Learn about Growth, Strategy and user acquisition
I'm Rupert Brenninkmeijer, digital marketer at GoCardless and previous cofounder at Dribble, a venture backed startup based in London.
I have experience growing a user base in a crowded market from 0 to tens-of-thousands of users, increasing top of funnel growth for a hyper-growth scale-up and enjoy writing detailed essays on all things growth and user acquisition from key learnings throughout my experience.
I am aspiring to be a world-class growth and digital marketer and extremely passionate about the field. Love brainstorming, testing, experimenting and analysing all growth initiatives. Join me on my journey.
There’s a stigma in business. People say B2B buying is rational and emotionless when compared to B2C. Do you agree?
A wise man once said:
“It’s not a problem if you buy the wrong can of soda”
A can of coke is 70p. No big deal if you accidentally get full fat coke rather than Coke Zero.
It would be an issue, however, if buying that can of coke had multiple stakeholders, took days to drink (implement), had to sign a binding contract, pay at least a few hundred dollars a month and get sign off from the c-suite.
There’s so much more at stake in B2B buying, which makes it more emotional than B2C.
Using Google Data Studio [template included]
Whenever I do my in-depth keyword research to highlight the next quarter's focus keywords, I always have this feeling I'm missing something.
Analytics and tracking.
Maybe that's because I'm a growth and digital marketer by trait, I always feel the need to track and measure everything.
But that's the thing, why should SEO (search engine optimisation) be any different? You spend hours researching the top keywords to focus on and create content around.
And for what?
We need to be able to see, clearly, how this work pays off.
Editor’s note: this essay tackles a problem my cofounders and I faced a few years ago during my time at Dribble. This conundrum is still prevalent for many founders today. Additionally, I am currently a digital marketer at GoCardless but remain an investor at Dribble.
When building your product, it’s natural for you to build it for yourself. I mean you are building this product to help with a problem you personally want to stamp out of existence, right? At least that’s the case for some.
So building the product for you as a customer is a great place to start.
With help from one of the greatest minds in growth, Brian Balfour (Founder and CEO @ Reforge and ex-Vp of growth @ Hubspot) we will demystify the differences between CAC and CPA to understand where, when and how to use them.
As a guiding principle to your growth strategies, it is important to note these key differences in order to make the best decisions for your growth. The common misconception with these two metrics is that you can use them interchangeably, and that is wrong.
Being able to know your way around a social network of 2B MAUs is pretty useful. It's an ocean of opportunity. And if you have the right tools for this ocean, such as, the right goggles, flippers and scuba gear, you'll not only be able to find the small fish (🎣 ), but also the medium to large ones (🐟 ). Oh heck, you may even find a whale or two (🐋 x2). Sounds good right?
Now enough with the ocean analogies.
I'll walk you through this robust framework which allows for A/B testing, multivariate testing, optimising and iterating, no matter how you target your users.
How I learnt the framework and strategy was predominantly through jumping in the deep end (ok just one more 🌊 reference) and trying to make sense of things as I went.
I have mentioned these metrics a lot in almost every essay, because they are THAT important.
The pirate metrics were coined by veteran (now disgraced) VC, Dave McClure from 500 Startups with the vision that they are the only true metrics that prove the health of a startup. They form a very adaptable conversion funnel that can be used for every business model. I literally can't think of one that won't work.
A B2B, B2C and B2B2C will have the exact same stages on this funnel, just focusing on different OMTMs (e.g. messages sent, uploads, games played, ARPPU).
In order to get the most out of your growth strategies, having a clear cut process in running growth experiments is paramount. As long as you approach this with some scientific methods - allowing any test to be analysed from a quantitative perspective - then you are on a good path.
A simple scientific experiment outlined below can be found in any secondary school textbook.
As mentioned in my previous essay about the 19 channels for growth, I promised a follow-up piece on how to prioritise them.
The "bullseye" name and framework was coined by Justin Mares and Gabriel Weinberg due to the three-step approach in reaching bullseye and unlocking your growth. This approach helps you prioritise your growth startegy in a qualitative way that provides more insight than just picking a channel out of thin air.
When I’m not listening to True Crime podcasts, I’m listening to more uplifting and aspirational ones. Ones that get me talking, thinking and sharing. I believe to be a huge channel of growth for some of these podcasts due to the voume of WOM marketing I do.
With this in mind, I thought I'd make it formal and write a small synopsis on which podcasts you could be listening to to stretch your mind.
When strategising on how to grow Dribble, the book "Traction" by Justin Mares and Gabriel Weinberg (which is amazing), was a go-to resource. They did a tonne of research into customer acquisition channels, interviewed startups and founders to hear their success stories on how they grew, and ended up with a pretty concrete list of 19 channels for growth.
The theory behind this list is that they are the only true channel groups that spur on growth, and within it you can find the 1-2 channels that will scale your business. However, I wanted to dig a little deeper into a few success stories to understand whether we need to add, subtract or keep the same number of channel groups on this list.