It’s App Growth Hacking, But Not As You Know It
Episode 491 of The App Guy Podcast
Paul Kemp: This is an episode of The App Guy Podcast. I’m Paul Kemp and have recorded over 500 interviews with outstanding founders of app startups. To listen to a short extract of this episode, visit my tweet. Now, I love this name Rebel Hack… I’ve got the co-founder of Rebel Hack. He’s turning start-ups into grown-ups and he’s here to talk about his journey with Rebel Hack.
Logan Estop-Hall, welcome to The App Guy Podcast!
Logan Estop-Hall: Hello, thanks for having me. I’m privileged and honored to be part of your long running show. I’m very excited.
Paul Kemp: We’re privileged to have you. First of all, where did you get the name Rebel Hack? It’s so cool — it’s got Hack, and I love hack, and Rebel — two of my favorite words.
Logan Estop-Hall: Well, it’s always a tricky one when you’re starting a business…
We had some pretty horrendous names in our choice list… But I remember speaking to somebody who runs a fantastic organization called thecrazyones.org. She’s been a guide, a bit of a mentor to me. She’s helped me through some interesting periods of my life, and she nudged me and suggested to me…
“You have to find something that is you. Something related to what you’re trying to achieve?”
And I think it came about very naturally. At this end, we’re a bunch of geeks, we’re a bunch of rebels. We employ hackers, ultimately, at this end; developers, hackers — we employ people that think very differently.
Interestingly, the business is actually called Rebel Hack Studios. We view ourselves as a studio business, i.e. we have several organizations under one roof. So again, this idea of a loose, decentralized organization, with lots of people that think very creatively, they think outside the box, they’re trying to find ways to do things that don’t exist or exploiting ways to grow businesses that perhaps you wouldn’t think about normally… So yes, Rebel Hack for us was a pretty natural name.
Paul Kemp: If anyone is struggling with their startup name, they should go to my sponsor, BrandBucket.com/appguy, because you’re right to say that don’t spend a lot of time upfront with the name.
Let’s talk about what you do, and how you can help the appster tribe listening to this show. How do you turn start-ups to grown-ups?
Logan Estop-Hall: The concept of turning startups into grown-ups is an interesting one.
What does Rebel Hack do?
We’re a growth marketing agency. We help businesses find and build sustainable channels for growth. In short:
We help businesses learn very quickly.
We do this through incredibly aggressive experimentation. We work with desktop software products. We also work with mobile applications or mobile-responsive sites as well. So we have a broad range of tactics that we either would like to try, or that we have tried previously, and we go and experiment — either in-product or off-product — to find ways to help products grow.
It’s a fascinating space. Most of what we do is very data-driven. I mentioned earlier, we’re called Rebel Hack Studios — the other part of the business is we build data products. The data products then help Rebel Hack go and do that job better. For us, it’s very much around analyzing the data, identifying which bits of the user journey are broken, which bits of the user journey are bottlenecks and then, as a team, we turn our entire focus onto that one piece of the funnel and we roll out a lot of experiments. Some of them are wild, some of them are crazy, and some of them are more standard. We unlock growth for businesses.
Ultimately, the aim is to build these sustainable growth engines. If we’re talking about lead acquisition (for example), app downloads, or anything similar — business should know we can put a cost next to “This channel drives an app download for 1 pound.”
Alternatively, we step inside the product and we might look at testing referral mechanisms. It’s a very holistic approach to growth.
It’s not just about putting more traffic in the top.
It’s really about creating a brilliant user journey, all the way from the top through to the bottom, so that ultimately you’re going to share it with your friends. This is the ultimate goal for all apps, where you have your viral coefficient, as they say; you share it with your friends.
Ultimately, if you can get one download, one user, and then share it with five of their friends, go live on a beach; you never have to think about marketing or growth every again. Away you go.
