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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.

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.

It was a wild ride. I took the altMBA program by Akimbo and Seth Godin in Jan, 2022. 100ish people from all walks of life made up my cohort 100 people are split in four cohorts, 25 each. Every week, they'll shuffle you around with new people in your cohort with whom you will discuss three prompts. The 13 altMBA prompts help develop soft skills and are on topics like: Goal-setting Business modeling Decision making Empathy & worldviews Building culture Intentionality Marketing methods Gaining buy-in Public Speaking Leading through ambiguity Strategy & critical thinking Giving and receiving feedback Having difficult conversations No, Seth Godin doesn't show up for the altMBA Seth Godin founded altMBA. But I don't think he is affiliated with them anymore. For me, this was the biggest bummer. I spoke to a friend who took the program and Seth showed up for their commencement ceremony. But for my batch 'altMBA54', he didn't. And it makes sense. Read what is written on Seth's blog "I’m the founder of Akimbo, home of the altMBA . These are the most effective learning opportunities I know of. Akimbo is now an independent B Corp , owned and run by the team" So, Seth isn't actively involved anymore. Just an FYI in case you speak to someone who graduated before the 54th cohort i.e. Feb, 2022 batch. The real cost of altMBA altMBA pricing: It costs $4,950. They seem to have increased the tuition from $4,450 to $4,950. Tbh, it's is pretty expensive compared to other educational programs I've taken before, ranging from $39/month to $2000/year. Time commitment ⌛ Takes 20 hours/per week. Some folks spent more; others spent far less. Mental commitment 🫠 It did break me down a couple of times because I had to face my fears. Family commitment 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦🐕 The old African proverb “If you educate a man you educate an individual, but if you educate a woman you educate village” held true. I brought my family along for the journey, teaching them what I had learned. Oral narration not only helped me better store this in my memory. AltMBA friends commitment 👯‍♀️ At times I had trouble navigating in and out of my newly developed altMBA personality so some of my friends didn't like this new change. Apparently, friends don't like when you become more polite. /s My confession To be honest, I never fully understood what the altMBA would teach me until the first day of school. If you're wondering why I still enrolled, I had two reasons: 1️⃣ I hit an inflection point in my career: People wanted to give me more leadership opportunities, but I was hesitant to take them up. I was hesitant if I could rally people around well enough. So I turned down the opportunity. I had plenty of hard skills but lacked the competency to lead effectively. 2️⃣ I also chase sunsets and have ridiculously high ambitions I asked someone who won the Forbes 30 under 30 award what did she do to win it. Her advice for me was to find people I want to emulate and trace back their path. Have enough sample size, and map my plan. "Find 50+ LinkedIn profiles of Head of Growth and analyze what was their path: roles, skills, courses, awards, public activities, etc". So I did just that. I set up an Airtable. And AltMBA came up way too often. Those two reasons were enough for me to say yes. A thorny altMBA review Every rose has its thorns. The altMBA is not flawless but beauty is in the eye of the beholder. 🌹 I'll share three things with you: 🙂The good stuff 😖 The stuff they could definitely improve on 🤔 Dated experience once I'm past the honeymoon phase. I'll share how I feel about the altMBA 3, 6, 9, and 12 months from today. My altMBA review: 6 awesome things 👋🏽 Community driven With the altMBA, I had the chance to spend 20+ hours with each of the 15-20 in my learning groups. These were people at the top of their game, with decades of work experience. 💬 Learned thoughtful and intentional messaging I've realized that sometimes hitting backspace is more important than hitting the keys. Nowadays, I try to think more deeply before I hit send, and I find that things like 'curiosity' and 'empathy' really make a difference. I feel like I've gotten better at giving feedback and framing my sentences in a way that people resonate with. Wondering what should I do with my typing speed 🥲 🙋🏽‍♀️ Learned how to ask better questions After the altMBA, I've become more empathetic when I'm talking to people. It's become easier to motivate people when you're asking the right questions. I used to think I had to draft instructions to get things done, but now I've found that asking questions and helping them come up with their own solutions is way more effective. 👩‍🏫 altMBA comes with on-demand coaches You'll have two coaches dedicated to your cohort. You'll get one piece of feedback from on your prompts. On top of that, you can schedule a personalized call with any of them. I used my call to talk more about figuring out my leadership style. I'd strongly recommend making use of these calls. 🙇‍♀️ I got so much better at receiving feedback. Receiving feedback is a life-skill. Even better when you have to actively seek out feedback. Small mindset change, but is really helpful for my career. The book "Thanks for the feedback", a part of the reading list at altMBA, was pretty good. 