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How to lose a user in 10 seconds or maybe not? 💥 User state 1: Aw dang, I have to check my inbox. And almost every company uses this in some form or another. 💥User state 2: Holy wow, this email auto-magically opens up I don't have to see my other emails and get lost in it. Nice filters. It's also a good use of the my overall user psych. 😢 I'm disappointed that I have to login with my Gmail. 😅 There's an open in Gmail button. 🤭 It opens up in the correct inbox. I have 9 email addresses. 🤩 It made the search for me, so I don't have to. All it took was 3 clicks. That's it! I've seen another variation of this without the newer_than:1hr filter which shows you all emails from the same sender. The Gmail button appears only if the user has a Gmail address. I'm assuming the folks at Growth Design ran my my email through MXToolbox (or something similar) to determine the hostname from my domain name to make that journey one step less.

User research is a sweet pain. Almost addicting? 🙁 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!

If you want to create this natural frequency identification graph in Mixpanel , I have step-by-step instructions below. 1- If you want to group core actions together, you will need to create a custom event to group those events together. Example: For our product, both copy and download an asset are inter-changeable. If you only have 1 event, you can skip this step. 2- Then create a cohort of users older than 28 days who performed the core event at least once, which you can do using the following query. 3- Then plotting the Frequency report by creating a retention report and select frequency from the top left. 4- That will result in a frequency curve, which isn't a histogram but still pretty much gets the same data. Use breakdowns to slice and dice the data. 5- You can convert this frequency curve to a histogram using any free online tool or Google sheets. I used Google sheets, and spent 15ish minutes converting it. You plot: days used, active users. Calculate active users from the cumulative users exported from Mixpanel . It's better to google if you aren't sure how to do this. Tons of articles on how to convert. I hope this helps!

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 !

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 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. 🐴🐴🐴🐴🐴🐴🐴🐴🐴🐴

Hi! I'm Khushi. I've paid for Growthmentor for nearly 15 months. And I've had over 30ish calls so far I got some nice feedback too. I hope the above context helps shine some light, that I've really used the growthmentor platform. Here's what I think of GrowthMentor and whether I will continue to pay for it: There are a few alternatives out there for mentorship but most feel very dry and transactional. Growthmentor doesn't feel dry and transactional. That kind of atmosphere is tough to create but they've nailed it. It's pricey! Especially if you don't use it. So, I usually have an on-and-off subscription. If I know, I'll need stuff in the future, I'll pay up. It's not super easy to book mentors but still easier than cold outreach. I usually invest 30-40 minutes to book each call. This involves research (who do I talk to?), and pitching them to talk to me. There's also a help request section. You put your help requests and mentors will apply to help you out. This worked better than my expectations Hidden benefits of Growthmentor Growthmentor introduced me to lots of people in the industry . So I'm not a small fish in a small pond. Foti (founder) introduced to me to someone who was hiring when I was early in my career looking for jobs. I was able to stay in touch with this person even after I ended my subscription, and they introduced me to lots of new opportunities. I've taken 60+ online courses but practical advice/feedback is invaluable. Today, whenever I have a problem I'm working on, I try to solicit feedback. Try to discover what it is that I don't know. And why my work might suck. It's working out really well! Growthmentor Review I think its money well spent. And I'll continue to pay for it. Although, I will pause/and reactivate my subscription and as when I can actually make use of it. My recommendation: Try for a month/or three. Give it your best shot. If it works for you, it can act as a huge catalyst in your career. If it doesn't, think of it as a bad investment and write it off.

