Morgan Brown is Vice President of Growth Marketing for Shopify. Prior to Shopify, he was a Director of Product at Facebook. He is also the co-author of Hacking Growth: How Today’s Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success.
Scott Tousley is an Operator in Residence at Reforge and the Head of Startup Growth at HubSpot. He's spent the past 7 years at HubSpot scaling new acquisition channels and go-to-market for product launches. He also advises and invests in B2B climate tech startups.
Natalie Rothfels is an Operator in Residence at Reforge and runs a leadership coaching practice. She has held product leadership roles at Quizlet and Khan Academy and was a classroom teacher in another life.
Growth teams are frequently misperceived as optimization squads who run experiments to increase product or marketing KPIs.
In reality, the best growth teams are like the best baseball teams. They know when to bunt, when to hit a single, and when to swing big for a home run.
In baseball, to hit a home run, a player has to:
Know when it's time to swing big (vs hit a single)
Put enough power behind the swing
Hit the ball in the right direction
In growth, to hit a home run, a team has to do all the same things:
Know when it's time to swing big (vs making optimizations)
Put enough power (aka people, time, and budget) behind the swing
Know when things are going in the right direction (aka validation)
However, before we get further into analogies about growth and baseball, let's define what exactly we mean by a "home run" in growth.
💡 A home run is a step function change in X driven by a big swing innovation in Y.
X = revenue, WAUs, traffic, etc.
Y = product line, acquisition channel, customer segment, regional market, etc.
Unfortunately, most growth teams get stuck in reactivity. They miss the moment when a big swing is critically necessary and end up:
Overly focused on one type of swing (usually the optimization bunt)
Attempting the wrong swings at the wrong moment, and striking out
On the defensive, reacting to the whims of changing strategies
This reactivity means growth teams can get caught in a negatively reinforcing loop, where firefighting leads to lack of clear strategic focus, leading to ineffective execution and missed goals, thus restarting the loop.
But it doesn't have to be this way. The best growth leaders know how to proactively step up to bat, knowing that a lead in one inning doesn't ensure a lead in the next. In an effort to better allocate their investments, they proactively ask:
What's our growth like across segments, product SKUs, and channels today, and where do want to be in x months/years?
What proportion of our investments need to be on big bets in service of step-function growth?
What market opportunities can we proactively play in and budget around?
This pulls the growth team from reactivity to proactivity.
In this post, we'll look at three big questions that will help us understand when and how to proactively take big swings. In doing so, we'll save time, gain confidence, and earn trust from those around us.
Allocation: What percentage of our growth roadmap should be allocated to big swings?
Discovery: How can we uncover the big swing opportunities?
Validation: How can we validate our big swing with the minimum amount of resources?
Allocation: What percentage of our growth roadmap should be allocated to big swings?
In order to understand our roadmap allocation, we ask four questions:
What stage are we in as a product and company?
What is our growth goal?
What are our current investments and how fast are they growing?
Will our current investments reach the goal?
Both big swings and optimizations can be viable methods to achieving your growth goals. The goal is to find which offers outsized leverage. The Allocation Blueprint is a tool to help you analyze the bottlenecks that apply to your current growth, and establish what type and size of intervention you may need to correct your growth trajectory.
Let's walk through a user acquisition example to illustrate a practical use case for the Allocation Blueprint.
1. What stage is our product and company?
Early stage companies take their first big swing by building a product and acquiring customers. Teams are rarely focused on optimizations because getting your first customer isn't an optimization, it's a home run.
But once you begin gaining traction with customers, things change. Users start sharing feedback about how well the product meets their expectations, and soon more quantitative data starts flowing in about product usage. This data usually gives growth teams plenty of low-hanging fruit to optimize, which helps to set the foundation for solid engagement and retention. Optimize too early or for too long and you're likely missing the forest for the trees.
With even more scale, growth teams develop sophisticated experimentation efforts, getting scores on the board and — critically — understanding why certain things flop or succeed. This wisdom is vital; it's often a source of inspiration to take future big swings, knowing what strategies are likely to make them successful. You can think of this like analyzing the pitches getting thrown to your team at bat: The better you can predict what's coming, the more effective you'll be with your swings.