🎁 The altMBA will send a welcome package your way. This was really special. I could post a picture but don't want to ruin any surprises. Is the altMBA worth it? Here are a few things I think they could improve upon: 1. altMBA is too self-serve I had submitted 13 prompts and received only one feedback per prompt from coaches, with the remaining four feedbacks coming from fellow students. It was as if we were all left to our own devices. While the approach of students discussing prompts, writing answers, and giving feedback to each other has its merits, I would have appreciated more guidance from the team. It would have been helpful to have a coach walk me through the feedback I gave others, offer suggestions for improvement, and show me how to better receive feedback. 2. altMBA gives no lifetime access A few weeks after graduation, the program material will no longer accessible to us, which was somewhat disappointing. Additionally, our Slack channel would be deleted within a week. Perhaps there could have been more emphasis placed on maintaining access to these resources beyond graduation. Rather than having each student spend several hours exporting stuff from the platform, which to me is a waste of man hours. 3. altMBA has poor networking after the cohort ends. After deleting Slack, we are all asked to join a Facebook group with the broader altMBA network. I don't use Facebook, and many Gen Z and millennials have switched over to Tiktok and Instagram for their. It seems like the wrong place to build a business community. If I want to find out who's working for Canva in Europe, for example, it's not a particularly efficient process. It should've either been Slack or at least LinkedIn if they couldn't code their own platform. And the numbers speak. People aren't joining this FB group. The AltMBA alumni FB group has 2.6k members whereas their website says there are 5,000 alumni. On the other hand, Reforge handles this so much better - it allows me to search for anyone based on their job title, industry, name, company, or business model and get results in just a few seconds. Plus, with the ability to DM them right in our Slack group in just one click, it feels much more streamlined and efficient. ShiftNudge, which is a cohort based design course, also handles it much better. Even though it's a one-person team. You have one Slack channel for your cohort, and the others are for prompts. All ShiftNudge students stay in one Slack workspace and you can hop in and out of channels that are relevant to you. 4. altMBA's calendar sharing system was quite outdated I had to add the entire calendar manually. And it didn't book my calendar, which means I could get double booked. To avoid this, I had to duplicate events one by one or use Zapier. Moreover, some events weren't even added to the calendar, causing a few friends to miss out on all of them. I recommended some third-party tools that makes adding to calendars as easy as a single click and hopefully, the altMBA team incorporates this feedback. 5. You won't meeting everyone in the altMBA You'll meet 12-16 people during your time at the altMBA. You don't interact with everyone. altMBA reddit and other reviews Take my opinion with a grain of salt. Here's feedback from around the internet: CJHoss when asked if altMBA worth it: "For education on topics taught in business school, mostly yes. To help you land a new job, make a career pivot, build your professional network, that’s a big no." John Rau : For me, Seth Godin’s altMBA was worth it. However not all my classmates felt the same. Some considered it too “culty,” others found it an unrealistic time commitment, some thought it was too expensive, and others said they didn’t learn anything. David Richards : The primary reason I feel it was not worth it for me, was because I am addicted to Seth Godin. So a number of the workshops in the course were covering things I had already done. So I feel I wasn’t exposed to much I hadn’t already been exposed to. Also, lots of people in my batch loved the altMBA and wanted to bring it to their entire team. So, there's definitely an upside. If you're still on the fence, just get on a call with their team to understand what it would really entail. altMBA books and reading list AltMBA will send you a bunch of books which you can find here and they also share plenty of articles to read. I'm still trying to find the article that has links to each of these resources. If you find it, please let me know so I can link it. altMBA Scholarship The altMBA has an incredible scholarship program. If you're unhappy with the scholarship offer you've received, request to through a second interview and explain your situation. altMBA Free Download Downloading the altMBA isn't really fun. The real magic is in the community and the discussions you have with your learning groups. You're constantly receiving feedback, and are giving feedback. Downloading a set of 13 prompts will be futile. altMBA has a fair use policy which I doubt anyone would disrespect. altMBA Alternatives Read a lot of philosophy books. They'll teach you a lot of what altMBA seeks to teach without the human interaction. It should still work because I shared altMBA learnings with my brother who said he already learned all of this from his philosophy books. Build your own learning groups, where you journal together. I don't think it's the same as an MBA since it teaches soft skills and no hard skills. An altMBA won't pass off as an MBA. It's sort of a condensed mix of self-help books put into a simulator. The End I was able to recoup my investment, so it ended up being a great decision. Awesome to know that you're reading this review and being wise with your choices.

