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User research is a sweet pain. Almost addicting? 🙁 This image is a joke, and a hyperbole. Over the past few months, I've conducted hundreds of user research interviews. For marketing like mapping out our JBTD and Buyer Journey For community and sales like customer stories and case studies For product like activation and retention For monetization like Van Westerdorp and MaxDiff Here's my template: With every result, I am more humbled. So humbled that I even ̶w̶r̶o̶t̶e̶ stole a song. I have this thing where I get users but just no retention Activation's become my attention When my product team works the graveyard shift All of the projects I've cancelled stand there in the room I should not be left to my own lousy onboarding They come with prices and vices I end up in crisis (tale as old as SaaS) As a kid, my parents discouraged me from songwriting. And I'm forever grateful to them for that. 😅 The weapons we choose is half the battle won I've tested with our own users, and I've tested with users from 3rd party platforms. Here are some tools that were on my radar: Usertesting.com — Usertesting costs $110 for a remote, unmoderated interview. For live, moderated interview, it was $220. This was for startups. Userinterviews.com — $45 for a B2C study. $99 for a B2B study. Live testing. Userbrain.com — $39 for an unmoderated test. Tester pool isn't great though. Hotjar Engage — $90 +$20 for a 30 minute moderated interview. Maze.co — $5-10 per unmoderated test. They have a startup program too which gives out free credit. Dscout , Suzy/suzylive for quick turnaround; qualtrics or ipsos for bigger surveys. We used Tally (cost-friendly alternative to Typeform ) for some surveys but not many. I found that the drop of rates in Tally were higher, even when identical surveys were set up in Typeform. 😢 Also, Tally can't help with thinks like MaxDiff surveys but works for Van Westerndorp, for example. Userzoom.com — Enterprisy. Someone who used it once told me that their experience wasn't great. Wynter — for message testing. It costs $900 per test to start out. It's per test though, not per interview which is a better value metric than the others. Although, that makes it harder to compare. Respondent.io — Enterprise, and I couldn't see a clear differentiation. But respondent.io did have a recommendation. tremendous.com/ — would've helped manage the payout process but we didn't use them. Internal tools: We triggered in-product notifications and emails. Inspiration I really like how Todoist does feedback sessions. They don't pay, but it is displayed under "support". And they use a lot of segmentation with Calendly. Only a 15-minute call is less commitment and they also offer an async option if you're not interested. Call option wouldn't show up for free users. Lets be friends on Twitter ? My content is absolutely non-educational.

Chalk is a highly commoditized product. The industry is saturated. There's no first mover advantage. But have you heard of Hagoromo Chalks? If you aren't a mathematician, I bet you haven't. The cult-like following "A brand of chalk achieved cult status among mathematicians. Some call it the Rolls Royce of chalk, the Steinway of writing utensils. Some say it’s unbreakable, others say it leaves no dust behind." CNN It became the math world's best kept secret. Professors went wild over a cult chalk. So much so, they started to hoard a lifetime supply of chalks. When rumour had it that the company would go out of business. The price It costs 0.5-0.9 cents per piece. Competitors and cheaper alternatives cost $0.1-3 cents. Their target audience hates cheap chalk. Because the quality is nowhere near Hagoromo Targeting the right persona Mathematicians use a lot of chalk. They possibly use more than all other teachers combined. So, this persona's usage is quite high. Which means, they consume fast and don't churn fast. So, how did this happen? Positioning. And product. The perception is that Hagoromo chalk is the best chalk on the earth. How do they tell this story? Through others. Hagoromo went viral when Stanford professors took to Youtube to praise the chalk, calling it the Rolls Royce of chalks. AKA word of mouth from an opinion leader. Then, they hired Youtube channels to tell their story. Their website? It's not fancy at all. It's just simple copy. Light humor. You don't need dozens of testimonials if one speaks volumes. Have history? Let it shine. The bottom line "Create a cult. And let the cult to do the marketing for you. The people in suits call it it branding." Some other examples A few that I can think of: Liquid Death — They sell water, possibly at a higher price. Oatly — The sell oat milk. Highly commoditized industry. Oatly is also the most expensive solution. Hexclad Pans — Same marketing as Hagoromo chalks but for pans

