Tag: growth hacking

Growth Hacking versus Product Vision

On October 10, 2014

There’s something about the relationship between Growth Hacking and Product Vision that has been percolating in my mind, and I’m trying to put my finger on it.

I see startups that are obsessed with growth hacking to the point where they think it’s going to lead them to the product roadmap.

And I see startups that have a great product vision, but they keep adding features and capabilities without worrying about solid user traction.

Neither approach is ideal on its own; but the combination works well.

In the first case, the tail is wagging the dog. Your growth hacking may tell you what features are getting more engagement than others, but if you are just testing features, it’s like throwing darts on the wall, and forgetting you can have a solid arrow instead, with all the wood behind it.

In the second case, the wheels will eventually come off. Product vision delivery will get weakened if it’s not supported by solid user traction, engagement and repeat behavior. This means you may miss the Product/Market fit phase because you would have skirted around it.

Growth hacking alone cannot lead you to a product vision, but it can lead you to maximizing your product/market fit, if you already have a great product vision. They work together.

That’s why I’m interviewing Ben Yoskovitz and Jason Moore together, at the next fireside chat I’m organizing, October 21st 2014 at OneEleven.

Ben Yoskovitz (left) is an entrepreneur with a product management orientation, and he is the co-author of Lean Analytics, a widely read book on metrics for lean startups. Ben is currently VP Product, VarageSale, and was previously VP Product at GoInstant (acquired by Salesforce). Ben is also an active angel investor.

Jason Moore (right) is also an entrepreneur. He is the CEO and co-founder of Videostream, a Waterloo-based startup that is redefining how you watch streamed videos on your TV. Jason and his 3 co-founders were the first Canadian team to win the Startup Weekend competition in 2012, and went on to form a startup together, and were accepted at Hyperdrive, Communitech’s accelerator.

What Ben and Jason have in common is they are both leading product vision and delivery for their respective companies, and they are both Mobile App centric products. Ben’s orientation is slightly more tilted towards product and lean metrics, whereas Jason’s is an expert on growth hacking and measuring user engagement.

I am looking forward to exploring the overall relationships between product roadmap, product vision, lean analytics, growth hacking with Ben and Jason. Having both of them together means that we’ll able dive into these topics from two different points and experience angles, but also holistically covering how you can do both Growth Hacking and Product Vision well, together.

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Venture Capital, Entrepreneurship, Marc Andreessen, B2B, SaaS, Growth Hacking, User Experience – Roundup #20, Nov. 24 2013

By William Mougayar

On November 24, 2013

In Advice, Week in Review

Startup Management is a manual selection of 15 article links from the hundreds of weekly articles being curated. Previous issues are available here. For regular updates, please visit the website’s River of news (as a stream), or Magazine view (by category).

Venture Capital and Global Ecosystem

A lot of good articles this week in the Venture Capital and global Ecosystem categories. Rather than list them here, here are the direct links for these categories: Venture Capital and Ecosystem.

Marc Andreessen

Here’s a transcript of an insightful interview of Marc Andreessen by Andy Serwer of Fortune, Inside the mind of Marc Andreessen. Must read. He talks about the state of IPOs, building long lasting companies, disruptive models, the shared economy, and where advertising and marketing are going.

B2B Marketing

There is a certain grind to B2B marketing in the early stages of growth. In Five Content Marketing Growth Hacks for Enterprise Startups, Ross Simmonds outlines 5 of these activities: 1) Webinars, 2) Presentations, 3) Videos, 4) Case Studies, and 5) Content.

VC/Entrepreneur Relationship

Brad Feld says to Create Structure out of the Gate and You’ll Thank Yourself Later, via a guest post by Ari Newman, where they advocate to treat your early debt investors like board members and institute structured governance expectations from them.

Raising Venture Capital

Alex Turnbull, CEO/Founder of Groove has 5 questions you need to ask yourself prior to taking VC money, in Why I Turned Down $5 Million in VC Funding. Bottom line is that your goals and the VC’s need to be aligned. There’s a good discussion in the comment section of that post, and on USV.com.

Employee Equity

Andy Rachleff of Wealthfront had a long post in First Round Review, The Right Way to Grant Equity to your Employees, where he lays out a process, some principles and formula. Fred Wilson responded, mostly agreeing with Andy, but pointing to a difference in how equity is to be calculated, in Employee Equity.