Hey there, I'm Khushi, and I lead growth and marketing at Streamline . We're a bootstrapped B2B SaaS company that serves designers. I joined Streamline two years ago as the first marketing and growth hire, and now we're used by most Fortune 500 companies, and we even won the Best Graphic Resource Award in 2022! Core Values At Streamline, our core values are centered around getting marketing right with designers, who are some of the most joyful, friendly, and empathetic people I know. They love life and their craft, so it's important that our marketing communication matches their fun-loving nature. Tips for Marketing to Designers Here are some tips that might help if you're marketing to designers: Keep your communication kind and joyful. Avoid being too direct or tactical. Share inspiration of what other people have created with your product. Designers' Characteristics Designers have high design expectations, so improving your website or app design is essential. But they're not demanding, at least not in my experience. When they make product suggestions, they do it kindly and offer feedback constructively. They're smart and can tell when someone's trying to trick them. They're generous and willing to give credit where it's due. They have an on-and-off need for products if they're freelancers. So make sure your churn flow accounts for natural churn. Conclusion I plan on building on this article over time, so if you're interested, feel free to subscribe to my newsletter below.

Starbucks ran a BOGO deal disguised as referral campaign Instead of the usual buy 1 get one offer, they encouraged people to bring a friend along. I want to discuss the untapped potential of Starbucks' disguised referral program. Getting a friend means bringing anyone — your boss, parents or even your ex. This gives people more possibilities to invite people. Instead of running a traditional, boring BOGO scheme, Starbucks turned it into a referral marketing campaign at scale. There were a few advantages New user activation Resurrection of a churned user Building habit loops for existing users and driving up loyalty Maximizing reach through influencer partnerships And Starbucks promoted the offer via influencer marketing, because distribution is everything. Did Starbucks Miss Out on Retaining New Customers? But I wasn't sure if they'd retain these newly acquired users. It wasn't clear from their campaign. So I went to Starbucks on the 7th of May to figure out what they'd do to retain new customers and drive up repeat purchases. Surprisingly, they were doing nothing. 🤔 We went in. Paid cash. Had the coffee. And we left. First impressions matter: Starbucks' overcrowding problem It was so crowded and people had to queue up outside the store in order to be let in. This was clearly not the kind of experience what Starbucks stands for — and why people pay for. So, it'd be harder to retain first-time visitors who have a sub-optimal experience. Missed opportunities to close the referral loop On the surface, I couldn't find any initiatives that were meant to close the referral loop. So I went to look more closely and I found some. 1. There were coupons printed out There was a pamphlet that could be used as a discount code. There was a time limit to redeem to get people into the habit. It looks like bi-monthly is the natural frequency that Starbucks is aiming to nurture users into. But it wasn't placed in a way where customers could see it. It was next to the cashier but was facing the baristas. The baristas didn't even give it to me when I placed the order, nor when I collected my order. The reason why this coupon is important is so that they'd nurture habit building and bring users the second time in the store. 2. Starbucks Card Starbucks also has a card system that requires you to load ₹ 200 before making your first purchase. In our case, it was possible to get our ₹ 400 order for ₹ 190 if we had loaded the card beforehand. However, we were rushed through the queue and didn't notice this option, nor did the baristas mention it. If we had used the card, Starbucks would have had our email or phone number to try and win us back if they noticed we were not returning. Additionally, we would have had ₹ 10 left in our account to spend. Oh and unfortunately, one of the offers on the page was no longer valid, so it was wasting our attention without providing anything in return, adding to our cognitive load. Conclusion In my opinion, Starbucks did a great job. One key takeaway for companies running buy 1 get 1 offers is to consider running them as give 1 get 1 offers. Additionally, it's important to actively promote good offers rather than relying on users to discover them on their own. Starbucks relied on influencer marketing to do so. Yes, they missed some opportunities to keep me engaged, like promoting the 25% discount more prominently or incentivizing new users to invite more friends. They could also streamline the Starbucks card creation process to prevent baristas from discouraging customers. Despite these issues, I'm certain Starbucks will consider this a successful campaign and will continue to refine it to generate even more revenue in the future. Thanks for reading my take! I write them to add to my swipe file and to remember it when the time comes.

