So you want to be a growth hacker?
Are you tracking and taking action on ‘growth limiting steps’ in your funnel?
A growth limiting step is any step (or stage) in your customer journey that is limiting your growth.
Working with a client, they are getting about 30 free-trial signups per month.
But this isn’t really an important metric to measure.
What’s more important is the number of real evaluators – meaning, of the 30, how many of them are seriously using the trial for its intended purpose, which is to evaluate the product?
For this, we need to look into the usage data of the trial users and determine what are the core actions we would expect a real evaluator to take?
✅ Adding their own dataset
✅ Using a specific feature
✅ Entering a specific command
These core actions will be unique to your business.
What you may find (as we did), was that of the 30 downloads per month, very few were real evaluators.
Therefore, that was what we needed to solve for – this was our growth limiting step.
We needed to figure out:
👉 a.) why are so few not actually using the product in the trial?
👉 b.) what can we do to increase their usage of core actions?
We created a spreadsheet with a number of experiments we could run to increase the usage of core actions.
Each experiment should answer these questions:
👉 What are we testing – what experiment do you want to run?
👉 What are we measuring – how will you measure the experiment?
👉 What are we predicting – what is the expected outcome of the experiment?
👉 What are we doing – how will we implement this experiment?
We then measure the experiment’s feasibility based on cost, time, and impact.
What’s not shown in the above screenshot is a column for the ‘Score’ or ‘Rank’. Basically, you need a way to determine which experiment is worth running and rank them in order of importance.
What I’ve done is multiply Cost by Impact to give me a score. So a 5 cost (5 being inexpensive) and 5 impact (being the highest impact) gives me a score of 25. That is the best possible score, and therefore tells me it’s a worthwhile experiment to run. Any score less than 25 can be ranked lower.
Here’s the exact ChatGPT prompt I use to help me ideate experiments:
I have an experiment framework that I’m building for my B2B SaaS business. The idea is to get more ‘real evaluators’ – essentially, we have people who have installed our software as part of a free trial. What we discovered was the trial users who perform certain actions within the software during their trial have a much higher percentage of converting. Those who don’t use the software at all, or use it very little, have a much lower percentage of converting. So we wanted to know if there are ways to get more users to perform these key actions in the software within their trial period. Our hope is that if we can get more of our trial users to actually use the software as intended, and therefore becoming ‘real evaluators’, perhaps we will have a higher rate of conversion. So we built an experiment framework with the goal to increase the percentage of real evaluators. For this, we need to come up with some ideas, or experiments, that are bold, risky, out-side-of-the-box, but have high-impact.We created the framework in the following format:
• We Believe that…
• And to verify this we will…
• And measure…
• We predict that…
Can you create some ideas or experiments that we can run that follow the above four bullet points?
***
ChaptGPT will produce something like this:
We Believe that…
Offering personalized success plans or roadmaps for users, outlining key actions and milestones to achieve their goals.
And to verify this we will…
Develop personalized success plans or roadmaps for users based on their goals and key actions.
And measure…
User engagement with the success plans and improvement in key action completion rates.
We predict that…
Personalized roadmaps will provide users with a clear path to success, motivating them to engage more with key actions.
Related Posts
Need help with your marketing activities?
If you’re looking to make a move with your marketing, reach out to us. We are priced fairly, we’re straight shooters, and are the very best at what we do.
