Growth-hacking as anti-fragile marketing

I do like giving public lectures on topics where I’ve good expertise. Public speaking help to structure your knowledge and build useful networking. Week ago, I had a public lecture on topic of “Growth-hacking as antifragile marketing”. As a fan of Nassim Nicholas Taleb books “Angifragile” and “The Black Swan” I enjoy finding familiar patters in everything I do. Definitely, there can be some points I do not agree but in general Antifragility framework works pretty well in analyzing phenomena in startups domain.

Here is the presentation itself(I like to do visual presentations and speak more then type a lot of text into it):

Growth hacking as anti-fragile marketing from Dmytro

I am very happy that almost 100 people visited the event. Full photo report can be found here. And here is me with micro telling stories)

So, below what I was speaking about, briefly.

I predict that “Growth hacking” is going to become buzz term in the nearest future. There are numerious cases when companies used combination of clever marketing and technology to obtain tremendous growth.

As for the definitions:

Growthhacking as set of strategies and tactics focused scalable growth. Sean Ellis

Mindset of data, creativity, and curiosity. Aaron Ginn.

As for me the pure definition in broad sense is something like:

Combining technology[science] with social[science] to obtain growth. Dmytro Voloshyn

So where is antifragility in startup marketing?

Let me explain. Classical marketing is fragile by its nature. For example, if you are startup:

• and try AdWords — you bids on commercial keywords definitely will be overbidden by mature businesses who have optimized their conversions before and know their customers LTV up to a penny.
• and try branding(TV, Radio, Outdoor) — you will fail on building your brand awareness, you brand is too small and price will be too high
• and invest in one channel, for example SEO — you will be extremely fragile towards changes of Google search algorythms or competitors making dirty tricks on you

This does not mean that startups should not try well-known instruments for marketing. You should. But always try to find an approach which can help you to be antifragile. To give you an idea how we use this kind of approach at Preply. We do use AdWords, SEO and other classical channels, BUT only when there is a room for marketing automation. We take a channel and look how can we leverage if will not work for us. We achieved some kind of marketing automation loop when our tools working together get 10x amplification of their outputs.

For example we got visitor for cheap keyword(generated by our machine learning system), he immediately goes to few remarketing lists(country, landing or discount based), after that we nurture him to leave us an email so if the user does not convert to a sale we can pursue him by our curated content through emails(dozens of them). Visitors goes through automatically tested A/B flows and on any step of his AARRR funnel we track how can we engage him in using our service. At a-ha moments our clever system asks to share our pages or use our referral system. And I forgot to say there is no marketers in our team, we all do that based on data.

We do not rely on single channel and will survive if our SEO positions will go low or AdWords bid will go beyond our LTV. We built a system which involves idea of optionality to everyday marketing. Our marketing incorporates barbell-style approach when we combine low-cost tested channel mix which to achieve organic growth and high-risk tricks to get that growth near-exponential. We face uncertainity with happy smile on our face:

• when Ukrainian Hryvnya or Russian Ruble(currencies of our main markets by far) devaluated two times — we switched to Stripe as it allowed us to hedge our currencies risks, moreover hired more people from this countries to sell their services abroad as they become more competitive;
• when local economy shrunk we hired translators for other languages to go internationally quicker and started special un-employement program widely covered in press;
• when our tutors complained that there is incorrect content on our pages- we asked them to help in creating better(now we have UGC working)
• and much much more…

We do not use the data to predict unpredictable, but to understand.

Last week I met with Shai Wininger, Fiverr co-founder and ex-CTO visiting Ukraine. It was amazing meeting with a person who has a great expertise in marketplaces marketing but remains technical. I think I’ll arrange outputs of that meeting into separate blogpost but one thing is very relevant. The conception they use in Fiverr is data-driven development:

“Even if things are going well you need to understand why they are going well.” Shai Wininger on data-driven approach at #fiverr.

— Dmytro (@dmytro_voloshyn) March 20, 2015

Data itself will not build you business but it will help to generate ideas that can become your new marketing Black Swans.

Successful companies always do a lot of stuff under the hood not known to the wide public. Do not tolerate average if you want to build something big. Speak with great co-founders or complete loosers. First can teach and inspire you, second will help you in getting an idea what you should not do.

Originally published at https://dmytrovoloshyn.com on March 29, 2015.