Product is the Ultimate Growth Hack by Kyle Wild

(Sustainable Growth vs.“Growth Hacking”)
Kyle Wild Cofounder, CEO of Keen IO
@dorkitude kyle@keen.io
Product is the Ultimate
Growth Hack
First presented in Tokyo at Growthhackers.jp
February 2014
Tuesday, March 11, 14

Who’s this guy?
Born & raised in a very rural area in the U.S.
(this means I grew up almost entirely online)
As a child in the 90’s, created and monetized a viral website
(Final Fantasy Fever / thefever.com / #2 onYahoo for “Final Fantasy”)
Moved to San Francisco to join Google Analytics in 2007
(I found the real-world home for internet citizens like me!)
Left Google and helped build 3 successful viral startups across 5 years
Started my own company, Keen IO, in January 2012, and
gained signiﬁcant traction with no marketing budget
Instrumental in spreading the “ﬁrst” viral video in 2000
(AllYour Base Are Belong to Us / http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,100525,00.html)

Why is this guy talking at us?
Simple.
I am going to try to convince you not to focus on growth.

But growth is a good thing! Why
shouldn’t we focus on it?
Because the best (or at least the cheapest) way to
get growth is by not focusing on it.
Okay, starting the actual talk now :)

The Five Startup Super-metrics
Dave is an investor in my company, so I don’t think he’ll sue me for stealing this.
Especially if I include this link: http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-pirates-long-version
Lifted shamelessly from “Startup Metrics for Pirates” by Dave McClure.
Read those slides ﬁve times if you haven’t yet!

Quiz: Which two metrics below matter the
most, when it comes to growth?

What most think
What secretly matters more
Quiz: Which two metrics below matter the
most, when it comes to growth?

How MOST people think about growth:
How many signups & activations have we had?
How can we get more signups & activation?

How can I Retain an insanely high percentage of my users?
How can I get them to Refer their contacts to my product?
How they SHOULD think about growth:

How can I Retain an insanely high percentage of my users?
How can I get them to Refer their contacts to my product?
How they SHOULD think about growth:
Product-Market Fit
Virality

Why does virality matter so
much?
Because it’s scalable.

Why does virality matter so
much?
Because the secret is, this is how good products have always spread.
You don’t need a “share” button to be viral, and you don’t need “winback
email campaigns” to retain your users.
You just need a truly compelling value proposition and
a brand that your customers are proud to represent.
There’s no “share” button on these viral products:

Why does sustainable growth matter?
Because MATH!
(Speciﬁcally, Calculus)
If your growth, which is the derivative of customer base, is itself a function of
your customer base, your graphs end up looking like this:

And that growth curve comes without you
having to spend more money.
Whereas, if your growth is all based on “hacks”, then your growth is a
function of how much effort you can keep putting into these hacks.
Sure, you might still end up with a chart like this (for a while):
There’s also an emotional toll: You don’t want to be a hackhead. Hackheads
for bigger and bigger hits of hack just to make the kind of curve investors like
to see. Don’t get addicted to hack.
But there’s no leverage: to get exponential results, you will have to spend
exponential amounts of effort / cash.

Why does sustainable growth
matter? (part 2)
Because the alternative is to keep raising
more and more money and pouring
it into the growth machine.

Just like these guys did (unsustainable
growth tactics = down and to the right)
Groupon’s ﬁrst year public:
Zynga’s ﬁrst year public:

Hacky growth tactics with crappy
retention and a low net promoter
score = graphs that go down and to the right
(once investors catch on)
(I know Groupon and Zynga were supposedly “viral” products, but there’s a
downside to their style of virality: once their products stopped having value to
the users, the complaints of those users went viral too!)

And even if you’re going to raise money
for growth, wouldn’t you rather put that
money to work in a more efﬁcient
machine?

Startups tend to focus on signups & daily/
monthly actives for a variety of reasons
• It’s easy to measure
• Many investors think this way, so the startups follow suit
• Everyone else is doing it!
(did you like my pun??)
IMO this is actually a very good reason to be suspicious

But I’ve done well in my career by focusing
on retention and referrals.
• Harder to measure, but possible:
Measuring retention:
- read https://keen.io/blog/47823687779/how-to-do-a-retention-analysis/
Measuring referrals:
- add an invitation event to your analytics package
- add a “user_referral” source type to your signup events
- put these events into your virality funnels
- study Net Promoter Score.
• The savviest investors will care more about retention
than about activations.
And you want to take money from the savvy ones, don’t you?!

Product Is The Ultimate Growth Hack

This Isn’t “Field of Dreams”
I’m not saying If You Build It,TheyWill Come
I’m saying something less catchy but more true: If you build something
compelling that they really love, they will stick around, and they will invite their
friends to do the same.

I’m saying something less catchy:

If you build it, and it’s something compelling that they really love, they will stick
around, and they will invite their friends to do the same.

If you don’t know how to build something compelling that customers
love, you should probably quit your job and go join someone
who does.
You’ll learn a lot from them!
(and trust me, it’ll be a million times more rewarding than slinging bullshit products all day)

The End!
If you liked this rant, you should
follow me on Twitter at
@dorkitude
http://twitter.com/dorkitude

Some books that have helped me
understand growth
TheTipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell taught me to think about the different components of viral
systems.
Groundswell by Charlene Li helped me frame a lot of this stuff in my head.
TheTen Faces of Innovation by IDEO and The Design of EverydayThings by Norman are two of the
most important books in my life. Go read them now!
I’ve also found a lot of value in studying the spread of religious and political propaganda throughout
history (and the people who created those messages). A great tactical book on that topic is Words
ThatWork by Frank Luntz.
Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior and The Mating Mind by Geoffrey Miller (thanks
@davemcclure for introducing me to these!)

Questions?

Product is the Ultimate Growth Hack by Kyle Wild

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