
Growth hacking: Leading indicators of engaged users - RichardPrice
http://www.richardprice.io/post/34652740246/leading-indicators-of-engaged-users
======
shykes
All of these examples concern social networking products... I would curious to
hear more from B2B online services. Tell us more about Salesforce, Atlassian,
Zoho, Box...

~~~
dm8
I believe for enterprise/B2B services sales guys are the "growth hackers" and
I believe for them it must be how many million dollar checks you can get over
quater/year. However, I'd love to hear from anyone with enterprise sales
experience on this topic.

~~~
ananddass
Based on my experience of enterprise s/w sales for about 6-7 years, the answer
depends on the ticket size of the deal and service delivery model. If it is
SaaS based ($1-$10K p.a) then a lot of what applies to Dropbox applies to your
b2b product too. At $15-20K or above you need to have inside sales reps who
smile and dial. You start breaking even at this point. when you hit $500K deal
sizes its time to bring in the rainmakers. Happy to chat more if you need
specific help. buzz me at adass at filepicker.io

------
knes
WOW. Great article...NOT. All of those "Growth hackers" indicators are just
normal activity indicator.

"Someone sign up on my service and does something on my service that's
expected of them to do?" BOOM! Leading indicator... No shit Sherlock...

As a marketer I'm getting tired to this buzz word shit around growth hacker...

~~~
RichardPrice
It's harder than you are suggesting to find a leading indicator of future
engagement. You want to find a metric that is relatively foundational, and is
going to produce engagement across a variety of dimensions later on (visit
frequency, tendency to pay, tendency to add content, tendency to invite others
etc).

For instance, when signing up to Facebook, there is a bunch of stuff they want
you to do: add friends, invite people, add content like photos, and come back
on day 1, day 2, and so on. It turns out that it's the first activity that is
more predictive of future engagement than the others, and specifically 7
friends in 10 days is an important threshold. You can't figure that out from
your intuition alone, and you definitely can't get the values of # of friends
in # of days just by consulting your intuition, or your sense of what's
obvious.

At the same time Chamath from Facebook was keen to point out that there was
nothing mystical about what the growth team at Facebook did. He said the best
way of describing what they did on the growth team is that they:

\- Measured things

\- Tested things

\- Tried things

His main take-away was that one should be extremely rigorous and analytical
when thinking about what drives engagement, and not rely on your gut, or
company lore.

~~~
moe
_one should be extremely rigorous and analytical when thinking about what
drives engagement, and not rely on your gut, or company lore._

Except the end result is usually the exact same.

A wildly inaccurate model for the sole purpose of impressing
advertisers|investors|stakeholders with fancy, meaningless charts.

The conclusions you can draw from these models are either utterly obvious, or
false. I'm looking forward to hear about a single example of the opposite.

~~~
RichardPrice
Every company at the conference was an example of the effectiveness of growth
teams. Facebook, LinkedIn, Zynga, Twitter and so on have all found that being
rigorous about optimizing their growth models has increased growth and
engagement.

They were also at pains to mention that you cannot A/B test your way to a
great product. You need deep insight and intuition to build a great product.
But once you have a great product, you can help it grow faster by being
rigorous about optimizing the drivers of growth.

~~~
moe

      "If, on a graph, the plotted data does not match the 
       initial hypothesis, make the line fatter."
       -- J. Meals
    

Or, to repeat myself, yes, it's rather easy to come up with these models and
tweak them to sell your team|book|conference|etc.

I'm still waiting for an example where such a model predicted something non-
obvious.

~~~
RichardPrice
An amusing quote, but I don't think Zuckerberg, Dorsey, Pincus, and the CEOs
of the other companies are all being deceived by fatter lines on a graph!

~~~
moe
Well, since you seem reluctant to provide an example, I'll try it with a
question:

Did Myspace have growth hackers?

~~~
RichardPrice
Reluctant to provide an example? In my comment above I said that all the
companies at the conference were examples of effective growth teams.

I suggest that we respectfully agree to disagree.

~~~
moe
Except I didn't ask for "effective growth teams" but for instances of
successful "growth hacking" (where the conclusions were not utterly obvious to
begin with).

------
bbq
Taken at face value, Dropbox's indicator is particularly interesting:

> ChenLi Wang, who runs the growth team at Facebook [sic: Dropbox?], said that
> the leading indicator of an engaged Dropbox user is when they put at least
> one file in one Dropbox folder on one device.

Basically - the leading indicator is any use at all. The other business' all
had, relatively, a much higher threshold.

This is probably because Dropbox is immediately useful and stupid-easy to use.

Of course, it's hard to take this at face value since we don't know how
everyone is defining an engaged user (and each definition isn't directly
comparable to the other services' definitions).

~~~
RichardPrice
Thanks for the typo correction re. Dropbox - fixed.

------
sbov
I was curious: when optimizing a leading indicator, what sort of effect does
that have on said leading indicator?

Presumably there can be a correlation-not-causation effect, and optimizing
said indicator wouldn't have as much as an effect on engaged users as it did
on the indicator itself. Does anyone know of a situation where they had an
increase in the leading indicator but none in engaged users? Might the
relationship change over time?

~~~
RichardPrice
It's a good question. You need to find a leading indicator that really is
causal of engagement, and not just tangentially correlated with it.

Chamath stressed how critical it is to both minimize the time it takes to
deliver a user their first 'Aha' moment, and then to continue to deliver those
moments as regularly as possible. Presumably how many friends you have is
causal, to some degree, of those 'Aha' moments - I expect that many of the
'Aha' moments on FB are to do with seeing cool content from your friends.

Nabeel also mentioned that it's also important to have various KPI metrics
that you are aware of. His view was that there should be one over-arching
operational metric that is broadly predictive of future engagement, and that
the growth team should focus on that, but that, for any given tactic that you
try out, you should be aware of its effect on a number of KPIs.

------
Torn
I thought this was going to be 'leading indicators of enraged users'... which
would be a pretty interesting thing to get analytics on to identify user pain.

Erratic mouse movements, page refreshes, etc ;)

~~~
RichardPrice
It would actually be good to be able to get leading indicators of enraged
users too!

------
andys627
What do people use for onboarding?

------
dreamdu5t
The great thing about "user engagement" is it means whatever you want it to!

