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IMPRENDITORIALITA’ E STRATEGIE
Laurea Magistrale in Sviluppo Economico e dell’Impresa
ALESSANDRO BIGGI

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DO THINGS THAT DON’T SCALE

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CHALLENGE
You had a great idea.
You validated it, people are actually interested in it.
Now you developed a nice MVP (or a MLP).
You’re out there, but still nobody knows.
You have to go get your first users!

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HOW?
1. Recruit
2. Test
3. Delight
4. Experience
5. Niche vs. Big
6. Use it yourself
7. Manual vs. Automation

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Recruit
DO THINGS THAT DON’T SCALE
Recruit users manually. Nearly all startups have to.
You can't wait for users to come to you. You have to go out and get them.
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For a startup to succeed, at least one founder (usually the CEO) will have to spend a lot of time on sales and
marketing. Numbers seem so small at first. The mistake is to underestimate the power of compound growth.

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DO THINGS THAT DON’T SCALE
In Airbnb's case, these consisted of going door to door in New York, recruiting new users and
helping existing ones improve their listings.
📷
The moment Airbnb started scaling was when they started taking great pictures for their listings.

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Test
DO THINGS THAT DON’T SCALE
How do you find users to recruit manually?
If you build something to solve your own problems, then you only have to find your peers.
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Otherwise, the usual way to do that is to get some initial set of users by doing a comparatively untargeted
launch, and then to observe which kind seem most enthusiastic, and seek out more like them.

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DO THINGS THAT DON’T SCALE
Play with some marketing: try different target demographics, different ad sets and monitor
performance.
💰
Understand the data, then invest where the best results are
# $ % & ' ( ) * + , - . / 0 1

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Delight
DO THINGS THAT DON’T SCALE
You should take extraordinary measures not just to acquire users, but also to make them happy.
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Your first users should feel that signing up with you was one of the best choices they ever made.

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DO THINGS THAT DON’T SCALE
Wufoo sent each new user a hand-written thank you note.
📃

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Experience
DO THINGS THAT DON’T SCALE
Your attention to users should be extreme. As Steve Jobs would say, it has to be insanely great.
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It's not the product that should be insanely great, but the experience of being your user.
The product is just one component of that.

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DO THINGS THAT DON’T SCALE
Be attentive.
Over-engaging with early users is not just a permissible technique for getting growth rolling. For
most successful startups it's a necessary part of the feedback loop that makes the product good.
🔧

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Niche vs. Big
DO THINGS THAT DON’T SCALE
Sometimes the right unscalable trick is to focus on a deliberately narrow market.
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It's not the product that should be insanely great, but the experience of being your user.
The product is just one component of that.

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DO THINGS THAT DON’T SCALE
Harvard —> More Colleges —> More Schools —> Everyone
Zuckerberg said that while it was a lot of work creating course lists for each school, doing that
made students feel the site was their natural home.

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Use it yourself
DO THINGS THAT DON’T SCALE
Put yourself in the users shoes.
Engage with them and you learn things you'd never have known otherwise.
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DO THINGS THAT DON’T SCALE
When it’s about hardware, you not only have to be a user but also a builder!
The Pebbles assembled the first several hundred watches themselves.
If they hadn't gone through that phase, they probably wouldn't have sold $10 million worth of
watches when they did go on Kickstarter.

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Manual vs. Automation
DO THINGS THAT DON’T SCALE
There's a more extreme variant where you don't just use your software, but are your software.
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When you only have a small number of users, you can sometimes get away with doing by hand things that
you plan to automate later. This lets you launch faster, and when you do finally automate yourself out of the
loop, you'll know exactly what to build because you'll have muscle memory from doing it yourself.

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AND NOW, KEEP GROWING!

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GROWTH PHASES
The growth of a successful startup usually has three phases:
1. There’s an initial period of slow or no growth while the startup tries to figure out what it's doing.
2. As the startup figures out how to make something lots of people want and how to reach those
people, there's a period of rapid growth.
3. Eventually a successful startup will grow into a big company. Growth will slow, partly due to internal
limits and partly because the company is starting to bump up against the limits of the markets it serves.

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Growth
Phase 1
-
+
S - CURVE
Growth rate
Phase 2 Phase 3
Time

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GROWTH RATE
If there's one number every founder should always know, it's the
company's growth rate.
That's the measure of a startup. If you don't know that number, you don't even know if you're
doing well or badly.

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GROWTH RATE
Growth rate is not an absolute number, it’s indeed a rate.
What matters is not the absolute number of new customers, but the ratio of new customers to
existing ones. If you're really getting a constant number of new customers every month, you're in
trouble, because that means your growth rate is decreasing.
GREAT STARTUPS HAVE 5-7% WEEKLY GROWTH RATE IN THE GROWTH PHASE

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THINK COMPOUNDING
It’s necessary to understand if you’re growing and at what rate
A company that grows at 1% a week will grow 1.7x a year,
whereas a company that grows at 5% a week will grow 12.6x.
A company making $1000 a month and growing at 1% a
week will 4 years later be making $7900 a month, which
means: stop it asap.
A startup that grows at 5% a week will in 4 years be making
$25 million a month.