For us, it’s aggressive, data-lead experimentation that delivers growth holistically for mobile apps and products alike,
Paul Kemp: I’m loving this already. I bet 99% of the appster tribe listening do not do all this stuff. We get so obsessed with — practically, downloads is our only goal. For example, I’m off the back of a few successful app launches, and you’ve made me really open my eyes to the whole user journey. Do you find that when you speak with most founder startups that they are obsessed with installs, downloads, and you kind of need to educate them with this whole user journey?
Logan Estop-Hall: Definitely, absolutely. Oddly, I find a lot of what we do is around education. I think that founders are totally preoccupied with vanity metrics. Within the technology business, there seems to be this infatuation with raising a round of finance. Entrepreneurs seem to think that if you could go to an investor and say
“We’ve got a million downloads”
that that’s kind of a surefire way to raise funding. Okay, it’s not a bad place to start, but I think that what’s important is to craft a user journey that works. There’s no point having a million downloads if on the first page of your app everybody then bounces and never returns to the product because they don’t understand it.
A lot of what we do is in-product UX work, a lot of conversion rate optimization…
One of our team’s, she’s fantastic — psychology graduate; she’s very interested in decision-making and she focuses on using user experience to drive growth through a product.
I’ve heard other speakers who you’ve interviewed talk about get one user, make him happy, get ten users, make them happy…
It’s a similar vein to what we do. What we’re saying is
“if the product delivers value, you can then place mechanisms for growth into the product”
i.e. sharing or driving other referral mechanisms through the product.
So absolutely, for your listeners, don’t become obsessed with downloads, because you can pay a lot of money and you can get a lot of downloads.
Where you should really be focusing is identifying the bottleneck.
The bottleneck might be downloads. You might have an amazing app, but you haven’t found a way to get that into the right channels. So actually, on some occasions, traffic acquisition and download acquisition is the appropriate part of the funnel to work on. More often than not, it’s not the case.
A quick example on this. We talk to a lot of entrepreneurs, we talk to a lot of businesses. They come to us and they say
“How can you help us?”
One of our questions is
“Okay, well what do you want to achieve?”
We spoke to an app — this was a while ago, just over 12 months ago, when we started the business. Somebody came to us and said,
“We really want to grow the business. We want to hit a million downloads.”
I said,
“Okay, that’s fine. Where are you starting from?”
and they said,
“We haven’t even launched yet.”
And he wanted to hit a million downloads in three months. I sort of politely said to the gent that
“You should probably walk away and learn to do this yourself. Learn how the product makes people tick, and then come back to us when you have a bit more data.”
Unfortunately for him, his decisions were being driven by his investors, and that’s not the right way to go. If all of your listeners are app developers, they should be intimately involved with their customers; they should understand what makes them tick about the app, what makes them leave the app, what people don’t like…
Your investors are just going to want to drive for growth at totally the wrong time. I’ve seen businesses do that, where they think that they have a perfect app and it’s just about pushing money into the top of the funnel. Don’t do that, that’s all I can say. Analyze your funnel, find out where the problems are and fix them. If ultimately the problem is
“Okay, we’re just not getting enough traffic now”
then you can focus on downloads.
Paul Kemp: Actually, it sounds like you’ve got the perfect business, because everything you say, I’m pretty sure that people reading are not going to go ahead and do all that stuff, because it’s ultimately very time-consuming and perhaps less sexy than getting into a Buzzfeed article or getting featured by Apple on the App Store and getting a lot of downloads. Having to look into the user journey is the less sexy part.
Logan Estop-Hall: A lot of what we do isn’t sexy… I mean, we love what we do, because you can find ways to unlock growth where nobody else is looking. I think a lot of people in the growth space are so preoccupied with growth-hacking onto Product Hunt or finding ways to get more people to download the app. People talk about the term ‘growth-hacking’ — I kind of don’t like the term “growth-hacking.” I think it has unfortunately spawned the wrong definition of itself.
