Running minimum viable tests for growth.

1. Minimum Viable
Tests to 2X Your
Growth (without
Paid or Sales) @conradwa

2. Is it possible to progress in a
smallish, but growing market
with 20+ competitors?

3. Teachable MRR curve
Yep…

4. $3M+ ARR, without paid or
sales.

5. Your situation will be different.

6. …your product, market,
contract value, messaging,
sales process, resources,
business model, etc. is unique.

7. And it’s all
changing…

8. What this means is most
supposed “expert” advice is
probably bullshit.

9. @conradwa
Here’s what’s
worked for me when
experimenting with
product-led
growth…

10. Co-Founder
& Advisor
3 years growth
consulting
An email list of 17,000
founders and
practitioners.
Built a repeatable
growth machine through
1M users and $3M ARR.

11. Right now, I’m bringing together
thoughts on product-led growth
on: http://growhack.com before
launching my next product in
2017.

12. Repeatable growth happens when
you have a core metric and a model.

13. That’s step 1
Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 Step 4 Step 5

14. We started
starting at
Weekly Active
User (WAU) as
our initial value
metric in product
development.

15. Although the
product was still
buggy, users
surveyed said it
was a “must
have…”

16. Which is when we transitioned
to Monthly Recurring Revenue
(MRR) as core metric.

17. For the next year, we hit an
aggressive 20%+ MRR MoM
growth (net of churn).

18. Actually it was more like 30-40%
MoM, but shut down all growth
activities in December and
January due to support overload.

19. MRR works for us because it
took into account all parts of our
business like churn and
retention.

20. Your metric is likely different.
Not an easy answer, so it’s
okay to spend time thinking it
through.

21. Find yours, then make all
decisions from the context of
what will move that north star
number 20% every month.

22. Step 2: have good ideas and prioritize
them.
Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 Step 4 Step 5

23. Early on, you care mostly about
prioritizing for impact and effort.

24. Pop Quiz: Where will a growth
experiment have the most impact?

25. The deeper it is in your funnel

26. Step 3 is about actually
running tests, quickly.
Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 Step 4 Step 5

27. Fun Fact: most of your
experiments will
probably fail.

28. To improve your odds of
success, increase the rate
and quality of your growth
experiments.

29. One great way to do this?

30. Run smaller growth experiments.

31. Acquisition Experiment

32. We found out that a post
Noah Kagan did within his
Facebook group led to 40
Teachable sign ups.

33. So we guest blogged with
SumoMe.

34. And spent time creating a deal
with AppSumo

35. Activation Experiment

36. Should we spend 3 weeks
creating an email automation
sequence?

37. Instead, we started with a 7-day
email sequence that took two
days to implement.

38. From this we learned there were
many use cases for Teachable.

39. So we tested a
survey after sign
up to segment
users.

40. And tailored messaging to each
group that would significantly
improve our onboarding.

41. Referral Experiment

42. Each referral
improvement is
a multiplier on
your funnel.

43. To test our referral program, we
just asked for users to email their
audiences.

44. When that seemed to work…

45. We co-hosted one webinar with
user Mariah Coz generated
$100,000 which we split. Mariah’s
now trained hundreds of
Teachable users.

46. Practical takeaways in running
minimum viable tests

47. It’s rare that any test should go
longer than 1 month.

48. I’m personally skeptical of any
test longer than 3-7 days.

49. My challenge to you is: When
you’re looking at your list of growth
experiments to help, how can you
launch each in 1 day?

50. Then over time
and you bring
on more
resources you
can focus on
larger
experiments.

51. Notorious projects that fit this
category include:
• Site redesigns
• Metrics overhauls
• Marketing automation builds

52. What would happen if we failed
with an experiment?

53. I created an email
course called
profitable course
idea designed to
improve
engagement.

54. The 6-email course averaged
60% open rates which was great
but…

55. The challenge is we just
transitioned to an MRR goal…

56. …but I didn’t build for a process
to upsell was tacked on later
and conversion to our new MRR
goal was low :(

57. So we tested
sending
users who’d
joined to a
webinar.

58. The webinar was a small
test. It was a simple product
demo, and took almost no
time to prepare for.

59. But yet, our attendee to
paid conversion was
~10% on our first
demo. Woah..

60. Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 Step 4 Step 5
Optimize and THEN figure out
how to automate.

61. Today, we convert 30% of
anyone who attends a Teachable
webinar.

62. Then we turned THAT content
and optimized it for SEO on our
blog…

63. Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 Step 4 Step 5
And automation you ask?

64. We now have a team to run webinars
with our Head of Growth Andrew
Guttormsen leading up the effort. We
also our own webinar software on top of
YouTube and hired a full team to run
them.

65. We took this to the next step with
the Teachable Summit, which is a
series of 7 live online events that
brought an audience of 20,000
people and generates $250k/event.

66. How much time are you
spending on your growth tests?

67. Stay in touch:
http://growhack.com