You are not your product's customer

But building it for you is a great place to start

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 many.

So building the product for you as a customer is a great place to start.

The needs of a few can skew the needs of many

The early users you acquire buy into your solution with a significant time-investment. Early product releases are never perfect, so the users who stick-it-out become your “power users”, providing valuable feedback (about themselves) to help make a better product (for themselves).

The early employees you bring on will have hopefully found the same value from your solution, as well as, buying into the long term vision of the product, so soon start building features to help maximise the reward for your “power users” (and themselves).

At this stage, you are building a product to solve the problem for you, your early “power users” and your early employees. That’s ideal right?

Yes, but only for a fleeting moment. It’s now time to think bigger.

Market Problem

Your target market

I personally experienced this conundrum when cofounding Dribble at university. Since we had the solution to a niche problem, the logical use-case was to target those just like us, other students. So all growth, acquisition and product development efforts were tailored to them/us.

If we stuck building the product for ourselves and the university lookalikes, we would have failed, since the market problem was not as prevalent for the segment. The real market problem was with a demographic, polar opposite to students….employed people with disposable income (also football fans and regular punters). This was the potential customer base we were missing and not building the product for.

So, we changed our product and messaging to accommodate. Changes included:

• Copy. From millennial slang to more succinct and professional. Like SPORTBible getting a job at Sky Sports

• User journey. To be less around the social side of playing with your friends, to playing to win and making money on the platform

• Acquisition. To target those that require a higher CAC since they are more affluential

• Branding. To suit the professional sports fan rather than the young student (notice how young = ⚡)

Dribble logo 2015 - Dribble logo 2016 (which has now changed again in 2018)

By coming together and working on all (and more) of these changes, we were able to start an ongoing iteration process that lasts today. Thankfully we learnt the lesson laid out by Casey Winters, the growth lead who helped scale Pinterest:

“Your customer focus should always be on new or potential users, not early users”

As Casey mentions, once early value is established, start building the product for the larger market problem. The problem which is incredibly diverse with an insane amount of use-cases. This new product must iterate, grow, evolve to be a living breathing solution to the larger market. Then, and only then, will you have a viable product for the long term.

Dynamic, not static product optimisation is the key.

Shifting away from your early "power users"

Your early "power users" are the dark side

When tackling a problem, you start with trying to monopolise a small niche within the greater market. If you’re a fantasy football app (using our app as an example) you can’t just jump into the whole sports market as you’d immediately be drowned by insane customer acquisition costs.

You start by focusing on a much smaller but highly engaged (daily fantasy) market.

Listening and learning from your early power users will help you reach great heights within your small niche. But remember this is just a small piece within the greater pie. So if you get stuck only listening and catering to their needs, your growth will be stunted since the ceiling of potential is mapped to that small piece.

Shifting your product and customer acquisition efforts to the wider market at the right time and shifting away from the power users, will hold you in good stead to address the much larger opportunity. This should only be done once you’ve reached product market fit.

How do you know when you’ve reached PMF?

In short, it’s when you have a product worth using by at least a sub-segment of the market. Questions to ask yourself:

• Is my retention curve flat after 1, 3 or 6 months (length of time depends on your business model)?

• If I turned off all acquisition and retargeting efforts (including push notifications and email) would there still be healthy usage?

Do note, this essay does not mean you must forget your early adopters. Building a community around the ever growing use-cases and user profiles is the best way to keep engaged your early and current power users.

Conclusion

So, even though your early power users are valuable at the beginning, be aware that they will bias your experiments, skew your data, make it harder to find new users and ask for features to help only their experience. (Note that an increase in power user engagement will be negligible since they’re already using it so frequently.)

The real value is to build the product for your potential customers, focus growth and development on the new users and be the solution to that larger market problem.

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The aim for this essay is to hopefully dispel any early founders from making a similar mistake my cofounders and I faced. If you found value in this essay and want others to see this, please share.

I really appreciate it!