If the SaaS community ever did a Spotify Wrapped... Reporting bugs isn't included in anyone's OKRs... Bugs were the bane of my existence... It's worse for startups without a dedicated QA person. As a marketer, I dog-food our product a whole lot than other team members and have attained the unholy lifetime achievement of the best bug hunter. Not willfully, I might add. Until the day I saw a twitter ad promoting Jam... Which is a linear channel than feeds into Jam's growth loop. Their homepage was delightful to see... Cute annotations and really good copy! I wonder who wrote and designed? And a really intuitive, helpful product overall... Jam is honestly product-led. The Jam Dashboard has 'Copy Link' as the primary action on hover (see first image) And copy link is shown as the primary call to action yet again when I open any jam video. Driving habit and retention by piggybacking They encourage you to connect Jam to the tools you use everyday. The integration helps build habit loop and piggyback on products that have better retention than Jam might. Invite your colleagues but not during the onboarding Jam's comment section covers half the screen. I think they could make this even better if I could send an invite directly from Jam. Imagine if all I had to do was tag first_name@domain-name.com for my colleagues? Jam's Growth Loops Until I'm corrected by someone else... I think Jam's making all the right product moves. Like a small boat in the ocean, it's sending big waves in motion! 🎵 Or not. Up to you! Thank you for reading!

Great marketing starts with great positioning. Get 8 Product Positioning Framework Templates Positioning Perceptual Mapping 5 Types of Positioning Storybrand framework Brand Equity Model April Dunford's Positioning Framework 3Cs of Positioning 12 Brand Personality Archetypes Brand Matrix Tip: Just use one or two frameworks and delete the rest. Ok, so let me explain each framework in a sentence or two. This will help you quickly guage which framework is right for you. Remember: you only need one or two frameworks. Trying to use all is like mixing apple pie and lasagne. No matter how much time you spend, it'll still end up terrible. Perceptual Mapping Positioning Template This is created by Philip Kotler. He's the father of modern marketing so this is a solid framework for brand positioning map. Storybrand Template This is inspired by how film makers tell stories. It's pretty popular, and is relatively easy to use. Your product isn't the hero of the story, the customer is. April Dunford's 'Obviously Awesome' Positioning Template April Dunford wrote a book which I consider to be a modern version of the legendary book "Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind", written by Jack Trout. While Jack Trout's book is considered 'The Bible' in the ad world, it still lacks some actionable items. April Dunford does a good job at bridging that gap with her book, and she has positioned more tech companies than anyone else. Keller's Brand Equity Model (CBBE Model) Template Another framework taught in marketing schools. You won't find this unless you have majored in marketing. This comes from my rather fat text book from uni days. If you want to learn it, I suggest looking up 'brand equity' model. Positioning Strategy Template (3Cs and Types) These two frameworks were taught to me when I was majoring in marketing. It'll help narrow down how you compete. So, it's a level higher up than hardcore positioning. 12 Brand Archetypes Template If you want to figure out what's your brand personality, the brand archetype framework is a solid start. It's the most complex of the personality-type positioning templates though. There are easier ones available if you google 'brand personality templates'. 1. To choose your brand archetype, work inside out. 2. Choose which of the four quadrants your vision and mission lie under. 3. Then, choose one of the three in that quadrant. 🚨 A brand can have more than one personalities but avoid more than 3. Brand Positioning Matrix Template I really haven't heard this one before but I saw another brand do this and decided to just add it to my endlessly long list. This is a partial template. Use these positioning templates in powerpoint Use these gorgeous product positioning framework templates in Powerpoint if you don't know Figma? 1. Duplicate Figma File. If you don't have a account, you'll have to create a free one. 2. Just edit in Figma directly. Change the text. It's easy 3. Select the framework 4. When done, right click on any framework and copy. Right click to copy as PNG, and paste in PPT. You can deselect the text, if you want to directly have the text file in powerpoint. 5. Paste as PNG in Powerpont Thank you for reading!