Your company's product stage should direct the allocation of different-sized strategies in your portfolio. Many companies over or under-estimate the volume of big swings they take, particularly at scale. It's important to remember that taking bigger swings also means you may be more likely to strikeout.
For the sake of our walk-through in the following example, let's imagine we're leading growth at a B2B SaaS company with one core product line already in the market and growing at a steady clip. We'll call the company CurveBall.
2. What is our growth goal?
Let's imagine that CurveBall currently acquires 360,000 new users per year. Given our stage, we've set a goal to increase new user acquisition by 40% year over year. This makes our new acquisition target 504,000 new users.
3. What are our current investments and how fast are they growing?
We have three active growth loops: a paid marketing loop, a user-generated-content SEO loop, and a social referral loop. Collectively, they're generating 360,000 new users per year.
Let's check out more of CurveBall's hypothetical data to understand the performance of these loops.
This data template shows four factors for each of the three existing growth loops for CurveBall. The first is the referral loop, then the UGC content loop, and then the paid marketing loop. For each, we provide data around the % of new user acquisition that the loop accounts for, the maturity stage of the loop, the year-over-year growth rate for that loop, and how well users from those loops retain.
There are four questions that can direct us to our biggest opportunities:
What is the current % of new user acquisition? This tells us how much this loop is contributing to our overall user acquisition growth, which will impact how much opportunity the loop has to impact the company's bottom line.
For CurveBall, notice how the Referral Loop accounts for only 5% of new monthly users, while the UGC-SEO content loop dominates at 80%. It's likely that tweaks to the referral loop alone wouldn't have much bottom-line impact on new users — but this number alone can't provide the full story. We don't yet know how much upside there is on this loop.
What is the maturity stage? This tells us if we've already got this loop working like a well-oiled machine, or if it's still early and needs more work to get the flywheel going.
For CurveBall, it looks like the social referral loop was an investment made under 6 months ago, so it's likely that it's barely reached awareness. Existing customers might just not know they can refer colleagues to the product. On the other hand, CurveBall's paid marketing loop has been around for years and has already been optimized.
What is the growth rate? This tells us how effectively and quickly we can anticipate impact from each loop, as well as if we're nearing any plateaus that suggest saturation (therefore giving investments in that area lower leverage). Even if a loop only represents a small percentage of aggregate new user growth, if it's new and growing well, it can provide a big opportunity.
For CurveBall, the newer loops are growing significantly faster than the more mature paid marketing loop — an insight that may be a false indicator of opportunity or a signal that more investment could mean better results.
What does cohort retention look like for each loop? This helps us understand if the users we're bringing in through each loop are effective matches for our existing product, or if we're bringing in new users who churn.
Knowing the "quality" of new users across each loop can also give you insight into the impact these new users can have on the business once they get activated into the product. We won't be using this as a big calculation input in our examples, but it's important for understanding the opportunity size of any investment.
Pro Tip: Know Your S Curves The S-curve is a valuable tool for understanding the maturity of an investment and whether it's ripe for optimization, or already reaching it's maximum saturation point. We dig into this tool in our Advanced Growth Series by highlighting which strategies most effective for channels and loops at different maturity stages.
Once you have a clear opinion on the types of bets you should be making at your company stage, the goal you're trying to reach, and how your existing growth loops are working, you can start putting the pieces together for the final question.
4. Will our current investments reach the goal?
Now that we know the inputs of our existing growth loops, we can do some simple math with our blueprint.
Given our existing investments and their individual growth rates, we will hit 20% YoY growth, coming up short by 71,100 new users. This is half of our YoY growth targets and would be a bad outcome, especially if we didn't see it coming.
Teams at this point look to options along a wide spectrum, from optimizing existing loops to taking innovative big swings. On one side, you'll consider optimizing existing growth channels to their full potential (including taking linear channels and turning them into loops), and on the other, you're looking at taking big swings that will require spinning up wholly new investments.
