minimum viable test

Minimum Viable Tests to 2X Your Growth (without Paid or Sales)

@conradwa

Is it possible to progress in a smallish, but growing market

with 20+ competitors?

Teachable MRR curve

Yep…

$3M+ ARR, without paid or sales.

Your situation will be different.

…your product, market, contract value, messaging,

sales process, resources, business model, etc. is unique.

And it’s all changing…

What this means is most supposed “expert” advice is

probably bullshit.

@conradwa

Here’s what’s worked for me when experimenting with

product-led growth…

Co-Founder & Advisor

3 years growth consulting

An email list of 17,000 founders and practitioners.

Built a repeatable growth machine through 1M users and $3M ARR.

Right now, I’m bringing together thoughts on product-led growth on: http://growhack.com before

launching my next product in 2017.

Repeatable growth happens when you have a core metric and a model.

That’s step 1

Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 Step 4 Step 5

We started starting at

Weekly Active User (WAU) as our initial value

metric in product development.

Although the product was still

buggy, users surveyed said it

was a “must have…”

Which is when we transitioned to Monthly Recurring Revenue

(MRR) as core metric.

For the next year, we hit an aggressive 20%+ MRR MoM

growth (net of churn).

Actually it was more like 30-40% MoM, but shut down all growth

activities in December and January due to support overload.

MRR works for us because it took into account all parts of our

business like churn and retention.

Your metric is likely different. Not an easy answer, so it’s

okay to spend time thinking it through.

Find yours, then make all decisions from the context of what will move that north star

number 20% every month.

Step 2: have good ideas and prioritize them.

Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 Step 4 Step 5

Early on, you care mostly about prioritizing for impact and effort.

Pop Quiz: Where will a growth experiment have the most impact?

The deeper it is in your funnel

Step 3 is about actually running tests, quickly.

Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 Step 4 Step 5

Fun Fact: most of your experiments will

probably fail.

To improve your odds of success, increase the rate

and quality of your growth experiments.

One great way to do this?

Run smaller growth experiments.

Acquisition Experiment

We found out that a post Noah Kagan did within his Facebook group led to 40

Teachable sign ups.

So we guest blogged with SumoMe.

And spent time creating a deal with AppSumo

Activation Experiment

Should we spend 3 weeks creating an email automation

sequence?

Instead, we started with a 7-day email sequence that took two

days to implement.

From this we learned there were many use cases for Teachable.

So we tested a survey after sign up to segment

users.

And tailored messaging to each group that would significantly

improve our onboarding.

Referral Experiment

Each referral improvement is a multiplier on

your funnel.

To test our referral program, we just asked for users to email their

audiences.

When that seemed to work…

We co-hosted one webinar with user Mariah Coz generated

$100,000 which we split. Mariah’s now trained hundreds of

Teachable users.

Practical takeaways in running minimum viable tests

It’s rare that any test should go longer than 1 month.

I’m personally skeptical of any test longer than 3-7 days.

My challenge to you is: When you’re looking at your list of growth experiments to help, how can you

launch each in 1 day?

Then over time and you bring

on more resources you can focus on

larger experiments.

Notorious projects that fit this category include:

• Site redesigns • Metrics overhauls • Marketing automation builds

What would happen if we failed with an experiment?

I created an email course called

profitable course idea designed to

improve engagement.

The 6-email course averaged 60% open rates which was great

but…

The challenge is we just transitioned to an MRR goal…

…but I didn’t build for a process to upsell was tacked on later

and conversion to our new MRR goal was low :(

So we tested sending

users who’d joined to a webinar.

The webinar was a small test. It was a simple product demo, and took almost no

time to prepare for.

But yet, our attendee to paid conversion was

~10% on our first demo. Woah..

Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 Step 4 Step 5

Optimize and THEN figure out how to automate.

Today, we convert 30% of anyone who attends a Teachable

webinar.

Then we turned THAT content and optimized it for SEO on our

blog…

Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 Step 4 Step 5

And automation you ask?

We now have a team to run webinars with our Head of Growth Andrew

Guttormsen leading up the effort. We also our own webinar software on top of

YouTube and hired a full team to run them.

We took this to the next step with the Teachable Summit, which is a series of 7 live online events that brought an audience of 20,000

people and generates $250k/event.

How much time are you spending on your growth tests?

Stay in touch: http://growhack.com