There are 3-5 key things that the best products out there do to acquire users. Join my talk and we'll discuss some role models, what they do right, and how you can apply the same principles to your product.
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Matt Bilotti:
All right. Hello, and welcome to "How to build Products that acquires users." I'm really excited to be here today presenting to you, and we're going to go ahead and just jump right on in. So I'm Matt Bilotti, I am a Staff Product Manager at a company called Drift over in Boston, and I've helped build and launch a lot of different products. And I've seen some work very well, and I've seen a bunch of others fail pretty miserably, and I'm also a big fan of product led growth in general. So we at drift talk a lot about role models here. So I'm going to talk to you about some of our role models that do a really good job building products that acquire users. So couple things that we're going to cover today, as I mentioned, we're going to go through examples of great role models for this, and then we're going to talk about the strategies that they get right, and how you can apply those principles too.
Matt Bilotti:
So, I'm going to go strategy by strategy. Here are the five core ones, and then talk about one or two, I think it's two actually in all cases, two a core role models for that strategy, the people that nailed that really well. I'm going to talk about why they do a good job, have a couple of screenshots and visuals around that, and then go on to the next one. And then at the end, we're going to wrap it up with a couple of additional tips that don't necessarily cover it in those five core strategies and then wrap up from there. All right. So role models, here are the core products that we're going to talk about during this conversation. Dropbox is an obvious one. I think Google Analytics is one that people kind of don't think about as often. They have a couple of really fascinating strategies. Superhuman, the cool new product that I think does an unbelievable job building around acquisition Notion, Zoom and Evernote.
Matt Bilotti:
I've never actually used Notion either, but all I hear is amazing things and they have some really cool systems to acquire users. So market alignment, this I think is the most important thing. Nothing matters at all. If your product acquisition strategy and the way that you think about product led growth, doesn't align around your market. If you are in enterprise level product, the types of things that a consumer app is going to do like an Instagram or Snapchat or whatever, it might be, those tools and the strategies that they take to build a product aren't quite going to work for you. So just at a really high baseline, a consumer app sometimes does an amazing job acquiring users because it's just so well done. Everything's perfectly polished. It's such a cool experience that everyone tells their friends about it. It's not quite how it would work in the enterprise space if you're trying to build something that acquires users there.
Matt Bilotti:
So some of the market alignment. So you got to think about which group, all the product strategy is going to go around it. And as examples, Viral Loops work for consumer, but not so much for enterprise, and the two examples that we have here are Superhuman and Dropbox. So Superhuman, I think is one of the most spectacular versions of this. They will even actively say as a company that they are only going after a very specific group of people right now and they show that to you in the way that... If anyone has gone through signing up for Superhuman, it's tough to get access. You have to answer a bunch of these surveys of exactly what tools you use, how you think about email, and then in order to get set up on it, you get on a call with an onboarding specialist off of this $30 a month product.
Matt Bilotti:
But what they're doing is they're being very, very, very selective about the market that they're penetrating now so that they can grow into other markets later. So all of their systems are built around this one core group, which are these young tech cool products. Think about email as a productivity tool work to get to inbox zero. They're not trying to get the 50 year old business owner that they open up their phone and their email icon has 47,221 unread emails. I mean, maybe they are, maybe I'm misinterpreting where they're going about this, but it really seems like they're asking what devices you use, what browsers do you use. They're building it around that specific use case. Okay. And the other is Dropbox and they have two very, very separate core funnels. One for enterprise that has its own product lead levers, which you can see here on the top.
Matt Bilotti:
They're saying, "Try it free for 30 days or purchase now." And the core dropbox.com has a very simple, straightforward way to get signed up and get started because that system is built all around virality and just getting people in the door and using the product. Whereas Dropbox businesses is much more focused and aligned around going from one user to many users at a company, whereas the core Dropbox tool, while it has notions of that for their virality, they also care about going from one company to another company. All right, great acquisition flows. This is important and we kind of just saw with the Dropbox example. Getting somebody to show up or click a link isn't enough. If your tool is going to acquire people, it has to think about the acquisition from the website part all the way through. And I'll talk about that in a minute.
Matt Bilotti:
So you have to stay aligned with the marketing team. This is something that we do at Drift all the time, is the growth team and the product team. If we own acquisition for a certain part of the product or certain product line we own, or co-own certain parts of the website with the marketing team, because the acquisition flow and the product experience has to start at the top of the funnel with the website and then they'd go into the product and go from there. So it also needs to be contextual to the source. I think this one is really critical. So here's a good example of Dropbox. The experience starts before you even get into the product where someone is sharing with you. This is one of their viral aspects of the product and you get this really nice email.
