Distribution via Continuous Improvement Feedback LoopsGrowth Hacking for the Agile Marketing Meetup

Paul Willard, Atlassian CMO • 11/27/2012

• Boeing Engineer• 7 years writing code

• Learned Japanese manufacturing concepts

• Product Management• Customer acquisition products

• A/B testing

Me

Marketing Growth Hacking

Development

• Startups need technology, product, and distribution

• Many fail on distribution• Myth:

If you build it, they will come

• Fact:The best distribution won

Distribution

• Most products do not have a target market of everyone• Nuclear chain reactions &

explosive virality are difficult to achieve without concentration

• Virality should not be THE plan

Unicorns & Viral Supernovas

• Most ideas will not work• Don’t invest too much in

any one idea – no epic fails• Planned failure - fast, cheap

Learn to Fail

• New media, channels, and platforms come and go quickly• Social, mobile, tablet, Pinterest, Groupon

• AOL, Yahoo, MySpace, Display, Palm Pre, BlackBerry, Meebo, hotmail, del.icio.us . . .

• Tech know how and flexibility needed to apply new sources, data, API’s

Change – The Only ConstantBirth and death timeline instead?

The Only Charts You Need

Month

Cus

tom

ers

Life

time

Valu

e ($

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Acquisition Exponential Cohort Curves

Months as Customer

• Test quick, cheap, and dirty• Released vs polished

• Front end flexibility

• Standardize reporting

• Measure LTV• Conversion is not good enough

• Model it from twitchy data

The Growth Machine

• Acquisition exponential• Eyeballs

• Conversion Funnel

• Never stop what is working, be incremental & relentless

Feedback Loops

• Prioritize releasing• Cadence - 2 / person week

• Drop things that don’t work

• Put more into things that do

• 2 Backlogs• New eyeballs to product

• Conversion A/B testing

Kanban Team

• 12 month break even• Conservative

• Estimating is ok

• Virality

• Model LTV for each channel or even campaign

How much should I spend?

Life

time

Valu

e ($

)

Allowable

Months as Customer

• Hypothesis Testing Equation• Myth: A vs B, best one wins

• Reality: Look at distribution, segmentation, learn about the market, and dream up C

• Conversion = Desire - Friction

A/B Testing - A Practical Guide

• Behavioral design: Read Cialdini, Dan Ariely, Nir Ayal

• Examples• Headlines

• An authentic solution

• Ask customer what they want

Desire

• UX testing useful for friction• Minimize ambiguity through

good design• Speed

• Call to action - placement, color, shape

• Grouping, contrast, IA

Friction

• Get your market hooked• Their fix = problem solved

• Eliminate all friction

• Test conversion to “fix”• Qualitative methods

Product as Designer Drug

• Do not A/B test your core repeat usage product• UX testing to show problems

• Offer beta - to a subpop

• Test newsletters, cross-sell/up-sell messaging, tutorials, first time user flows, etc

• Find twitchy measures of success

Cohorts

Life

time

Valu

e ($

)

Test impact on LTV

Months as Customer