I'm re-invigorating my LinkedIn profile so feel free to connect. I'm accepting all connections :)

You can find more of my musings about growth, strategy and user acquisition on my site Bright Fund, and if you’re feeling quirky you can even subscribe. Alternatively you can find my Medium publication, Bright Fund.

How To Run A Growth Experiment

Using the G.R.O.W.S method

Editor's note: I promised another prioritisation essay in last week's piece. This is it. Plus more. Much more. Similar to last weeks piece, best results from this approach happen when you have plugged as many holes as you can in that leaky bucket product of yours :)

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.

Minimum viable experiment

We will use the same concept, just in a more scalable way.

The key here is to have an unbiased decision making process when focusing your time, effort and money into finding your core growth channels. Putting your trust into a scientific growth experiment allows you to follow the data rather than your gut (don't get me wrong, your gut is very intuitive, but it won't be able to consistently tell you whether your multivariate-tests-of-the-future will work). It will ultimately help you make the most informed decisions you can in un-earthing the growth for your business. 

There are a few ways (or anagrams) you can follow for your experiments, however, one that has worked for me is the G.R.O.W.S process, coined by the Growth Tribe out of Amsterdam. 

G.R.O.W.S

The G.R.O.W.S method

The G.R.O.W.S process follows this order:

1. G - Gather Ideas

2. R - Rank Ideas

3. O - Outline Experiments

4. W - Work

5. S - Study Data

Let's dive in to each stage.

G - GATHER IDEAS

Trello board for backlogged ideas across the Pirate Metrics

Creating a company-wide spreadsheet for ideas that popup anytime is great way to start. How I organised our growth backlog is by using the conversion funnel (or pirate metrics) as a guide, going from awareness, acquisition, activation, retention, revenue and referral.

You can take things further by setting up formal brainstorming sessions with the whole company or multiple teams depending on size of co. To get the most out of these sessions, it's best to learn how to brainstorm like a Googler.

Simply put, the growth team ask every individual to brainstorm on their own around a specific stage of the conversion funnel, e.g. user acquisition. Everyone then comes together to flush out the best, most creative and innovative ideas to start ranking. Each person must:

1. Know the user

2. Think 10x

3. Prototype said ideas

R - RANK IDEAS

Next step is to rank or prioritise your ideas. If you take a look at my previous essay on how to prioritise your growth, I map out a prioritisation framework (Bullseye). You can use that or, since we are focusing on experimentation, you can create any simple ranking system to help rank best ideas. Such as:

Who ate all the P.I.E.S

What I like about this system is the semi-scientific approach. Good tip is to make any decision a quant one. The image above shows a mixed variety, meaning ideas from different stages of the conversion funnel. It's actually best is to focus on one stage every time. 

O - OUTLINE EXPERIMENTS

Now that you have one highest ranked idea, you can start experimenting. Key here is to design a test that will verify whether the specific idea/channel/approach will be a success or failure. Best way to go about this is to build out an experiment sheet.

Minimum viable version:

Minimum Viable Version

• Top ranked idea: Create a popup page after created a lineup to incentivise users to play multiple paid games with one-click

• Research: Currently we have paying users playing 2 paid games per gameday. This popup page will make it much easier to play more

• Hypothesis: By using the popup page to incentivise more paid games, we will increase paid games per user per gameday by 50% and therefore increase average revenue per paying user (ARPPU) by 20%

Maximum viable version:

Top ranked idea: Create a popup page after created a lineup to incentivise users to play multiple paid games with one-click

Maximum Viable Version

Top ranked idea: Create a popup page after created a lineup to incentivise users to play multiple paid games with one-click

• We believe that there will be an increase in paid games because of a popup screen that incentivises users to play more with one-click

• To verify this we will send out a beta version with said integration to our top 5% users - without telling them the update - and analyse their behaviour when prompted

• We will measure number of paid games played (#) and ARPPU (£) to see if there is an increase in either or both due to the integration

• It is a success if we improve the ARPPU by 20%

• Results Quantitative: # paid games played up by 75% and ARPPU up by 33%

• Results Qualitative: users say "very useful", "quick and easy", "organic placement of popup", "much more fun, quick and useful"

• Next steps are to rollout integration and update game 

W - WORK WORK WORK

Rihanna says it best

This the area that separates the men and women from the boys and girls. You can do a number of things to maximise the effectiveness of your work and experiment, however for me, weekly sprints worked best. They really allow you to laser focus on one goal (the experiment) and truly smash it out the park. No excuses. 

