Lioness Magazine drafts a Growth Hacking plan @ Pivotal Labs Product Office Hours

The article below was written by Natasha Clark from Lioness Magazine (@LionessMagazine).

Natasha wrote this after attending a Pivotal Labs Product Office Hours. At Office Hours, start-ups get one hour of free consulting from Labs Product Managers. We spend the hour addressing whatever product questions the start-up is dealing with, from “What feature should I build first?” to “What should I ask my users?”

Natasha asked “How can we grow our user base?” and wrote about the Office Hours Experience below.

Start-ups in NYC, DC, Dublin, London, Berlin, San Francisco, Denver, LA, Tokyo, Toronto, and more can apply to participate in a POH here.

There’s this marvelous thing we do as entrepreneurs — it’s called “Whatever The Hell I Want.” We spend long hours building our dream product, adding all (or what we can afford to do at the time) of the bells and whistles that give our product its unique value proposition and then we stand back like proud, tearful parents and marvel at our creation while gently nudging it into market tests.

When I started Lioness, the digital magazine for female entrepreneurs, I had no idea if anyone would even read the darn thing. When women started responding to the content and we kept landing credible, high profile interviews, I thought, “Oh shoot! I better figure out what I’m doing with this thing.” Lioness had kind of been in survival mode. It was hard to think about scaling when I had to work in the startup every day rather than on it.

My business partner Dawn and I are finally in a place where we can do the work necessary to take this thing to the next level and once we were serious, I remembered a conversation I had had with Pivotal Product Manager Lauren Gilchrist. I first discovered Lauren at The Lean Startup Conference in San Francisco. I was a mentor at the event in 2014 and she was a speaker. Her ideas on customer development were brilliant and I subsequently asked Lauren to be our January 2015 cover star. As our startup struggled to build our business model, I later reached out to Lauren and she told me I had to hit up the Pivotal office in Boston. Enter in Shanfan and Simon.

Dawn and I headed over to Pivotal from Western Massachusetts to participate in Product Officer Hours (POH) with Shanfan and Simon that focused on Growth Hacking. Over lunch we created the first profile of our target customer, Rachel, based on the analytics, research and feedback we’d received thus far. We talked about her behaviors, her frustrations, acquisition methods and our retention efforts.

What we accomplished with POH allowed us to draft a realistic revenue model and testable marketing language. It was also the perfect segue into customer interviews. It was necessary to step back and take a bird’s view of our startup’s structure. As entrepreneur’s we’re in the trenches and can easily get caught in worker bee mode or “Whatever The Hell I Want” mode, which does nothing for growth.

Thanks to POH, I had the reminder that the first step to great growth hacking is remembering that it’s about whatever the hell the CUSTOMER wants in the first place.

Around age eight Natasha Clark was told it was a woman’s job to take care of the home and since then she has built a career out of telling women they can do whatever the hell they want to do. Founding partner of Lioness, the digital magazine for female entrepreneurs, the former news reporter has created a platform to educate, elevate and support female entrepreneurs. In addition to publishing and hosting events for women, Natasha enjoys spending time with her teenage son, Shaun.