Imagine this... Your marketing budget is cut by 90%. Your headcount is cut by 90%. The total time you have to show results is also cut by 90%. How would you grow? How would you grow 10x? The best marketing strategy is the lazy man's marketing strategy. When you're broke and have the clock against you. Never market alone. Find someone else to market for you. Find a horse to ride. When that horse gets tired, go find another horse while this one takes a break. Climb that mountain. Then another. A marketing team of 1 can't do a lot alone. You are more likely to dump all your budget or waste a ton of time. Piggybacking in marketing Start by answering these questions: Who might be incentivized to promote you? How do you get them to promote you? Who is not incentivized but isn't disincentivized either? How do you get them to promote you? Add as many options as you can. Then, rank them all on opportunity, effort, and scalability. When that's done. You have a fine list. ⭐ Types and Examples of piggybacking: 1. Piggyback on indifferent platforms Zynga piggybacked on Facebook. Airbnb piggybacked on Craigslist. This is a channel partnership where Craigslist wasn't incentivized but wasn't disincentivized either. Likewise for Facebook, for a while. [2] 2. Piggyback on the founder or thought leaders. Reforge got acclaimed as the best growth courses out there because it was promoted by Andrew Chen (thought leader) and Brian Balfour (founder story). They hire the best operators, and piggyback on their authority. Operators let them, because they receive industry recognition that fuels their personal brand. [1] 3. Piggyback on celebrities without paying them. Henry Moodie created covers of popular songs but changes the lyrics . Covers help audiences recall popular songs and changing lyrics helps him show his true skill. Twitter ran the " If you can dream it, tweet it " campaign. 4. Piggyback on history You can even piggyback on history. Piggyback on dead people. On monuments. On literally any historical moments that can evoke emotions and capture attention. Cafe Madras was established pre-independence era, and that's what they piggyback on. The food is unparalleled too (the best breakfast of my life). 5. Piggyback on governments and new policies You can piggyback on a new government law. Clean energy laws. International trade. India's richest families piggybacked on new govt. policies. Find an opportunity even if that's Afghanistan. 6. Piggyback on macro-economic trends You can piggyback on a macro-trend like the pandemic. That's what Shopify did. You can do this on a smaller scale with moment marketing. Oreo's dunk in the dark tweet came out when the lights went out at the Super Bowl for a minute. 7. Piggyback on objects Ever played the game: name, place, animal, thing. You can even piggyback on a fruit. 8. Piggyback on people even with interceptions You can piggyback on other people, via 3rd party platform. Lenny's Newsletter saw this massive growth after Substack released their recommended newsletter feature. 9. Hey! You can piggyback off of your employees too. Instead of simply providing accounts to reporters and tech media outlets, Google decided to try a different approach for the rollout of Gmail. The company gave its employees special "invitation tokens" that they could use to bring their friends into the beta testing phase. 10. You can piggyback on your own marketplace too. That's what Lyft, the ride-sharing startup did to launch in 24 markets at once. I have a case study here . 11. Piggyback on other ad campaigns, or on an entire product line. Oreo piggybacked on one of the world's famous ad campaigns "Got Milk?" and changed its tagline to "Milk's favorite cookie" so that milk created a trigger moment for Oreo. When Oreo outgrew milk, they piggybacked on the entire desserts menu range. 12. Piggyback on the enemy Salesforce: When they launched, Salesforce ran a campaign against software Transferwise: Campaigned against egregious bank transfer fees Dollar Shave Club: Challenged the expensive razor oligopoly Uber: Rallied against waiting for taxis (and the industry fought back, giving Uber millions in free publicity) 13. Piggybacking on your customer Unity, which is the world's #1 software tool to build 3D games, saw their biggest ever surge in user acquisition when Pokémon game went viral. Everyone noticed which tool Pokémon used to build and jumped to sign up. It was incredible. Miro, the online whiteboarding software, has this concept called MiroVerse which is a way for customers to create templates and share. One of Miro's customers created a Fifa template during the world cup. That alone had 120k downloads, and started to get shown in the first page on Google when people searched for Fifa World Cup. Coca Cola has "Share a Coke" campaign that's basically a referral marketing scheme at scale. If I told you Coca-Cola's sales in Australia increased ~7% in 2011 you'd probably guess they changed the taste or the price. Nope. They simply replaced their logo with 150 of the most popular teenage names and encouraged people to “share a coke”. 14. Piggyback on another product your customer uses Figma and Mixpanel both share the same audience of "Product Teams". Figma and Mixpanel's integration is a triple win (for the user, Mixpanel, and Figma). Mixpanel piggyback's off of Figma's inherently multi-player use case. Figma increases user engagement because it brings important metrics right into the product. This helps companies drive a culture of data. Even though Dropbox depends heavily on word-of-mouth growth, it’s huge for it to be installed on every Samsung phone Channel partnerships is why Coca-Cola locked down McDonald’s for many years. It's a huge distribution partner for Coca-Cola. Bira 91 (beer company) partnered with boAt (headphones) to launch ‘BOOM’, a limited-edition collection of audio devices and a new range of bold beer. Read more about channel partners in this blog post . 15. Piggyback on famous people without paying them Surreal cereal brand couldn't afford celebrities, so for this campaign they found real people (bus drivers, students) with celebrity names to try out their cereal and give them good reviews. 16. Piggyback on a country When Spain's digital nomad visa was finally available, Remotive shared the news, earning over 28k likes on a single Linkedin post (which is very high for Linkedin). They are a remote job aggregation portal. Think about who can you piggyback off of? The possibilities are endless. As long as you aren't marketing alone. Choose the route that will lead to a 10x growth with 90% less budget. Choose a route that is scalable. Your host needs to have an audience. If they don't, find another host. Copyright notice: Remember to credit and link back to my website if you use this material. I find patterns and bucket examples in different categories so we can better understand piggybacking as a concept.

Oreo has a 78% brand awareness in the USA. 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