Luke Thomas on ineffective growth tactics
From Luke's interview about Friday on Query:
What growth tactics have turned out to be ineffective for you?
I spent a little time on paid acquisition before the product was sticky and it was a massive waste of time and money. Throwing money at a retention problem never works. It’s like pouring water into a leaky bucket.
Another problem I experienced was not staying focused. It’s easy to want to build new features in the hopes that suddenly people will want to use the product. That is rarely true (it wasn’t for me). Spend all your time focusing on the core product loop instead (a repeatable behavior in your product) and build out from there.
It’s a better use of your limited time and dollars.
Agreed totally with both points. Interestingly, I think a good content strategy can help with both problems.
Getting your foot in the door with a simple, core product can help limit your content strategy (a simple product solves fewer problems better, so you can create content around fewer problems), and helps create semantic relevance around that single topic.
Content can also help with retention -- you can show use cases, case studies, examples, etc. to your current customers to drive engagement. Much of that content can be used in the sales and onboarding process, as well.
Paid search is awesome for acquisition if you know your CAC and LTV targets, but if the acquisition team doesn't have the right / real numbers, it can get ugly fast and be akin to setting your budget on fire.
This really hits home. I just made another post about me having trouble focusing on what's next for my app, when it's now obvious I should focus on the core product loop.
Yeah, Luke knows what he’s doing. I thought it was interesting that when I asked him about growth he talked about building and not just a bunch of “hacks.” I need to learn too that the core product loop is the foundation and that I can’t get distracted by less important stuff.