We call it ‘growth marketing’, and it’s more of a holistic approach. It is very much around data analysis. You have to identify and build your funnel, understand how your entire user journey is working, all the way from a website that pushes across to the app store, all the way down to the revenue piece of the product. There’s the good old Dave McClure’s Pirate Metrics, which I’m pretty sure everybody knows about, which is your
AARRR! — Awareness, Activation, Retention, Referral and Revenue .
That is a really good place to start. There’re some great videos on YouTube with Dave McClure talking about Pirate — we’ve actually extended that. We now have 9 or 10 phases of the funnel, because we understand that 5 phases just isn’t granular enough for us. We build out specific events around 9 or 10 phases of the funnel, and that gives us a very granular insight of what is really going on with the product in the user journey. It’s not sexy, but it’s fun nevertheless. We think differently.
Paul Kemp: I had a project that had a ton of traffic to it; when you look at the analytics, we had a huge spike at the start and then a complete drop-off. It just held off and I lost interest after several weeks…
Logan Estop-Hall: I’ve never specifically worked on a product that this has happened to, but I’ve read about this on occasion, where you can accidentally get found too early. When we talk with businesses or mobile app developers who are looking to grow their product, ironically, doing app store optimization first isn’t necessarily the best thing to do. If you get accidentally found and your app is not particularly good, the old adage
“You only get one opportunity to make a first impression”
if you get 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 thousand downloads incredibly quickly, but the app is pretty shitty, then you’ve lost all of those potential early advocates. And early advocates are valuable. You want to grow them and nurture them over time. You shouldn’t just throw a ton of them at your product and just keep your fingers crossed and pray that, hopefully, your app is going to deliver. You should always start with low traffic level, low user numbers.
There is a problem with this, and everybody will come back to
“What about statistical significance?”
What I always tell people is
“Data is there to help you make business decisions.”
If you can get to statistical significance — fantastic. But more often than not, at the beginning of your journey you just don’t have enough data, so you have to go with your gut. You have to look at the data and you have to make decisions. For me, when you’re right at the beginning of your journey, you have some data. It’s not a lot, but it should guide you in your decision-making process. Also, you should be doing lots and lots of qualitative research; lots of user polling, lots of user research. You should be jumping on video Hangouts whenever you can, because that’s where you get that rich qualitative data to find out what people are really thinking.
Over time, you can grow your user base, and then at some stage you can move into the realms of statistical significance, you can change the shade of green etc. But I think early on, when you have low data levels, any changes that you make should be quite drastic, because I think drastic changes will very quickly tell you whether your change is successful or not. And remember, if it’s not successful, you can always rewind; you can go back and put it back to the way it was.
So start slow, grow, but make sure that your product does what you think it does first, and then you can start pouring traffic on top.
Paul Kemp: This is fascinating. I can take this in a number of directions. One, I’m just interested how you would go about getting those first beta users into the app. Have you got any suggestions for anyone who’s perhaps thinking about doing this?
Logan Estop-Hall: There’re lots of ways. I think I’ve pushed a recent post on our blog around how you would go about finding the users. A really common way is build a simple landing page. I don’t know whether we’re talking about whether we’re in closed beta or whether we’re talking about open beta at this stage, but let’s just assume we’re in closed beta. Create a landing page with an e-mail field. What you’re effectively saying on your landing page is
“Look, this amazing app is gonna come and it’s gonna totally change your life, but we really want feedback from you first before we push this live.”
You take that landing page and you then — I mean, if we just think quite logically here, right? Let’s say that we’re building an app and it’s relevant for pet owners, and we want qualitative feedback, we want user interviews from people. Let’s go out into communities on Facebook — a really simple example. Let’s go into a Facebook community for pets and let’s test to see whether or not we can get some level of engagement. So we go in, we engage, we talk with people, we add value to conversations, and then maybe after about a week or two weeks we drop in the fact that
“Oh, by the way, I’ve actually just created this app. It’s really relevant for pet owners. I’d love it if all of those who’ve engaged with me recently would become a beta tester, maybe jump on a video call and give me some feedback.”