The best innovation in marketing happens outside of marketing. I found out that in 2022, a former Japanese Prime Minister , Shinzo Abe, was assassinated . Why? He had connections with the Unification Church — a controversial religious corporation in Japan famous for its brain-washed followers and mass weddings. The story of the man who assassinated the Prime Minister highlights the manipulative tactics of the Unification Church. He recounts his mother's decision to donate their life savings to the Church instead of using it to save his younger brother from cancer, ultimately leading to his brother's passing and their bankruptcy. But how does a cult manipulate people to donate their life savings to the church instead of saving the life of a family member? The opportunity cost was wild. But she still chooses. And she chooses death and bankruptcy. Love bombing to acquire and activate Cults use "love bombing" as an emotionally draining recruitment strategy and that it is a form of positive reinforcement. [ Source ] This works because humans have a natural need to feel good about who we are, and often we can’t fill this need on our own. The unification church (although a bad organization) spread like wildfire. Love bombing was one crucial element of their strategy. Love bombing is when you shower someone with affection and attention. We can borrow the foundational principles and truly influence consumer behavior for greater good. I'm not totally sure how yet but I'm going to find it out how to creatively apply this in a way that positively impacts the world. But for now, I leave you with this thought — religions and cult organizations are really good at consumer behavior. We have to figure out how to bring that over to marketing. Do you have any ideas how? Please let me know !

The Market Gmail didn't really have a first mover advantage, and yet, it holds the majority of the market share today. How? Monetization Model Supports Growth A little while before Gmail came, Yahoo downgraded users to their 2 MB mailbox plan wanting them to upgrade to their premium option. Hotmail was a little generous at 5 MB. Gmail offered 1GB instead. It shook the internet community at the time. "A 1-gigabyte mailbox! Impossible!" Making a too-good to be true launch offer helped garner organic PR mentions. They launched on April Fool's Day which added confusion to the mix and helped get people talking. The timing was really stellar. Be 100X better than the current offering to get people talking. This can be achieved either by saving people 100x the time, the money, or improving the performance by 100x. Easiest to measure is the money. Never Market Alone — Use Employees? Instead of simply providing accounts to reporters and tech media outlets, Google decided to try a different approach for the rollout of its new email service. The company gave its employees special "invitation tokens" that they could use to bring their friends into the beta testing phase. As more and more people became interested in getting a Gmail account, some even resorted to selling their tokens on eBay due to the high demand. This exclusivity and limited availability generated a lot of media attention and buzz, leading to a viral marketing campaign. Those lucky enough to receive a Gmail invitation during this time often bragged about their access to friends and even shared screenshots on their personal blogs.

Growing your following as a food blogger Hi! This post is about @shereshe. She creates food videos. It's one of my favorite Instagram accounts. She created a series and ate her way through the alphabet in India She piggybacks off of the most popular cuisines of India. Wraps it in a series format since there are 26 alphabets. And it got really popular. Indians would watch because there's of the curiosity gap, even if what she shares could be obvious, people would still watch. She shares history and culture — things even I don't know — and exceeds expectations. Tourists would be interested because this creates somewhat of a guided travel. I don't think that she's re-inventing the wheel. She isn't creating each recipe on her own, or trying to find interesting restaurants. Nope. She's just taking what works well, and resonates with an audience. She's piggybacking off of the popularity of the Alphonso Mango. A fruit's popularity. Wrapping it up in a series so it increases retention and creates a habit loop. Pretty clever. Always find a horse to ride. Never market alone. 🐴🐴🐴🐴🐴🐴🐴🐴🐴🐴

