Framework for Running Minimum Viable Tests (MVT)
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This document discusses product-led growth strategies that the author has used to achieve $3M ARR without paid marketing or sales. It recommends focusing on a core metric like monthly recurring revenue (MRR) and running frequent, small experiments to test ideas and prioritize efforts. Specifically, it suggests running experiments in 1 day or less to quickly learn and optimize, rather than lengthy projects. The author shares examples of experiments they ran, such as guest blogging, referral programs, and webinars, that led to improved user activation, engagement, and conversion to paid plans.
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Framework for Running Minimum Viable Tests (MVT)
- 1. Minimum Viable Tests to 2X Your Growth (without Paid or Sales) @conradwa
- 2. Is it possible to progress in a smallish, but growing market with 20+ competitors?
- 4. $3M+ ARR, without paid or sales.
- 5. Your situation will be different.
- 6. …your product, market, contract value, messaging, sales process, resources, business model, etc. is unique.
- 8. What this means is most supposed “expert” advice is probably bullshit.
- 9. @conradwa Here’s what’s worked for me when experimenting with product-led growth…
- 10. Co-Founder & Advisor 3 years growth consulting An email list of 17,000 founders and practitioners. Built a repeatable growth machine through 1M users and $3M ARR.
- 11. Right now, I’m bringing together thoughts on product-led growth on: http://growhack.com before launching my next product in 2017.
- 12. Repeatable growth happens when you have a core metric and a model.
- 13. That’s step 1 Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 Step 4 Step 5
- 14. We started starting at Weekly Active User (WAU) as our initial value metric in product development.
- 15. Although the product was still buggy, users surveyed said it was a “must have…”
- 16. Which is when we transitioned to Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) as core metric.
- 17. For the next year, we hit an aggressive 20%+ MRR MoM growth (net of churn).
- 18. Actually it was more like 30-40% MoM, but shut down all growth activities in December and January due to support overload.
- 19. MRR works for us because it took into account all parts of our business like churn and retention.
- 20. Your metric is likely different. Not an easy answer, so it’s okay to spend time thinking it through.
- 21. Find yours, then make all decisions from the context of what will move that north star number 20% every month.
- 22. Step 2: have good ideas and prioritize them. Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 Step 4 Step 5
- 23. Early on, you care mostly about prioritizing for impact and effort.
- 24. Pop Quiz: Where will a growth experiment have the most impact?
- 25. The deeper it is in your funnel
- 26. Step 3 is about actually running tests, quickly. Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 Step 4 Step 5
- 27. Fun Fact: most of your experiments will probably fail.
- 28. To improve your odds of success, increase the rate and quality of your growth experiments.
- 29. One great way to do this?
- 30. Run smaller growth experiments.
- 32. We found out that a post Noah Kagan did within his Facebook group led to 40 Teachable sign ups.
- 33. So we guest blogged with SumoMe.
- 34. And spent time creating a deal with AppSumo
- 36. Should we spend 3 weeks creating an email automation sequence?
- 37. Instead, we started with a 7-day email sequence that took two days to implement.
- 38. From this we learned there were many use cases for Teachable.
- 39. So we tested a survey after sign up to segment users.
- 40. And tailored messaging to each group that would significantly improve our onboarding.
- 42. Each referral improvement is a multiplier on your funnel.
- 43. To test our referral program, we just asked for users to email their audiences.
- 44. When that seemed to work…
- 45. We co-hosted one webinar with user Mariah Coz generated $100,000 which we split. Mariah’s now trained hundreds of Teachable users.
- 46. Practical takeaways in running minimum viable tests
- 47. It’s rare that any test should go longer than 1 month.
- 48. I’m personally skeptical of any test longer than 3-7 days.
- 49. My challenge to you is: When you’re looking at your list of growth experiments to help, how can you launch each in 1 day?
- 50. Then over time and you bring on more resources you can focus on larger experiments.
- 51. Notorious projects that fit this category include: • Site redesigns • Metrics overhauls • Marketing automation builds
- 52. What would happen if we failed with an experiment?
- 53. I created an email course called profitable course idea designed to improve engagement.
- 54. The 6-email course averaged 60% open rates which was great but…
- 55. The challenge is we just transitioned to an MRR goal…
- 56. …but I didn’t build for a process to upsell was tacked on later and conversion to our new MRR goal was low :(
- 57. So we tested sending users who’d joined to a webinar.
- 58. The webinar was a small test. It was a simple product demo, and took almost no time to prepare for.
- 59. But yet, our attendee to paid conversion was ~10% on our first demo. Woah..
- 60. Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 Step 4 Step 5 Optimize and THEN figure out how to automate.
- 61. Today, we convert 30% of anyone who attends a Teachable webinar.
- 62. Then we turned THAT content and optimized it for SEO on our blog…
- 63. Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 Step 4 Step 5 And automation you ask?
- 64. We now have a team to run webinars with our Head of Growth Andrew Guttormsen leading up the effort. We also our own webinar software on top of YouTube and hired a full team to run them.
- 65. We took this to the next step with the Teachable Summit, which is a series of 7 live online events that brought an audience of 20,000 people and generates $250k/event.
- 66. How much time are you spending on your growth tests?