haven't, don't be afraid to use extra product real estate so you can motivate more.

Like today’s newsletter? Let me know what you thought was the most useful.

When you’re ready, here’s I can help you grow:

Book a free 30 min strategy session to discuss potential areas of opportunity.

Get the Startup Growth Roadmap - my playbook of 25+ templates that's helped 300+ founders and marketers to scale their startups.

Hire me to audit your onboarding flow.

Cheers,

Theo

Are you struggling to keep your new users engaged?

Can’t prevent them from churning?

If you need some ideas to improve your onboarding flow, here’s what you should do:

Play some video games.



By incorporating the principles of video games, you can reduce churn, improve onboarding, and get your users to value faster.

In today’s newsletter, we'll explore how video game mechanics can be applied to your products, and provide you with actionable tips to help you level up your engagement.

I recently caught up with Brian Bourque, SVP at Smartasset and writer of the brilliant newsletter, Unicorn Growth Strategies.

He kindly invited me to share my insights into Product Onboarding as a growth strategy.

In the post, I share details about my approach to onboarding and some tactical advice to drive more product growth.

Check out the post and join 8,868 who read his newsletter by subscribing below.

Unicorn Growth Strategies

Actionable insights from winning startups

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Video games have some of the best onboarding experiences out there.

Successful games value that first experience. 



They want to make sure you quickly how to use it so you can start having fun fast.

They focus on Fast Time to Value.

Here are 4 actionable tactics we can use from games to create stickier products:

1) Get Players to an Early Win

Candy Crush - After completing the first level

Aside from having fun, the aim of games is to win.

So the best games will get you to achieve success early on.

Products should be the same.

Map out your customer journey using FigJam or Miro.

Decide on what you want users to achieve in their first experience with the product.

Then help them to get there in-product.

And it’s ok to celebrate with the user when they do get that win.

Duolingo uses this principle nicely in its onboarding.

2) Teach through Doing

Temple Run 2

The best onboarding experiences help users to learn through doing.

Games are immersive and require you to do.

As both games and products involve interaction, my view is that contextual walkthroughs that get users to learn through doing are the most effective.

Tooltips and videos are good in some instances, but the act of learning is passive.

This hypothesis was proved correct when I was Head of Growth at acasa, a Fintech focused on bill-splitting and home management.

We were struggling to get users to understand the value.

So rather than just explaining how to use the product, we got them to do an action.

We did an interactive walkthrough on how to split their first bill.

This had a 45% uplift in the activation rate.

So if you’re struggling with your new users churning, try getting them to do key actions in the product that help them learn by doing.

P.S. If you run a SaaS or mobile app, are driving 500+ signups a month and want to achieve similar results, book a free strategy call here.

3) Give Indicators of Progress

In a user’s journey to find success, there are key milestones along the way.

This is usually in the form of levels or a map in games.

Games outline what these steps are so there is a target for the player.

There’s a powerful psychological principle called the Goal Gradient Effect which says our efforts increase as we move closer to a goal.

So the best games give their users a goal to work towards.

You should do the same.

The customer journey I told you to map out earlier on…

Show some of the progression steps to the user.

Let them know what they need to do to achieve long-term product success.

Angry Birds 2 - Level Map

It’s important not to overwhelm with loads of steps but to break it down and show enough to keep a user motivated.

In Angry Birds, they show a few of the first levels.

Sonic

Some like Sonic the Hedgehog, are more specific and use progress bars.

They outline what the objectives are before the level starts and then remind you again as the level is in progress.

Checklists and progress bars are great ways to get a new user to get deeper into the product.

Read how Klaviyo uses checklists to onboard users.

4) Limit Functionality to Increase Desire

Candy Crush

Game designers understand how important psychology is.

Candy Crush famously makes you wait if you run out of lives.

They know that these are points of desire.

They leverage it to get you to use/buy in-game currency.

Or during the height of Facebook, they allowed you to play again if you invited a friend.

(You like me may have received tons of annoying messages from friends at that time. 😅)

Ultimately they understandd desire and leverage.

And they use those points to make big asks. I’m sure it accounts for a large % of upgrades.

Many freemium products give too much away. They give no reason for a user to upgrade.

Give enough for users to want and see the value. But don’t give away it all.

And understand your product’s key moments of when to make an ask.

Bumble cleverly took on this approach in their app.

Playing videos - aside from a way to cool off from the stresses of building a startup - are great ways to learn about stickiness and onboarding.

