Top Tips & Tricks from Silicon Valley Growth Marketers
This evening I attended the Uncharted Minds Thought Leadership Series created by the ever-talented Gregory Kennedy and Kathie Green. For those who don’t know, the UM Series has featured speakers from top Silicon Valley companies such as Airbnb, Lyft, Medium, PayPal, Coinbase, BoostVC, Misfit Wearables and more. Its quite the accolade of thought leaders and this evening’s panel did not fall short.
The Speakers and Companies
Nadim Hossain, CEO & Founder at Bright Funnel:
SaaS helping connect sales and marketing and finance.
Kelly Watkins, Director of Product Marketing at Slack:
A place where work happens for companies of all sizes; connect people inside companies with each other.
Zack Onisko, VP Growth at Hired.com:
Disrupting traditional recruitment industry with an automated market place.
Ivan Kirigin, CEO & Founder at Yes graph:
Identifying and recommending who you should invite.
Peter Clark (plc), Head of Growth Marketing at AdRoll:
Retargeting and prospecting platform for thousands of businesses
Moderated by Gregory Kennedy, founder of Uncharted Minds:
A sought after thought leader, speaker and author whose writing has been featured on The BBC, VentureBeat, YahooFinance, Entrepreneur.com, CMO.com, and Marketing Profs.
*Venue graciously sponsored by General Assembly
The Key Takeaways:
- Everyone in a startup should be part of the “growth team”
and trying to feel the customer’s pain and what your product is trying to solve. Marketing teams can often feel like Silent Discos — where everyone has their own set of headphones on and is dancing to their own respective beat. We should move more towards flash-mobs where everyone is on they same page. - Build a simple product that solves a real problem
and ask your first customers for referrals — even if those first customers are vaguely in your sweet spot — referrals are a real “hack” and something you can measure, quantify and grow. - Stop the temptation with zero-sum metrics.
Find out your “only metric that matters”, which is your key growth index, stop chasing vanity metrics that have low or no impact on your business. For example, if your CPM is low, that’s great, but what is the real result? How is it moving the needle on one of your KPIs? - Build a culture of academia.
Be rigorous about testing your marketing experiments and close the loop with someone on the team leading a discussion on key lessons learned and next steps. - Learn balance to step outside the growth mindset and focus on the product mindset.
Don’t obsess over growth and lose sight of product and user-experience. Obsessively changing a website’s CTA from red to blue to orange and measuring its impact is useless - Don’t make ego-based decisions and sales.
Stop trying to sell to big names and brands. If BestBuy is not your ideal customer, don’t go after them just because you can throw their logo our use-case on your website. Having a customer who is happy and who’s problem you solved is worth its weight in gold. - Startups and products are ultimately about people.
Whether its B2B or B2C or any permutation of the two, if you build a solid product, it will get people talking. Leverage that discussion and reward people for talking nice about your brand — let growth come organically. - Invite customers to come try your product
or UI such as sign-up flow in front of you. Its painful to watch someone interact with your baby but its the path to product enlightenment — watch them struggle with it, and see where they get stuck. Its more effective than online A/B campaigns. - Look at your support tickets
and find trends in customer complaints and issues. Make it a transparent process where the team sits down and tries to resolve those issues and keeps in close-contact with the customer. - We all dislike the term “Growth Hacking” —
its a term reserved more for nefarious basement hackers trading contraband on the deep web
Key Recommendations & Reads
- The Clue-Train Manifesto by Rick Levine, Doc Searls, Christopher Locke & David Weinberger
- Customer.io
- Optimizely
- Honorable Mention: Pythagoras Pizza
*This is going to be the beginning of a new series of posts I do, which summarizes key ideas from panels, talks and conferences I attend in bite-size formats. Let me know what you think in a comment below!
