💎 Growth Gems #122 - User Research, Activation, Engagement, and Strategy
I dug up some special gems 💎 during my last shift in the growth mine…I’m bringing you back insights on:
North Star Metric
User Research
Activation tactics
Mined in person once again, I hope these hard-dug insights from Hannah Parvaz and Michelle Murcia will be valuable.
🥇 TOP GEM OF THE WEEK
Building a Full-Funnel Growth Strategy
Gems from Hannah Parvaz (Founder at Aperture) in the roundtable “Building a Full-Funnel Growth Strategy” at the App Promotion Summit SF.
If you’ve read Growth Gems #120, you know I thought Thomas Petit’s roundtable was 🔥.
Hannah’s didn’t disappoint, either!
It was kinda cool to hear people going around the table and sharing how they decide on what to focus on (including some decent answers IMO)…And to hear Hannah conclude with a “Wrong” full of confidence.
Back to fundamentals, I see.
Way to get my attention, Hannah!
Onboarding and activation approach
💎 Your north star metric must encompass both user and business needs. It should have a core action, a cadence, and a revenue component. Example: weekly “reading” subscribers. Ratios are very easy to manipulate, so that won’t work.
This is similar to the gem from Hannah I shared in Growth Gems #105, where she also suggested a next step: “Then, for both free trialers and people who dismissed the paywall, work step-by-step on reducing friction to have them reach this activation point: making it simple, reducing friction with autoplay, showing tooltips, gamification with rewards, etc.”
For more gems on Activation 👇
For a thorough refresher on North Star metrics, check out Amplitude’s North Star Playbook.
💎 Once you have your north star metric, figure out the key levers to impact it.
Whether they work in Acquisition, Activation, or Retention, everyone in your business should be able to understand how they impact that metric and focus on the most impactful work to drive it.
💎 A signup or a trial is a meaningful action, but it’s not your core action: a core action needs to be repeatable and show a genuinely interested user. Example: at Curio, it was initially hypothesized as when someone presses “Play” on a piece of content, but then it shifted to when someone listens to 95% of the content (they found out that people were skipping the end credits, and this didn't impact activation).
💎 Plot your core action on a drop-off funnel to understand the drop-off between signup and the first moment users do the core action (e.g., 50% drop-off). When you see several smaller drop-offs between core action events, that’s your activation moment (e.g., activation moment = 6 core actions).
💎 You still need to think about the Activation of your free users: if you manage to activate them, you have more chances to convert them.
One thing Hannah tried at Uptime was a “reverse trial” for users who would not initially convert to trial. At the end of the trial, users were presented with an “I want to lose access” CTA.
Elena Verna shared some thoughts on reverse trials and a few SaaS examples here. I don’t think it’s that common in B2C subscription apps (I have one more example), but I find it particularly interesting as a backup offer.
Thomas also mentioned that softer paywalls can lead more people past the paywall to activate, grow the free user base, and do other actions (e.g., invite friends, share).
💎 If someone has taken out a trial or a subscription and cancels early on in their journey, they may not have reached their activation moment. It's possible to win these customers back, but it requires a deep understanding of their blockers—which means speaking to them (e.g., getting on the phone).
The importance of user research
💎 Talking to customers is the most important and the very first thing you need to do. It’s not product interviews; it’s psychological interviews to figure out what’s going on in their mind. Why are they using your product? What would they be using instead? How do they articulate it?
Hannah mentioned you shouldn’t think your competitor is necessarily another app: often, it’s just the user not doing anything.
Here’s a unique user research question David (co-founder at Moongate) shared during the roundtable: “Why do you think the Meta algorithm targeted you for this product?”
💎 You also need to talk to the people who didn’t make it to the activation moment, depending on where you see the biggest drop-offs. Run retargeting ads like “win a $100 for answering a question,” then ask for signup, and finally, ask them if they’re up for a customer interview.
To do this, you can create custom audiences on Meta and retarget them.
Hannah said you shouldn’t incentivize people inside the product unless you’ve really tried to get them and you couldn’t. As mentioned in Growth Gems #117, this gets harder as you move up the funnel.
One lower-cost option for incentives is to use a subscription benefit (e.g., X months free) instead of money.
💎 Halfway through the trial, email users that haven’t activated yet. They often write back.
Something that might help your conversion rates: introduce yourself as “I’m the developer of that” feature or send emails “from the CEO”. Here is an example Hannah made:
For users still in the product, you can use a pop-up sending to a Calendly.
North Star Metric and Growth Strategy
Gems from Michelle Murcia (Head of Growth at Storybeat) in Finding your App’s North Star for Growth on the Apptivate Podcast
I also stumbled upon this podcast episode on a very similar topic.
The insights complement well the ones from the roundtable.
💎 Identify the stage of growth you’re in before you start creating your growth strategy: discovery stage, optimization stage, scaling stage. Then, identify the bottleneck(s) in the user lifecycle so you know what to focus on: Acquisition, Activation, Conversion, etc. Start prioritizing based on your resources.
💎 A North Star metric is a metric that needs to meet at least three requirements:
It needs to help show the value of your product to the user
It measures the happiness of the user
It ends up bringing revenue
Example at Storybeat: number of stories (designs) created by a user per week.
💎 The GOI tree framework is a way to structure experiment ideas to align them with business goals, maximize creativity, and prioritize efficiently. It starts with the North Star Metric and is followed by:
G - Actionable Goals
O - Identified Opportunities
I - Specific growth Ideas, for which you define hypotheses you validate through experiments
Here is the link Michelle shared with me regarding the GOI tree framework (it’s in Spanish).
You might be doing this “naturally”, but it’s always interesting to see how someone has structured it (and put a ™ on it 🤣).
💎 3 things to be successful in growth:
Have different growth loops and ways to grow your business. You can start with the paid acquisition loop but don’t keep relying just on that.
Stay informed on industry changes, from privacy to ad fraud.
Understand the users and their needs. Don’t focus too much on what the competition is doing; focus on your users’ problems.
Before I leave, here is a quote from “Not Boring”:
“Nothing great was ever created from a playbook” - Packy McCormick (Founder at Not Boring)
See you next time.
Stay curious!
⛏️ Sylvain
🔗 Sources:
Building a Full-Funnel Growth Strategy at App Promotion Summit SF
Finding your App’s North Star for Growth on the Apptivate Podcast