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SO, HOW TO ACHIEVE GROWTH?

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1. MARKETING

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MARKETING
https://medium.com/swlh/the-19-channels-you-can-use-to-get-traction-93c762d19339
List of 19 simple ways to market your company:

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2. TRICKS

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The first and best rule of growth is: don’t loose existing clients/users
GROWTH TECHNIQUES
1

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Adding layers to the cake
GROWTH TECHNIQUES
Work on innovating the product, add features
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Much of the natural effort in the organization is spent on chasing optimization of the core business. This
makes sense, as small improvements in a big business can have a meaningful impact. But there is huge
potential leverage to adding layers of new, complementary businesses on top of the core (aka “cake”).

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ADDING LAYERS TO THE CAKE
In Ebay’s case, buy-it-now, stores, features, checkout and PayPal integration were all new
initiatives that layered on top of the core business but added something new to it.

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The New User Experience
GROWTH TECHNIQUES
Brand new customers have different needs that your regular customers. So you have to give new
customers a unique user experience that helps them start using your product.
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Go ahead and give them a step-by-step process to get started, call out critical features they should be
aware of, and help them navigate everything.

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THE NEW USER EXPERIENCE
When you create a new account on Airbnb first you get a welcome box that offers a quick tour.
As soon as you click on the “take a tour of this page” button, you get a popup explaining one of
the features of the page

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Adding Social Proof
GROWTH TECHNIQUES
Would you go to a full restaurant or to an empty one?
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We use the actions of others to guide us through decisions in our daily lives. Whenever we’re uncertain
about which action we should take, we automatically look to those around us for guidance.

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ADDING SOCIAL PROOF
So your marketing message is always
much more powerful if someone else says
it. You can overcome that skepticism by
getting quotes from past customers.
TESTIMONIALS LOGOS OF CLIENTS OR MEDIA CUSTOMERS STATS
But let’s say that you don’t have any big
name clients. In fact, you don’t have ANY
clients. And the media hasn’t mentioned
you at all. Is there a way to still use
authoritative logos?
Absolutely. Use logos of products and
services that you or your product work
with.
For someone on the fence that’s trying to
decide whether or not to finish filling out
the form, this social proof gives great
reassurance that other people are also
doing the exact same process right now.

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Product Integration
GROWTH TECHNIQUES
Instead of trying to build a customer base from scratch, why not piggy back off what other businesses
have already done?
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Leverage on existing communities to push your product.

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PRODUCT INTEGRATION
This is exactly what Spotify did when they launched in the US. Instead of building their user base
from scratch, they were one of the first companies to integrate their product into the Facebook
News Feed.
Some other examples:
- Paypal and Ebay
- Zynga and Facebook
- Spotify and Facebook
- Airbnb and Craigslist

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Viral Loops
GROWTH TECHNIQUES
A viral loop means that if you start with 10 customers, they’ll bring more than 10 other customers to you.
Each batch of new customers gets larger and larger as you go viral.
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That’s when you have a viral coefficient of more than 1.
http://nichevertising.com/viral-coefficient-calculator/
If the viral coefficient is below 1, that means your growth will stall sooner or later without an injection of new customers from marketing.

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VIRAL LOOPS
It’s better with Friends.
Skype has an amazing viral loop that’s built into the fabric of its product. Once you’ve started to
use the product, you’ll encourage friends and family to join you so everyone can easily keep in
touch. As they start Skyping with you, they’ll encourage people in their network to also use it.

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Referral programs
GROWTH TECHNIQUES
Set up a system where users benefit by recommending other users to use your product.
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Incentive is Key!

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REFERRAL PROGRAMS
100,000 to 4,000,000 users in 15 months.
According to founder/CEO Drew Houston, referrals increased signups by SIXTY percent,
PERMANENTLY. That’s a 40x increase, or a doubling of users every 3 months.
Just in April 2010, Dropbox users sent 2.8 million direct referral invites

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Pre-Launch Buzz
GROWTH TECHNIQUES
Create expectation before your product comes out. Make people desire it and talk about it.
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1. Benefits
2. Urgency
3. Bandwagon effect
4. Influential team
5. Great story + customer validation
HOW IT WORKS

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PRE-LAUNCH BUZZ
One-minute long video, which
showcases the Benefits of Mailbox
Mailbox created Urgency by setting up
a reservation line. You don't want to
wait any longer before getting the app
hence you want to subscribe.
The Reservation line is an incredibly
clever marketing move as it make use
of the Bandwagon effect
An influential team always helps a lot
to get the word out: involve advisors
A page that sums up the story with
comments and feedbacks from
customers gives validation
1 2 3
4 5

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MEASURE EVERYTHING