CurveBall will need to allocate investments between:
Optimizing the three existing loops — Referral, UGC-SEO, and Paid Marketing — to get an additional 20% YoY beyond our expected growth rate targets
Trying to hit a home run
Deciding if it's possible to squeeze out the incremental +20% YoY growth from existing channels is an art. You need to opportunity size all of your possible investments to be able to compare and prioritize them against each other.
While there's no hard and fast rule about how many swings CurveBall should take at once or which type is universally preferable (e.g, is it better to stand up a new acquisition channel to grow new users, or go for new segment expansion?), a simple framework to compare opportunities is this:
expected outcome = opportunity size * confidence level
As with anything, real-world constraints will shift what's possible. You may have more marketing budget than before and can pump it into the newly growing referral channel to increase awareness. On the other hand, you may have a fixed amount of time to test a home run idea because your business is incredibly seasonal. Get comfortable with making a calculated but uncertain bet about these allocations — we'll discuss more about how you can reduce risk from your decisions below.
The fictional team at CurveBall has decided that will be hard to eke out the missing 20% growth with optimizations alone.
Since we're aiming for 40% but only get half of that (20%) with our current investments, we'll make the choice to dedicate half of our growth resources to a new innovative bet in order to hit the target goal.
Discovery: How do we discover big swing opportunities?
In our example, we can't optimize our way to our goal. We have to take a big swing and aim for the fences. So how do we discover the home run opportunities at CurveBall?
We can approach the opportunities across two axes:
Market opportunity: Existential survival and opportunistic growth are at two ends of the market opportunity axis.
At the far left, we have the Market Opportunity for Survival. These are major industry or societal shifts that require you to fundamentally pivot your core business and/or take a big swing. You can discover these by starting leadership conversations with the question:
"What are the societal or technological tailwinds that threaten our existence?"
For example, in 2008 Netflix was a company built around shipping DVDs. If Netflix didn't pivot to online streaming, it likely would have failed as the world moved towards streaming.
On the far right, we have Market Opportunity for Growth. The timeline on these is less constrained, as it doesn't threaten your existence today, but there is a massive opportunity if you're proactive. You can discover these by starting leadership conversations with the question:
"What are the societal or technological tailwinds that are growth opportunities?"
One example is Stripe announcing its entrance into crypto payments — the company has payments infrastructure and is dedicating a percentage of its roadmap to crypto.
Company competence: Company strengths and company weaknesses are at the two ends of the competence axis.
Different opportunities can play into your company's current capabilities. This axis represents areas you need to build muscle in, or areas where you already have existing expertise and therefore may have an advantage over other solutions.
Zoom had already spent several years preparing for the shift to remote work, building in video quality and performance as primary feature differentiators from the outset. When COVID-19 hit and remote work accelerated to nearly 100%, Zoom thrived in the uptick in demand for online meetings.
On the other side, Ford plans to be the second-largest manufacturer of electric vehicles by 2024 despite the majority of its vehicle production being combustible engines today. Though this isn't an existing strength, they recognize the need to develop it into a core competency for market survival.
Understanding societal or technological shifts allows you to track where the ball is headed so you're right where you need to be when it comes. Understanding how an opportunity aligns with your existing core competencies will determine how much power you already have loaded to hit a home run.
With that in mind, there are four core ways to think about home run opportunities:
Product line expansion
Growth loops expansion
Regional expansion
Segment expansion
Disclaimer: The following examples are from both privately-held and publicly-held companies. Therefore, all data is fictional and does not represent the actual financial, product, or marketing metrics at the company at the time. It's for illustrative purposes only to walk through examples of the framework
1. Product line expansion
The first option is to expand your product lines. You may expand your product offering vertically or horizontally. Horizontal product expansion extends the existing capabilities to a new audience. Vertical product expansion extends new capabilities to existing audiences.
We'll share a few examples of each from different folks in the Reforge ecosystem.