Index Good landing pages examples My test with Framer Framer CMS tutorial (text-based) Framer CMS tutorial (video-based) SEO landing pages are better than blogs Veed has these landing pages that drive more traffic than all of its blog posts combined. See the traffic on SEMRush. 168k monthly visitors just from a handful of pages. SmallPDF also has similar landing pages. And each of these pages bring in millions of visits each month. Look at /edit-pdf driving 1.8M monthly visits! These landing pages are fairly simple to create compared compared to blog posts. I was able to create 20 of these in a few hours. Veed has a simple CTA that directs people to the main product. Veed also uses deeplinks to improve the UX and ranking. SmallPDF has an embed right within the landing page that people can interact with. My successful test with Framer I launched a quick and dirty test and let it simmer. It was something I did without a developer or a designer. Even with hardly any effort or any real optimization, you can see that it's growing in the right direction. It's also bringing paid conversions. A Framer tutorial for marketers Framer is a real competitive advantage so I created a little tutorial guide below if you wanted to check it out. I re-created Veed's landing page in Framer but you'd just have to copy/paste your Figma components in Framer. It's easier than you think. Then, create a simple landing page. It's a drag and drop editor, just like Figma. You can duplicate and create as many as landing pages as you want. I recommend creating 20 variations to test with and understand which performs. After you know what's working, you can convert a single landing page into a CMS template. A Framer CMS template lets you edit the content but the structure remains the same. Traditional CMS platforms make it easier to write blogs but to create landing pages, you need to go to a dev. Framer changes this status quo. You can duplicate pages in Framer's CMS just as easily. Framer CMS Pricing: On their basic tier ($15), you can create one CMS template, and on their premium tier ($25), you can create ten. In my opinion, Framer should have allowed everyone to use CMS for free, even if they prompted an upgrade pop-up when publishing the site. Restricting people from using the feature makes it harder to discover. However, I do not have enough knowledge about their product to comment. It could also be that the CMS is still underdeveloped and leads to churn if people see it. 🤷‍♀️ Scaling it up even further If you wish to scale it up to hundreds of posts, you can upload a CSV file to Framer, and it will auto-populate the data. You can use either ChatGPT (instruct it to output as a table) or Google Spreadsheet's OpenAI integration. Video tutorial for Framer landing pages and CMS Learn to create SEO landing pages with Framer in 5 minutes. Thanks for reading! Best, Khushi

“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” ― Pablo Picasso The status quo for SaaS products is onboarding. But most onboarding funnels add more friction than they seek to remove. And if activation is your goal, there's only so many steps or friction that you can remove. At Streamline, we provide icons and illustrations. People can browse, customize, and export as many assets as they want. And it's not just the web app that is ungated. Our Figma and Lucid plugins as well as our desktop app is ungated or has open funnels. There's literally no barrier to using the product. Humble beginnings.. A indie-maker created a zip file with some icons. It went viral. People asked for more. And the indie maker turned into a full-blown company. After I joined, Streamline moved from a transactional based business model to a subscription based model. People had to sign up to use the free product back then. Streamline's current onboarding.. Check out our onboarding: 1. You land on the icons homepage with all free sets at the top 2. You click into a set 3. You customize colors and size before exporting in the format you want. 4. And that's it. No watermarks. No low-resolution images. No signup needed. No account. No credit card. No questionnaire. Note: We do ask users to attribute to us if they use for free. The free tier is generous enough for most users and acts us our growth loop to generate high quality backlinks. The good stuff of open funnels.. People experience the product without friction and are delighted because it delivers on what they were hoping to get. One big benefit for us is via programmatic SEO. The more time people spend on the page, Google rewards us and ranks us higher. Activation explodes because there are no onboarding steps that lead to drop offs. Everyone skipped the line. More product data, perhaps 10x more than what'd you'd see with a traditional gated experience. This helps us understand which searches have no