Matt Bilotti:
And then the signup flow is again, very, very specific to the thing that you are there for. "Matt Bilotti wants to share this file with you, click here to sign up, to access it." So it's all contextual and the product is built around getting you to that core use case. Here's an example of something that we did at Drift was... Drift is a conversational marketing platform and so it has a little chat bot by Drift on the chat widgets or chatbots that customers install on their websites. And so if you click on that from marketo.com, it says, "Hey, want the experience that you just saw from marketo.com, right?" And this is one of our best performing versions of this page, because it is so contextual to where someone was coming from.
Matt Bilotti:
All right. The third, Viral Loops. It doesn't work on all products, which you probably know, but it's really, really critical to leverage if you need to. And here's some good examples. You have to think about how the Viral Loop aligns with the core product value because there are ways to think about this that will just drive tons and tons of users. We've fallen into this trap before where we made the Viral Loops so slippery and so easy to fall into that we get all these people to sign up, but then they're not... those flows either aren't optimized to get those people to value, or those people weren't necessarily a good fit in the first place. They just signed up because it just seemed like the thing that they should do when they're going through the flow. It's funny because we've all gotten really good at building these signup flows and acquisition systems that if it's not built specifically to get someone to the value point, or if it's way too easy to get through, then people can get there. And then they're never going to use the product anyway.
Matt Bilotti:
So you have to think about how the Viral Loop specifically aligns with the product value. One is inherent virality versus forced. Forced would be something like... I saw a, I'm not going to call them out by name, I saw a more enterprise type product have a "refer a friend" feature prominent in the dashboard of their web app. And while that's cool, it's weirdly out of context and doesn't quite fit with the product. Something like Zoom, you have to share the video or you have to share the link with somebody for them to get to the video. There's inherent virality to that. And same thing with Drift, we just launched a video product. Video is unsurprisingly viral. We just launched a video product where you record a video and you send it to someone. It's inherently viral because then if they want to send you that back, they send you a video back they also go ahead and sign up.
Matt Bilotti:
It's also really important to leverage the moments where a non-user would see or interact with your product. So virality is a critically... What am I trying to say here? It is accomplished best when you think about how it aligns with the value. If we were to just brand everything and everywhere, I see a lot of companies all across the internet brand their thing everywhere. It only matters when it matters. What I mean by that is Superhuman, for example, they at the bottom of any email that you send via Superhuman says, "Email sent via superhuman." It's contextual to that part of the product and the value that the thing is offering. So I'm not sure I have a perfect example there, but hopefully you get what I'm saying.
Matt Bilotti:
And here's a couple examples. So with Zoom, you copy and share the link. With Drift we have this Viral Loop at the bottom of the product. All right, this one is, I feel like generally overlooked. There are certain products that align really, really well with certain acquisition channels. And if you could find the right channel for your product, and then you build your product around that channel, you can have a really, really great opportunity to get tons and tons of downloads, installs, signups, whatever it might be. So let's talk through what I mean by that. So some of these could be distribution channels, like your typical ones, like the App store or the Chrome web store, any type of store. You could have a communication system like email, I just mentioned with Superhuman messaging, maybe something over like a keyboard on a messaging tool or something like that.
Matt Bilotti:
Developer tools is an underrated thing here. If you can get distribution through something like Zapier or having really, really great APIs, that is a good thing to leverage. Additionally, there are other platforms and ecosystems such as Slack and Salesforce. You build an app on top of it. It's different than an app store or web store where you build an app and someone takes the app and uses the app. This is more to say, you can build on top of another system. And if you become the best in class tool on that system, then you inherently have built it so that it is going to acquire more and more users because then it winds up at the top of that app community or plug in tools or whatever it might be. WordPress is another great example. You build it into their platform and then you can get, I mean, there are apps that are getting tens of thousands of downloads a day or plugins rather from the App Store because they built it so well around that use case that it then gets highlighted by those systems.
Matt Bilotti:
This is the same thing that can happen with any of the distribution channels. You get featured, you get a spot on the homepage, you get spots at the top of certain categories. Those things really really matter. And if you're just building the app and you throw it into these places, you're never going to wind up at the top of those lists. And so if you build it specifically with the type of use case in mind. An app that works on top of Slack should work very... and all the workflows associated with it if you sign up from that place should work fundamentally differently than all the workflows that are in your mobile app or app store. It's a different permutation of your product and offering. So some examples that I didn't quite touch on.
