Hi everyone! My name’s Ben and I lead growth at accuRx, a startup that builds communication software for healthcare. In the last 18 months, we’ve grown to being used by 40% of GP practices in England, and had almost 5 million patients messaged using our platform!
Here’s a few principles around growth we’ve picked up along the way. Hopefully you find it helpful and let me know if there’s anything you’d like to hear more about (my details are at the bottom).
Data driven decision making:
All our decisions and priorities should be backed by data. Simply put, data & analysis is a pretty cheap way of challenging the assumptions behind how big a problem actually is, and how users tend to behave.
We’ve got a fantastic dev team so we can get most of the quantitative data we need from App Insights (while keeping patient data secure and protected). SQLbolt is a great resource if you want to learn the basics here. Not all data needs to come from numbers though. Most of what I’ve learned about our users’ behaviour has come from watching them interact with the product, or just reaching out and asking people why they do the things they do.
N.B. reliance on data can go too far in the other direction (e.g. ‘analysis paralysis’). I often need to remind myself that even though it can be interesting and satisfying, data and analysis don’t offer any value in themselves! They’re only as valuable as the actions and decisions that they support.
Having the right metrics:
Getting new users is the most obvious translation of ‘growth’, but there’s a bunch of things we need to consider first. The same growth principles apply to improving these, and neglecting them means that we’ll be spending time and effort trying to ‘fill a leaky bucket’
Retention (product market fit) — product market fit is about having something that people find truly valuable and want to stick with. When developing accuRx Chain SMS, the team spent 3 months basically living in a GP practice to understand their biggest pain points, and develop the product with the same people who’ll use it. We’re incredibly proud to have a product that’s so well received. Over 97% of practices who have ever tried Chain SMS used us last week to message a patient — and check out our feedback wall!
Activation (user flow) — once we’ve got a product that early users believe in, it’s time to look at the funnel (i.e. what percentage of users move from one stage to the next). New users are useful to get a new perspective here and to test the impact of changes, but scaling should wait until we’re satisfied that activation is ‘good enough’ (e.g. if we can reduce drop-off rate at one stage from 80% to 60%, boom, the impact of all future acquisition efforts has doubled!).
Acquisition — once we’re happy with the above mentioned metrics, it’s time to start ramping up new user acquisition. At accuRx we’ve found referrals to be our most effective lever, but for more ideas on scaling Andrew Chen has a great article on this (I’d recommended signing up to his newsletter).
Having a process that works for the whole team:
Honestly, I’m still working this one out. I used to work as a consultant, where aligning the priorities of different stakeholders was in my opinion, one if the most valuable things we could do. But accuRx is still a small team, and I’m the only person who works on growth full time at the moment. Jacob (our CEO) and I work closely together to make sure we’re always spending time and effort on the most impactful areas, and the team is full of great ideas that they share.
I know it’s important that growth doesn’t become siloed, so I still try sending email updates and making dashboards to communicate progress and priorities to the team. While these make sense on paper, I’m not sure how effective they really are or how much more detail the team needs to know. I’ve been recommended the 4DX framework as a gold standard of keeping the team updated, but for accuRx as we are now this feels like overkill.
It would be great to hear thoughts and feedback on this. As the team grows I’m sure there’s loads more things we should be thinking about!
Growth experiments:
Without growth experiments, the above are just conversations and won’t change anything.
Without the above, growth experiments are shooting from the hip and crossing our fingers.
Growth experiments are actions that challenge the assumptions behind an idea in the real world (e.g. A/B testing and putting mock-ups in front of real users). Experiments shouldn’t need to be polished or immediately scalable in their first iteration. If an experiment fails (most do) we record the learnings and improve our understanding. If it works, we can scale the experiment and implement it into ‘business as usual’.
Ideation and prioritisation is useful, but it’s important to remember that talking about experiments isn’t the same as doing them. I also found it easy to spend too much time working on or implementing a single exciting experiment or area, but this comes at the expense of learning by trying new things.
The most important KPI I hold myself to is the number of experiments run per week (not talked about or looked into, actually run). I aim for 3 per week, and if it’s less than that I’ll need to ask myself, why? How else was I spending my time? Were these other things actually more important than running experiments? Spoiler: often the answer is no!
To put a bit of context behind all this, here’s a link to a couple of actual experiments we’ve run over the last few months.
Thanks very much for reading and I hope you’ve found it helpful! Here’s some extra resources that I’ve put together. If you have any thoughts or questions feel free get in touch by email.
I also help run a Growth, Marketing & Engineering meetup group in London with regular events, so if you work in this area or have an interest in learning more, do come along! (If you have trouble registering, just email me).
Thanks,
Ben Spiro, Growth Lead,
ben.spiro@accurx.com
