You can’t grow a crappy product.
Why things should start with organic retention.
I wanted to start with this first topic for ProductGrowth.io, as I believe this is the foundation for healthy growth. With all the buzz around growth marketing recently and specifically “growth hacking”, it is important to remember that no matter how many people you bring at the top of your funnel, no matter how you design your viral loop, if your product does not solve a problem people have, you are not going to succeed.
So focus on finding that problem, and use marketing to help you nail that first.
In this article, I will describe the metric that we looked at and the simple marketing tactics we used for Spark Post (iOS app I am working on, that lets anyone create stunning social graphics) to get confidence in our product/market fit, before we embarked for growth experimentation.
Organic retention
This is the first thing we looked at. If users are using your product regularly without any external triggers (emails, push notifications, etc.) it is authentic usage, and you have achieved organic retention.
For Spark Post we shipped the product with some basic MVP analytics instrumentation but without any growth experiments, we did not even have a push notification strategy (push or email). We wanted to be lean, get the product out as soon as possible and learn from more early adopters. We knew that a solid push strategy would boost our retention and user engagement in the future, but first, we needed a delightful product that people would enjoy. The only growth related feature we had was an AdobeSpark watermark on all images created, and if you wanted to remove it for all future images, you had to refer a friend once.
Here is an example below, see the watermark at the bottom right?
This was common sense, lightweight engineering and design wise, so we could afford it. We did not see this as a growth hack, but really just a simple lean marketing MVP. We wanted people to know which product had been used to create these cool images on social.
So back to organic usage, after a few weeks, we noticed that our retention was healthy, sure could be improved but our M1 (first month) retention was of 38.46%, and 22.96% for M4, which were solid numbers. Andrew Chen’s article on retention has some great reference data for retention to see how you compare. So we knew that people were returning organically, given that we had no external triggers setup. We had people coming back, but we needed a way to engage with them, inspire them, remind them that we are around, and even get more qualitative feedback from them. For this, we made the simplest change you could think of.
In our 1.0 release, we had our social accounts surfaced in the Settings menu. It was possible to follow us on Instagram, but we did not really encourage people to do so. The option was kinda hidden, at the bottom of the Settings menu pictured below:
So we decided to make this more visible and we thought, let’s just put it at the bottom of the home screen so that when people scroll for inspiration we encourage them to Follow us for more. So that’s what we did, we shipped our 1.1 end of January 2016 with a big Follow us for Inspiration button at the bottom of our Inspiration Wall:
We have been using Iconosquare to track our Instagram game, and here is what the change looked like in our followers growth after our release (end of January 2016):
The impact is pretty clear. We are today at around 24k followers, with an @adobespark Instagram account that is 8 months old.
So we now had a steady stream of users following us on social that we could leverage for qualitative feedback. Everyday, we started posting content to get our community inspired. We learnt a ton about Instagram engagement techniques (I will be posting about it soon). For every product release, we posted about it, through comments we had users sharing some nice encouragements, but also some feedback or questions. This was the perfect opportunity to engage, and ask questions to always learn more.
After a few months, it was time to get qualitative feedback at a larger scale. The last surveys we had was from early adopters, we now needed feedback from a much larger group. For this, we used the awesome Getfeedback.com service.
The beauty of Getfeedback.com surveys is that their surveys don’t look like surveys and they work amazingly well on mobile (No, I don’t work for them, seriously, just a great product). So one day, we posted this:
As you might know, Instagram does not allow links in the caption content. So we used the classic “Link in bio/profile” technique by informing people to go vote using the link in our profile. In matter of minutes, we had 140 people who completed the survey. Every response email coming in through our feedback mailing list was eagerly read by the team.
For the survey, we focused on open questions to capture as much feedback as possible. Which other products are you using? Where did you hear from us? What could be improved? But two questions were really critical for us. First: How would you feel if you could no longer use Post?
This is a classic one from Sean Ellis to estimate Product/Market Fit. In this article Sean explains the idea:
If you find that over 40% of your users are saying that they would be “very disappointed” without your product, there is a great chance you can build sustainable, scalable customer acquisition growth on this “must have” product.
This is what people had to say on this one:
The other one was: How likely are you to recommend Spark Post?
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) question. Another classic that aims at capturing how much people are willing to recommend your product. A very important indicator given that recommendation from a friend or colleague carries way more weight than most other sources. Here again, you can imagine the team morale when we saw the results coming in:
With these strong positive signals, we felt better about our product/market fit and future retention. So at that point, it was a good time for us to spend more bandwidth on growth experiments. People are coming back and enjoying the product, how do we accelerate its growth now?
Conclusion
I wanted to show you that it is ok to not have all the growth hacks you can think of for a 1.0, it could actually be a big distraction sometimes. Many times, teams are small and resources are scarce, so you better focus on organic retention, nail product/market fit first and use marketing to accelerate validation. Much like symbiosis, it is a mutual benefit, but growth needs first a healthy product to live and strive, never forget that!
In the next article, I will be writing about mobile push notifications strategy.
Thibault Imbert
PM | Adobe Spark Post
@thibault_imbert
productgrowth.io
