The First 100 Users Playbook

What is a hypothesis?

• A basic hypothesis has two parts: what we believe, and the evidence we're seeking to know if we're right or wrong;
• A simple hypothesis might look like this:
  • We believe that if people share pictures of our t-shirts at a greater rate, it will prompt existing customers to return to our site at a greater rate;
    • To present what you believe, you need to show some evidence. Can't just be gut feeling.
  • We'll know we're right when we see a correlation between social shares and return visits.

Ref:

• Outcomes Over Output: Why customer behavior is the key metric for business success

Value your content should deliver

• NEWS AND INFORMATION
  • Facts, breaking news, the latest gossip stories, and world events, e.g., “Top Ten Things to do in Greece.”
• ENTERTAINMENT
  • It’s sharable, fun, compelling and causing to laugh, to smile, to cry.
• EDUCATION
  • Help solve a problem, become better at something, or learn a skill.
• INSPIRATION AND MOTIVATION
  • Get pumped up and excited, to think bigger or feel better about themselves.
• CONNECTION AND COMMUNITY
  • Provide a feeling of connection, i.e., feel like they’re part of something bigger than themselves.

Ref:

• YouTube Secrets

Use documentation to research what to build for a product

• Write documenation with a clear table of content (TOC)
• Add a section in your TOC for each feature you want to dev (it can redirect to a "coming soon" page)
• Add HotJar free plan to get a heatmap for where people clicks
• Work on the red dots

Ref:

• Pierre de Wulf's tweet storm

Product messaging is about how to talk about your product

• First step in marketing is thinking about product messaging, i.e., how to talk about your product;
• Only when you know how to talk about it are you ready to bring all the other aspects of marketing in.

Ref:

• Intercom on Marketing

Knowing when to answer on Reddit and HN

• Set-up your brand and industry keywords on f5bot.com
• f5bot will email you when new mentions of those keywords appear

Ref:

• Pierre de Wulf's tweet storm
• F5Bot

How to get users on a call

• Offters 10x what your free plan offers to people willing to spending 15 minutes on the phone with you
• Those are people who really want to use your peoduct

Ref:

• Pierre de Wulf's tweet storm

flomo的营销

• 营销的核心不是求转化，是沟通我们在坚持什么，如flomo坚持的是让你更好的思考；
• 为了这个长期的坚持我们愿意放弃什么，如flomo每一篇文章都在告诉你怎么更好的思考，不会给你强推广告；
• 要输出理念，要给别人提供谈资，你的营销应该帮助用户更好的二次传播。

Ref:

• 组织进化论：E25 w/ 少楠
• More on That is Marketing - David Perell

Criteria for what a solid marketing channel is to KISSmetric in the early day

We were looking for online platforms where marketers connected professionally. But we wanted more than a hangout. We also needed a marketing channel. After all, it doesn’t work to show up in a place and shout, “Hey, give us your money!” Instead, we needed to identify a place of opportunity — an opportunity for us to listen, learn, and give value.

Here were the criteria we established for vetting viable marketing channels:

1. Interactive

In order for the platform to be successful, there needed to be give and take. We needed to engage with potential customers, and they needed to be able to engage with us. This nudged us towards a platform with a social angle.

2. Content-focused

Back in 2008, “content marketing” wasn’t a thing. According to Google Trends, the term didn’t become a hot search item until 2011. (We founded KISSmetrics in 2008.)

The idea behind content marketing is giving value, ideally for free. That’s what we wanted to do with KISSmetrics. Our tool was designed to provide actionable metrics. Our marketing, then, needed to be valuable for marketers.

3. High Positive ROI

Most of the time, getting a high ROI requires spending little money. Usually, organic platforms require more time than money, and we were okay with that. As an early stage startup, we were cheap and scrappy.

As it was, analytics incumbents like Omniture were dominating paid search. For us to bid on relevant AdWords, we would have to spend more than $10 to get a single click! That wasn’t an option for us. We ruled out all contending marketing channels that required us to invest a large amount of cash upfront.

4. Scalable

If you want your business to be scalable, your marketing has to be scalable, too. In fact, marketing scalability should be a primary consideration when considering business scalability as a whole.