relevant results and if some icon sets convert better than the others. More users to run experiments. Instead of relying simply on homepage A/B testing, we now have more users in the product. The not-so-good stuff of frictionless onboarding.. Tracking is extremely hard. You have to stitch pre-login and post-login data together. If your audience is tech-savvy, you have to invest in server-side tracking to bypass adblockers that block client-side. Around 40-60% of devs, designers and tech-savvy people have ad blockers turned on. Users once lost are lost forever. If you fail to activate a user, you can't hope to win them back via onboarding emails. Lifecycle campaigns won't cover up for an average product experience. You're setting up users to fail. Some users require more hand-holding or your product has complex features that you can't just let people explore on their own. No sunk costs to keep users invested. It's easy to quit and make another search on google. Conversion rates will be lower because more people explore the product. In a traditional setup, these people would've dropped off already in an onboarding. No segmentation data. Onboarding usually helps to get information around industry, company size, role, traffic source, etc. And without one, your cohort analysis capabilities are limited. No user data means harder to qualify users or pipe them into sales funnels. You can't even customize the emails based on what their role / jbtd is about. You can customize only based on what you've seen them use. To get people to sign up, you'd have give away even more value. We layered on a free trial to get people to sign up. At the end of the day, you have good friction and bad friction. You have to choose whether to keep both or remove both. Thanks for reading :) Khushi Lunkad

Hi, I'm Khushi, and I lead the growth and marketing efforts at Streamline. Streamline is an icon and illustration library with a generous free tier. In fact, our free tier is even more generous than the paid tiers of some of our competitors! The story of Streamline Streamline's founder released an open-source UI icon set consisting of over a thousand icons. This set achieved tremendous success and eventually led him to achieve financial independence. Lots of backlinks According to SEMRush, Streamline has nearly 100k backlinks, and Ahrefs rates our domain with a score of 76. Open-source products typically ask users to provide a backlink when they use the product. Open-source strategy For any successful business, two key elements are necessary: an audience and a revenue strategy. By creating a (good!) open-source product, you can effectively address the first part of the equation. It's important to note that "free" and "open-source" are different concepts. Freemium models offer some free features but place restrictions, while open-source provides everything possible and more. Solving revenue Generating revenue becomes more challenging when users' needs are already met with a free product. Moreover, Streamline is not the only open-source product available in the market. Companies like Google and IBM are also competing for the same market share. The history and the future We observe an increasing number of companies developing a defensible strategy based on open-source. If the paid product focuses on managed services while the free product is self-hosted, an open-source offering effectively discourages newcomers from entering the market. Examples : Red Hat: For a long time, Red Hat sold services for open-source software and scaled it with human resources. Hadoop: The paid tier had more intellectual property than the open-source product, but scalability was challenging due to imperfect user experience. between the two products. Streamline: Streamline represents a third-generation open-source software. It builds differentiated intellectual property around the open-source core and offers differentiated open-core software as a service. (I use "open-core" because that's the most commonly used term to refer to Streamline). People pay for more than just support, as they gain access to the Figma plugin, Lucid plugin, a desktop app, and ten times more icons than the free tier provides. Distribution-first, not product-first Although this viewpoint may be controversial, I believe more founders should consider a distribution-first strategy rather than a product-first strategy. At the very least, this approach ensures that your company won't fizzle out in the early stages. Take Netflix as an example—its biggest growth driver is the fact that it comes pre-installed in set-top boxes. By solving the distribution aspect, you can buy time and gather more user feedback, which is essential for success! Thank you for reading! Disclaimer: Opinions, insights and everything is pretty much mine. So, take it with a grain of salt!

