Month: August 2016

Smoke testing in the context of growth marketing is a way of quickly, and with very limited resources, finding out whether a growth idea is worth executing or not.

If you’re trying to gain traction for your software product, there are a ton of growth experiments you could run. Most of the time, growth marketers have no problem coming up with ideas, the challenge is to find out which idea to execute next.

Typically there’s a reliance on engineering that slows things down as well. “We’d love to execute that idea… but engineering is busy and they don’t have time to do this now.”

A smoke test is a method to validate a growth idea without relying on engineering.

Here’s an excerpt from Lean Startup:

Smoke test with its marketing materials. This is an old direct marketing technique in which customers are given the opportunity to preorder a product that has not yet been built. A smoke test measures only one thing: whether customers are interested in trying a product.

DistroDom (aka Dominic Coryell) released an excellent free course on smoke testing that you can go through in less than 1 hour.

Smoke test process

Dominic shared a 6 step process for smoke testing growth ideas:

1. What is the hypothesis?
   Keep your hypothesis simple: If we do______(growth idea) then we’ll be able to achieve ______ (result) in ______ (time period) by investing ______ (dollar amount).
2. What is the minimum proof I need?
3. How can I get that proof with no coding?
4. How can I get the right traffic?
5. How can I measure conversion?
6. How do I analyze and optimize?

=> What did I learn?

Why is this smoke test process so valuable? Because it enables you to let customer demand decide how to grow your business, rather opinions and guesstimates.

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Smoke testing the smoke test course

One of the things I like the most about DistroDoms course is actually that he at the end of the course reveals how this free course is a smoke test for a paid course he’s launching on the same topic.

DistroDom’s hypothesis was:

1. Hypothesis: If I give free content, people will like it enough and buy the course if they need more advanced courses from deep-dive experts.
2. Minimum proof: If 15% of the people who see the landing page sign up for the free course, and there’s at least 100 signups for free.
3. Do it with no coding: For this free course, no coding was required, but it would take DistroDom about 1 week to record all these videos for the free course before getting minimum proof.
   He set the landing page up using InstaPage and Canva to design some of the creative assets on that landing page. He also used emojis from EmojiOne.
   All the signups went into Autopilot using a simple 1-click integration for InstaPage. (He said it’s one of his favorite email automation tools, very low priced compared to comparable alternatives. Plans start at $20/month! He did a video screenshare of the Autopilot interface, and it looks really awesome. I might finally get rid of that old Aweber account I still pay for and move things over…)
4. Right traffic: DistroDom didn’t have time to implement a referral program. So instead he sent people directly to the paid program landing page to see if anyone would buy. Some people did!
   When people sign up for the free course, he’s running their emails through ClearBit to get some context around who it is that’s signed up.
   In terms of getting early traction, he’s got a nice framework for how to get it:
   Network: Easy (low impact)
   Paid: Medium (medium impact)
   Community (blogs, forums, press, buzz, influencers…): Hard (high impact)
5. Measure conversion: Since this was just an email signup form, it was super easy. Number of visitors & number of signups.
6. Analyze & optimize: DistroDom hasn’t done that yet, since this is so early in the process.

With every growth experiment, there’s 3 phases:

1. Smoke test it
2. Get distribution
3. Keep or toss it

Random things:

• There are several useful templates in there that you can use to turn the theory into action.
• He uses Jeff Bezos’ / Amazon’s press-release method to “announce” new ideas.
• He often feeds data into these three tools to use them in different ways:
  Zapier
  Clearbit
  Stamplay – This is one I haven’t heard of before. It’s a visual API builder, and according to DistroDom “the most robust way to connect data”. Curious to try this out soon. They have a free plan, and then the paid plans range from $24/month to $499/month.