Ref:

• The 3-Step Startup Marketing Framework We Created to Grow KISSmetrics

选择旧体验最小化的人群作为切入点

• 旧体验是别人的产品，我们无法改变
• 唯一能做是选择在特定情景下的用户和选择用户的参考系
• 需求可无限细分，将旧体验最小化，本质是选择旧体验相对新体验最差的用户
• 极端情况是旧体验为零的完美的用户，即有一个用户群完全没用过同类竞品

Ref:

• 俞军《产品方法论》

A.I.D.A Model

• Attention: make the buyer aware of a problem they have
• Interest: the buyer becomes interested in solving their problem
• Desire: the buyer becomes interested in your solution to their problem
• Action: the buyer acquires your solution

e.g., Swiffer's ad:

• Attention: Traditional cleaning methods stir up dirt
• Interest: Dirt needs to be removed, not just moved
• Desire: Swiffer cloths collect dirt and can be thrown away
• Action: Find Swiffer in the household cleaning aisle

Ref:

• Published in Edward Strong’s The Psychology of Selling and Advertising
• The Anti-Amazon Alliance article from Stratechery's Ben Thompson

Thomas Cook uncovering a goldmine of long-tail keywords in travel market

• Thomas Cook was a travel company, who provide package holidays to hundreds of destinations around the world;
• They realized a lot of people search google with the query pattern of {destination} weather {month}, e.g., Tenerife weather april;
• They ended up creating thousands of weather pages, one for each month of the year for each holiday destination;
• These pages ended up pulling in nearly 500k organic traffic every month.

Ref:

• How step by step keyword research led to an SEO goldmine
• Thomas Cook

Kapwing's SEO Project Marketing

• Kapwing is a startup that makes an online video editor;
• They faced the same problem like every other new startup: no funding, no organic traffic and no users;
• Tried cold emails, ads, posting in Facebook groups but none of it worked;
• They realized SEO is key for their product with the observation that first fifteen of their paying users all came from Google;
• The link building strategy they empolyed is SEO Project Marketing, i.e., the is press exposure results in articles and backlinks:
  • Make side projects;
  • Host them on your own domain;
  • Get them in front of the press.
• In total they have launched 10 side projects and the result is more than 480 unique dofollow backlinks;
• How do they get the side projects in front of the press?
  • Direct outreach to journalists / bloggers who work in their niche;
  • Utilize Product Hunt since journalists browse Product Hunt for article inspiration.
• e.g., Cartoonify:
  • In 2018, a polaroid camera was getting attention for being able to turn photos into cartoon drawings;
  • They found the open-sourced code and turned it into a simple web app;
  • Then they started emailing all the journalists who wrote about the original, sharing their web-app version;
  • Their reward was 100+ new backlinks.

Ref:

• SEO project marketing
• Kapwing

Grubhub's Link building strategy when launching in new a city

• In 2007, Grubhub raised $1.1 million and time to expand to New York;
• Every day, thousands of Americans search for food delivery on Google so ranking on top would mean high intentional traffic;
• SEO is the key growth channel and to rank high they needed backlinks;
• The strategy was to offer incentive to local press:
  • Grubhub would go to local press and offer to give their readers $10 off their first order;
  • All the local press had to do was link to the new city's page which explained the discount;
  • After a while, the new city's page would build enough local links and it would rank 1st;
  • The "link juice" then flowed downstream to each city's specific food pages, helping them climb the search results.
• For every new market to enter after, Grubhub replicated the process again.

Ref:

• Grubhub's link building strategy

Cronitor's little SEO side-project Crontab takes in 120k organic traffic a month

• Cronitor is a SaaS to monitor applications, e.g. cron jobs;
• They realized a lot of people search Google with the query pattern of cron job {time interval};
• So they built a simple site called Crontab providing you the cron job codes for different intervals to catch all the long tail searches, i.e., 120k traffic/mo;

Ref:

• Cronitor's Little Side-Project
• Cronitor: Simple monitoring for every application
• crontab guru

KISSmetrics's 3-Step Startup Marketing Framework

1. Who is your target customer? Identify your target customer by understanding:

• What your product does;
• What problem is solves;
• Who wants this problem solved.