Now, if you go into that community cold and drop a link, no one’s really going to listen. But if you’ve gone in and you’ve built rapport with the community, if you’ve befriended 20, 30, 40 of those people in that group and you’ve added value to some of their conversations around pets and whatever that particular community or app is about, then you’re gonna pull people across the landing page, you’ll convert some of them into giving you their email address, and then you can contact them individually. You can reach out and you can say
“Hey, Sarah, thanks so much. I’d love to get you into a call. Here’s a link to the beta app. Have a play and then let’s jump on a call and you can tell me how we can make it better.”
That’s a really basic example of how you can go about getting rich qualitative data right at the beginning of your journey, before you’re exposing it to the dangers of the open market, where you can pick up bad reviews really quickly, you can accidentally get found too quickly and lose all of those early advocates. That’s the way we would look to launch businesses. Feedback, very early. It’s always good to have negative feedback right at the beginning, definitely.
Paul Kemp: Yes, I see this so often, where people are just desperately wanting to get onto the app store… I’ve actually heard a good way is to maybe launch parts of the app as standalone apps, and get all the data about these different features, and then you can combine that, all the things that you’ve learned, and then launch your official app.
Logan Estop-Hall: Definitely, yes. I haven’t specifically heard that as a strategy, but it makes sense; break the app down into its feature sets… Something we do at this end, we have on occasion worked with businesses that have an idea and they’re in the process of launching… We’ve done kind of engagements even before there is an app, so what we’ll do is we’ll say
“Okay, this is an app for pet lovers.”
We’ll go out into those communities, whether it’s on Facebook or Google+ — wherever those users might be — just with prototypes, just with a mockup, just with screenshots, and get into conversations. You’ll be amazed at the data that you can get right at the beginning.
We run a lot of in-person user testing, as well. We’ll arrange for ten people to come in over a space of a day, and our team will sit down with them and go through prototypes, and get lots and lots of information, before you invest any time even in building anything. So yes, as early as you can, get people into your journey. I think entrepreneurs are terrified about sharing an idea with people in case somebody’s gonna copy it. Trust me, no one is gonna copy it, because no one cares. They only care when it takes off. But it only takes off if you have this feedback very early on.
I always advocate, build your product with your customers. They are your early advocates, they are the people that will share and will grow your product over the long term.
Paul Kemp: This is wonderful, and I’m actually tempted now to give one scenario, which is what I see all the time, and warn anyone listening that this can happen, it’s very easy. The scenario is that you have this idea in your bedroom, garage, wherever; you keep it closed from the world, you work on it for a year, you lend money from friends and family and you then get yourself into huge amounts of debt, and then you launch it. It goes into the app store, and it’s a flop. I’ve seen this so many times.
So what we’re learning from you is that the better way is to get lots of feedback early on — even before you build the app, perhaps — and just know that the problem you’re solving is worthy and that you’re going to get the attention and the engagement that you were hoping for.
Logan Estop-Hall: Definitely, yes. I’ve seen other businesses where they know they know that it’s a mobile app that they’re building, but they actually build a desktop prototype. It’s much quicker, it’s easier, it’s agile; they can make changes much more quickly, they can see whether or not… Are people even vaguely engaging with this? And if they get those early indicators, they then invest time in building an app and submitting to the app store, which takes time, effort and energy. It’s much quicker to whip up a desktop version of the prototype.
There’re lots of ways you can do it, but ultimately it’s all about investing the least amount of time, effort and energy in order to validate your ideas. It’s all about idea validation.
Paul Kemp: Logan, the last thing really is that this is a podcast that inspires a lot of people. I have many listeners who have quit corporate jobs and started their own thing. You’ve been running this as a co-founder, you’re running your own company effectively. I’d love to know whether you feel like the journey has been worth it for you, and the things that you’ve learned along the way, and any advice you can give to the rest of us who perhaps are in that decision-making of whether to jump out of university and into a startup, or whether to leave a corporate job. Has it been worth it?
