Thinking in terms of Growth Flywheel — Feb ’22 company update
I recently started writing public company status updates. You can read more about why here.
Ask: Over the next 3 weeks we are accepting cheques (min. USD$25k) in the first phase of our fundraising. Please let me know if you’re interested or know anyone who might be interested to know more!
Previously at Aggregate Intellect…
In January ’22 …
- We started micro-design sprints where all staff gathered once a week for an hour and did user testing and made design suggestions
- We started doing daily user testings to improve our design continuously
- We made rigorous Journey Maps and Story Maps
- We started some strategic planning for our Fundraising
See also: November ’21 | December ‘21
Here is what happened in February 2022:
As we were ramping up for our fundraising, one of the things that we realized was that due to several pivots our growth story was out of date and needed to get updated. We also had learned that we should use a language that investors are familiar with when we talk about growth to reduce their need to do mental gymnastics to understand what we are saying. So, we spent some time researching and landed on Growth Flywheel as the name of the model that we were doing. So, we needed some time to re-articulate all things we’ve been doing with that vocabulary:
- Visitors who come to our platform to view our recipes
- Casuals who sometimes come to our platform to find information but use it elsewhere (say on Notion and such)
- Regulars who use our (newly developed) integrations and other features to find and organize information
- Champions who publish content (recipes) / run community activities which result in more Visitors joining us which closes the flywheel
The next step was to get more concrete about our metrics for each of these segments and start measuring them religiously so that we can forecast our growth more accurately.
We have been using Google Analytics for Product Analytics, but with this new perspective things started looking too limiting (GA is very acquisition focused vs behavior analysis), so we looked into all the alternatives:
- GA 360 ($$$$) — most importantly you can access event level data
- Mixpanel ($$) — user behavior but more sales focused
- Amplitude ($$) — user behavior but more product experience focused
- Segement ($) — data aggregator
- Heap ($$$)
- Pando.io ($$)
- Snowplow ($$$ for managed service — open source as well) — data aggregator with some analytics
- Or implement our own evevnt tracker and collector in JS (free???)
They are all kinda sorta the same, but with different features, different levels of dev work etc. We are still finalizing this decision, and you should subscribe to this newsletter to hear where we will end up!
We also spent a lot of time talking to friendly founders and investors to get pitch feedback. I recently did a non-verbal communication workshop where I learned that pitching should really be a conversation (vs a presentation). So, we’ve been trying to internalize this in these practice sessions, and I should say it’s going well! We do have a pitch deck, but the majority of the conversation happens by showing them how users currently do things, how people do things on our current platform, and where we are going using our Figma prototype, then how we plan to execute using our planning Sheets, and sometimes our pitch deck for answering specific questions.This is such a different way of pitching compared to last time I tried this, and feel so much more natural, and way more constructive. I highly recommend it!
ps. ping me if you want to give us pitch feedback
I am feeling like we’re close to finalizing the story around what we’re building in preparation for our (pre)seed raise. It’s genuinely getting me excited about the broader positive industrial impacts & potential scientific breakthroughs a product like this could help catalyze — Maryam, COO
What were the highlights of the month for the team?
I’m going to start this one by highlighting some community activities first since we have 3 major things happening:
1) We have finalized all the details for Women in AI (WinAI) Week with 6 virtual events the week of Mar 14–18 showcasing 20 speakers & run in partnership with 10 organizations across the broader AI & tech communities!
2) We’re hosting the outreach event of the year for Environmental Data Science!
In collaboration with Aquanty, U of T & the Government of Canada (NRCan), we’ll be hosting a 3 session foundations workshop, 8 week Working Groups to get your hands dirty, & giving away $15,000 in gifts for finished projects.
Watch the info session:
3) Join us in the Eight AI / ML Community Mega Meetup [March 8th]. Hear about…
- How are community works
- The 10+ 4–12 week project groups you can join.
- How you can start your own project with us
Dev & Design Team
Based on some recent pivots, we needed to do some significant backend and data schema changes, and it was some significant piece of work:
yo! this is scary!!! -Samuel
All of us were biting our nails and I honestly expected to have a broken system for a while, but our dev team is pretty kickass, to put it mildly!
My proudest contribution this month is the design for the new schema and prep work for all of us to make necessary modifications to support the new schema. — Hamid
This change affected pretty much everything in our system, and every one pulled some extra effort to wrap up all the changes in one sprint. It was a remarkable display of us working as a unit to make our product better for the users
I think we were all scared of touching certain parts of our code base but now we feel much more confident to make more bold changes. — Hamid
and…
My proudest contribution is changes we made as a result of data schema change — everyone in the dev team
On the R&D side we worked on unifying our search and recommendation engines, and to diversify the resources we are indexing
My proudest contribution this month is the inclusion of internal resources in the recommendation engine and the customization of the recommendation engine into a search engine! — Percy
and…
I spent time looking into all APIs and data sources we should be using, and started to think about our data strategy. — Alice
Parting thoughts…
I have been working on this problem for 3 years now, and I enjoyed most of the days of it, but the past few months I’ve been feeling unstoppable! We are finally thinking about things that solve real user problems, and we know exactly what the solution is. This is adding so much fuel to my fire, and I can’t wait until we can scale up our team and build it much more aggressively.
Reources
Deep Random Talks
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