Growth comes to those who Obsess!

Someone recently asked me how Ola managed to grow as fast as it did. Many would argue that Ola grew because it gave discounts to customers. But the truth is, we started pumping our growth much before we had the cash for discounts.

People generally think that there is a formula for growth. That there is a secret that some have discovered and others haven’t. But there really isn’t. Products that grow, do so because someone (or everyone) in the company is working away obsessively on growth.

Early days at Ola, when our small tech and product team was driving the number, we practically didn’t sleep. Emails at 3am/4am were run of the mill. Metrics were reviewed and optimized all the time. We knew our numbers like the back of our hands.

There was limited budget and limited bandwidth — anything that required a lot of developer time was out of question. But we knew a few things about our customers and we decided to run with them, applying first principles:

1. We knew that SLAs for call center bookings were poor. We weren’t able to answer all calls we received. — We knew demand existed

2. We had quite a bit of website traffic, but not as many bookings. Repeats were low too. — Our website was a leaky bucket

3. We knew that users who booked from the app had higher repeats than other channels — We needed our users to use the app over other channels

Our booking numbers at the time were: 70–80% over calls, 15–20% on the website and remaining from the app. Our target — to reverse the booking numbers from various channels and to become the number one app in transportation category.

Strategically, this meant we had to focus on two things:

· Migrating users from other platforms on to the app for better experience and retention

· Acquiring more “mobile-first” customers

Once we knew the broad strategy, it was get-set-go time…

Try something. If it doesn’t work, try something else. If it works, do more of it. Do anything it takes, but don’t stop!

- We looked at the booking experience on the website and identified various points during the booking flow where we could promote the app — right from google search to the landing page, to images on the page, to the text right next to the booking button.

- “Ride now”, an important feature of the product, was deliberately not enabled on the website — users wanting the feature were directed to the app.

- We even placed an interstitial on the landing page of the website to redirect the users to the app and experimented with different kinds of messaging and design on the interstitial. Aggressive move, but it worked. And we were shameless about doing it. We didn’t over think it. We knew the website sucked at conversions and we didn’t want users to experience it.

- We made it super simple for people to get access to the app URL. We placed a text box for users to type their phone number on the interstitial and sent them the URL over SMS.

- The same process was repeated for call center bookings. The IVR, the script for support staff, the SMS we sent when we couldn’t get you a cab — everything was optimized relentlessly.

- We went full throttle on online marketing. All digital marketing channels, their targeting, the content was constantly optimized and constantly refreshed for higher conversions.

- We didn’t outsource digital marketing to agencies. I personally ran and optimized Facebook campaigns on a daily basis.

- We didn’t leave our digital marketing to ad networks either. We worked closely with them. We questioned them when we didn’t hit our targets. If we didn’t get a convincing reply, we pulled our money back.

- To save time, we started marketing with multiple partners with small budgets and based on performance, we moved the budget around. Often.

- We looked at strategic partnerships with other app based startups such as Freecharge, PayTM etc. for cross promotion of products at lower cost. We closed contracts and paperwork at a rapid pace — processes never came in the way of speed.

I could go on with the list. But the bottom line is, we were hungry. We watched and optimized our funnels on a daily basis! We thought fast and executed faster! We lived and breathed our target. There was no secret. We just analyzed basic data, picked our target and started chasing the hell out of it! Obsessively.