Rational Growth (PDF)

Description
When talking to startups about the growing their user base, there is one topic that comes up - there is a huge amount of noise on this precise subject. Furthermore, there is a considerable emphasis on the tactics - tricks such as placing orange buttons or what new trending Facebook integration to try out. Sure, these tactics can be of great help, but if you don't take into consideration a larger framework to bring all of this together, you'll neer reach the millions of users and just achieve 10-20% marginal improvements.

In this document I attempt to do a better job at addressing the topic. I want to describe the mindset and sequence of experimentations needed to achieve high growth.

A year ago, I participated in a series of interviews to give an introduction to the topic. The gist of it was to give a simple introduction to growing your number of users with an analytical mindset. These interviews then got turned into a PDF document that was sponsored by AppSumo.

Outline of the PDF:

Introduction
o Visual to spreadsheet based models
o Your signup flow
o Example of DailyDiary website
o Brainstorming about growth
o Shortening the signup flow of the DailyDiary site
o SaaS example with “TeamShare”
o Convert Now versus Free Trial
o Other random things to try
o Conclusion

- Andrew Chen
- SPONSORED BY APPSUMO and written by Sandi MacPherson