Oreo has a 78% brand awareness in the USA. Brand Awareness from Statistica But this wasn't always the case. Brands aren't born with a high market penetration. Nope. So, how did Oreo make this happen? Besides their awesome moment marketing . Oreo piggybacked on one of the most successful campaigns of all time — the Got Milk? campaign A short history of the got milk? campaign The California's Dairy Processors were concerned. Milk demand was falling each year. So the non-profit decided to pool in a total of $20 million dollars and recruit a marketing agency to drive up the overall demand for milk. The agency did market research and found these insights: The 'milk is good for health' messaging wasn't resonating. Messaging had to be intellectual. You had to tell people the truth. Milk was always consumed with other products like 'milk and cereal', or 'milk and chocolate chip cookies'. Milk wasn't the hero, the other product was. It was more like 'cereal and milk' or 'chocolate chip cookie and milk". These were 'trigger moments' in people's lives that could remind them of milk . People don't like to run out of milk. There are certain things in life you appreciate more when you don't have it. Milk was one these. They ran a classic deprivation marketing strategy. Now known as "got milk?". Eventually, got milk? hit the jackpot. People started coining their own phrases like "Got beer?" or "Got cupcakes". Got Milk? asked Oreo out first. When Got Milk? rose to fame, their agency decided to do a co-marketing campaign with the other complementary products. Oreo being one of them. But then, Oreo never let milk get away. Oreo created a new tagline "Milk's Favorite Cookie" to piggyback on the popularity of milk consumption. These trigger moments are important because every time people think of milk, they should think of Oreo. They kept this slogan for years. Piggybacking Takeaway 🐷 You don't need to create your own incredibly successful "Got Milk?" campaign. Try to find one that is already successful, and see if you can piggyback on theirs instead. Oreo found another horse to ride — all desserts People now use Oreo as an ingredient instead of simply treating it just as a cookie eaten separately. This drives up the volume per capita for Oreo, and it adds a lot of trigger moments. Imagine seeing an Oreo Cheesecake, Oreo Milkshake, Oreo Kunafa, literally on every dessert menu. This is an insane amount of free publicity and marketing touchpoints. Piggybacking Takeaway 🐷 You don't need to piggyback forever. Once they help you get to your destination, you can pick another horse to ride Applying these lessons to your business Find trigger moments that people use with your product. For example, Streamline (a graphic assets pre-made library) is used in Figma. Yours could be a product that is used with Shopify. Next, find ways to piggyback. For example, it could doing generic stuff like creating templates, plugins, or getting featured in awards. Or it could be something much wild and creative. Finally, see if you really have to partner with them or can you piggyback without it. After you piggyback, re-evaluate if you need the partner or need a new partner. If you want to extend the ROI of your piggybacking investment, try to make sure it's a win-win for both parties. The host and the guest. Let me know if you have more questions in the comments below and we can brain-write together. This post is inspired by Tagline's podcast . Opinions above are all my own and not of Tagline. Best, Khushi

Lyft is an on-demand ride-sharing startup. Like Uber, if that exists where you live. Drivers onboarding other drivers (+) Early in the process, they micromanaged market launches. A Lyft staff member interviewed all drivers. This was good for the first few markets, but it meant their ability to launch new markets was slow and constrained. Then they launched a ⭐ ‘mentoring’ ⭐ process, which allowed drivers to train newly onboarded drivers, through the Lyft Driver App itself—the trainee’s first ‘ping’ would be the mentor requesting to train them, and they’d go through a ride-esque experience to meet up with them. This allowed them to launch 24 markets in a single day , in one fell swoop, something that would have been unimaginable months earlier. Quality might take a hit, as a tradeoff (-) Like the Ride Share Guy pointed out, " it seems like most mentors are more concerned with rushing through the session than doing a great job", it's hard to scale while keeping quality consistent. That's a tradeoff to account for with this method of piggybacking. Piggybacking Takeaway 🐷 You don't need external sources to piggyback. Sometimes they exist within your company. If you have a marketplace, you can use your own marketplace to piggyback. If it's not a marketplace, you can piggyback on your employees like Gmail did. Piggybacking on marketplaces may not always be defensible, or easy to manage. I appreciate the read. Curious to hear what you think in the comments below or anywhere else you'd feel comfortable sharing. Here's a cute doggo for extra good luck on your day today. Source: Facts come from Lenny's Newsletter . Opinions are my own. I don't do a lot of research since I'm just trying to match patterns about piggybacking as a concept, so I may have drawn incorrect conclusions.

Duolingo's onboarding with a fun twist. I work as a growth lead, and my work is a venn diagram between design, growth, and marketing. This leaves me in a very unique position to balance acquisition needs, design decisions, and retention tradeoffs. 🥵 App Install Page Splash Screen Delayed Sign Up Screen Onboarding: What's your goal? Onboarding: Loading Screen Onboarding: Attribution Question Onboarding: Why do you have a goal? Onboarding: Summarize benefits Onboarding: Setup habit loop Onboarding: Allow Notifications Onboarding: Segment power users Onboarding: Social proof Onboarding: Launch product Onboarding: Ask for email Thanks for reading! Best, Khushi Lunkad Resources used to create this: Pageflows (screenshots), Growth.design (comic style), Neurofied (biases)