I recommend downloading a few games and taking some notes on how onboarding is done.

You will learn a lot and potentially find some good ideas to reduce churn for your product.

Let me know - have you used any game mechanics in your product that has worked well?

Any video games you’ve been inspired by?

When you’re ready, here’s I can help you grow:

Get the Startup Growth Roadmap - my playbook of 25+ templates that's helped 300+ founders and marketers to scale their startups.

Hire me to audit your onboarding flow.

Work with me 1-1 to solve your most pressing marketing challenges.

Cheers,

Theo

Are you struggling to get users to stick around and use your product?

Do you find it hard to know what your customers really want?

Maybe you've tried different tactics, but nothing seems to work.

The truth is, you can't build a successful product without understanding your users.

That's why user feedback is so essential.

You can get a ton of valuable insights that could change your business.

When working with teams, I help them set up systems so they:

• speak to minimum of 5 users/month on a call

• get a minimum of 50 survey responses/month

We want to get learnings across the whole user lifecycle so we get insights from:

• New users

• Active users

• Churned users

I'm going to show you my process for doing this.

You will see the types of questions you can ask different segments and how to get feedback on autopilot to help you improve your product and grow your business.

New Users

Your new users are a great source of insight because they recently engaged with your product.

They made a commitment.

You should figure out why they did.

Aside from face-to-face meetings (which aren't the most practical), calls (video or phone) are the way to get user feedback.

You can ask 'why' questions. You can get the context behind decisions. You can go deeper.

This helps you to learn what problems users really want to be solved.

Here are some of the questions you can ask on a call:

However, lots of founders and marketers I speak to don't know how to get users on calls.

Most of the time it just takes a simple email.

Here is the simple outreach message that has worked for me and my clients:

Outreach message to book calls with New Users

Calls can be tricky to get, however. Not everyone has a spare 30 mins in their calendar.

So the other option is to get feedback via email or surveys. This approach is especially useful because you can automate the process.

So here's how I've automated getting feedback from new users before:

How to Automate New User Feedback:

Ask them a short, direct question via drip email during their first few days using your product.

You can change up the questions you ask but setting up this automated email can be extremely valuable in understanding what new users want.

As the responses will come into your inbox, you will need to stay organised by tagging/filtering them.

Now I'm getting to break down the questions you can ask on calls, what messages have worked for me to book calls and how to automate getting feedback for the other two segments.

Active Users

Questions to ask on calls

You don't need to ask tons of questions. You just need to make sure to delve deeper when you can.

Use these as a starting point.

Outreach message to book calls with Active Users

I've added an incentive here. This is to increase the booking conversion rate.

Play around with the incentive.

How to Automate Active User Feedback:

In-app surveys

In-product surveys are low-touch ways to get insights from your users.

You can quickly ask questions to your users as they use your product.

You can segment your surveys to show to different types of users, to show on different pages/screens.

Important: Make sure you ask in-app surveys when a user has done a meaningful event in the product. Don't interrupt their flow.

There are 3 types of in-app surveys that you can use at different times depending on your situation and what you want to learn.

Each gives different insights into what users think.

Net promoter score

A great way to learn how much your users like your product is by asking them if they would recommend it to a friend.

This method is called Net Promoter Score (NPS).

This survey is particularly useful when your product is inherently viral - meaning that inviting others to it is a large component of how it grows.

It helps you quantify your virality potential and get qualitative answers about why people would share it or not.

You should look to measure your NPS monthly and reach out to those who have given low scores.

Product Market Fit (PMF) Test

“Product-market fit is ‘the only thing that matters early on in the startup journey” Marc Andreessen - Co-Founder A16z

Before you can scale, you need to find product/market fit.

This is no easy task but to find out if you are there, you should ask your users how would you feel if they could no longer use the product.

If you get 40%+ saying very Disappointed, then you have Product / Market Fit.

Customer Effort Score (CES)

The Customer Effort Score (CES) is a way to help companies understand how much effort their users need to put into using their product.

It measures things like how easy it is to navigate the product, how simple it is, and how quickly problems get solved.

By using CES, you can make sure their customers have a great experience and keep coming back for more.

Churned Users

The group you definitely want insight from are churned users.

You want to learn why they left.

And what you could do better in future.

Questions to ask on calls

Outreach message to book calls with Churned Users

How to Automate Churned User Feedback:

Longer Surveys

Surveys allow you to get in-depth answers.