Here are the 20 things I learned from reading Hiten Shah’s new (free) book 5 Habits to Building Better Products Faster:

1. Figure out what your customers need, instead of what you think they need.
2. The early stages of product development aren’t at all about your constraints or your resources. They’re about focusing on what’s important: the customer.
3. Work backwards like Amazon. New initiatives start out by writing an internal press release. More details here. Take the example of the press release for Amazon AWS (now a $9.6 billion run rate business):
   
   Writing this took the current head of AWS, Andy Jassy, 31 drafts before he took this to Jeff Bezos
4. The jobs-to-be-done formula is:
   When_______, I want to _______, so I can ______.
   Check out what Intercom has written about the JTBD framework.
   Intercom’s example: When I talk to customers, I want to start conversations with the right customers at the right time, so I can get quality customer feedback.
   JTBD makes the customer the compass that drives the direction of your product development.
5. “Employee motivation should be aligned with happy customers” – Chris Savage, Wistia CEO
6. “Complex ideas are almost always a sign of muddled thinking or a made up problem.”—Sam Altman, Y Combinator
7. One of the most important habits for continuous learning and improvement: writing stuff down.
   Documentation is often more a medium of self-discipline than a way to communicate information. -> better quality thinking
   Documentation is a reusable asset, and one that accrues in value and in quantity over time

   But I'm wondering... isn't there such a thing as death by documentation? Documentation overload? Too much documentation, so that the workplace becomes a big swamp, where it's impossible to move fast because you gotta wade through all that documentation?

8. “The simple and familiar hold the secrets of the complex and unknown. The depth with which you master the basics influences how well you understand everything after that.” —Edward Burger and Michael Starbird, 5 Elements of Effective Thinking
   Start by thinking deeply about the basics, instead of everything that you’re hoping to achieve.
   Thinking deeply isn’t about increasing complexity. It’s about breaking problems down to their most basic form. Reduce the number of steps.
9. Tony Fadell, who led Apple’s iPod team, spent six weeks in stealth mode looking at the competition.
10. Otellini’s decision [to say no to Steve Jobs when asked to build a new processor for the first iPhone] was completely logical and also completely wrong.
    Without context and a larger vision for the future, data means nothing.
11. Summarize findings into a single sentence. This forces you to look away from the numbers, and into what they actually mean for your product.
12. Before you get started on an initiative, answer the following question: What would success look like?
13. 
14. Use data to constantly challenge your assumptions, to validate hypotheses, and to solve urgent problems.
15. The only advantage a startup has over larger companies is the ability to move quickly.
    Your competitive advantage comes from your ability to attack one problem at a time. Why?
16. Former HubSpot VP of Growth, Brian Balfour, gives a 4-step process for building focus:

    1. Identify one long-term meaningful goal: This might mean boosting the single metric we discussed in the last chapter. The alternative to focusing on one goal that matters is to spread yourself thin on short-term optimizations in order to hedge your bets.

    2. Distill the most important thing to make progress toward that goal. Say that tour goal is to increase inside sales revenue by 40%. Using data has shown you that users integrating other services increases free trial conversions by 3x. You could then focus on getting these trial users on a call with a sales rep.

    3. Create a timeline for making progress long enough to gather data. All product initiatives need to have a clear goal, a measuring stick for what success looks like, and enough time to measure. For small teams, this should range from 30-60 days. Sticking to a timeline ensures that you don’t sink too many resources into a product goal that you can’t achieve. It allows you to move on and focus on the next thing.

    4. Editing your longer-term goal according to data. The fourth step is why it’s so important to set a single measurable goal in the rst place. It’s what allows you to gure out what you’re doing right and wrong, and improve. Making mistakes is forgivable and inevitable in product, but failing to learn from them is wasteful. Startups operate under conditions of extreme uncertainty, and it’s tempting to

17. Focus + Sequence = Speed
18. Project management spreadsheet Hiten loves: click here
19. A small improvement to a high-impact feature is far more important than a large improvement to a low-impact feature.
20. Every day, ask yourself one question: “Am I working on the right thing, right now?”

I’d highly recommend you get yourself a free copy of the book and study it. Plus, you can even get a free consultation from him, which is freaking insane.