3 Mistakes I made as a Growth Lead
- I hired a few specialists early on- For a VC backed startup, a healthy growth in user base is fundamental to attracting more capital and pumping that back into growth initiatives. While building the growth team, I found myself struggle with answers to questions such as- “Should I hire a digital marketing specialist?”, “Should I get on board a SEO specialist?” or “Should I look for smart, first principle problem solvers?” I have to confess that I made the mistake of hiring a few specialists early on. [The way to approach this problem is by understanding one’s confidence in the future. A startup in the first few years is generally trying to figure things out — prediction of how the future will pan out is pretty poor. There is more benefit in going ahead with a generalist when there is lesser foresight]
The first 6–9 months of a startup’s growth journey is spent on doing everything under the roof — performance marketing, SEO, referral, content marketing, building a community, etc. It is during this time that the team needs to lay down the various paths to take, bet on the ones that make sense, help validate the path that makes most sense by having the right metrics defined. This requires a person to start at the whiteboard, free himself/ herself from biases, learn from peers & competition, question everything, razor sharp focus on the objective, commit to a direction. This requires a generalist not a specialist.
Let me share with you a real example- Google does not allow crypto companies to run ads in India [Google and Facebook are the most important channels under performance marketing for most brands]. The specialist we hired had the following approach- “We can’t run ads on Google UAC because of policy violations. We might have to find other channels. Affiliates will get us frauds, Facebook may have policy violations. What do you suggest I do?” Now, a generalist responded to the same problem like this- “Google UAC is disapproving our ads. I read the disapproval emails they sent and I think the reason for disapproval is xyz. What we could do is run the following experiments….. we can test this for a week. Parallelly, let me try and connect with a Google SPOC to find solutions”.
Hire smart, first principle problem solvers early on, when you are in the phase of experimenting and finding answers.
2. When it comes to branding, go big or go home- I take pride in the fact that I lead Growth at a frugal startup, CoinSwitch. The way we look at performance marketing is- a) understand the user b) analyse where users spend most of their time c) pilot with small budgets on various marketing channels for a certain period of time d) analyse the pilot and decide whether to commit to the channel or not. Now, building a brand is a different ball game. I understand there are cheaper ways of building a brand such as
, who basically relied on great content to grow their user base (PS: I’m a big fan of Zerodha). But when it comes to paid branding- ATL activities (print, TV, radio) or say digital advertising on “hot” properties such as IPL (CoinSwitch partnered with Hotstar for IPL 2021), either go big or go home.In October, 2020 during IPL we wanted to advertise on HotStar and see if the live sports segment made sense for us. The rationale was- most men invest > most men watch IPL > higher attention > best forum to get crypto mainstream > great time to leverage all the fuss around crypto. We decided to invest about 15 Lacs (marketers would laugh at this) on a very targeted audience. The metric for success would be to see a bump in organic numbers. Nothing happened. Nothing. We spread too thin, we played too safe. We were right in wanting to experiment. We were wrong in going too small.
News around crypto getting banned in India started floating around the months of January, February and March 2021. The narrative started changing slowly on the positive end. We at CoinSwitch decided it was time to get crypto to mainstream and help make crypto conversations normal. April 2021, we showcased our ads on HotStar. We did a 360 degree campaigns- performance marketing, PR, leveraged all top news channels, influencer marketing, revamped content and kick started our YouTube channel. A significant large investment was made and the growth was just phenomenal. We say 5x bump in organic numbers, our customer acquisition costs on performance marketing channels improved by almost 25- 30% and most importantly people wanted to work with us!
Branding can’t be piloted. Pilot performance marketing activities to understand your user better. Eventually commit to a channel and go big.
3. I chose a wrong metric- When I joined CoinSwitch, we were growing at about 20,000 users a month. The target was to acquire 1 Million users in a matter of 4 months. Because of the steep acquisition curve, I was nervous about two things- a) how do we get this exponential growth b) even if we do end up getting this growth, how do I know these are the “right” users for us. Now, let’s focus on point 2, what is “right”? Right could be — users who invest on our platform, users who invest above a certain amount, users who invest frequently, first time investors, first time crypto investors. The way to arrive at the definition of “right” is to go back to the leadership team and define the following together-
a) Why do we exist?
b) What are we trying to solve?
c) Who are we building for?
d) What do user think, feel and do and how do you want that to change?
e) Who is the competition and how do we differentiate?
f) Company’s short, medium and long term objectives
Having a deep understanding of the above will help in crafting the definition of “right” users. Note: the definition changes with time depending upon the objective of the company.
At CoinSwitch, the Growth team’s goals was to get to 1 Mn registered users by December. First two months were spent on experimenting on different paid channels, understanding how much could each channel scale to, what targeting was working for us, what messaging was working wonders and why. Inspite of challenges around Google & Facebook policies around running crypto ads, we were growing really fast. We were spending money and bringing in users at one third the CAC of other startups in the investing space (our product is beautiful). However I started focusing on customer lifetime value. Customer lifetime value basically means profit you can earn from a customer until he/she leaves your product. There were two implications of choosing LTV as a metric early on- a) incorrect optimisation based on LTV when we were in experimenting and learning phase and b) constant dilemma of chasing LTV or scale. While LTV is a rich metric, there is a right time to use it to make effective decisions. Too early or too late may create more problems.
I’m sure I have made a lot of mistakes. Mistakes like these have helped me grow, learn and get better. I’m curious about what are some of the mistakes you made in your roles? How do you reflect upon them and what is your mechanism of learning?