Horizontal product expansion at HubSpot
by: Scott Tousley
At Hubspot, we ran an exercise similar to the Allocation Blueprint to determine existing growth rates vs our target goals. We'll use fictional data to illustrate what happened:
Let's say our existing revenue was $100 million with a target growth rate of 40% YoY. When we ran our numbers we saw we'd come up short by $9 million. ****While coming under goal by 9% might not seem like it would require taking big swing, there were very few viable optimizations on the table, and there were additional constraints around our CAC and LTV that were leaving us with few additional levers we could pull to make up the difference. Put another way, we were hitting a saturation ceiling that we had to get ahead of for continued growth.
We had already successfully expanded horizontally in 2015, moving from marketing software to CRM software. Given that, we had some confidence around what it would take to expand to another type of profession, so a few years later we considered expanding in customer service software. Customer service professionals were often connected with marketers and sales folks within the same organization, meaning we had an "in" already for a big swing into a horizontal product line to service this new audience of professionals.
It played into the company's strengths, as we had an existing new user acquisition engine and strong regional marketshare, which allowed us to cross-sell existing customers. In doing so, we also learned about the needs of a new audience and how those needs overlapped with our existing product offerings, allowing us to reuse our existing product assets in new ways.
Image shows HubSpot's investment opportunity in a new product for a new audience. The customer service product leaned into existing strengths while also representing a large market opportunity.
Vertical product expansion at LinkPop at Shopify
by: Morgan Brown
At Shopify, we are constantly looking to help make entrepreneurs more successful. One of the fastest-growing trends in commerce is the rise of creators and influencers who rely on commerce as a way to monetize their content and extend the relationship with their audience.
One of the most important tools for creators for monetizing their audience is their link in bio. Typically a link from their social media profiles leads to another property, such as a website, online store, or subscription site.
Entrepreneurs typically pay for functionality with these tools to help them monetize and often they link to their Shopify store. So we built Linkpop, which is a free link in bio tool for creators that enables them to sell featured products directly from that link, saving a step for their users to buy from their social profiles.
The bet played to our strengths in the growth quadrant. We're a popular choice for entrepreneurs to sell online and by creating an offering for creators, we're able to provide value to them and create an on-ramp to Shopify.
Image shows breakdown of the type of opportunity Shopify saw as they built Linkpop, which leaned into existing strengths and a big market opportunity.
2. Growth loops expansion
The second option is to expand your growth loops by building new acquisition loops or habit loops.
Disclaimer: the following examples are from both privately-held and publicly-held companies. Therefore, all data is fictional and does not represent the actual financial, product, or marketing metrics at the company at the time. It's for illustrative purposes only to walk through examples of the framework
Acquisition loops expansion at HubSpot
by: Scott Tousley
The majority of freemium user acquisition at HubSpot was driven by SEO and paid acquisition. We were considering layering on a third acquisition channel for partnerships:
Which led to the creation of our Allocation Blueprint:
At our existing pace, would end the year at 8% shy of our goal. Therefore, we decided to take a big swing for freemium-driven acquisition at HubSpot with partnerships.
Sometimes a big swing can be the sum of a collection of smaller bets. This was true of our investment into new partner-driven acquisition channels. We decided to:
Create an affiliate partner program for content creators.
Double down on our "Surround Sound Strategy" internationally. We took various high-intent keywords (e.g, "best CRM software"), looked at who ranked in the top 10 Google results, then partnered with each website to include a mention to HubSpot. We scaled this internationally across all product features.
Partner with developers in the WordPress ecosystem to build integrations, so as they grew their Monthly Active Users (MAUs), we proportionally grew MAUs.
Partner with startup accelerators, incubators, and venture capital firms to give startups in their portfolios discounts, private event invites, exclusive content resources, and other perks.
While all four of these bets were in service to new acquisition channels, we were able to focus on multiple bets at one time because we had different levels of confidence about each, and the resources to effectively experiment in parallel rather than sequentially. Your mileage may vary here, but it can be useful to evaluate bets both against each other and alongside each other if you're looking to maximize your learnings quickly.
