Atlassian CMO Paul Willard presents some of his growth hacking philosophy to the San Francisco Agile Marketing Meetup in November, 2012.

2. Distribution via
Continuous Improvement
Feedback Loops
Growth Hacking for the Agile Marketing Meetup
Paul Willard, Atlassian CMO • 11/27/2012

3. Me
• Boeing Engineer
• 7 years writing code
• Learned Japanese
manufacturing concepts Marketing Growth Development
Hacking
• Product Management
• Customer acquisition products
• A/B testing

4. Distribution
• Startups need technology,
product, and distribution
• Many fail on distribution
• Myth:
If you build it, they will come
• Fact:
The best distribution won

5. Unicorns & Viral Supernovas
• Most products do not have
a target market of everyone
• Nuclear chain reactions &
explosive virality are difficult to
achieve without concentration
• Virality should not be THE plan

6. Learn to Fail
• Most ideas will not work
• Don’t invest too much in
any one idea – no epic fails
• Planned failure - fast, cheap

7. Change – The Only Constant
Birth and death timeline instead?
• New media, channels, and platforms
come and go quickly
• Social, mobile, tablet, Pinterest, Groupon
• AOL, Yahoo, MySpace, Display, Palm Pre,
BlackBerry, Meebo, hotmail, del.icio.us . . .
• Tech know how and flexibility needed
to apply new sources, data, API’s

8. The Only Charts You Need
Acquisition Exponential Cohort Curves
Lifetime Value ($)
Customers
Month Months as Customer

9. The Growth Machine
• Test quick, cheap, and dirty
• Released vs polished
• Front end flexibility
• Standardize reporting
• Measure LTV
• Conversion is not good enough
• Model it from twitchy data

10. Feedback Loops
• Acquisition exponential
• Eyeballs
• Conversion Funnel
• Never stop what is working,
be incremental & relentless

11. Kanban Team
• Prioritize releasing
• Cadence - 2 / person week
• Drop things that don’t work
• Put more into things that do
• 2 Backlogs
• New eyeballs to product
• Conversion A/B testing

12. How much should I spend?
• 12 month break even Allowable
• Conservative
Lifetime Value ($)
• Estimating is ok
• Virality
• Model LTV for each channel or
even campaign
Months as Customer

13. A/B Testing - A Practical Guide
• Hypothesis Testing Equation
• Myth: A vs B, best one wins
• Reality: Look at distribution,
segmentation, learn about the
market, and dream up C
• Conversion = Desire - Friction

14. Desire
• Behavioral design: Read
Cialdini, Dan Ariely, Nir Ayal
• Examples
• Headlines
• An authentic solution
• Ask customer what they want

15. Friction
• UX testing useful for friction
• Minimize ambiguity through
good design
• Speed
• Call to action - placement,
color, shape
• Grouping, contrast, IA

16. Product as Designer Drug
• Get your market hooked
• Their fix = problem solved
• Eliminate all friction
• Test conversion to “fix”
• Qualitative methods

17. Cohorts
• Do not A/B test your core Test impact on LTV
repeat usage product
• UX testing to show problems
Lifetime Value ($)
• Offer beta - to a subpop
• Test newsletters, cross-sell/up-
sell messaging, tutorials, first
time user flows, etc
• Find twitchy measures of Months as Customer
success