A while back, I had to run A/B tests to improve the activation rate. If you've never run in-product A/B tests before, it can be a little overwhelming so here's a simple guide on how to get started. The first test The first test we conducted showed a significant lift, increasing our core action from 14% to 21%. It was a tiny change, but it made a huge impact. And got buy-in to run more experiments. The second test After we working on activation, we went a bit deeper making sure each part of the funnel was tested. We found a user insight that we wanted to actively solve for. The result? If you look at the data below, you can see that the percentage of people that successfully went and selected a plan increased by 28%. And all other health metrics improved. The test concluded that if site traffic remained constant, we had improved trial starts by 6%. I also want to acknowledge that it was a relatively big change (involved positioning and messaging) that required a week of design and dev support. When we first launched the test variant, the test failed. So, we watched some Hotjar recordings. Discovered a few bugs and some design flaws. Everyone jumped in to help and we quickly fixed it. Had we lost faith in the test early on, we wouldn't have done anything to improve it. You can start via these 3 ways. I've over-simplified them so you know where to look and what to look for. Option 1 Step 1) Use a feature flagging tool like Flagr to conduct A/B tests. Developers will create two different environments (control and test). Step 2) Then send that data to Mixpanel, linked with the users' device IDs. Step 3) Next, analyze the data in Mixpanel. Mixpanel will directly calculate statistical significance for you, which is helpful. Option 2 Step 1) Send data from Segment directly to a tool like Statsig . Or via code. I chose Statsig because it was used by companies like Notion, Microsoft, Flipkart. It was self-serve (no need to speak to a sales rep to get started). They also offer a nice startup program if you wanted that? Statsig really speeds up the process of running experiments. You get to see all your metrics easily and can filter users with the user profile data that works best for you. I haven't completely explored the product myself, so it's a good idea to do some research on your own. In my own journey, I've evaluated Eppo, Optimizely, Taplytics, Split.io, and Launchdarkly. I finally chose Statsig. Step 2: Conduct experiments in Statsig. The process is similar: developers set up an experience, and you run a test, sending data to Statsig. Step 3: Then make a decision Option 3 Step 1) Utilize the experimentation tool in your analytics platform, like Mixpanel Experiments . Step 2) Ask developers to code the experience and run the test. What to test? To collect qualitative data for this test, I sent an email to users who signed up but did not activate in the product, asking for clear reasons why they didn't. It worked well but only after a bit of tweaking (adjust copy, timing etc). Here's the final template that worked well (h/t to Hillary for sharing): Subject : Brutal feedback for {company name} Body : Hi {first name}, I noticed that you signed up for {company name} but never did {core action}. Any chances you'd share why?—even a single sentence would go a long way in helping us improve the platform. Thanks! {founder's name} Founder at {company name} Start here with the user research if you want. Then validate with data. And finally, move on to building your test using the three options I shared above! Thanks for reading! Best, Khushi

// This post has strong opinions that are loosely held. I also acknowledge that I'm taking inspiration from other industries which might not be accurate. But it's a starting point to solve an industry-wide problem we face. I'm open to feedback and suggestions. Everyone knows that marketing and growth teams are the first to be laid off. These teams have the shortest tenure in tech. Often times, they get fired because of one of these reasons: "The company has to pivot." "We have a retention problem." "Marketing can't acquire customers." "Growth can't grow revenue anymore." Not all layoffs are bad. Some are valid but there's a reason why marketers/growth people have the shortest tenures compared to other departments like product management, engineering, and customer success. I was inspired to find a solution and asked a few questions to myself: Are growth/marketers fluffy? Can they really not sell? Are they all words and no results? And assuming all of that is true, then Why is this the case? And what can we do about it? This investigation led me to explore whether the problem lies elsewhere? First, please walk with me through some examples. Then, I'll stitch everything together and share a hypothesis. #1 Intuit's most successful vs. a total failure ad Intuit is one of the most successful SaaS companies in the world with a valuation of $180 billion. Their earliest product was an accounting software. Campaign #1 To run a direct advertising campaign in PC Magazine, Intuit had to bet its entire net worth of $125,000. If it failed, the company would be bankrupt again (they had almost gone under twice before, and at one point, they had to stop paying employees' salaries). The founders wrote this direct response ad themselves after consulting with a marketing friend. Take a look at their old ad copy from 1986: The result? Huge success. The copy was drafted by Intuit's co-founder who had previously worked at Procter & Gamble. If you've got a few extra minutes, watch the interview below starting at the 33:42 mark. Campaign #2 Eventually, Intuit hired a marketing agency. This agency created a two-page ad featuring a bald lady who had seemingly pulled out all her hair doing accounting. Do you think it would perform well? Source: In$ide Intuit Book The ad was expensive to produce, with all the agency fees. Worse yet, it brought in a grand total of 4 (four!) customers