Series Growth Hacker? Marketing your app is not an extra task 6/6

Conclusions

We are at the last article of this series about growth hacker marketing. With the help of our talk show guests ‘The old way’ and ‘The new way’, we explored 4 fundamental steps of the growth hacking cycle. We saw how they integrate with our application development cycle. Without further introduction needed, we give voice to our guests for the last time. It seems that ‘The old way’ is keen to speak about what it learned from ‘The new way’...
Series Growth Hacker? Marketing your app is not an extra task 6/6 - Conclusion

The talk-show

MobileThinking: “Yes, we can confirm there is excitement here, so ‘The old way’ tell us everything!

The old way’: “First of all, thank you to have been patient with me. I learned a lot these last weeks. I understood that before promoting an application we have to perfect it around the needs and mental processes of its users. We need to iterate until the application fits their behaviour and they find it very convenient to use it. Only when we reach ‘Product market fit’, we can start to grow.”

The new way’: “Exactly! And it is very important to notice that the first iterations of the application don’t require to develop it. As MobileThinking explained you can use prototypes and user studies to iterate fast and in a cheaper way. These methods are part of the so called Design Sprints.”

The old way’: “Yes, I’m going to take that approach from now on! Then after ‘Product market fit’, we need to build the core of our users base. We need to ‘Find our growth hack’ to acquire the first thousand hardcore users, right?”

The new way’: “Totally! You need to acquire early adopters, users that will be the ambassadors of your application. Users that are willing to share their positive experience of your service with their family and friends. These early adopters are also well suited and willing to test your initial product and help you to make it even better. You should listen to them carefully!”

The old way’: “And then, when you have a core user base they can help you to ‘Go viral’. Of course, you need to give them some incentives, but if your application is outstanding they will be willing to help you naturally. I understood that we must engineer ‘Going viral’ in the structure of the application itself, don’t we?”

The new way’: “You understood well! You need to lower the barriers to share your application, it should be natural for your users. You should not ask them to do you a favor, they should spread your service because it is outstanding. At the same time, we need to perfect the acquisition of users that are using your application for the first time.”

The old way’: “True! And if I’m not wrong this is the last step of the cycle: ‘Retention and optimization’. Acquiring users has a cost and we need to optimise the onboarding process and the application itself to transform the users that we have captured to highly profitable users. These are the users that will return to use our services over and over. The users that investors like, the ones that really count.”

The new way’: “Exactly! We need to understand how users use our application, find the barriers, and improve our service over time. Iteration after iteration! We need to minimize the number of users abandoning the service, the users that do not return, the ones that cause our ‘churning rate’ to grow. This is another metric that investors consider to decide where to invest.”

MobileThinking: “‘The old way’, we are amazed about your progresses! We thank ‘The new way’ for its patience and we thank also our audience for having responded positively to the format of these interviews. We are looking forward to help you transform your apps and mobile services from ideas to apps!
This was the summary of these series of articles about growth hacker marketing. We hope that these series of articles helped you to grasp the complexity, but also the fascinating world of growth hacking. We gave you a summary of the efforts that you should expect and the methods to follow to be successful in your venture. We leave you with an important note: “Anyone can have an idea, but few have the courage to do what it takes to bring them into reality, a working reality!”. 

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