2. Where do they hang out? To find out where your target audience hangs out:

• Create a master list of potential places;
• Establish criteria for what a solid marketing channel (KISSmetric's);
• Vet your list according to those criteria;

3. How do you engage with them? To engage with your customer:

• Identify your method of engagement, e.g., using twitter hashtags;
• Expand as far as this method allows, e.g., dominating relavent hashtags;
• Confine your reach only to the target audience;
• Aim to deliver a high amount of value, e.g., share great content from other marketer.

Ref:

• The 3-Step Startup Marketing Framework We Created to Grow KISSmetrics

How Snapchat solves cold start problem in the early day

• Identified their target audience in the high school demographic;
• Then located popular students in high schools, gave them the app, and incentivized the cool kids to share the app with others. [...] it was word of mouth within high schools.

Ref:

• The 3-Step Startup Marketing Framework We Created to Grow KISSmetrics

How KISSmetrics got their early traction

• The channel they identified for their target audience was Twitter;
• The value giving tactic they employed was sharing great content from other marketers;
• The key to drive engagement and awareness of KISSmetric was Hashtags. Their early efforts were focused on dominating a hashtag.

Ref:

• The 3-Step Startup Marketing Framework We Created to Grow KISSmetrics

Bullseye framework by Gabriel Weinberg Part 2 - How do you decide which traction channel to focus on?

Or more broadly what to work on? Define your traction goal and critical Path to guide you.

Defining your traction goal

• Given all the different opportunities/product or service revisions/tasks pulling you in a lot of different directions.
• Always should have an explicit traction goal you're working toward, e.g., one thousand paying customers, one hundred new daily customers, or 10 percent of your market.
• Once that is defined, you can work backward and set clear quantitative and time-based traction subgoals, such as reaching one thousand customers by next quarter or hitting 20 percent monthly growth targets. Clear subgoals provide accountability.

Defining your critical path

• The path to reaching your traction goal with the fewest number of steps is your Critical Path;
• You should literally enumerate the intermediate steps (milestones) to get your traction goal;
• These milestones need not be traction related, but they should be absolutely necessary to reach your goal;
  • Milestones could be:
    • Hiring these people;
    • Adding features A, B and C to your product;
    • Engaging in marketing activities X, Y, Z.
  • DuckDuckGo as an example:
    • Intial traction goal was to get to 100 million searches a month. The team believed the milestones they needed to hit included a faster site, a more compellig mobile offering, and more broadcast TV coverage (from publicity traction channel). Some product features like images and auto-suggest were continually requested, they believed they were not absolutely necessary milstones in their Critical Path to reach that traction goal;
    • But when the traction goal changed to 1 percent of the overall search market, those features are needed because now they had to get new users and those new users won't be that forgiving;
  • The milestones will be different for you. The point is to be critical and strategic in deciding what to include. That's why it's called the Critical Path.
• Be critical to your milestones:
  • Stay on the critical path: limited resources hence can't afford to waste;
  • Reevaluating the critical path: some milestones might no longer needed as you've finished a milestone.

Ref:

• Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth - Chapter three & four

Bullseye framework by Gabriel Weinberg Part 1 - How to get traction for your startup

As Peter Thiel says in his book Zero to One:

It is very likely that one channel is optimal. Most businesses actually get zero distribution channels to work. Poor distribution—not product—is the number one cause of failure. If you can get even a single distribution channel to work, you have great business. If you try for several but don’t nail one, you’re finished. So it’s worth thinking really hard about finding the single best distribution channel.

But what is the one optimal channel that works for you? Bullseye framework is intended to help you find that.

A loop of three steps

Step one: Outer ring, what's possible

• Outer ring is all about brainstorming and to help you counteract your traction channel biases (your experience & what the crowd says);
• Brainstorming every single traction channel:
  • At least one idea for every channel:
    • Advertise offline, where the best place to do it?
    • Give a speech, ideal audience?
  • One decent channel strategy that has a chance of moving the needle (What a channel strategy is);
  • What would success look like in each channel?
  • Research to feed your brainstorming:
    • Should get much more specific to your company;
    • What marketing strategies have worked in your industry;
    • History of companies in your space:
      • How similar companies acquired customers over time;
      • How unsuccessful companies wasted their marketing dollars.