S - STUDY DATA

Which pill...?

This is where the insights kick in and you make your growth decisions. This is where the test is verified as either a success or failure.

If you get the analysis wrong, you make the wrong decisions. Therefore you could jeopardise your whole growth model. Which could mean the end of your business, depending on its stage of life. No pressure.

Make sure you understand, record and analyse both quantitative and qualitative data for every experiment. Understanding how the users reacted and felt, matter as much as the data behind their behaviour.

Try to find any differences in user behaviour from before, and ask yourself why this has (or has not) occurred. Does it fit with your original hypothesis? Is this healthy, scalable behaviour?

From all of the data you have acquired and consumed you can now conclude success or failure. And depending on answer, either use the data for further background research in future projects, or use to rollout the experiment company-wide. 

Key tools I used were Fabric.io (for real-time acquisition metrics), Amplitude (for retention, segmenting, behavioural cohorting, data visualisation and Metabase (for all data retrieval and querying). 

RINSE AND REPEAT

Rinse and repeating growth experiments

Even if your first seven experiments fail, you can use the data acquired as more background research for the next seven. This iterating experimentation process theoretically means the more experiments you run the higher value they become (so by experiment 1,273 you'll be pooping gold). 

Remember, rinse and repeat until you find that one core channel that really grows your business. The one that hits the sweet spot. When you do, ride that channel as long as you can, dig deep, iterate and squeeze as much growth as you can out of it until it's fully saturated. 

Then rinse. Then repeat. 

You can find my other musings here, here and here. 

How to Prioritise Your Growth Strategy

Leaky bucket?

In the "4 things I wish I knew when cofounding my startup" essay, one of the advice pieces was that every product is a leaky bucket. Test and optimise all aspects of your product - from onboarding, activation, conversion funnel etc - to make it as 'un-leaky' as possible before you go through this process.

Why? Because it will save you time and money. 

How to prioritise your growth strategy

This is a bullseye - courtesy of myself

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. You'll see that the way I use the framework differs slightly to theirs, which means there is room for interprotation. 

I think it's also important to note that there are many ways on how to prioritse your growth strategy, this is just one of them, and one that I found very useful at the beginning of my career. I will cover another type of prioritisation down the line, one that has a few more steps in the process but begins with the brainstorming technique from Google.

Bullseye Prep

Who are you targeting?

To preface the prioritisation process you must have an understanding of who you are targeting. If you are pre-product launch with no customer data then you can target and test different hypotheses with different customer profiles (but one at a time). Simply put, hypothesise who they might be, what demographic, where they are, what they consume and what they do.

For example, this is how I started my own customer profile:

• Product = Dribble - daily fantasy football app

• Who = men, 18-21, uni, football fans, premier league, champions league, pub culture, punters, 

• Where = Oxford (started locally, so where I was when started out, as it's always good to find a niche market, no matter how small, to potentially monopolise)

• What they consume: football highlights, football fan pages

• What they do: 5-aside football, season ticket holders, pub culture, FIFA, Pro evo

The One Metric That Matters For Acquisition

Once you have your target customer profile, it's time to understand the one metric that matters (OMTM) for your acquisition. Is it pure installs, registrations, activations, or further down the funnel with revenue or games played / messages sent? The OMTM is different fo every business so really think what your product is trying to do. For Dribble, we targeted activations, so users that have installed, registered and deposited money.

