
20 days as a growth hacker - Tetral
http://timothy.userapp.io/post/68699141337/20-days-as-a-growth-hacker
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patio11
So thumbs up for trying new things. I really and sincerely mean that.

Now I'm going to say something that will sound discouraging but has your best
interests at heart: do you currently have 100 people who absolutely,
positively could not run their business without UserApp? Or, as an
intermediate goal, ten? If not, your only job is for you to go out, as an
actual person rather than a web page, and recruit those users one at a time.
Your service level can be _stupidly_ unscalable -- forget "Here's our API
documentation", you can _literally_ offer "Give me your laptop and I will
write the integration for you. Right now. I'm serious. You think I'm not
serious? Laptop. Now." (My understanding is that Patrick Collison was doing
this for Stripe in the early days.) If they stop using it, rather than doing
deep analytics magic to discover what lead to their lack of engagement, you
should call them up and say "Dude, I literally coded the integration for you.
Level with me: why isn't this everything you need in user management? What can
I implement for you to get you to revert that commit?"

After you've got 10/100/etc people who really like your service, you can start
thinking about scaling acquisition channels. In the process of doing that,
you'll likely optimize the living daylights out of them, and in the process
develop intuitions for "This test is a priority for me to run" versus "This
seems like it's likely a poor use of my time even if it succeeds."

At the moment, the cart appears to be a step or two in front of the horse.

~~~
timothy89
I really like your advice! Others have actually told me the same and I
understand "the concept". But I would like to ask you for some more advice:
how can I spend my days only focusing on getting users to use us? We are
already emailing every new signup offering them help etc, and some respond
with questions, which we help them with. But that usually doesn't take the
whole day. I would like to know some activities on how to get more of those.
Cold calling?

Otherwise, thank you for your feedback. Appreciate it :)

~~~
patio11
Cold calling could work. If I don't miss my guess, though, I bet your social
circle and activities already intersect with people who build apps, so I'd use
every opportunity possible to ask them about their pains with user management
and to tell them that they should use UserApp instead of their homerolled
solution. (Be prepared to hear "I don't have any problem with user management"
and "There is nothing you could offer me, not even your services as free
engineers, which would convince me to let somebody else manage this core a
part of our offering." If that was the only thing you heard from the next 100
people you talked to that would _still_ make talking to them the most
productive activity you could possibly have been engaged in.)

~~~
timothy89
I will give this a thought and see how I can plan my upcoming weeks. I have
considered about canceling my every-day growth hacks to focus more on larger
"hacks", and also finding users and helping them getting started. Let's see
what happens :)

Thank you for your advice!

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gacba
It would be nice to see some follow up on the items "Need to run this test
longer..." or "It's too early to tell..." items. You have a LOT of those, and
for a growth hack to be valuable, you need to see some results.

Since you post the hack without the results, it's harder for people to learn
from your actions here. Can you do some updates for the earlier rounds?

~~~
nedwin
I can also imagine a lot of the data getting muddled as a result.

Do more people click the signup button because you made it bigger and changed
the copy, or is it because you reduced the clutter in the footer reducing
distraction for the user?

~~~
timothy89
I know what you mean. Many of the hacks' results may collide. I wonder what a
possible solution to that problem could be?

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gk1
You're focusing too much on small UX/UI changes with even smaller effects.
Aka, optimizing for the local maxima.

~~~
timothy89
Yeah I know, the problem is to find time to do one large "hack" each day. Do
you have any tips for me?

~~~
gk1
I think the whole premise (one "growth hack" per day) isn't right. I would
call this more like "one UI touch-up per day." I don't mean that in a
condescending way.

If you want to make a bigger impact you have to dig deeper. Look at your
analytics and conversion funnels for ideas.

For example:

Is there a bottleneck for many visitors on their path from First Visit to
Signup? Do visitors from a certain source convert or stick around longer than
others? Is there a page within your Docs section that a significant number of
visitors view before eventually signing up?

Now make some educated guesses to explain the data. For example:

If 13% of the Trial User segment viewed the demo apps prior to signing up,
maybe the demo played a significant role in convincing them to sign up. (BTW,
you can even segment this group out in Analytics as Demo Viewers and compare
their conversion rates vs those who did not view the demo.)

And now for the test:

A/B test adding a link directly to the demo somewhere prominent on the
homepage (maybe even replacing the subscription link under the CTA).

* * *

Lots of blogs make it seem as though you can "growth hack" by merely changing
a button color or adding a modal popup somewhere. Easy things like that only
work when you're starting from the bottom. Once your site is half-way decent,
it takes more ingenuity than that to make a meaningful impact.

EDIT: From looking at the other comments here I'm getting the impression that
you don't have a whole lot of traffic. In that case you probably don't have
enough Analytics data to look as deep as my examples. Still, assuming your
Analytics is setup properly, you should be looking at it for opportunities.

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pwim
The top page of [https://www.userapp.io/](https://www.userapp.io/) looks
great. However, it leaves me wondering who your service is actually for.

I'm a web developer, so login, sign-up, and user storage are my bread and
butter, and I can use open source plugins for handling this, so your target is
someone who has more challenges for adding this functionality.

Mobile app creators could be one niche, and if so, something like "User
Management for Mobile Apps" could help such developers understand your product
is for them.

~~~
timothy89
Yes, we are working on that :) The user authentication stuff maybe take a few
hours/days to get in place for a experiences developer. However, what we want
to focus on is everything else around user management. That's why we are
building an add-on store for third-party integrations. Some example cases that
we could solve:

* If you have users, you might want to sync them to e.g. MailChimp.

* You would probably want to charge them for using your app, so you would need to integrate a payment provider, calculate payments, creating price plans, etc. UserApp already takes care of all that except the payment processing, which will come as add-ons later.

* Social login (OAuth) to support login from Facebook, Twitter etc.

* Send welcome emails, forgot password emails, etc.

* An admin interface t be able to delete, block, search and manage your users, permissions, etc.

And this is not just for mobile apps. It's for every web, or mobile, app that
has users to manage.

Thank you for your feedback!

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programminggeek
Here is a growth hack for you, Put $100 towards AdWords and bid cheap(shoot
for less than a quarter per click) and send users to a free trial landing
page. Little tweaks here and there obviously help, but at some point you just
need more traffic.

~~~
timothy89
I will give this a try (along with other ad networks as well) when I've got
the conversion rates to a better level.

~~~
gk1
How do you know visits from ads won't convert any better than your current
visitors? If you do a half-descent job of targeting your ads you could get
visitors who are much more likely to convert than your current visitors.

~~~
timothy89
True that. Will maybe give it a try this month :)

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hissworks
If your blog is going to live on a subdomain of userapp.io, you may want to
more fully integrate the browsing experience with that of userapp.io. I looked
for the footer mentioned in Day 19 and couldn't find it. Why not? (as in "why
not try anything?")

~~~
timothy89
Good idea, will see what I can do. Thanks!

