• Author: Hui Qu, who was recruited by Sean Ellis, the father of growth hacker, served as growth product Manager at the famous Growth Hacker network. Currently, she is director of marketing at Acorns, the leading personal finance app in the United States. Qu Hui is the guest author of data analysis product GrwoingIO.

Earlier this year, the GrowthHackers Conference 2016 was held in San Francisco. Experts from around the world, including the growth leaders of Silicon Valley giants like Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook, shared their insights on growth.



GrowthHackers Conference 2016

As one of the attendees tweeted, “Having so much fun at Hack Growth 2016, I literally have a hundred things to test next week.”

Here are five of my biggest takeaways.



Lesson 1: Integrate growth into your product and R&D culture

One of the lessons I learned was that real, long-term sustainable growth is always about product culture, r&d processes and teams, not just a dedicated advertising strategy.



Build a growth team

Willix Halim from Freelancers.com got the conference off to a great start with his keynote speech, Building a Comprehensive Corporate Growth Culture. With a long-term focus on growth, he built his team and process by:

Build teams based on products, not functions:

• Every team should have a product manager, data analyst, engineer, designer and quality supervisor.

• Quantify your monthly and quarterly goals so everyone in the company can actually see what you’re measuring (including revenue).

• Each team is responsible for its own quantitative standards, and each team member’s pay for performance is strictly tied to team metrics.



Experience 2:Find your North Star indicator for growth

At Hacker Growth 2016, a number of speakers also talked about the importance of finding the North Star metric, which shows the true value that users can derive from your product. This metric also makes the growth team more efficient and serves as a mirror to evaluate the testing and monitoring process.

Elena Verna from SurveyMonkey emphasizes that you should understand what growth means to you before you even touch the product, and choose the right key performance indicators (KPIs).



Use predictive leading indicators as KPIs

For example, many companies use earnings as their key indicator of liquidity, but this indicator is not always effective because earnings are actually happening and therefore a relatively lagging indicator. So you should use your key performance indicators (KPIs) as predictive leading indicators that drive revenue.

To avoid being influenced by vanity metrics, the HubSpot team set their blog’s North Star growth metric as number of monthly active users (MAS), focusing on increasing the number of active users rather than increasing mailing list length. The team also regularly purges users who have never participated in their product content.



Lesson # 3: Think strategically about growth channels

Another lesson learned here is the need to think strategically about growth channels. Identify and develop the core growth channels suitable for products, while constantly looking for new channels worthy of investment.

Aatif Awan from LinkedIn shared in his talk “The Lessons behind LinkedIn’s 400 million Users” that the early LinkedIn team developed two core channels:

First, viral user growth through users building their own social networks;

Second, use search engines to optimize people’s public resumes. LinkedIn will then expand into other channels, such as mobile strategy, internationalization, partnerships, and more.

Note that relying on a single growth channel is a strategic mistake; Once the core channel is established, companies should invest in strategic channels such as new platforms.



Explore growth channels

At the roundtable discussion, participants shared their views on growth channels:

Channels grow very quickly, but some channels (like Google search) have a longer shelf life than others (like Facebook paid ads).

When choosing a channel, be sure to find your audience and pay attention to which channels are already adopted by your competitors. This can show how effective those channels are.

Being first in a new channel can give you a price advantage.



Lesson 4: Adopt a data-driven testing model

One point that all the speakers at the conference made over and over again: in order to grow, your team must choose highly viable models. Best practices or generic strategies may not work for your company, so you have to question them, come up with your own ideas, start experimenting, and support your decisions with data.

AnnaBell Satterfield from BitTorrent shares a framework for data-driven growth and decision making: from data to ideas to action in her talk “Exploring the Next Growth Opportunity through Users”.



Data – thought – action

BitTorrent wanted to increase revenue from paid apps, and while the team wasn’t in a rush to add new features, the growth team asked a broad question: “Which of the following would drive revenue from paid apps the most: awareness, price testing, and added features?” They then sampled the target demographic of highly active users of the free version and found that the number one reason users didn’t upgrade to the paid version was because they didn’t know there was a paid version.

This led to a series of tests, a change in strategy to promote the paid app, and a 92% increase in paid app revenue without adding any new features.

Sophie-charlotte Moatti offers an example. When she worked at Facebook, they ran a test that showed users an automatic pop-up screen to activate push notifications. The team expected user conversion to be low, but to everyone’s surprise, more than 25% of users activated push notifications following the five steps on their phones. The result completely changed the team’s thinking about push notifications and greatly increased the number of people Facebook could push.

So don’t assume what works and what doesn’t, just test it and let the data speak.



Lesson # 5: Sustainable growth will be all the rage

“Did you know that 60 percent of all market capitalization created by tech companies since 1994 has been generated by companies with network effects?” says James Currier of NFX Guild.

Why is that? Currier went on to explain that network effects provide scale and persistence, both of which are difficult to achieve without network effects.

First, economies of scale.

Ask yourself, does your product give new users an advantage over existing users? If the answer is yes, congratulations, you have network effects at the heart of your business. If not, stop and re-examine your product as a multi-player game rather than a single-player game.



Economies of scale brought by the Internet

Second, user engagement is also key to driving sustainable growth.

The audience of growth experts placed a high value on “user engagement”. Here are some ideas worth sharing:

“If you can grow, but you don’t have user engagement, you’re a funnel and you’re obsolete in Silicon Valley.” (Nir Eyal)

“User engagement is attention share. If users don’t engage with your product, end user churn is going to go up.” (Shira Abel)

Sustainable growth is ultimately about realizing real product value. Erin Turner from Google shared how to identify product opportunities: Prove your idea, measure its impact, and evaluate product market fit (PMF).

As traffic dividends fade, the concept of refined operations and growth hacking will become more popular, and the practice of growth hacking occurring in Silicon Valley will gradually be more tried in China.

Want to come to the Growth Hacker Conference and learn how their Silicon Valley counterparts are doing growth?

You don’t have to travel to Silicon Valley, but an international growth hacker event is about to take place in Beijing. GrowingIO data Driven Growth Conference, led by Sean Ellis, the father of growth hacking, more than 20 top Growth masters in China and the US, bring you the most cutting-edge growth practices in Silicon Valley.

And I myself will also share the theme of “From Growth Hacker to Growth Team” as a guest of the growth Conference product operation special session on The 17th.

December 16-17, featuring Sean Ellis, the father of growth hacking

Growth Masters from China and the US gather at GrowingIO Data-Driven Growth Conference

Click “Sign up” to be a growth hero with Sean Ellis!

The two – day package is sold out in advance, all other tickets are available as soon as possible.



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