of the millions of people that saw it. Yikes. No wonder the founders were upset. I think tech is relatively easy to sell. There's a clear value-exchange and risks are offset by a subscription business. "I think SaaS is beautiful because it's a pure value exchange between customer and company. And as long as the customer is receiving what they think is enough value, they'll continue to pay for your product. So it creates this really great incentivization structure for businesses to solve real problems." — Dave Burson, Head of Product, Growth & Monetisation at Canva Intuit built one of the best products. They became the market leader in 2 months. They had done lots of market research. If you watch the interview above, you'll see they mention 'research' in almost every 3rd sentence. Founder was ex-P&G and that marketing background is incredible. But who is to blame for the failed Intuit ad? The agency, the company, or just the process? To answer that question, let's take a step back and see if companies outside of tech have solved this problem. Life's not so easy in other industries. #2 FMGC companies approach differently At bigger companies like Unilever or P&G, Marketing == Product team. Marketing decides what to build, for whom to build, why to build it, how much to price it, and how to sell it. Sure, sometimes we end up with products that are over-optimized for marketing. Look at any supermarket aisle. But the products sell. They aren't built by one team and then simply handed off to the marketing team to "sell." Revenue and product accountability lies with one team. It's why PMs at Airbnb are accountable for revenue. In tech, product marketing often ends up with the task of "hey, we've built this, now let's get customers." This approach doesn't effectively address demand. #3 Baskin Robbin's 31% Discount Consider another example: Baskin Robbins, the ice cream company, has maintained a consistent message since its founding in 1947. Their logo has always featured the number 31. This number wasn't arbitrarily chosen; it signifies the "31 flavors" concept, offering a different flavor for each day of the month. If a user is well-retained, Baskin Robbins asks them to deepen usage by ordering more of the same flavor (get a tub at a 31% discount). The 31% discount is a clever trigger moment and a time-lapsed deal which, once expired, would require users to wait for about 60 more days. It associates Baskin Robbins with the 31st of each month. Upon closer inspection, Baskin Robbins has effectively implemented: Usage and Frequency Mapping:  Something typically managed by Growth teams today. Trigger Effects:  Leveraging the 31st of each month. Product:  Introducing a new flavor to attract a new niche. Activation:  Encouraging the trial of multiple flavors. You might think this entire strategy [ read case study ] was conceived by someone at Baskin Robbins. However, the idea for "31" actually came from the Carson-Roberts advertising agency (which later became Ogilvy & Mather), in 1953. So, the difference is clear And it makes sense why. Marketers don't understand the possibilities that tech can build. That's why in tech we have product managers. People with the ability to do market research and communicate to devs. So, you have sales, marketing, and growth teams all working on leads. The product team is good at identifying a pain point and making the best possible product in the world. But then, product managers might not have revenue accountability. If it doesn't sell well, the short-term solution is always to market more. Here are some examples of what is written in my college marketing book by Philip Kotler: Growth is essential for the success of any firm. Thus, to be a long-term market leader is the goal of any marketer. Marketers can try to increase the amount, level, or frequency of consumption. (What Reforge Growth courses talk about) In targeting new customers, the firm should not lose sight of existing customers. (Poor line expansion in SaaS). Ironically, some food firms such as Hershey's have developed smaller packaging sizes that have actually increased sales volume. (Pricing and packaging). While trying to expand total market share, the dominant firm must actively defend its current business. Boeing against Airbus. Staples against Office Depot. And Google against Yahoo! and Microsoft. How can the leader do so? The most constructive response is continuous innovation . (Marketing does product management). Six types of defense strategies when you're a dominant firm: position, flank, preemptive, counteroffensive, mobile, contraction (PM work). Market challenger strategies: attact the dominant firm (high risk, high payoff), attack similar sized firms that are not doing the job well, attack regional firms, attack status quo ( lemonade insurance ). Market follower strategies.. and so on.. What you'll notice is that marketing does everything except manage the supply chain. So, it decides what to build, when to build, what to price it at, and where to sell. It does NOT decide how to build it. That resides with the R&D teams and manufacturing plants. Going back to our Intuit case where the bald lady ad failed...maybe the problem isn't with marketing or with the company. It's with the process. The reason why the agency failed is because they didn't quite get it. And they didn't help shape the product. They didn't understand the nuances. And potentially, they might not have been allowed to do so. Who knows? One of the agencies I worked didn't do any research, forget shape the product. They just interviewed clients and delivered work. Things would obviously not perform. I would spend extra time outside work on the weekends to get user research done. Taylor does a good job summarizing the idea: My recommendations If we want to solve this in tech, I've got some recommendations. These are just starting points: 1) Involve growth/marketing early on. Maybe they're called the "Growth" team. But they should be a part of the process much earlier on. It's hard to market a product you don't love or have faith in. 2) Growth/Marketing should understand tech opportunities and limitations in a better way At GitHub, all their marketers know how to code. At Streamline, I took one of the most intensive design courses to speak the same language as our designers. But, I did not put the same effort into learning about frontend/backend terminologies when that would've probably been a more meta skill to develop. 