Step two: Middle ring, what's probable

• Promote the best traction channel ideas to middle ring and run cheap traction tests:
  • Sort the traction channel ideas by excitement and promote them one by one until a drop-off in excitement (usually occurs around the third channels);
  • Have ideas in multiple channel so you can test them in parallel:
    • Can run multiple experiments at the same time because tests take some time to run after setup (Online tools);
    • But pick only one channel strategy for one traction channel;
    • But too many things in parallel lead to lack of focus. Number of tests need to be somewhat low.
  • For each traction channel idea, construct a cheap traction test to see if good or not. Test should be designed to roughly answer:
    • How much will it cost to acquire customers through this channel?
    • How many customers are available through this channel?
    • Are the customers getting through this channel the kind of customers that you want right now?
  • One caveat though. Don't prematurely scale your marketing efforts for a channel. This step is to determine if it's a channel that could move the needle for your startup. Main point is speed and get data and to prove your assumptions.

Step three: Inner ring, what's working

• Focus solely on the ONE / CORE channel that will move the needle:
  • If one of the traction channels tested in middle ring produced promising results, start directing all your traction efforts and resources toward it;
    • One traction channel dominates in terms of customer acquisition at any stage in a startup's life cycle. That's why focusing one at a time.
  • Goal for step 3 is squeeze and twist every bit of traction out of the core channel:
    • Experiment continually to find out exactly how to optimize growth in the channel, i.e., effective effective strategies & tactics:
      • To optimize your chosen channel strategy to make it the best it can be:
        • e.g., targeting blogs, tweak which blogs to target, type of content to push and CTA in the content or SEM, tweak keywords, ad copy, demographics, and landing pages.
      • To uncover better channel strategies within the same traction channel:
        • Run cheap and fast testing and answer the same basic questions as middle ring tests to see if there is a better channel strategy you should be using within the core channel.
    • Scale the efforts until no longer effective due to saturation or rising costs:
      • All marketing channels become saturated over time, happening with all channel strategies. Tactics that once worked will become crowded and ineffective;
      • To combat this reality, should consistently brainstorm new channel strategies and conduct small experiments to find an untapped channel strategy in an established venue or trying a venue no one else is using.
  • Don't get distracted by marketing efforts in other traction channels showing promising results, albeit much less so (tendency to try more on them). This is a mistake. Core channel needs efforts to uncover additional strategies and tactics to have greater effect;
  • Sometimes to scale a core channel, you need supports from other channels. But you should still be focusing on that one core channel and execute its strategy instead of pursuing multiple traction strategies at once.
• If no channel seems promising after testing, the whole process should be repeated.

Ref:

• Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth - Chapter three & four

早期Shopify的冷启动

• 一个电商业务要做起来「流量 → 店铺运营 → 支付 → 仓储 → 物流配送」这几个环节都要跑通，且ROI是正的；
• Shopify起步时遇上了搜索引擎广告爆发的阶段，流量大且精准又便宜，商户做电商有很高的ROI。这对于Shopify建站工具业务是一个很大的助推剂，完美组成了一个电商stack：Google广告 → Shopify建站 → 信用卡或PayPal支付 → 第三方仓储和物流 - Fedex或UPS配送；
• 一个新业务需要联合上下游一起服务一个市场的，不能欠缺其中一些环节；
• 做一个新的业务，需要考虑上下游有哪些环节，有什么环节现在是缺少的，新业务对于上下游环节处于什么位置。

Ref:

• tobi lutke's tweet

通过免费版本获客后再挖掘更细分的需求收费

• ImageOptim一开始提供一个免费的app，极简UI、安装包极小、而且实实在在解决了用户的需求，在Mac圈算是精品应用了。在这之上，开发者推出了一个Web service，给开发者提供了API，当然这是收费的；
• 同样的例子，还有Open Web Scraper，一开始给有爬网站需求的用户提供了一个浏览器插件，后来在用户积累到一定体量后，推出了Web Scraper Cloud，提供更高级的功能，当然也收费了；
• 免费版本的用户中总有一小部分用户会有更细分的需求，这些更细分的需求就可以深挖顺理成章的进行收费。

Ref:

• ImageOptim
• Web Scraper

Some famous growth hacks from Airbnb, PayPal and Canvas

• Airbnb wrote a script to automatically post each new listing to Craigslist bringing them loads of free qualified renters;
• PayPal wrote a script to message eBay sellers, pretending to be a buyer, to ask if they would accept payments via PayPal. Sellers thought their buyers wanted PayPal, so they quickly added the payment option;
• Canva created thousands of SEO-optimized pages with design templates and tutorials because they realized many basic design tasks start with a Google search like "award certificate template."

