To be used by Got Users clients & community.

At a high level, you need to understand your customer and value props before you jump into brainstorming growth experiments.

Otherwise, you risk running the wrong experiments and drawing the wrong conclusions.

Here’s the high-level growth process we recommend.

Phase 1: Set North Star Metric (NSM)

The goal of growth is to get more people to experience the value of your product.

Growth strategy means coming up with experiments that help people ”do the thing” — experience that value — more.

To know if an experiment worked, a metric should improve. That metric should flow into your North Star Metric: the measurement of when people “do the thing”.

Examples

• Rides completed per week (Uber)
• Monthly active users (Facebook)
• Documents sent per month (DocuSign)
• Daily active users (Slack)

Bad Examples

• Signups. What if people don't actually take a ride, order food, etc.?
• Revenue. Revenue happens because of your NSM.

Phase 2: Clarify User Personas

Growth depends on users. Products don’t grow if people don’t use them.

So, to come up with a growth strategy, you first have to understand your ideal user, how you solve their problems, and how they hear about you. Then, you can prioritize experiments to get more of these people.

Who are your ideal users? They’re the ones that retain — they experience your core value over and over.

This means you need to answer the question: who is doing your NSM the most?

For example, if your NSM is # of monthly events thrown:

1. Pull a list of the people who throw events the most.
2. Interview them. Paint a picture of who they are and how they ended up using you.
3. After your interviews, fill out this value props sheet and these persona slides:

• Here are some specific questions you can ask in interviews