Rational Growth (PDF): An intro to growing user signups via data and analytical thinking

When I talk to startups about user growth, one topic that comes up is that there’s an overwhelming amount of noise out there on the topic. And on top of that, there’s a huge emphasis on the tactics – little tricks like turning buttons orange, or what cool new Facebook integration to try. These tactics are helpful, but without a broader framework to tie it all together, it can get easy to make 10-20% improvements but lack the approach to really substantially grow a product to the millions of users.

Below is my attempt to do a better job, and describe the mindset and experimentation needed to get to growth.

Download the PDF here

About a year ago, I participated in a series of interviews that would try and provide an intro text on the subject. The idea is just to provide a basic intro to thinking about user growth from an analytical standpoint. These interviews got turned into a PDF, sponsored by AppSumo, but then sat in my email inbox for months until I had the time to read through and approve it.

I’m happy to make it available here on my blog.

Outline of the PDF:

Introduction
Visual to spreadsheet based models
Your signup flow
Example of DailyDiary website
Brainstorming about growth
Shortening the signup flow of the DailyDiary site
SaaS example with “TeamShare”
Convert Now versus Free Trial
Other random things to try
Conclusion

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http://www.adamlieb.me/ Adam Lieb

I ended up being stuck at a library @ UW Tacoma (which I didn’t know existed) for a few hours today and had a chance to read through this entire eBook. This is a great starters guide for how to think about the top half of a conversion funnel. I will pass this along to a few entrepreneurs who I know are struggling with some of this. I agree with your thesis that “there are too many tactics” and not enough strategy or framework thinking.

I am really curious about your philosophy on one click registration and lazy registration. Obviously there is a trade off, acquisition numbers will go up, activation numbers will likely go down. We recently switched our “traditional” on boarding process in exchange for a lazy/1click reg. We won’t know about the long term payoff for a few weeks (short term things look good). I’d love to hear your thoughts.

For us the rationale was “deliver value as quickly as possible” and not patronize our audience with an obvious tutorial. Much of our new user experience was driven by classic game development (show me, don’t tell me how to play). Here is an amazing video (if you haven’t seen it) that walks through classic Megaman games and how amazing they were at teaching new gamers how to play. This really inspired us. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=8FpigqfcvlM
http://andrewchenblog.com Andrew Chen

You’re right that it’s a tradeoff. It’s easy to get more signups, but at the expense of quality.

In general I’ve always erred over to the side of signups, just because once you have a signup you have various ways to notify them to get them back. Whereas if you don’t sign them up at all, then you will never have a channel to get them back.

Worst case, you can think of it as shifting the problem later in the funnel- you increase some top-line metrics but then you have to focus more on activating those lower quality users. I’d personally rather take that problem, but combined with higher signups, than to have lower signups overall.

@andrewchen