20 days as a growth hacker | Hacker News Reader

20 days as a growth hacker

timothy.userapp.io

27 pointsTetral20 comments

So thumbs up for trying new things. I really and sincerely mean that.

Now I'm going to say something that will sound discouraging but has your best interests at heart: do you currently have 100 people who absolutely, positively could not run their business without UserApp? Or, as an intermediate goal, ten? If not, your only job is for you to go out, as an actual person rather than a web page, and recruit those users one at a time. Your service level can be stupidly unscalable -- forget "Here's our API documentation", you can literally offer "Give me your laptop and I will write the integration for you. Right now. I'm serious. You think I'm not serious? Laptop. Now." (My understanding is that Patrick Collison was doing this for Stripe in the early days.) If they stop using it, rather than doing deep analytics magic to discover what lead to their lack of engagement, you should call them up and say "Dude, I literally coded the integration for you. Level with me: why isn't this everything you need in user management? What can I implement for you to get you to revert that commit?"

After you've got 10/100/etc people who really like your service, you can start thinking about scaling acquisition channels. In the process of doing that, you'll likely optimize the living daylights out of them, and in the process develop intuitions for "This test is a priority for me to run" versus "This seems like it's likely a poor use of my time even if it succeeds."

At the moment, the cart appears to be a step or two in front of the horse.

I really like your advice! Others have actually told me the same and I understand "the concept". But I would like to ask you for some more advice: how can I spend my days only focusing on getting users to use us? We are already emailing every new signup offering them help etc, and some respond with questions, which we help them with. But that usually doesn't take the whole day. I would like to know some activities on how to get more of those. Cold calling?

Otherwise, thank you for your feedback. Appreciate it :)

Cold calling could work. If I don't miss my guess, though, I bet your social circle and activities already intersect with people who build apps, so I'd use every opportunity possible to ask them about their pains with user management and to tell them that they should use UserApp instead of their homerolled solution. (Be prepared to hear "I don't have any problem with user management" and "There is nothing you could offer me, not even your services as free engineers, which would convince me to let somebody else manage this core a part of our offering." If that was the only thing you heard from the next 100 people you talked to that would still make talking to them the most productive activity you could possibly have been engaged in.)

I will give this a thought and see how I can plan my upcoming weeks. I have considered about canceling my every-day growth hacks to focus more on larger "hacks", and also finding users and helping them getting started. Let's see what happens :)

Thank you for your advice!

Hey, this is sound advice.

I've a very early days version of a travel bucket list app, that I've geographically limited to one city - my own, as the place that you can fly out from. I know that I want user's who are more travel-orientated than typical as early adopters.

I've been building up a social profile on facebook, with high quality articles/links, and interacting with travel focused people on twitter. I've added links back to the application from the facebook article. And, it feels like I'm doing this right. But, it's not yet gaining much traction, whilst actually soaking up a lot of time, and I feel like I'm not in a coding-mindset if I do too much of this that day.

I've got a small bunch of users, who are seeded from friends and friends of friends. Even a couple of randoms. Today I'm sending out a site update email, and showing them what they can do to help, as well as showing them the plan for 2014, and some interesting travel information.

I hope it makes a difference, as I agree that you need a 100 or so users initially. I've been talking to an airport about physical advertising, and I think it's too early for that at the moment, but I'm working on getting it at a reduced rate.

Ultimately, it maybe that I've tried to engage with people too early in the development process, and I need to get on with development. Tricky, though as once you start engaging it feels that you really should keep those channels going.

Anyway. Basically, I'm agreeing. And this is a progress update as to what I've been doing so far. I think there's many other things I could do; actually getting permission to survey those in the arrival area of my local airport being one. There's plenty more, but my time is limited, and in a city where the startup scene is fairly new, it's pretty hard to find co-founders, though that would be a MASSIVE help.

Cheers for the post & I hope my thoughts/progress are useful to others. Thanks for reading.

It would be nice to see some follow up on the items "Need to run this test longer..." or "It's too early to tell..." items. You have a LOT of those, and for a growth hack to be valuable, you need to see some results.

