By Dan Peron, growth designer. Follow me on Twitter for more @danperyo
You are a startup founder, you should already know this.
If startups are companies designed to grow fast, growth design and designing a company to grow fast should be the #1 priority of any startup founder like you.
From day #1.
Yet 90% of startups fail mostly because they don’t do it.
They enthusiastically start out by building a product, thinking that growth is a problem that can and will be solved later. Their launching day finally arrives… and nobody seems to notice. Days and weeks go by without getting any significant traction. Reality hits them in the guts as they realize they have a growth problem to solve.
They failed at designing for growth.
Have you already made this mistake?
You have built a product that some people need, you’ve validated it and you’re positive the demand it’s there.
But you’ve failed at attracting them, turning them into users and clients; you’ve failed at keeping them around and becoming a regular stop in the flow of their daily life.
Get your priorities straight
Let’s get straight to the point: you are not merely designing and building exceptional products. That’s not the business you are in.
You are building products that grow by attracting users and customers, stealing them from your present competitors, keeping and guarding them from your future competitors.
As a founder, you will not be rewarded for the quality of the products you’ll build but for the growth you’ll be able to attain.
So, how do you exactly do that?
It’s your lucky day. I’m going to give you a framework you can use to design exceptionally products that will get traction if you are exceptional at it.
It’s an art. I can teach you how to draw, but I can’t turn you into Leonardo da Vince or Vincent Van Gogh.
Answer thoughtfully to the following questions.
From the quality of your answers will depend the growth potential of your startup.
It will help you choose what market to enter, what opportunity to capitalize on and how to develop and build a product designed to attract new potential users and turn them into regulars that will bring in more users that will bring more users that will bring more users…
Remember: you are not just building a product.
You are choosing a market first, based on your ability to innovate and design a product for those customers who won’t be able to resist the massive more value you’ll be providing them over what the current competition has accustomed them to.
Only then you are building a product tailored to those customers.
1. What’s the opportunity you are leveraging?
Analyze the market you want to enter, know as much as possible about the different type of its users and customers: what problems they have, how and what they are buying to solve and from whom. You are looking for an opportunity, a market with weak competitors with old, badly designed, inefficient solutions you can innovate with your own new ones: how can you serve those customers immensely better than the current competition with the product you are about to build?
What bold promise can you make them nobody else has the skills, the guts and the vision to even conceive?
You are going to need a great innovation to stand out. You’ll need to provide massive, unprecedented value customers have never heard of and won’t wait to try.
2. What’s your competitive advantage?
When you find a way to provide so much more value to the customers make sure it’s not just “more of this, less of that” and a marginal improvement. It must be so good that the pain and hassle of changing for your customers is a fair and reasonable price to pay for the greater experience of a better product.
People don’t like to change their habits and the competition works to keep them theirs. Your product will have to be so much better.
3. What are you going to tell your potential users and customer to get their attention and to get them to try your product?
We live in a crowded, noisy world of people trying to get their attention: your product must be different enough to spark their interest. It must something unique that only you can provide. You should be able to communicate its ground-breaking benefits in a catchy, short statement that clearly tells potential customers the greater value it provides. When people will read or hear about it, they’ll get excited about the potential of your promise and even if they are skeptical, they’ll need to try it, to see if it’s just hype or there’s actual value in it.
4. How do you provide them the promised benefits they can’t elsewhere?
Design an onboarding process that delivers ASAP the massive value you have promised in your marketing. It should be simple and straightforward and easy for the user to get from point A (I want what you promised, show me the goods) to point B (I got what you promised, you are the real deal).
The more painful it is to get through, feeling like “work” and frustrating the user and the longer and unclear the onboarding, the more the chances you’ll lose them along the process.
If they never get to experience your magic™, they don’t become your users and will leave frustrated thinking your product sucks.
5. What will you have them do on-site to stay and interact as long as possible?
Have them invest as much as possible in the product: the more time they spend on the site, playing around with it, the more information and data the put in, the more likely they’ll remember about it afterwards and will come back for more.
The goal is to own the natural response of a trigger: I need this, your product is my first thought/choice/mean to get what I need. Google owns the “I need to find something” trigger. Linkedin owns the “I need a online resume and connect with other professionals” kind of trigger. Youtube owns the “I want to watch a video” one.
What trigger will you own?
6. Why should they share your app with others?
Incentivize the sharing of your product with other people by making it easy, convenient and rewarding for them to share about the product on social media or refer and bring more users to your site.
7. Why should they come back over and over again?
Engineer the creation of a new habit involving the use of your product instead of another: if it’s a daily need they have, find a reason why they should get on app daily.
This is the growth design framework at the high level.
If you want to get into the details and see how it’s being applied by others and myself, follow me on Twitter for more @danperyo