Growth depends on targeting your users at the right time, in the right way, with the right words. You need to figure out who uses you to write effective messaging, know what channels to test, and what triggers you may want to hook into.

To understand users, we recommend running user interviews. When done well, user interviews are ripe with learnings that lead to fruitful experiments.

Some of our clients fill out persona slides after interviews:

These persona slides aren’t traditional personas. Traditional personas focus too much on demographics like job titles and company sizes. We focus on things like budget, active company initiatives, and buying triggers — to give you more useful information one how to target and write to your best users.

Writing out your buyer’s journey — the steps that lead users to buy your product — forces you to think about exactly which boxes they have to check before they purchase.

A buyer’s journey determines things like messaging, how you handle objections, and at a high-level, what experiments you’ll need to run to make sure people buy/use your product.

Here’s an example:

Figuring out why people use you helps you target more of them. It also teaches you how to write to them.

Founders aren’t often sure exactly why users use them — other than a vague sense that their product is useful.

This is why we recommend filling out a value props sheet (as informed by user interviews). Do the mental work to get these out of your head.

People use your product when they hit problems with “bad alternatives” (more here). The implications of those problems are very painful to deal with. You pitch features to solve those problems so your user benefits.

We use these details to brainstorm acquisition channels and copy ideas.

A growth team’s job is to get more people to experience the value of your product (which gets them to continue using it).

How do you know if more people are experiencing the value?

You measure the North Star Metric. We’ll know our growth experiments work if the NSM goes up.

Examples:

Bad Examples

We have serious horror stories about teams picking the wrong NSM. Choose wisely.

If your startup has a longer sales cycle, it may take a longer time to determine whether your growth experiments are affecting the NSM. In those cases, we recommend teams choose an input metric, such as meetings booked or SQLs, to focus on.

You can read more about growth loops in our intro docs here, but to summarize, growth loops are when you take an output of your product and repurpose it as an input acquisition channel (where people put their attention).

Examples

Based on your user interviews, you may think of a growth loop to monitor, but growth loops aren’t always obvious. It sometimes takes researching & experimenting before you find it.

To make sure your experiments work, you need to track what’s happening when you run them.

We recommend clients measure every major step of their funnel, along with CAC.

For example:

It should look something like this. Here's a template you can copy.

This usually starts in a spreadsheet, but you’ll eventually move to a data tool like Improvado, Databox or Google Data Studio so you don’t have to manually update it every week.

The other benefit of a sheet like this is that you can debug marketing problems. For example, we’ve had clients who saw unusual dropoff between their landing page and checkout page, and then narrowed the problem to their mobile site being broken.

We like to run low-hanging-fruit experiments as fast as possible before adding tons of process.

We recommend starting a document with these easy experiment ideas. This can live in a Notion doc or even your notes app.

As a part of this document, there should be a metric that determines whether the experiment succeeded or failed — so you can build on its learnings. Otherwise, you’ll be spinning your wheels.

After a couple of weeks, when you have more experiments to run, we recommend you create a backlog (see template here) to help you prioritize.

It’s vital you run experiments effectively.

If you don’t run experiments well, you won’t build on useful learnings.

How do you know if you ran an experiment poorly or if the experiment actually failed?

We’ve seen too many startups half ass experiments. This means you waste weeks of time time and tens of thousands of dollars — with no learnings to show for it.

This is one of the main reasons we built Got Users. We have docs that cover every major experiment from running social ads to writing cold emails. We give detailed feedback so you only ship experiments that pass a very high quality bar.

Every week, before your growth call, you’ll send us a Slack message that includes the following:

The message should look something like this:

Our growth calls follow a loose structure, but we adapt the call to whatever you’re struggling with or need the most help with in a given week.

This is the rough structure we’ll follow: