4 ms·

Growth hacking: Leading indicators of engaged users

33 points by RichardPrice 14y ago

Torn 14y ago
I thought this was going to be 'leading indicators of enraged users'... which would be a pretty interesting thing to get analytics on to identify user pain. Erratic mouse movements, page refreshes, etc ;)
- RichardPrice 14y ago
  It would actually be good to be able to get leading indicators of enraged users too!
andys627 14y ago
What do people use for onboarding?
shykes 14y ago
All of these examples concern social networking products... I would curious to hear more from B2B online services. Tell us more about Salesforce, Atlassian, Zoho, Box...
- dm8 14y ago
  I believe for enterprise/B2B services sales guys are the "growth hackers" and I believe for them it must be how many million dollar checks you can get over quater/year. However, I'd love to hear from anyone with enterprise sales experience on this topic.
  - ananddass 14y ago
    Based on my experience of enterprise s/w sales for about 6-7 years, the answer depends on the ticket size of the deal and service delivery model. If it is SaaS based ($1-$10K p.a) then a lot of what applies to Dropbox applies to your b2b product too. At $15-20K or above you need to have inside sales reps who smile and dial. You start breaking even at this point. when you hit $500K deal sizes its time to bring in the rainmakers. Happy to chat more if you need specific help. buzz me at adass at filepicker.io
knes 14y ago
WOW. Great article...NOT. All of those "Growth hackers" indicators are just normal activity indicator. "Someone sign up on my service and does something on my service that's expected of them to do?" BOOM! Leading indicator... No shit Sherlock... As a marketer I'm getting tired to this buzz word shit around growth hacker...
- RichardPrice 14y ago
  It's harder than you are suggesting to find a leading indicator of future engagement. You want to find a metric that is relatively foundational, and is going to produce engagement across a variety of dimensions later on (visit frequency, tendency to pay, tendency to add content, tendency to invite others etc). For instance, when signing up to Facebook, there is a bunch of stuff they want you to do: add friends, invite people, add content like photos, and come back on day 1, day 2, and so on. It turns out that it's the first activity that is more predictive of future engagement than the others, and specifically 7 friends in 10 days is an important threshold. You can't figure that out from your intuition alone, and you definitely can't get the values of # of friends in # of days just by consulting your intuition, or your sense of what's obvious. At the same time Chamath from Facebook was keen to point out that there was nothing mystical about what the growth team at Facebook did. He said the best way of describing what they did on the growth team is that they: - Measured things - Tested things - Tried things His main take-away was that one should be extremely rigorous and analytical when thinking about what drives engagement, and not rely on your gut, or company lore.
  - moe 14y ago
    one should be extremely rigorous and analytical when thinking about what drives engagement, and not rely on your gut, or company lore. Except the end result is usually the exact same. A wildly inaccurate model for the sole purpose of impressing advertisers|investors|stakeholders with fancy, meaningless charts. The conclusions you can draw from these models are either utterly obvious, or false. I'm looking forward to hear about a single example of the opposite.
    - 14y ago
dreamdu5t 14y ago
The great thing about "user engagement" is it means whatever you want it to!
bbq 14y ago
Taken at face value, Dropbox's indicator is particularly interesting: > ChenLi Wang, who runs the growth team at Facebook [sic: Dropbox?], said that the leading indicator of an engaged Dropbox user is when they put at least one file in one Dropbox folder on one device. Basically - the leading indicator is any use at all. The other business' all had, relatively, a much higher threshold. This is probably because Dropbox is immediately useful and stupid-easy to use. Of course, it's hard to take this at face value since we don't know how everyone is defining an engaged user (and each definition isn't directly comparable to the other services' definitions).
- RichardPrice 14y ago
  Thanks for the typo correction re. Dropbox - fixed.
sbov 14y ago
I was curious: when optimizing a leading indicator, what sort of effect does that have on said leading indicator? Presumably there can be a correlation-not-causation effect, and optimizing said indicator wouldn't have as much as an effect on engaged users as it did on the indicator itself. Does anyone know of a situation where they had an increase in the leading indicator but none in engaged users? Might the relationship change over time?
- RichardPrice 14y ago
  It's a good question. You need to find a leading indicator that really is causal of engagement, and not just tangentially correlated with it. Chamath stressed how critical it is to both minimize the time it takes to deliver a user their first 'Aha' moment, and then to continue to deliver those moments as regularly as possible. Presumably how many friends you have is causal, to some degree, of those 'Aha' moments - I expect that many of the 'Aha' moments on FB are to do with seeing cool content from your friends. Nabeel also mentioned that it's also important to have various KPI metrics that you are aware of. His view was that there should be one over-arching operational metric that is broadly predictive of future engagement, and that the growth team should focus on that, but that, for any given tactic that you try out, you should be aware of its effect on a number of KPIs.

33 points by RichardPrice 14y ago

Torn 14y ago

I thought this was going to be 'leading indicators of enraged users'... which would be a pretty interesting thing to get analytics on to identify user pain. Erratic mouse movements, page refreshes, etc ;)

RichardPrice 14y ago
It would actually be good to be able to get leading indicators of enraged users too!

andys627 14y ago

What do people use for onboarding?

shykes 14y ago

All of these examples concern social networking products... I would curious to hear more from B2B online services. Tell us more about Salesforce, Atlassian, Zoho, Box...

dm8 14y ago
I believe for enterprise/B2B services sales guys are the "growth hackers" and I believe for them it must be how many million dollar checks you can get over quater/year. However, I'd love to hear from anyone with enterprise sales experience on this topic.
- ananddass 14y ago
  Based on my experience of enterprise s/w sales for about 6-7 years, the answer depends on the ticket size of the deal and service delivery model. If it is SaaS based ($1-$10K p.a) then a lot of what applies to Dropbox applies to your b2b product too. At $15-20K or above you need to have inside sales reps who smile and dial. You start breaking even at this point. when you hit $500K deal sizes its time to bring in the rainmakers. Happy to chat more if you need specific help. buzz me at adass at filepicker.io

knes 14y ago

WOW. Great article...NOT. All of those "Growth hackers" indicators are just normal activity indicator. "Someone sign up on my service and does something on my service that's expected of them to do?" BOOM! Leading indicator... No shit Sherlock... As a marketer I'm getting tired to this buzz word shit around growth hacker...

RichardPrice 14y ago
It's harder than you are suggesting to find a leading indicator of future engagement. You want to find a metric that is relatively foundational, and is going to produce engagement across a variety of dimensions later on (visit frequency, tendency to pay, tendency to add content, tendency to invite others etc). For instance, when signing up to Facebook, there is a bunch of stuff they want you to do: add friends, invite people, add content like photos, and come back on day 1, day 2, and so on. It turns out that it's the first activity that is more predictive of future engagement than the others, and specifically 7 friends in 10 days is an important threshold. You can't figure that out from your intuition alone, and you definitely can't get the values of # of friends in # of days just by consulting your intuition, or your sense of what's obvious. At the same time Chamath from Facebook was keen to point out that there was nothing mystical about what the growth team at Facebook did. He said the best way of describing what they did on the growth team is that they: - Measured things - Tested things - Tried things His main take-away was that one should be extremely rigorous and analytical when thinking about what drives engagement, and not rely on your gut, or company lore.
- moe 14y ago
  one should be extremely rigorous and analytical when thinking about what drives engagement, and not rely on your gut, or company lore. Except the end result is usually the exact same. A wildly inaccurate model for the sole purpose of impressing advertisers|investors|stakeholders with fancy, meaningless charts. The conclusions you can draw from these models are either utterly obvious, or false. I'm looking forward to hear about a single example of the opposite.
  - 14y ago

dreamdu5t 14y ago

The great thing about "user engagement" is it means whatever you want it to!

bbq 14y ago

Taken at face value, Dropbox's indicator is particularly interesting: > ChenLi Wang, who runs the growth team at Facebook [sic: Dropbox?], said that the leading indicator of an engaged Dropbox user is when they put at least one file in one Dropbox folder on one device. Basically - the leading indicator is any use at all. The other business' all had, relatively, a much higher threshold. This is probably because Dropbox is immediately useful and stupid-easy to use. Of course, it's hard to take this at face value since we don't know how everyone is defining an engaged user (and each definition isn't directly comparable to the other services' definitions).

RichardPrice 14y ago
Thanks for the typo correction re. Dropbox - fixed.

sbov 14y ago

I was curious: when optimizing a leading indicator, what sort of effect does that have on said leading indicator? Presumably there can be a correlation-not-causation effect, and optimizing said indicator wouldn't have as much as an effect on engaged users as it did on the indicator itself. Does anyone know of a situation where they had an increase in the leading indicator but none in engaged users? Might the relationship change over time?

RichardPrice 14y ago
It's a good question. You need to find a leading indicator that really is causal of engagement, and not just tangentially correlated with it. Chamath stressed how critical it is to both minimize the time it takes to deliver a user their first 'Aha' moment, and then to continue to deliver those moments as regularly as possible. Presumably how many friends you have is causal, to some degree, of those 'Aha' moments - I expect that many of the 'Aha' moments on FB are to do with seeing cool content from your friends. Nabeel also mentioned that it's also important to have various KPI metrics that you are aware of. His view was that there should be one over-arching operational metric that is broadly predictive of future engagement, and that the growth team should focus on that, but that, for any given tactic that you try out, you should be aware of its effect on a number of KPIs.