Since you post the hack without the results, it's harder for people to learn from your actions here. Can you do some updates for the earlier rounds?

I hear you. But some are hard to measure and some just takes longer than a few days to show results. I will probably follow up on the earlier rounds, and maybe also update the posts as well with the results. Though for every day there's one more "hack" to follow up on.

I can also imagine a lot of the data getting muddled as a result.

Do more people click the signup button because you made it bigger and changed the copy, or is it because you reduced the clutter in the footer reducing distraction for the user?

I know what you mean. Many of the hacks' results may collide. I wonder what a possible solution to that problem could be?

You're focusing too much on small UX/UI changes with even smaller effects. Aka, optimizing for the local maxima.

Yeah I know, the problem is to find time to do one large "hack" each day. Do you have any tips for me?

I think the whole premise (one "growth hack" per day) isn't right. I would call this more like "one UI touch-up per day." I don't mean that in a condescending way.

If you want to make a bigger impact you have to dig deeper. Look at your analytics and conversion funnels for ideas.

For example:

Is there a bottleneck for many visitors on their path from First Visit to Signup? Do visitors from a certain source convert or stick around longer than others? Is there a page within your Docs section that a significant number of visitors view before eventually signing up?

Now make some educated guesses to explain the data. For example:

If 13% of the Trial User segment viewed the demo apps prior to signing up, maybe the demo played a significant role in convincing them to sign up. (BTW, you can even segment this group out in Analytics as Demo Viewers and compare their conversion rates vs those who did not view the demo.)

And now for the test:

A/B test adding a link directly to the demo somewhere prominent on the homepage (maybe even replacing the subscription link under the CTA).

* * *

Lots of blogs make it seem as though you can "growth hack" by merely changing a button color or adding a modal popup somewhere. Easy things like that only work when you're starting from the bottom. Once your site is half-way decent, it takes more ingenuity than that to make a meaningful impact.

EDIT: From looking at the other comments here I'm getting the impression that you don't have a whole lot of traffic. In that case you probably don't have enough Analytics data to look as deep as my examples. Still, assuming your Analytics is setup properly, you should be looking at it for opportunities.

The top page of https://www.userapp.io/ looks great. However, it leaves me wondering who your service is actually for.

I'm a web developer, so login, sign-up, and user storage are my bread and butter, and I can use open source plugins for handling this, so your target is someone who has more challenges for adding this functionality.

Mobile app creators could be one niche, and if so, something like "User Management for Mobile Apps" could help such developers understand your product is for them.

Yes, we are working on that :) The user authentication stuff maybe take a few hours/days to get in place for a experiences developer. However, what we want to focus on is everything else around user management. That's why we are building an add-on store for third-party integrations. Some example cases that we could solve:

* If you have users, you might want to sync them to e.g. MailChimp.

* You would probably want to charge them for using your app, so you would need to integrate a payment provider, calculate payments, creating price plans, etc. UserApp already takes care of all that except the payment processing, which will come as add-ons later.

* Social login (OAuth) to support login from Facebook, Twitter etc.

* Send welcome emails, forgot password emails, etc.

* An admin interface t be able to delete, block, search and manage your users, permissions, etc.

And this is not just for mobile apps. It's for every web, or mobile, app that has users to manage.

Thank you for your feedback!

Here is a growth hack for you, Put $100 towards AdWords and bid cheap(shoot for less than a quarter per click) and send users to a free trial landing page. Little tweaks here and there obviously help, but at some point you just need more traffic.

I will give this a try (along with other ad networks as well) when I've got the conversion rates to a better level.

How do you know visits from ads won't convert any better than your current visitors? If you do a half-descent job of targeting your ads you could get visitors who are much more likely to convert than your current visitors.

True that. Will maybe give it a try this month :)

If your blog is going to live on a subdomain of userapp.io, you may want to more fully integrate the browsing experience with that of userapp.io. I looked for the footer mentioned in Day 19 and couldn't find it. Why not? (as in "why not try anything?")

Good idea, will see what I can do. Thanks!

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