At scale.

Use a mix of open-ended questions, true or false, list and rating questions.

This will make analysing easier.

Set up automated email like before 7 days after a user churns and include the link to the survey.

So after all this feedback, you should be armed with the knowledge about what you do next.

Here are some tips:

1) Come up with experiments

You should use the findings to come up with ideas for experiments.

And then run these tests.

Think about how the conversations could help you make a better product.

Take the good and do more of it, find the bad and get rid.

Then test it.

2) Create/refine personas

Use the insight you get to either create or refine the personas you have.

These are the people you're solving problems for.

When you making a product improvement you should mark the change on a scale of 1/5.

“Does this product change make the experience better for our persona?”

This gets you into the habit of ensuring all the conversations you have with your users directly impact the product you are building.

3) Improve your Value Proposition

You should soon be able to know what features and benefits are most important to your customers.

This will help you talk about your product in a way that resonates with them.

You can use this on your landing pages, onboarding flows and more.

4) Share with the wider team

Every 2 weeks, do a show and tell of the insights.

Whilst your lead developer may not be jumping on calls, it’s important for them to know how users view the product.

Share your findings in slack and explain how these insights could help improve the product.

This email is about getting user feedback so I would love to hear what you think.

Please reply:

1) Did you find this email useful?

• Yes

• No

• Could be better

2) Why did you give that answer?

How I can help you grow:

Get the Startup Growth Roadmap - my playbook of 25+ templates that's helped 300+ founders and marketers to scale their startups.

Hire me to audit your onboarding flow.

Work with me 1-1 to solve your most pressing marketing challenges.

Cheers,

Theo

Unsure about your current growth strategy?

A quick way to learn what potential growth opportunities that are out there is to look at competitors.

The goal is to see what is working for your competitors.

And find ways to do better than them in their strategy.

Important: We don't want to steal. We want to reverse engineer. This means we still have to be original with our marketing. And definitely ethical about our approach.

So today I'm going to show you how to leverage your competitors to accelerate your growth.

In 2 just mins.

Using Similarweb for Competitive Analysis

To start off with, we are going to go to Similarweb.

Similarweb is a data insights company that IPO'd for $1.6Billion in 2021. They're a great example of a successful product-led SaaS company.

Today, we're not going to break down their product growth. You can read this article by Kyle Poyar for that. Instead, we're going to be one of the free users to learn more about our competitors.

1) Pick a competitor to research

Let's look at the project management space and Notion.

Firstly, go to the site and enter the URL of one of your competitors (Free)

Once, we enter the site, we can see the revenue (est.) they make: $25M - $50M.

Interesting insight.

We also see how popular their site is compared to others in the space.

2) See their Traffic & Engagement

Next, we can quickly see they get:

• Total Monthly Visits 156.3M

• Bounce Rate: 31.17%

• Pages per Visit 7.5

• Avg Visit Duration: 7:33 seconds

Seeing how much traffic a competitor gets can quickly give you a benchmark to compare against.

You can also see if their traffic is trending upwards or downwards.

Is yours going in the same direction?

Why not?

3) See Traffic Locations

Notion are most popular in the US, Japan and then Brazil.

So a pretty even spread across countries.

This data shows where these kinds of tools are popular in these regions.

Think about this in the context of your business. You may find a competitor thriving in a particular region.

Is there a reason why you haven't been as successful? Is that a potential market for you?

4) See What Channels They Use

Direct Traffic

Most of their traffic comes from Direct (going direct to the site)- 87%.

This is likely returning visitors and users who want to use their tool daily.

But it also shows us Notion has a strong brand and word of mouth is very strong.

The market you are working in may be brand driven. Are you focused enough on building brand equity in the space?

Referral Traffic

We also see they get a small amount from referrals - people sharing their Notion templates or links to their sites.

Perhaps you could create types of content that are more shareable.

5) See What Search traffic they get

8% of their traffic also comes from search. Branded keywords mainly.

We can also see their approx paid vs organic split:

• Organic: 93.74%

• Paid: 6.26%

This may indicate that investing in SEO may have value. Notion is driving millions of organic visitors to their site.

Looking at the keywords gives an insight into their SEO approach.

We can see that templates are a big reason people search.

Allowing their community to create templates & having people search for them is a great growth driver for them.

You can go deeper on search by looking at tools such as Ahrefs and SEMRush (Paid).