Ref:

• Growth Levers and How to Find Them

Mint Marketing Plan from Noah Kagan

• Mint.com grew to over 100,000 registered users within 6 months of launch from a prelaunch list of 1000 registered users 3 months before launch;
• The secret is their Quant-based marketing framework called The Mint Marketing Playbook:
  • It's a framework for acquiring customers and promoting your business as defined by two main features:
    • A specific, quantitative top-line goal that says what and by when:
      • Instead of staring at a single enormous goal, the entrepreneur can view the top-line goal as an aggregation of many smaller goals, that can be rearranged, magnified, or dialed back in order to optimize for X result in Y timeframe.
    • Eliminate hope by naming, measuring and reacting to every feeder channel:
      • Quant-based marketing demands that you break down your marketing strategy into multiple tactics, your "feeder channels," that are all discrete, measurable, and easily magnified or minimized.
  • It has 5 steps:
    • Establish specific goals;
    • Make your target list prior to launch;
    • Find where your users are online;
    • Test messaging;
    • Track everything.

Ref:

• The secret is the Quant-based marketing framework

DuckDuckGo's early days to get traction

• DuckDuckGo had rather uneventful launch: posted it to Hacker News and received some response that led the founder Gabriel Weinberg to investigate search privacy and eventually become "the serach engine that doesn't track you." But it didn't bring traction;
• The initial traction came from SEO, targeting a keyword "new search engine". The trick was to build a karma widget that would display links to your social media profiles and how many followers you had on each service. People embed it on their sites and at the bottom there would be a link back to DuckDuckGo that said "new search engine." This channel strategy brought them a lot of links. Got number one for the keyword;

Ref:

• Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

Sam Altman on getting your first 100 users

• Use your network. Email/call in favors from everyone you know. If it's a paid product, charge them. It's a good way to validate your product;
• Research people who might use your product and reach out to them asking to try. "Conversion rates are low — maybe 2-3% — so youll have to reach out to more people";
• Social media outreach, posting to HN, forums, PR, etc. "The important thing to look for here is a traffic source that is sustainable rather than one big pop that then promptly goes away";
• Buy ads and point them at your website. "This is the 'laziest' and least impressive thing you can do".

Ref:

• Sam Altman on getting your first 100 users

Slow and steady wins the marketing channel race (Marketing playbook by Datadog’s CMO Alex Rosemblat)

Build Your Marketing Channel Like You Build a Product

• Product team operates with a series of iterations, cycles, and feedback. Same for a marketing channel;
• Main difference is the feedback loop;
• The main feedback you’re looking for is whether your leads are converting, clicking, or completing desired actions based on your campaign efforts;
• Need tons of cycles to get everything right to build a marketing channel.

Narrow Your Focus and Set Your Goals Realistically

• To master a marketing channel, work on one at a time:
  1. Choose one marketing channel;
  2. Choose one campaign or campaign type within that channel;
  3. Then, allow the campaign to meet its goals.
• You do this until certain criteria (determine based on your business needs) are met.

Data Collection

• Data collection should always remain your guiding light as you build your channel;
• Good quality data will be your currency as you navigate campaigns and channel mastery;
  • Marketing data can be imprecise, but it will ultimately prove to be directionally correct.
• So be sure that you trust your data and collect the right kind to help your case.

Embarking on a hypothesis-driven approach

• Someone has an idea for a campaign. The right questions to ask:
  • ls it clearly thought out how this campaign will work - mechanism, time limits, budget limits, expertise on team or vendor, and who knows what else?
  • ls it clear what the minimum result is to declare this (somewhat) successful - are there actuals from other campaigns to compare to?
  • ls the team/vendor actually equipped to run this campaign as needed to achieve and measure that initial result?
  • Has anyone not involved in setting up the campaign played “devil's advocate”?
  • Are you able to capture the data to make the assessment of the campaign'ssuccess?

