Growing your startup might not be as easy as it sounds. Avoid common myths about growth hacking and learn why you as a founder should not focus 100% of your resources into user acquisition right away.

1. @Growthhackasia (Growth Hacking Asia)
Why you shouldn't focus on user
acquisition (yet)
Natalija Snapkauskaite
@growthhackasia
#letshackasia

2. FLIP THE SUCCESS RATE OF ASIAN
STARTUPS FROM 1/10 TO 9/10

5. THE MYTHS

6. GROWTH HACKING:
DIGITAL MARKETING or PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT?

7. Growth hackers see their product / service
as a growth driver
THE TRUE AND ONLY GROWTH DRIVER

8. To get the healthy growth curve,
work towards getting the product experience and
engagement right
and achieve the hockey stick as a result of it
THE TRUE AND ONLY GROWTH DRIVER

9. GROWTH HACKING FUNNEL
Optimize
Optimize
Optimize
Optimize Optimize
RESULT: GROWTH ENGINE

10. GROWTH HACKING FUNNEL: ACQUISITION
Acquisition = getting people to come to your site

11. EXAMPLE: AIRBNB

12. GROWTH HACKING FUNNEL: ACTIVATION
Activation = getting people to take the required action, e.g.
purchase, sign up

13. EXAMPLE: AIRBNB
Listings with high quality photos received 2-3x more bookings
→ AirBnB invested in professional photography

14. GROWTH HACKING FUNNEL: RETENTION
Retention = getting users to come back to your site

15. EXAMPLE: AIRBNB

16. GROWTH HACKING FUNNEL: REFERRAL
Referral = getting active users to refer others

17. EXAMPLE: AIRBNB
→ Referrals increased bookings by 25% in some markets

18. GROWTH HACKING FUNNEL: REVENUE
Revenue = monetising active users

19. GROWTH HACKING FUNNEL
Optimize
Optimize
Optimize
Optimize Optimize
RESULT: GROWTH ENGINE

20. GROWTH HACKING = USER ACQUISITION?

22. ALL MONEY INTO ACQUISITION?

23. EXAMPLE: VIDDY
Viddy is a social video application that enables its users to capture, edit, and share videos,
photos, and collages with friends.

24. EXAMPLE: VIDDY
‘The Instagram For Video’
Celebrity users like Mark Zuckerberg, Justin Bieber, Snoop Dogg, and T-Pain
Funding
Raised $30 million in May 2012
Valued at $370 million
Investors like Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, Shakira, and Jay-Z's Roc Nation

27. EXAMPLE: VIDDY
Returned $18 million of its big funding round to investors
Bought out by Fullscreen

28. Don’t over-focus on growth / virality
ACTIVATION and RETENTION are much more challenging
than user acquisition
WAIT, WHAT?

29. EXAMPLE
Visitors:
30,000
500 300
1,000

30. EXAMPLE
600
Visitors:
30,000
500
1,000

31. QUICKLY GET FROM VALIDATION TO 1 MILLION

32. PHASES OF GROWTH

33. Product-market
fit
Growth stage
PHASES OF GROWTH

34. A BIG JUMP
Product-market
fit
Growth stage

35. THERE IS MORE TO THAT...
Product-market
fit
Initial user
acquisition
Product
calibration
Growth stage
Initial qualitative
data
Initial
quantitative data
Improve VPs,
UI/UX,
activation,
retention

36. PEOPLE UNDERSTAND THE VALUE OF YOUR
PRODUCT RIGHT AWAY

37. YOU + CUSTOMER

38. The Aha! moment
Many leading tech companies have promoted “aha moments”—the instant a
user understands the value of their product—as a key to growth.
Credit: Chamath Palihapitiya and Facebook’s “aha moment”

39. The Aha! moment
Chamath Palihapitiya, who ran Facebook’s growth team, said that the Aha!
moment they used was a user reaching 7 friends in 10 days.

40. The Aha! moment
Twitter
Josh Elman, Twitter’s product lead for growth and relevance until 2011, took a
look at their usage numbers and realized that once a user follows 30 people,
they’re more or less active forever. If Twitter couldn’t get a person to follow 30
other people, that person was very unlikely to ever come back.

41. The Aha! moment
Nabeel Hyatt, former GM at Zynga, realized in their case that if someone came
back the next day after signing up for a game, they were much more likely to
become an engaged and paying user. So they focused on what they called “day 1
retention”.

42. The Aha! moment
ChenLi Wang, who runs growth at Dropbox, has noted that the best indicator of
whether someone will continue using Dropbox is when they put at least one file
in one Dropbox folder.

43. The Aha! moment
For Slack, the number is 2,000 — 2,000 messages. “Based on experience of
which companies stuck with us and which didn't, we decided that any team that
has exchanged 2,000 messages in its history has tried Slack — really tried it,”
Butterfield says. For a typical team of 10 people, that’s maybe a week’s worth of
messages. But it hit us that, regardless of any other factor, after 2,000 messages,
93% of those customers are still using Slack today.”

44. Find your Aha! moment
As Richard Price notes, Aha! moments tend to fit into three categories:
■ Network density: X friends or connections made in Y days
■ Content added: X bits of content added
■ Visit frequency: Visiting again within X day
How?
Look at different cohorts of users that became engaged and cohorts of users that didn’t.
You could also look at power users, your super fans, scrutinize their usage history and their
usage activity and the channels where they come from.
The Aha! moment

45. RECAP

46. 1. Don’t focus on big growth & virality right away
2. Work with the whole Growth Hacking funnel
3. Get user experience and engagement right
4. Calibrate your product
5. Find your aha moment
THE GROWTH MYTHBUSTER CHECKLIST