Nine lessons to help you achieve Product/Market fit & more

The Growth Letter #92

October 11, 2022

Welcome to the new members of the Growth Letter who have joined us since last Tuesday. I hope you are enjoying the content. Feel free to send me a message on LinkedIn with your ideas and thoughts.If you like the newsletter, share it with others.

Today at a glance:

  • Article: How Marketplace Startups can achieve Product/Market Fit

  • Post: Get customers to pay you with this one strategy

  • Media: SaaStock 2022

  • Tool: Find exploding trends and topics

  • Framework: Growth Engine

One Article:

Customers are the foundation of your business, without them your product doesn’t do much. ClassPass Founder Payal Kadakia takes you through her journey of keeping the essential signals (customer needs, queries..) and avoiding false signals (followers, capital raised, web design..) while building your product. A great read where she shares the nine key lessons she’s learned on how startups building a marketplace can find product/market fit.

One Post:

Brian O’Connor shares the 1 thing that Amazon does to make customers pay them. This one piece of advice can empower your sales strategy. You can read the post here.

One Media:

SaaStock 2022 is the world’s most impactful conference for SaaS founders on the journey to $10M+ ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) and beyond. As the Chief Growth Officer of taskDrive I am looking forward to engaging with exciting startups, great innovators and connecting with 5000+ SaaS Founders! Dublin, Ireland here I come!

One Tool:

Exploding Topics helps find exploding trends before they take off. The platform uses advanced technology to analyze millions of searches, conversations, and mentions across the internet. It then identifies topics in three categories: regular, peaked, and exploding.

One Framework:

The Growth Engine Framework breaks down growth strategy into 4 parts. All of which help the engine (product) and business run.

The breakdown of the 4 parts:

  1. The Engine → Companies grow primarily through 4 engines: a) Performance Marketing (ads, TV) b) Virality (word of mouth, invites) c) Content (SEO, shareable, newsletters) d) Sales (inbound & Outbound)Examples: Zoom (virality + sales), Snapchat (virality)

  2. Turbo Boosts → Tactics that can accelerate growth for a period of time but don’t deliver ongoing acceleration. They include things like PR, events, and brand marketing. These are valuable to kickstart your startup journey like a product launch.

  3. Lubricant → These don’t drive growth directly, but instead, optimize the efficiency of your engine. Also, without enough lubrication, your engine will stop. They are in broad categories, such as: a) Conversion: Increasing the rate at which customers sign up for your product. This includes optimizing the clickthrough rate on ads, the effectiveness of salespeople, and increasing signup funnel conversion rates.b) Activation: Increasing the rate at which customers use your product for its core purpose. This includes everything related to the new user experience and how your customers learn about and begin to use your product.c) Retention: Improving the rate at which customers continue to use your product. This includes everything related to the ongoing customer experience.

  4. Without it, even the most optimized engine won’t run. The type of fuel required is specific to the type of growth engine you’re running:a) Paid Marketing (Capital needed and look out for ROI) b) Content engines (Content generated by the company and UGC) c) Viral: Focus on K-factor (users who refer other users)

These 4 parts are essential to creating a sustainable and profitable business.

Tim’s Hiring Zone:

You can find growth-related jobs here.