While we had a well-oiled machine for SEO-driven acquisition and paid acquisition, we did not have a scalable playbook for driving user growth through partnerships. At the time, this was a weakness of ours and a muscle we had to develop.
GrowthHackers community at Qualaroo
by: Morgan Brown
In 2012, the growth team at Qualaroo (a SaaS-based user feedback tool, similar to Hotjar) was working on expanding the number of product trials to support our sales-driven acquisition model.
One of the most important customer acquisition loops for Qualaroo was the "Powered By" link that ran on each Qualaroo unit. Users who saw the unit and clicked on the link were taken to Qualaroo.com. This loop accounted for ~25% of our trials but had never been optimized.
First, we developed some hypotheses:
There's likely low-hanging fruit that would improve performance (optimizations).
Those optimizations would show us high gains from improved click-through rates.
Products with audiences similar to Qualaroo's (digital marketers looking to improve web performance) would likely have higher conversion rates than other products.
We ran some quick tests and validated all three of these hypotheses and had some upfront impact.
But eventually, additional tweaks around link copy and landing pages were yielding diminishing returns, so we knew we needed to take a bigger bet, so we opted for VIP partners program that would provide Qualaroo for free to sites with large audiences that served digital marketers. Our hypothesis was that we'd be able to secure a portion of traffic from these big audiences and convert them to trial our product.
This didn't work as expected. We quickly realized that the relative difficulty of getting Qualaroo set up and running for these partners meant the plan wasn't scalable, and wouldn't drive the scale of impressions we were aiming for.
So we tried another bet: Instead of trying to reach marketers where they were aggregated, we could aggregate them ourselves. After surveying marketers to discover how they found new growth content and tactics, we hypothesized that we could aggregate marketers around a Reddit-like community, which we called GrowthHackers.
We bootstrapped the community with long-form growth studies and built a large audience of marketers. We then used the site to effectively showcase how Qualaroo could be used, leading to a new stream of trials.
Ultimately, this created a new high-quality acquisition channel for Qualaroo. But what's important about this story is that sometimes your low-hanging fruit leads you to the hypothesis about the big swing, and then that swing leads you to the next. Don't get overly attached to one big swing. Stay open to what other possibilities come with it.
3. Regional expansion
The third option is to expand into different regions. This may be a country, state, city, or neighborhood level — depending on the scope of the company.
International expansion at Khan Academy
by: Natalie Rothfels
As a non-profit, Khan Academy wasn't strictly required to expand internationally purely to survive market shifts, but we invested early in internationalization because being a global company was critical to the core mission of the organization: A free world-class education for anyone, anywhere.
One of Khan Academy's deep core competencies is content creation. But developing in-house content for all K-12 subjects in the US (and eventually for standardized exams like the SAT, LSAT, and more) was a massive undertaking. Doing so at scale across many more languages, aligned to local curricula, was going to be a feat.
We knew it would take years to launch in new markets so that students and teachers could have access to free educational resources, so we decided to proactively start investing in expansion well before the company reached saturation in the US.
There were three big swings we had to take to accelerate our international growth efforts:
Local partnerships
At the onset of our international market development efforts, we needed to establish a deeper understanding of the realities of education on the ground in countries outside of the US. While content creation was a strength, local relevance was not. At the time, existing foundations in places like Mexico and Brazil were looking to strengthen their impact on education through social responsibility investments. Khan Academy was looking for local expertise, and these foundations were looking for scaled impact. Establishing partnerships was the key foundation to bringing the product into other languages and countries.
Product localization
Making the product accessible in other languages was key to achieving the minimum scope required to reach new audiences. When it comes to learning material, it's important that users can navigate effectively to content or do practice exercises in their own language to maximize the value they can get out of the product.
Content localization tooling
Any product with heavy reliance on in-house content creation has to manage a full operation of content localization or local content creation for relevance. We had to make a big investment in the tooling required to allow translators and educators to create video content across dozens of subjects to maintain the credibility and core value prop of the product in new markets.