3) Let marketers/growth teams write their own briefs When recruiting agencies, see if they're writing their own creative brief. Mediocre ones will do as you ask them to. Top-tier ones will write their own. A friend of mine shared Ogilvy's campaign brief if you wanted to see how it's done. #4 Ogilvy's Client Brief An example brief for Fanta. Just look at some of the questions. What do they need to know?   Product facts are not usually decisive when people choose between brands, but if they are, list them here, or attach an addendum to the brief. What do they need to feel?   Emotive campaigns usually sell harder. What emotional response are we looking for? (Avoid clichés like “friendly,” “trusted,” etc.) Why should they care?   Brands that address issues bigger than their own category earn more time and attention. Why should people talk about our brand? Marketing has always been doing growth All this growth stuff around A/B testing, in-product tests, statistical significance has been used by marketing teams since ages. Even when there was no tech. Marketing gets a bad rap because, well most marketing is bad. So, I'd say if you worked in marketing/sales/growth or any of these ancillary functions and were laid off, it could because of one or more of these reasons You didn't truly influence the product. You haven't considered the full impact of the marketing lifecycle (awareness, activation, monetization, retention). Or maybe your work wasn't good enough — that's ok! We live and learn :) I'm happy to see that the industry is moving away from spammy marketing and looking at user journeys holistically. If you liked this article, you should read up " The Top 5 Reasons CMOs Get Fired " by Carilu Dietrich who's taken Atlassian public and is an advisor to hypergrowth companies. Thanks for reading! Best, Khushi

[This article is a WIP. I plan to sponsor newsletters and list down what I learn as I go] Elena Verna The first one I sponsored lately was Elena Verna's newsletter. I learned about PLG from Elena, took most of her courses in Reforge, and followed her to her Growth Scoop newsletter. Writing is actually fun and engaging. Hers alongside Kyle Poyar's Growth Unhinged newsletters are the only ones I read often. I think she and Jonathan on her team truly set the bar on what sponsorships could look like. They truly went above and beyond There were a few things I liked: First, they were able to match our topic with the topic of the newsletter. Second, we even got a featured image with the "Get your free churn reduction analysis". Third, the post linked to another blog post of ours in the article itself. They even honored a second CTA towards the end of the article. My ask was this, Khushi: Can we also have a link at the bottom of the newsletter? Sometimes, I'm so curious about the topic Elena writes about that I want to finish reading it, before I click on an ad. If it's towards the end, there's no other CTA that competes with it for attention. And people won't need to scroll back up. If this list wasn't already enough, they even helped write a blurb for us and gave me feedback on the graphic when it didn't look quite good on the first try. My takeaway is to sponsor posts you already love when you're just starting out as a brand. Then, you can increase your brand awareness budget. I wrote them this message: This partnership is as good as it can get! I could not have asked for anything better. Thank you <3 Our cost was $3000 for this post. It's publicly available here to sponsor . For the second time around, there wasn't enough time to discuss a few items so I had to opt out of sponsoring her newsletter. And Elena just offered it in for free. 🫨 I was playing carrom with my family, celebrating my dad's birthday. And that email came through. It had Churnkey's name at the top. I went through so many emotions all at once. First was an adrenaline rush. I was thinking, "Wow, what an article. Glad we're featured." Then, a little bit of regret followed. "Was I stupid to opt out? This is an incredible article." Then came worry. "Had I messed up the comms and they didn't see we opted out?" Then came relief. "No worries, I'll convince the team to pay and honor it." And it took me 30 minutes to type an email. Before I was done overthinking and rewriting the email again and again, I heard back from her. It said, "it's on the house". What! My jaw just dropped. It wasn't an accident. We were intentionally featured a second time around. This second article of hers was even more popular on social so I definitely would've regretted opting out. Like, a lot. But yeah, it was quite classy and kind of her to do this for us. If you'd like more metrics (click rate etc), I'm happy to share some more of those if you'd like to contact me . Otherwise, you can sponsor her newsletter . There's a lot that you get: a newsletter, a social post, and if you're lucky, maybe that post would be tied in to your topic. The only downside is that the shelf life for a post is around 2 weeks, after which it is behind a paywall. But, I'm clearly biased. I love her content and would do absolutely ANYTHING to be a part of the content she puts out. So, yeah. So far, so good. [Next Post Sponsorship Will Be Updated Here]

As a growth lead, I've extensively used Hotjar and Mixpanel for companies of all sizes, including those with millions of users and even small early-stage startups. Here's an in-depth but brain-friendly buying guide.