#ghconf

Growing Pains - Lessons From People Who Grew Linkedin, KISSMetrics & Livingsocial

As a startup founder it's always a struggle to decide if a certain conference is worth your time. The growth hacker conference caught my attention with their speaker line up which was super impressive and included the likes of Chamath Palihapitiya (formerly of Facebook), Elliot Shmukler of Linkedin  and Aaron Batalion, CTO of Livingsocial. To top it all, the event was organized by our fellow cohort Gagan of Udemy and hence I decided to give it a shot. 

The speakers shared some key actionable insights that an entrepreneur can apply to his daily business. Without much further ado, here are some of the lessons that I took away from this conference

1. Know your customers

Sean Ellis, CEO of Qaularoo and formerly an Interim Marketing head of Dropbox, Xobni, Eventbrite, had an excellent presentation on how important it is for businesses to understand their customers. Often startups spend a lot of time trying to interpret customer actions via analytics and other technical solutions forgetting that they can accomplish this by asking the customer a direct question. Targeted one question surveys can yield more information and understanding of a customer than any other tool. This a reminder to entrepreneurs like us that often simple solutions are the most elegant and insightful. 

2. Beware of vanity metrics, choose your benchmarks & build your own tools

A panel consisting of Hiten Shah, Founder of KISSMetrics, Nabeel Hyatt, Founder of Conduit labs, and Joe Zadeh, product lead at Airbnb shared some great insights. Hiten was very clear in  advising that companies not get caught up in metrics without actually having an understanding of those metrics and their impact to growth. It's important that companies spend time defining the metrics that matter and track them. For companies that are constantly growing it's important to benchmark growth against their own and not just chase the competition. One last piece of advice from this great panel was, no analytics tool or solution will ever offer everything a business needs to track. It's important for businesses to build their own tools and reports that measure growth.

3. A/B testing is not the miracle drug for growth

Mike Greenfield of Circle of moms had some important aspects on A/B testing. For starters he cleared some myths about A/B testing and provided clarity. The key points are:

A/B testing matters when traffic on your site / product is not a statistical blimp but an actual graph

A/B testing is an investment for high growth companies to test features instead of actual product releases

You cannot A/B test your product to growth without actual product vision

4. Know thy API

The most spirited and energetic talk of the day was by Aaron Batalion, CTO of Livingsocial. Aaron rocked the room with some superb technical advice. It was interesting to know that before Livingsocial was a reality or a business, Aaron and his team made their livelihood building social apps for the Facebook platform. Aaron and his team built more than 60 apps before they launched the idea of Livingsocial. It was wonderful to listen to Aaron's story on how understanding a platform's power and leveraging API led to one of the most viral or a virus of an app (Animoto), which incidentally was also the most popular app before Zynga games. Aaron talked about how they were able to build some key aspects of virality for growth just by paying attention to API of the social platform. 

5. Double down on your strengths

Elliot Shmukler of Linkedin growth really shared the math behind growth strategies. He shared a story of how they chased a big number by going after a low conversion channel and raising the number. It took them about an year to get there, while they realized they achieved a growth number similar to their original goal with the high conversion channel within a short period of time. The lesson for me was double down on the strengths of your product, you will be able to grow faster. This growth will improve your weak channels too. Leveraging engaged users to evangelize your product is also a good idea.