While we had developed internal expertise for content creation, it took years to hone the expertise around partnership development localization. This was the type of bet that really couldn't be compared to optimizations — if you can't access the product at all, there's nothing to optimize.
4. Segment expansion
The fourth option is to expand into different segments within a product vertical.
*Disclaimer: the following examples are from both privately-held and publicly-held companies. Therefore, all data is fictional and does not represent the actual financial, product, or marketing metrics at the company at the time. It's for illustrative purposes only to walk through examples of the framework
Expanding from bikers to runners at Strava
by: Lia Siebert
After their first successful company, Kana Communications went public, the founders of Strava found themselves nostalgically drawn back to their athletic days. While rowing crew together in college, they experienced first-hand the unique magic that flows on sports teams: competition, camaraderie, and community.
It was 2007 — the internet had matured substantially, and they thought the timing was right for a new digital locker room. But where to start?
Both founders had experience running, but the technology and device adoption weren't there yet. Phones were not yet ubiquitous, and the gross dollar spend per individual runner seemed significantly smaller than for other sports. Runners usually just need a pair of shoes and nothing else. Plus, to be able to track, monitor, and share running activity would have required a hardware investment first.
Despite not being cyclists themselves, they realized that cycling was a great first use case because the market timing was right: GPS technology was advancing, cycling computers were becoming more mainstream, and cyclists were spending significantly more money on gear and training.
Years later, Strava had built a very loyal following amongst the cycling community. They understood that starting with extremely passionate athletes was a key to building the camaraderie and competition from the ground up.
Having already researched the running market, they knew the opportunity was there. So when the tech became more mainstream (everyone had a phone in their pocket and runners brought these devices with them in hand), they saw the opportunity to expand to this new audience.
But the investment wasn't easy. Rather than keeping a single app experience and trying to incrementally tailor it to new audiences, they decided to take a bigger swing and launch it as a separate app.
They had some key hypotheses:
The passionate and focused cycling community wouldn't download something that was for anyone/everyone. Introducing new audiences to the app would alienate existing loyal customers.
To be successful with runners would require more than a few new fields for pacing or small tweaks.
What made running successful was what also made the cycling audience successful: bringing together a passionate group of athletes to develop it together from the start.
Eventually, once running was more formally established, things could be consolidated and thoughtfully communicated with the cycling community.
It took years of strategic investment for the running app to gain traction and eventually get consolidated into a single app. Eventually, runners became a substantial portion of monthly active users. It started with a proactive big bet, coupled with a deep understanding of the user needs and validation that the big swing would pay off years down the road.
Validation: How do you validate your big swing opportunities most efficiently?
Validation at its core is a series of practices that will help you gain confidence and develop a stronger opinion about which bets to make. The goal is to learn how to develop your big swings into scalable winners or abandon them when you've learned they don't have legs.
Avoid getting stuck in the endless pursuit of perfect validation — it doesn't exist. But at each step, define what the gates look like that you have to pass to move to the next step. You should set your exit criteria ahead of time based on what you know needs to be true for the big swing to pay off and turn into a home run.
1. Market Research and Understanding
Goal: Learn the market and understand the problem.
Always tie things back to the fundamental customer problem, and the key insights you believe to be true.
Your exit criteria for this include:
Exposing the core of what really matters, and what's just noise
Getting really honest about what you thought was true, but isn't, and what you've learned is true instead
Developing a map to understand the system, not just the individual nodes within it
Let's walk through an example.
In 2014, Morgan's team at Inman launched a paid news subscription called Inman Select, which became more than 40% of the company's annual revenue after just 18 months, putting the company on track for a 10x increase in annual revenue run rate after two years.
Before this investment, Inman had only monetized through ads and event revenue. But the team saw a market opportunity for introducing a new tier of journalism on the site gated by a paywall.
Though the move seems obvious now, in 2014 there were only nascent efforts by news organizations to introduce paywalled content as a revenue stream beyond advertising. It became clear that the organizations successful at it had a differentiated value proposition and unique content that wasn't commoditized or found elsewhere. Inman held many of those qualities as a news organization, so there was a core hypothesis that a subscription product could have potential.