Concentric circles of channel experimentation

• Once the campaign passes the examination, try it out with the concentric circles of channel experimentation approach:
  1. The Pilot;
  2. Repeat & Enlarge Pilot;
  3. Real Money Spend;
  4. The Ceiling.
• This second step is necessary to ensure success is repeatable, scalable, and dependable.

Ref:

• Datadog’s CMO Alex Rosemblat on Building Marketing Channels Slowly to Achieve Massive Scale (Pod and Video)

Monica.im冷启动

• 早期得益于收购一款基于搜索引擎的AI增强开源插件，有着不错的用户增速，通过这款工具进行导流的测试和优化，度过了冷启动期；
• 另外一个方式是Twitter KOL投放：
  • 选择推特作为早期推广平台是因为推特有着数量不低的PC端活跃用户，正好契合了我们作为PC端产品的形态；
  • 推文里的url支持直接跳转，这样我们就能够在PC端使用带参数的官网链接，来追踪每一条推文带来的用户注册量；
  • AI相关领域的KOL发一条tweet是50～150美金；
  • 找了几十个博主发布Monica相关内容，效果好时能带来小几百万的曝光量。

Ref:

• AI应用层创业是否延续工具出海的路径？

理解STP另一个角度

• 按照不同维度拆分市场后，看看哪个细分市场还有机会，然后重点投入这个细分市场，这就形成了「目标市场」；
• 然后长期耕耘这个「目标市场」，通过一系列特有的经营活动，为该市场的顾客匹配合适的供给，进一步形成了「市场定位」。

Ref:

• 营销笔记

做营销的五个步骤

• 第一步，创造一个值得存在的东西，它有一个内在可以讲述的故事，以及你的贡献是值得谈论的；
• 第二步，针对一个特定群体，把这个东西打造成该群体会特别受益和以及特别在乎的东西；
• 第三步，讲述一个故事，这个故事与目标群体内在的叙事和期望是一致的（该目标群体是一个最小可行性市场）；
• 第四步，对外传播；
• 第五步，经常被忽略的一步，持续的耕耘，持续不断的输出和耕耘，在消费者心目中建立信心，让他们相信你的承诺，以及获得许可，进一步向他们沟通。

Ref:

• Chapter: Marketing in five steps from Book: This is Marketing by Seth Godin

刘飞 / 少楠 / 白光的直播笔记

• flomo一开始冷启动采用了人拉人的方式（很多人都劝他们不要做了）；
• 产品沉思录是否对冷启动有帮助？
  • 当时就4000多的订阅者，公众号1万多订阅者，对一开始的冷启动帮助不大，而且产品一开始太粗糙了，都不好意思推。
• 品牌是果，很多路径可以达到这个果，比如说flomo输出了很多怎么思考的内容走出来的；
• flomo当时参考了如何打造革命性的思维工具文章的建议，做了flomo 101，教人怎么记笔记，改变别人思维方式很重要；
• 无论做产品，做内容，都要考虑传播，怎么重复沟通，可规模化传播；
• 很多时候，最后的结果，都是大量boring的事件走过来的（Tim Urban也是这样说的）；
• 产品经理做的不是产品，是需求，做产品的是业务负责人或者老板；
• 要转型业务人，没有捷径，就是下场做，把手弄脏；
• 有产品、能传播、能收费，缺一不可；
• 虽然都是to c的业务，to c变现是一种方式，还有另外一种方式是to b变现。

Ref:

• 公众号：刘飞Lufy

为什么要细分市场？

• 选择细分市场本身不能获得竞争优势，但设计业务时还是要进行细分且选择一个细分市场；
  • 如何判断市场有效性？
• 因为你一开始不可能做所有人的生意，也没机会做所有人的生意；
• 但选择一个细分市场并不意味着你就一直做这个市场，只是切入点需要是一个细分市场；
• 在切入点的细分市场站稳脚跟后，可以在其它市场进行渗透。

Ref:

• 营销笔记

如何判断一个市场的有效性

• 可识别性与可衡量性，即人群画像是否具体；
• 市场容量，市场体量大不大，市场是在萎缩还是在增长；
• 可接近性，是否可以通过渠道建设或广告宣传触达这个群体；
• 反应性，是否能找到打动目标群体的故事进行营销。

Ref:

• 营销笔记