6) See What Social Media Platforms they get traffic from

Most of their "Social Media Traffic" traffic comes from Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and Reddit.

Likely communities and learning videos from Youtube.

Places where people are passionate and engaged.

Communities are a great place to get a targeted set of users and so exploring their groups may be a potential source of future customers.

7) See More Competitors

You can also then find more competitors to go and reserve engineer.

Other places you can find competitors is by using sites such AngelList, Producthunt.

That was quick.

In just minutes, we're able to get tons of insights into competitors that can help us to ask key questions about our growth strategy.

And uncover opportunities we may have missed.

Need help with your growth strategy?

I'm offering free strategy sessions (30 mins) for 5 people.

Just reply "Strategy" to this email.

🛠 Tool of the week

Ahrefs Keyword Generator

This is a great way to do competitive analysis. You can use it to see how much traffic a keyword gets and if it's hard to rank for or not.

It's the free tool from Ahrefs (the paid version is worth it if investing in SEO)

🤓 Resource of the week

Twitter tweet

Came across this thread this week. It's packed with value about building and growing great products. Plenty of gems in there.

That's all for now.

How I can help you grow:

Get the Startup Growth Roadmap - my playbook of 25+ templates that's helped 300+ founders and marketers to scale their startups.

Hire me to audit your onboarding flow.

Work with me 1-1 to solve your most pressing marketing challenges.

Cheers,

Theo

Welcome to all the new subscribers who joined this week.

It's the first newsletter of 2023 for me. I hope you are all already working towards your big goals for the year. 💪🏾

Today, I'm breaking down the SaaS collaboration tool Airtable. The company is valued at $11 Billion and is one of my favourite "no-code" tools to create processes.

I really enjoyed this breakdown.

There's so much you can learn from them on product growth and especially around onboarding.

Here's 7 tactics Airtable uses to onboard new users:

1) Bold Messaging

The message on the home page is a bold claim.

It focuses on outcomes. Not just features.

People take action based on emotions, not just logic. So they speak to that.

And they use imagery to back up their claim of "achieve anything".

They cleverly show their product in different contexts to illustrate how versatile the tool is.

Tip: Don't sell the plane journey, sell the holiday.

2) Personalisation

Airtable asks what team the user is are on as one of the first steps.

Then they personalise the experience later with relevant templates.

They know what use cases certain roles use Airtable for and make the experience better based on this.

Tip: Good personalisation increases conversion. Find a way to create a more tailored experience for your users. This will activate them quicker.

3) Incentivise sharing

A huge value prop for using Airtable:

Building collaborative workflows.

The product is more valuable when others are using it too.

It's multi-player vs single-player.

So they ask for you to invite early on.

To increase the chance that you do, they incentivise inviting teammates with free credits.

We all love freeness. And it doesn't cost Airtable anything to offer it.

It's a powerful way to drive the viral loop.

Tip: Ask for shares early during onboarding and find ways to make the user more likely to share

4) Letting users import data

Airtable wants the user to embed the tool into their workflow.

So they ask them to import their own data as one of the first steps.

That allows users to see their own data.

And start seeing the value in a useful context quickly.

Tip: Let users integrate their data into the product so there's low moving costs. Tools like Flatfile can help with this

5) Goal-based Walkthrough

If you don't have data to import, Airtable still wants to get you to a real-life goal.

They get you to Airtable to create your own project.

They guide you through the process.

And show outcomes in real time.

Contextual walkthroughs are a brilliant way to get users to activate.

This is because new users learn how to do key actions as you guide them.

Tip: Get users to a goal during their first experience. Guide them to achieving something meaningful.

Airtable starts by asking what you want to track

Then they guide you in filling out the project.

6) Highlight unique value

Data in a grid is a spreadsheet.

But data in a "Kanban" style is a project management tool.

Airtable shows you that automating tasks and visualising data in different ways is possible.

This is what makes the tool unique.

They are not just a spreadsheet. The product does more.

But if they just dumped users in product, many wouldn't ever notice.

It's important to showcase the features early on.

Tip: Your product is unique. Make sure to showcase that to new users or they may never find out.

7) Reverse Trial

A reverse trial is where new users get a free trial period with premium features.

If they don't upgrade, they're moved to the free plan.

Airtable automatically puts new users on the reverse trial.

Users can build out complex workflows and see full value.

Many won't want to lose what they built with those features.

Loss Aversion is real.

We don't like losing what we already had.

And so lots of users will decide to upgrade.