The zeitgeist for news value was changing and willingness to pay was increasing. We evaluated the core of what really mattered:
Free content could be monetized by ads
People were willing to pay for higher quality content (a premium asset)
Virality didn't need to be a key component of paid content if it had higher perceived value by those who would pay
Their exit criteria for this step was:
An assessment of whether people would be willing to pay for content on the site
An understanding of how much they'd be willing to pay
What they'd expect in a product in return for a subscription
Morgan's team validated the subscription product bet by conducting qualitative interviews, doing market assessments, and running experiments on multiple content surfaces.
2. Prototype Testing
Goal: Develop a working prototype to validate your assumptions.
You want to do whatever you can to avoid a big bet that just ends up as a foul ball. Test your biggest hypotheses with the goal of proving them wrong and refining them with a new understanding.
Your exit criteria for this include:
Clarity about your biggest assumptions
Some proof-points that those assumptions are valid (qual or quant surveys)
Smoke tests around the concept to evaluate demand (early retention or engagement)
Continue refinement around your key insights and hypotheses
After getting some concept validation on Inman Select, Morgan's team tested the concept with some potential enterprise partners. Their excitement highlighted clear latent demand and a willingness to pay, but it also informed some of their key assumptions about what differentiation would require such as the ability to manage multiple users on a single subscription and various subscription packages (for teams of 10, etc.).
3. Live Testing
Goal: Expand your prototype into an alpha product, continue more rigorous testing.
Your exit criteria for this include:
Clarity around what the alpha achieves in what period of time. Think impact goals: revenue, traffic lifts, engagement rates, key conversions, etc.
An understanding of what you'll need to scale. This could include operational expertise, deeper engineering infrastructure, data and analytics pipelines, x-platform support, and more.
As the Inman Select team continued development, they realized they didn't have the right team to effectively build the product past prototype. They needed to improve some of the operational pieces to make it successful, including:
Hiring a great external product development agency to build the MVP and get Inman Select off the ground. Inman only had marketers and journalists and not enough tech or product chops to build at the level to deliver a subscription service they would be proud of.
Reimagining what the journalistic product would be. Previously contributed articles were housed on a blog and journalism on another blog but they were pretty similar in user experience and it was hard to tell them apart. The team knew that if they were going to charge for content that it had to be differentiated from the free stuff, not just in quality (which it already was) but it had to look different, so they invested in new UX for Inman.com and Inman Select to drive that perceived value.
Working on getting the analytics right by hiring more technical people (Data analysts, growth leads) and bringing in consultants (SEO experts) to help improve the understanding of what was working and how to grow it.
They continued to test the concept with a small group of early customers and the internal team.
The exit criteria for this stage was:
Take rate of the subscription offer
Positive user feedback about intent to retain
User engagement with subscription content
Subscription cancellation rate via customer support
4. Roll Out
Goal: Roll out to the target market.
Launching to your full user base is only the beginning of a big swing. It will take further investment to make it successful.
Your exit criteria at this stage include:
Identifying the gaps that you missed in testing
Identifying the opportunities for where it could be even better
Making a reasonable plan for how to improve it for the bet to actually reach its potential
After launching Inman Select, the team identified several areas to improve the product offering based on early user feedback. This led to several iterations on everything from adding payment options for subscriptions (invoicing for group subscriptions, Apple Pay, and PayPal), experimentation with free and low-cost trials (free 14-day trial, $1 30 day trial, etc.), changes to billing logic, and improvements to the content itself, more local market information and unique data stories.
The investment in understanding the product retention led to further investments to helping subscribers access the site at least 1x/week to improve the likelihood to retain.
Step up to the plate
Now you've got the tools and mental models to help you identify when to swing, where to aim, and how to have more confidence in your next big bet. It's time to move away from optimization-led firefighting and into proactively re-evaluating your growth portfolio.
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