Product Management

Top Hacks from a PM Behind Two of Tech’s Hottest Products from First Round Review is a long read, but contains some really good nuggets of practical advice in product management from Todd Jackson who worked for Mark Zuckerberg and managed the fine line between Mark’s vision demands and the product development realities. “You can’t leave any chance for misunderstanding, or for even one person to walk away from a meeting with different conclusions.” And “When engineers are motivated, even if they run into something they don’t know how to do, they’ll say, ‘We can totally figure this out. We’ve got this.”

Collaboration

Ellen Gottesdiener and Mary Gorman explain How do you Turn Competing Stakeholders into Collaborating Product Partners. You’ll need to figure this out when you have customer partners, business partners and technology partners, each with diverging goals and priorities.

SaaS Strategy

There is a gem of a chart in this article by Indy Guha, The race for growth: Why SaaS marketers are feeling the pressure. Developed by Bain Capital Ventures, and named “The “Revenue Pit-Crew for Cloud Apps Growth”, the table breaks the key enterprise SaaS tools by the various needs and outcomes: 1) qualified leads, 2) initial buy experience, 3) churn reduction and upsell revenue, and 4) cash for growth management. Must read if you’re in the enterprise/SaaS market.

User Experience

How do you provide design feedback when a team gets together to review a product? Jake Knapp of Google Ventures has Nine Rules for Running Productive Design Critiques. Not surprisingly, tact is as important as substance. And Frank Guo says to Create Great UX in an Agile World by Conducting Lean UX Research, if you’d like to inject agility into the user experience process.

Growth Hacking

Brian Balfour outlines 3 phases of evolution in Traction vs. Growth. They are 1) Traction, 2) Transition, and 3) Growth. They correspond respectively to 1) product/market fit, 2) discovery growth levers, 3) turning up growth levers. It’s a great read, and includes the metrics you need to look at, for each phase.

Software Development Choices

Should you build mobile apps in native or cross-platform code? “40 percent of developers have started building native, only to switch to HTML5, and 31 percent have started building cross-platform, only to switch to native” says John Koetsier in HTML5 vs. native vs. hybrid mobile apps: 3,500 developers say all three, please. However, Ravi Pratap says there’s and alternative to responsive design, in Responsive Design vs. Adaptive Delivery: Which One’s Right for You? “With adaptive delivery, the most significant difference is that the server hosting the website detects the devices making requests to it, and uses this information to deliver different batches of HTML and CSS code based on the characteristics of the device that have been detected.” Finally, a third article from Abhay Parasnis on a related topic, Native, Web, Platform: What’s the best way to build a new app?, where he lays out the pros and cons of each approach, from a developer’s perspective. That SUMs it up! Don’t forget to share on Twitter, add us to your Feedly, forward to a friend, follow on Twitter, read in Flipboard, or just visit the website often and daily. To sign-up, please click here. William Mougayar Founder & Chief Curator Startup Management]]>

Entrepreneurship, Sales, SaaS, Marketing, Failing, Mobile, Scaling, Growth Hacking,- Weekend Roundup #18 Nov 11 2013

