At last week’s growth community group at Fishburners, Expert In Residence and Managing Director at Ikaros, Daniel Lohrmann interviewed Jess, the head of growth at Shippit. During the session, Fishburners members asked Jess a series of growth related questions, here’s the key takeaways from the session.
Previously, Jess’s strategy centred around ‘by-the-book’ tactics: PR, ads, and building content around ‘personas’ she had hypothesised. To begin with, this investment into organic and paid traffic worked well; tripling traffic and doubling leads. However, eventually, the inefficiencies began to show. Despite optimising the top of the funnel, she was unable to scale up high-value sales leads at the bottom: ‘it was like filling a leaky bucket with leads.’ She recognised a few key problems: no visibility from discovery to purchase, no way to attribute the source of high-quality leads, and weak measurements of in-app engagement.
Her solution? She created a growth squad and implemented product-led growth to find bottlenecks and identify which features needed to be optimised. She instrumented this through Amplitude, and saw some interesting takeaways and awesome results:
Her assumptions around the customer journey were wrong, and she was able to optimise onboarding flows to direct users to what they were actually looking for. ‘We were creating so much extra work for ourselves than we needed to.’
Through behavioural cohorts, she was able to understand the profiles of those who were successfully using the product (and those who were dropping)
She was able to attract more relevant users and keep marketing comms more conversational, ultimately shortening the sales cycle and lowering acquisition costs by 50%.
Her main challenges? Getting buy-in for both Amplitude and a growth process was an important hurdle to overcome, and required a culture shift to ‘living and breathing product-led growth.’
Her advice? Whether you’re a budding startup or an established corporate, you need to bake product analytics into anything you’re working on (start cheap, then invest as you scale). It will allow you to get your customer to their ‘aha’ moment much quicker!
If you’re looking to improve your own data and analytics strategy, ikaros have a great post on must-have analytics tools.
Written by Growth Expert In Residence at Fishburners and Managing Director at Ikaros, Daniel Lohrmann
