The 2016 Mobile Growth E-Book from Silicon Valley
Mobile is everywhere, almost 3 billion people will own smart-phones this year. No business today can ignore the impact of mobile on their business and each country and category has their own Mobile Growth Experts.
We spoke with Growth Experts from top apps like Pinterest, Yelp, Jet.com, Twitter, Box, Buzzfeed, Zynga, Flipboard, Tinder, SoundCloud, Grindr, Greylock Partners and hundreds more to put together the most comprehensive resource for mobile growth in 2016 — The 2016 Mobile Growth E-book.
A snapshot of our Mobile Growth Community
As Entrepreneurs, the genesis of this book from Mada and I was to help other entrepreneurs. User Growth is the biggest challenge for any start-up, but it is magnified 10X for mobile developers as they face the challenge of two brutal app stores with 2 million+ apps on one hand and a user who on average has 33–34 apps on his/her phone on the other. It is an uphill battle.
We scrapped through hours of conversations from Branch’s Growth Meetups, online discussions, blogs and resources to put together The 2016 Mobile Growth E-Book.
At the time of writing, the E-book already had 22,000+ readers within 6 days of publishing.
We analyzed over 37 growth channels across acquisition, activation, retention and referrals.
We went far and beyond listing all the channels. We mapped channels to the growth activity and then listed the key metrics to track that channel. We went a step further and went through heaps of data and spoke to 100’s of apps to list down their favorite tools to measure each of those metrics.
An example of the Growth Chart for Acquisition Channels with metrics and tools is below.
We have compiled many more similar growth stacks across your growth stack.
As entrepreneurs ourselves, we have seen our apps and startups struggle with user acquisition and engagement. We don’t want you to.
We also put together the 45 of the most unique and easy to implement growth tips from these experts.
Have you ever had a ‘Coming Soon’ icon for a feature or for your android version of the app? Just converting that to a “Join the waitlist” button and collecting email IDs has proven to be an untapped source of early users or Beta testers.
And if you feeling crazy, one of our Community members did this crazy hack to get to 10’s of millions of users: They built a ton of utility apps for free downloads and ran ads within them to create millions of downloads for their actual app.
Or did you know that the Cost per acquisition rates on Video Ads could be almost 50% lower when compared with simple Install ads?
There are tons of such tips in the Mobile Growth E-book from growth experts of top apps. Below is an example of tips from industry leaders on app performance benchmarks and key engagement metrics.
The Mobile Growth E-book is filled with such tips from growth experts.
Blogs are like books for professionals; We compiled a list of 16-must read blogs on Mobile Growth
We all read blogs and Quora Discussions to educate ourselves and often stumble upon absolute gems, only to forget them or start searching for them when we need them. It happens to me all the time.
A list of blogs was not intended to be part of the Mobile Growth E-book when I started writing it, but after going through hundreds of blogs, I would often find myself searching for a previous one because it had some great advice or nugget of information that I felt was essential for growing our own start-up.
In the end, I made a list of blogs on Mobile Growth for myself but decided to compile the 16 best blogs and Quora discussions in the Mobile Growth E-book.
Three of my favorite charts, picked from three different blogs are copied below.
Growth Modeling: A lost art. Most start-ups don’t do this or don’t know how to. We have a neatly formatted excel with all the formulas to get you started.
Whether its k-factors or terminal retention rates or cohorts. We have you covered. Are you wondering, if you should run growth modeling experiments or whether they are useful at all?
Let us dispel that confusion.
Imagine if you have 1000 new users being acquired every month, and you increase your retention rate from 10% to 40%, you can increase your Weekly Active Users from 37,000 to 512,000 at the end of 6 months.
The above was assuming that each user invites 5 friends to the app in the first few weeks. Now, let us change that assumption from 5 to 2 friends.
The range above dips to 8,900-28,000 users. Yes! a 4X-18X difference.
Are you inclined to now prioritize that referral feature over the retention feature?
Let us assume, you overload on referral features and each user now invites 8 friends; but you continue to have poor retention rate of 10%, you would still end up with almost 1.2 million users (2.4X more than increasing retention from 10% to 40%).
You have to run tons of modeling experiments to understand impact of features or even simple A/B tests and focus your development teams on areas that will create maximum impact for you.
Go ahead and give it a try. By the way, in the above example at approx. 8 friends and 40% retention, you would reach at 40 million weekly active users. Yes, 40 Million Weekly Active users. Run your growth experiments now!
If I showed you the below Graph and asked — as an app developer should you be worried or happy?
The answer is you should be worried.
If you wondering why? Get the Mobile Growth E-book, do your own growth modeling and start understanding growth charts.
The E-book is filled with real examples and real conversion rates.
The E-book was built for the today’s developers and marketers, to help them solve their user growth problems. We understand the importance of having benchmarks and best practices to help you grow your app. We have listed a ton of real life examples of growth hacks along with the impact they had on conversion rates.
We spent hours creating this with a lot of thought and love to help our fellow entrepreneurs, app developers and mobile growth marketers.
We are humbled by the response so far. With hundreds of tweets and 22,000+ reads within 6 days of publishing we are very excited that we are able to create something that is useful for the community.
If you like it, do reccomend the Medium post and share it with your friends in the mobile ecosystem.
Mobile for the win
Link to download the FREE PDF Version of The 2016 Mobile Growth E-book