Logan Estop-Hall: A hundred percent. [laughter] I wouldn’t know what to do if you dropped me into corporate and pay me a ton of money. I would feel really uncomfortable, I think.
One of the things about startups — some people find it scary, some people find it exciting — is the ability to make decisions and make change very quickly. To give you some context, this is my fourth business now. I’ve had a combination of successes and failures. I’ve done very different businesses throughout my working life. I have only had what I would class as one real job, which was a European brand manager for a big fashion and accessories brand. But what was funny was even when I was doing that job, I actually tried to buy the distribution rights of the distribution company of the brand I was working on. So the entrepreneurial brain kind of kicks in; I get quite bored, and unless I’m able to command my own destiny…
If you’re thinking about taking the leap — and I think this actually ties in really nicely with this concept of validation, right? Imagine if you took the leap and then you launched something that flopped. That wouldn’t be a great outcome. But imagine if whilst you’re working at your corporate, you can do this kind of minimum viable testing, you can get validation of your idea, which makes you more confident in jumping out of the corporate… Because by the time you’re jumping out
“You know what? I’ve already got a thousand e-mails. I’ve already had conversations with people that say that it’s a great idea. I’ve already done three iterations of my prototype, I’ve already had people in my beta testing and we’ve moved through several iterations of that product.”
If I was in a corporate looking to make the jump, I would be looking for as much validation as I can get for cheap, quickly. It’s down and dirty validation here. We’re not talking about huge amounts of data. It’s gut instinct, right? You need to have gut data to satisfy your confidence to make the move.
So if you’re thinking about doing it, I’m so glad to hear it, because you’re already on the journey. So now it’s a question of
“What do I actually need to make the jump?”
To me, make some mockups; go out and talk to people. If people say,
“This is rubbish”
then listen to what they say and ask them
“Well, how could it be better? What problems do you really have? I’m trying to address this problem — you don’t have that problem, but you have the other one? Okay, well let me come back to you in two weeks with another prototype.”
You can stay in this creative space for a really long time, until you eventually find a solution to a problem that is real, that doesn’t just exist in your head, that other people share. That then gives you the confidence to say
“You know what? I’m ready to step out now. I’m ready to get out and do this.”
Build a product, start raising funding if that’s what you need, and start on your startup journey.
Paul Kemp: You’ve just reminded me why I do this podcast… What a fascinating story, and definitely inspiring. I guess the best thing to do for everyone listening, if you do want to look at the show notes, it’s episode 491. Visit www.TheAppGuy.co
Logan, how best can people reach out and connect with you? What’s the best way of getting in touch?
Logan Estop-Hall: Twitter, it’s @loganjehall. That’s probably the best way. I’m on LinkedIn, Logan Estop-Hall, I’m on Google+, I’m on everything, ultimately. Or you can connect with us directly through the website, which is rebelhack.com. I’m pretty accessible. My phone doesn’t stop buzzing, telling me I’ve got notifications of every single platform, but I get back to everybody I talk to. I’m fascinated to hear people’s journeys. I think I’m the definition of an extrovert, I get my energy from other people. I’m fascinated to hear what other people are doing, how they’re doing it, we can share ideas, you can educate me — I don’t know everything, I’m learning as well. We’re validating our ideas and our services as we go. So definitely reach out; I’d love to hear from all of your listeners. If you’ve got ideas or you have questions, fire them away. If we’ve got experience, maybe I can write a post on that and share it with your listeners.
Paul Kemp: Yes, absolutely. And when you start a podcasting service, in terms of how to optimize your podcast, you’ve given me loads of ideas. You know what’s been really refreshing? It’s that in a lot of these episodes we’ve never really touched on and emphasized the points that you’ve made in this episode. It’s just wonderful to be reminded of how to build a successful business. Logan, thanks for coming on this show, and all the best with Rebel!
Logan Estop-Hall: Thank you so much for having me, and all the best. This is a great podcast, and I’m stoked to be part of it. Thank you very much!
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