Tip: Overload on value in the early days of the trial or user journey.

Airtable focuses on getting new users to value straightaway.

They make it easy to get started and guides users to doing meaningful activities.

Consider how you can leverage some of these similar approaches with your product.

🛠 Tool I've been playing around with recently:

Hive Index

Communities are a great way to find your ideal customers and engage with them.

This tool makes it really easy for you to find them. Very cool.

🤓 Resource of the week:

Five steps to starting your product-led growth motion by Hila Qu

She goes deep into the topic and ways to best approach turning your company into a product-led company. Well worth the read.

How I can help you grow:

Download my free strategy templates

Kickstart your growth with the Startup Growth Roadmap - my playbook that's helped 300+ founders and marketers drive traction.

Hire me to audit your onboarding flow.

Work with me 1-1 to solve your most pressing growth challenges.

Cheers,

Theo

Welcome to Growth Roadmaps - my rebranded newsletter.

The best companies always have a great product. And usually their product drives their growth.

So in this newsletter, I will break down how and what fast-growing startups do grow their product.

And I will deliver to you:

7 Actionable Tactics. 7 Examples. In less than 7 minutes.

I aim to provide you with practical examples that you can use to inform your product and marketing roadmaps.

If this doesn't sound like you, please feel free to unsubscribe. No hard feelings.

No public Black Friday or Cyber Monday deals for me this year.

Why? Because if everyone is doing the same thing you become a commodity.

People don't look at your brand this time of year - just how big your offer is.

Not a game I love playing.

But I do understand that this is a period when you may finally buy the product you've been eyeing up all year - largely because it's on offer.

So if you want to buy one of my products, send me a message with which product/service you want and I will hook you up with a nice price.

This will mean only people who really want my products will reach out and there will be less of you with buyers remorse in a few days.

24 hours only.

And remember, don't ask you don't get. You never know how generous a person is feeling...

Now onto today's product growth breakdown:

Bumble's product is a masterclass in copywriting and psychology.

They has over 42 million active users. Over 3.3 million paying customers.

Last year, they drove $944 million in revenue from their app.

They know how to turn free users to paid ones.

Here's 7 tactics they use to onboard new users (that you can too):

1) Exceptional Microcopy

Bumble provide more context and disarm users on each step.

This makes the user feel more comfortable.

And allows them to make decisions that aren't always simple.

They give that extra context where required.

Empathy helps boost conversion.

2) "You" focused language

According to Thomas Mckinlay, using "You" in your messaging increases engagement.

Bumble talks to you.

They take you through a journey.

It's friendly and like it's there to help you.

Onboarding doesn't feel like a chore.

3) Dating Jobs To Be Done

Understanding goals and jobs in a dating app is crucial.

You need to understand what the user wants to get out of dating.

Bumble ask about jobs in a few different ways.

This helps them personalise.

Greater clarity = better matches.

4) Outline correct behaviour

Before getting into the product, they set the tone.

For how to use the product.

And how to behave.

It's a social product.

So they make rules clear.

This helps promote the right behaviours.

It won't eliminate bad actors.

But it helps.

5) Contextual walkthrough

The walkthrough act as your mini-dating consultant.

Once you have done an action for the first time, they reinforce what that means to the user.

This educates the users on the best way to use it.

And get more matches.

6) Leverage Psychology for upgrades

They use psychology in very smart ways to get a user to upgrade.

They leverage loss aversion and FOMO to get you wondering who your match is.

You don't want to miss out on potential matches.

After all, that could your future partner.

7) Gamify building out your profile

They tell the user they're more likely to match.

And reach your goals from the app.

It gives users an incentive to fill out their profile.

🛠 Tool of the week

Arcade

I've been playing around with Arcade this week to help me better educate new users.

You can use it to show which parts of the product to use or how to show your product in action without a clunky demo.

They have a good free plan. Worth a try.

🤓 Resource of the week

Building Resilience in an Uncertain World.

Bejay Mulenga is running a FREE workshop where they will explore techniques to help you reframe resilience and frameworks in how to create support systems. Should be interesting for every founder or marketer

You can sign up for it here

How I can help you grow:

Download my free strategy templates

Kickstart your growth with the Startup Growth Roadmap - my playbook that's helped 300+ founders and marketers drive traction.

Hire me to audit your onboarding flow.

Work with me 1-1 to solve your most pressing marketing challenges.

Cheers,

Theo