This metric will be your north star, so for every channel you look at you need to think "how is this going to drive [enter your OMTM]?" and then test, optimise and iterate to really maximise results. Focusing on one metric really helps, and advice would be focus on metrics further down the funnel, away from the vanity metrics like installs. 

19 Channels For Growth

Last step in the preparation process is the brainstorm session, which is often the funnest part. The key takeaway here is to take your time with every acquisition channel, don't disregard any and understand one way you can drive acuisition.

E.g. looking at the channel "content marketing", are you going to focus on writing long form content, making a series of infographics, get into podcasts? How will you distribute to acquire the user profile you created at the beginning? Will that be on Medium, reddit, Instagram? 

When brainstorming, always keep in mind your user profile and OMTM. How do you think your user profile will react with that specific acquisition channel, are they known for using said channel, and how will that channel positively affect your OMTM? 

What helped me was listing out all 19 channels for growth on a large white board with space to input where and how you'd use each channel.

19 channels listed

Bullseye Framework

Prioritisaiton

There are three sections in the bullseye framework. The outer ring, the middle ring and the onion ring...only joking, it's the bullseye. 

So once you have all channels listed with ways you can leverage each, think about how relevant / promising / effective each are by rating each channel with 1,2 or 3. 

The priority key

But it's not that simple.

To help prioritise, you can only choose three channels for the bullseye, four for the middle ring and 5 for the outer ring. 

The onion ring structure

At this stage you might have 5 channels with relevance score of 1, so the two channels you don't put in the bullseye will be the first to fill out your middle ring. Then from there you have two spaces for your number 2's, which will then overflow into the outer ring. Get the jist?

Prioritised Bullseye

Testing

Once you have completed the qualitative part of the bullseye diagram it's time to start with the quantitative! Because at the end of the day, data is king and will tell you where to spend your time, money and efforts.  

The first channels you start testing are the innermost. To do so, set aside a small amount of budget with a timeline, for instance, £1k to be allocated to the first three channels in total and run for a month.

At this stage, one or more channels will have started to perform better than the rest. If there is a clear loser(s) after the first month, swap in the equal amount of poor performing channels with ones in the middle ring. If all three are performing relatively similarly, test a little longer to find a statistically significant difference. 

Keep swapping out channels in and out of the bullseye ring - while testing them over the same amount of time and budget - until there is a clear winner. This winner is your core channel and the one you should focus on.

How to keep momentum

The distribution of growth from the 19 channels follows the power law.

Distribution of growth among channels

There really is only one channel at a time that brings in most of the growth. However, you can't rely on that singular channel until the end of time. Each channel has a saturation point.

You need to be able to squeeze every ounce of traction out of your core channel before you move on. To do so, you must focus, dive deep and continually experiment to find out exactly how to optimise growth. You will uncover new and effective tactics and try to scale them until you reach the saturation point. You will know when you've reached that point because growth will have stagnated, no matter what you do, and costs will no longer be sustainable. 

Common Mistakes

We've all been there...

When testing, it's quite common to have multiple channels working but with varying degrees of success. For example, you test online ads, influencer marketing and SEO. They all work well, however, influencer marketing works far better in terms of cost effectiveness and scale, but you elect to keep all three going. This is a common mistake that must be prevented. Really focus and specialise on the singluar channel that works well. 

If no traction channel is significant by the end of testing, then you must go through the framework again. However, this time you'll have data to work with about previous experience, copy, tone of voice, language, creative etc. If you have gone through this process a number of times and still no real results, then you still have a leaky bucket. Fix that first. 

Hope this has helped you in prioritising your growth startegy. It sure helped me.

FYI - after running my growth strategy through bullseye targeting, I found my core channel. It started with social ads, but after saturation point it became, and still is, partnerships. Things move. Don't worry.

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If you enjoyed this, catch my other essays on "how I launched my iOS app", how I'd improve it, 19 channels for growth, "4 things I wish I knew when cofounding my startup" and 5 podcasts to listen to.