1. Startups & Growth
Learn Early. Learn Often.

2. Most of the startups go through the same
phase and face the same set of
problems.

3. You create a product which you think is
the best solution to a problem already
existing in the market.

4. expecting virality
and exponential user adoption.
You launch the product

5. It’s important for us to remember that every
product will not be an Instagram.
99% of time, the traffic falls off after a
initial spike.

6. You’re in a stage of your startup called as
The Trough of Sorrow
Source: @andrewchen

7. Trough of Sorrow
because you launch your product hoping
You fall into the
that the market would accept it and not
because the market wanted it.

8. It’s important for a startup to understand
the different phases in it’s growth
cycle
and realize when to launch.

9. 3 Stages of Product Growth Cycle

10. Each stage in the product growth cycle
has got certain success end goals.
Finding First Set
of Customers
Validating Your
Product
Exponential
Growth
• Problem/Solution Fit
• Product/Market Fit
• Scale Exponentially

12. Measure.Measure.Measure.
Reference: Dave Mcclure’s pirate metrics

13. Identify metrics
each stage.
that matter
during

14. Maximize for
speed, learning.
Build
Learn
Measure

15. Iterate.
Optimize/ Pivot.

16. Always find your Product/Market fit before
scaling.
Else
You Fail.

17. What
Product/Market fit
Source : @andrewchen
looks like.

18. Traction
This is what you should aim for.
Pre P/M Fit
Post P/M Fit

19. How to
scale after P/M Fit?

20. Distribute cheaply
to as many people as
possible.

21. Use a mix of Paid and Non-Paid Strategies
to distribute and acquire.

22. Use the power of
Social Media
Get your Viral Loops right :
(k=invites/user*invite acceptance)
k>1

23. Leverage Platforms that work for your product

24. Blog
end goal
•
Establish
and identify your target audience.
•
Churn out world-class content your target
audience would be interested in.
•
Guest-Blog:
•Builds natural links
•Increases your online authority
•Builds Relationship
•Opens up your product/ service to a large audience
quickly

25. “Solely through guest blogging we've acquired around
100,000 users within the first 9 months of running Buffer.” –
Leo Wildrich, Co-founder, Buffer
Take a leaf out of Kissmetrics & Moz’s Book.
Remember this takes time & effort.

26. Create & Distribute Infographics
“KISSmetrics was able to generate 2,512,596 visitors
and 41,142 back links from 47 infographics. This
strategy helped take the KISSmetrics blog from 56,380
to 146,197 visits per month.” – Neil Patel

27. Search &
Connect with Influencers
niche.
Leverage
their reach.
in your

28. E-books, Guides and White papers
Presentations & Slideshare ( Traffic, SEO)

29. SEO done right.

30. Run
Contests
&
Give-aways

31. Use Paid Channels
Keep a check, @LTV = 3*CPA

32. What do I do
after acquisition?

33. Build your
conversion funnels.
Measure.

34. Optimize for conversions in each stage.
Get this fixed first.
5000
16%
800
Acqusition
Activation
300
Retention
50
Revenue

35. If conversions from visits to sign up is low. Fix
that first.
A small landing page tweak helped cloudsponge
increase conversion by 33%

36. If Activation is low, work on user onboarding.
Twitter has a step-by-step onboarding Process. Makes
you
follow 5 people. Users tend to be more active.
40% of Twitter users use the platform without publishing.
4x number of monthly visitors who don’t login. Just read the stream.

37. If retention is less focus on getting users to
come back to the platform.
Use both transactional emails and autoresponders to get people back in.

38. LinkedIn was successful in increasing
engagement &
retention using the double viral loop.
Prompting users to connect/ invite during onboarding led to 16%
increase in invitations sent & 41% increase in page views.
Source: http://www.slideshare.net/joshelman/josh-elman-threegrowthhacksgrowconf81413

39. Not all hypothesis & the resulting experiments
result in a better conversion.

40. So
A/B Test
Version b is better than a. Roll out version b.
Source: Smashingmagazine

41. Not just the landing pages and calls to
action, but A/B Test product features as
well.

42. Iterate on features and use cohort analysis to
track engagement/ retention/ revenue/ referral
Fig Above : Twitter’s cohort shows how the product improvements
resulted in an increase in the percentage of engaged users in the
second month.

43. Find your AHA Moment!
Turn a visitor to a engaged user.
Facebook : 7 friends in 10 days.
Twitter : Follow 30 people.
Zynga : Day 1 retention.
Drop Box : Atleast one file in dropbox folder.

44. Remember the mantra : Learn early, Learn
often.

45. Thank You
Email me:
amarnath.vannarath@gmail.com
Follow me:
@freaks007