By William Mougayar

On November 11, 2013

In Week in Review

Startup Management is a manual selection from the hundreds of weekly articles being curated. Previous issues are available here. There are 21 article links in this edition. Entrepreneurs and Blogging Prompted by Keith Rabois on Twitter, there was a discussion on whether successful entrepreneurs have time to blog. Chris Yeh asked Should entrepreneurs blog? Mark Birch chimed in with Successful Entrepreneurs Do Not Blog? And I wrote a post entitled All Entrepreneurs Should Blog. The consensus is still debatable, but at the end of the day, it is up to the entrepreneur to blog or not. Blogging is not related to their success or failure, rather to their willingness and ability to communicate by writing, and seeing the marketing and social capital value behind blogging. Mobile ROI Ameet Ranadive from the product management team at Twitter has an insightful post, Why Mobile ROI is So Hard. It covers mobile monetization, with a focus on m-commerce, perhaps a hint on upcoming Twitter products in mobile commerce. “28% of mobile searches result in a conversion (defined by store visit, call, or purchase).” SaaS David Skok has a mega post, Manage Customer Success to Reduce Churn. The key point is that focusing on customer happiness is not enough. You need to make sure they are receiving the promised benefits. “Customers bought your product to get a clear business benefit. To make them happy, I believe that you need to make sure they are getting the business benefits they hoped for.” Sales Jason Lemkin has another one of his practical advice posts, If Your VP Sales Isn’t Going to Work Out – You’ll Know in 30 Days. He lays out 5 top things they should do, and the order of priority for doing them. Here’s one of the red flags: “if they start creating and driving deals themselves,” they should be out in 30 days, because they didn’t focus on recruiting a team instead. Bob Marsh asks and answers, What Has Changed in Sales? The Sales Manager. And here is a third post on sales, The Trend that is Changing Sales, where Steve W. Martin points to the increased nature of inside sales. Marketing Communications In Deconstructing PR: Advice From a Former VentureBeat Writer, Conrad Eyusa outlines a step by step approach for working the media. I know it works, because I have used a similar approach successfully several times. VC-Entrepreneur Relationship Fred Wilson and Matt Blumberg have another set of related posts on this important topic. In What Makes For The Most Productive Management-VC Relationship, Fred advises to “keep the frustration to yourself,” when dealing with startups. And in Getting the Most of Your Investors, Matt says to “take on-boarding seriously,” when it comes to new board members. Failing Last week, the Everpix shut down was publicized, and lessons were being drawn. Here’s a pair of posts that explain why the company wasn’t able to raise more money to continue operating, although they had a great product. Andrew Chen weighed in with When a great product hits the funding crunch, and Casey Newton at The Verge wrote Out of the picture: why the world’s best photo startup is going out of business. And related to this, here’s a post by Hutch Carpenter covering 10 examples of fabulously flawed product-first thinking. Marketing James Heaton has a short post, What is Marketing Strategy? that builds the case for marketing and helps you to differentiate between marketing strategy and tactics. “Why does marketing strategy matter? Because it saves you money.” Scaling In Built to Scale: Why Growth Entrepreneurs Need Structure, Dino Signore highlights this important topic. “Structure is like a well-written software code that enables your organization to reduce errors and run consistently.” Growth Hacking If you missed the third Growth Hackers Conference put on by Gagan Biyani and Erin Turner, here’s a pair of posts recapping the key points from it: Growth Hackers Conference 2013 A Detailed Bullet-Point Summary, and Growth Hackers Conference Recap and Slides. Competitive Analysis Steve Blank has a new way to depict a Company Competitive Analysis, using a “petal diagram” instead of the classical 2×2 matrix. By putting the startup at the center and linking it to the various market segments, this new visualization helps to get VCs excited about the opportunity to re-segment existing markets or create new ones. Entrepreneurship Fred Wilson posted a recent video interview of his partner Albert Wenger with me, where Albert covered the USV thesis, working with entrepreneurs, Tumblr, Foursquare, venture capital, and many other topics. SEO If you’d like to see the top 200 Google ranking factors in a wicked Infographic, here is a view on Every ingredient that contributes to search engine ranking. There is a method behind the Google search madness. That SUMs it up! Don’t forget to share on Twitter, add us to your Feedly, forward to a friend, follow on Twitter, read in Flipboard, or just visit the website often and daily. William Mougayar Founder & Chief Curator Startup Management]]>

Hack Your Growth, But Don’t Hack Your Marketing

By William Mougayar

On September 16, 2013

In Marketing

Pricing, SaaS, Venture Capital, Biz Dev, Product Management, Sales, Marketing, Growth Hacking, and more, Weekend Roundup Must Read Sept 7 2013

By William Mougayar

On September 7, 2013

In Week in Review

Startup Management is a manual selection from the hundreds of weekly articles being curated. Previous issues are available here. There are 21 links in this edition, and please feel free to FORWARD to a friend, so they can sign-up and benefit too. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Product Management One of the factors in startup failure is when the product roadmap drifts away from the core value proposition. In Introducing Product/Value Alignment: What Comes After Product/Market Fit, I go over the steps to define a strong value proposition so you can align it with your product roadmap to facilitate the realization of your business model. And Gojko Adzic explains how to avoid a common mistake product teams make when they confuse themselves with their customers, in How we solved our #1 product management problem.