Netflix Onboarding with a fun twist I work as a growth marketing and growth product lead, and my work is a Venn diagram between design, growth, and marketing. This leaves me in a very unique position to balance acquisition needs, design decisions, and retention tradeoffs. Two things Netflix does right Adds filler pages. Auto-upgrades people to a reverse trial if they choose a cheaper plan. Thanks for reading! I plan to write more cases and would love a favor. Can you DM me or leave a comment below (no sign up needed) with what you liked / didn't like? I'm just trying to improve. Thank you! Best, Khushi Lunkad Resources used to create this: Pageflows (screenshots), Growth.design (comic style), Neurofied (biases)

Strongly advocating to set up a feedback collection system is perhaps one of the most impactful things I've recently done. It allows people provide feedback without being bothered by a chain of replies from customer support. Today, we have a very simple form which pre-populates as much information as possible (email, plan, Mixpanel ID, etc). This is how the form looks like for logged in users... For users without an email addresses, we ask them to share it. It's not a mandatory question to have fewer drop offs and more feedback. The Case Against Feedback Historically, our team received feedback via customer support tickets, tweets to our brand account, or replies to our marketing emails. So, it's not like there's zero feedback coming in! What this does is that there's no trigger moment that can push your team to add a feedback tool. Without a trigger moment, motivating someone to take action becomes more challenging. Inherent Culture and Beliefs If your company doesn't have a simple feedback collection system in place, the feedback loops take far longer to cycle through. As someone working in growth, shorter feedback cycles is crucial! It's our bread and butter. If you don't have a feedback tool, it's likely because there's of an inherent culture to not ask for feedback for reasons such as these: So, it's hard to make a case for adding a feedback button and using tools like UserSnap that demand a certain level of development support. But...I absolutely wanted a feedback collection tool I had my own reasons for this... Feedback from multiple channels can be delayed. If it's not easy enough, people will just not do it. Earlier, when people hit an error page, our ask to them was publicly tweet at us. 😅 I'd rather connect our designers to our users so they don't have to take my word for why a certain design decision or a product decision can hurt us. It's a way the entire company becomes more customer-centric and learn together instead of having varying levels of understanding about our customers. I was unofficially proclaimed as the best bug hunter at Streamline. Sometimes I can be a bit nitpicky too so having a large enough audience do that at scale gives me more mental peace. Feedback is a gift and you can never have enough of it! Marketing was being asked to add a feedback collection email in the lifecycle email campaigns, which isn't the ideal place to ask for feedback IMO. So, how did we deploy a feedback collection system? One thing I've learned is that you have to let people make decisions for themselves. Your job is to provide them with information and share the context. Then encourage them to react to trigger moments. And prime them into getting to that decision. It's pretty much like sales. Selling isn’t something we do to people. We do it with them. People buy products; we don't sell. Similarly, I can't make decisions for people with higher authority. I do it with them. The tricky thing about feedback is that stakeholders need to experience it to know its value. And they can't experience it unless they implement a solution. Our Trigger Moment: Streamline was launching a redesign and rebrand! It was a huge change — new logo, new branding, new UX, new monetization plans. A massive amount of team work and months of work! This could have been a significant trigger moment but it was heightened by the fact that we had to ship earlier than planned to meet a certain deadline. So, we had to rely on our users quite a bit to tell us incase we missed out something major. But even still, it was challenging to install a software like UserSnap because it required dev resources at a time where we were constrained. For us, we have tools like Tag Manager that make integrating software too easy. But for product people and devs, they are usually more wary of the integration costs. There's more management, more setup, more time, reliability issues etc. So we ended up embedding tally.so which is an alternative to Google Forms or Typeform. Now Tally isn't great as a feedback tool because it doesn't get us console data or any other data that is needed for better bug reporting but it gets us started on the right track. It was easy to implement and I bet we will graduate us to a more sophisticated tool in the future. Did implementing Tally save us time? Maybe not - it probably took us the same amount of time as it would have to implement UserSnap. Final Thoughts Stakeholders were surprised how often feedback came in. Interestingly, I was surprised that it didn't come in as frequently as I thought it would. So, I guess everyone either under-estimated or over-estimated! 😅 It saved us a lot of time and revenue. For example, we found out that our pricing pages had a mismatch. A simple typo led to lost revenue. We shipped new features that broke people's workflow. And all this feedback came pouring in. Feedback is very costly. People spend time away from your product writing feedback so make sure you don't ask too much of it! Our team was very swift in getting user feedback into the product. We shipped things in days, not weeks! Thanks for reading! Best, Khushi