Matt Bilotti:
So Evernote, I touched on. They are famously well-known for being one of the first apps in the App Store as it launched. And so not only is it important to think about the channel that you could get, it's also important to think about the channel that you can leverage that it's just starting to take off. All the people that were getting into podcasts really early on, I know this isn't quite product, but all the people that were getting into podcasts really early on, they now have these crazy libraries and they have huge leverage over other podcasts that are just launching today. So think about this from the perspective of, 'What is a channel that is currently nascent or brand new, or could have a lot of potential and how do we get something there and maybe double down on it, if it seems to be working well?" Which is something that Evernote did.
Matt Bilotti:
And then another example is just pure distribution and partnership channels. So as you may see across the internet, if you're ever building a website or setting up a new app, like an enterprise app or software or whatever it might be, something for your business. A lot of those tools have a spot where you just copy and paste your Google analytics account code, and so some of these, the companies, what's an example, maybe Squarespace. I don't know exactly how they set this up, but maybe Squarespace built that because the system already existed so well. Whereas other platforms built it in because Google went and built a partnership with that platform and said, "Hey, we made this really easy to use system. Could you set it up on your tool so that we show up right here and there?" We have tons of companies reaching out to Drift all the time saying, "Hey, how can we help you build an app? How can we build something into the product?" And if you can build into those types of products, that is another way to get pure acquisition from a product perspective.
Matt Bilotti:
And then this last one, which anyone who is a product lover, which I'm sure all of you are there listening. This one is kind of a given nothing beats something that's just that good. And some examples are Notion and Superhuman. Again, like I said, I've never even used Notion, but everyone just talks about how incredible it is, which makes me want to use it. I think there are some other tools like Airtable, for example, it's just such a well-built product that people talk about it. And so you get this word of mouth. So if you think about it, making something truly world-class that solves a problem, a little bit of a different way than everyone else out there, or in a better way. Superhuman email has been around forever, but somehow Superhuman's workflows just feel perfect. They so well thought through they're meticulously crafted. They get exactly to the core of what the person is trying to do.
Matt Bilotti:
I feel like most product organizations these days fill product in the sense of, "Oh, it's good enough. It'll help them get their thing done, go ahead and ship it and maybe we'll get back to it and make it better." That is a very, very different perspective and this is a philosophical one that you just need to have as a product leader or on your product team. Are you trying to get things out there or are you trying to build something that is just so perfect? And if you're trying to build something so perfect, you have to double down on that because it makes people notice.
Matt Bilotti:
So be the best, yep. And so Notion is one example. Superhuman, I think that that is just a spectacular product for so many reasons. So a couple of other things that I haven't touched on here, some additional tips, something that works today, isn't going to work forever. So it's important to think about as you're building your product, what are the channels that are working now? How can you build on those, but also continually look for other opportunities to go into other channels. Additionally, it is critical to measure these users as they go downstream.
Matt Bilotti:
So as they get further and further into the product, because you might be really good at building some Viral loop or some product acquisition strategy, referrals, whatever it might be that gets people to give you their email address and sign up in the first place. But if 99% of those aren't actually using the product, then are they really that valuable to you in the first place. Then you need to make a decision of, "Do we help those people get the value or is that channel just not working for us?" And that's always a fun crossroads to be at. I've been there, been there a couple of times. Play to your strengths. If your product organization is built around building a perfect well crafted product, then double down on that. If your product team is better at shipping these really fast, then just try building on top of a bunch of different platforms and see which ones work.
Matt Bilotti:
Yep, double down on what's working. And then when something is working well, it's important to then start to run experiments then start to AB test things. So when we think about, at Drift on the growth team, when we think about new acquisition systems like Viral Loops or whatever it might be, our approach is build in a bunch of them. Build three or four at once or over the course of a month or two. New systems to acquire users, put them out there, see which ones are working really well. And then you find the one that's working the best. And then you AB test on that until you stop getting big gains. And then you move on to the second best one, and then you AB test on that. Don't try to do everything at once and work on the funnel in the order that it makes sense for your business.
Matt Bilotti:
You have to think about, early on, we were super focused on just getting people to sign up. And then we were focused on getting people to activate and acquire, but you might want to think about it differently in the context of your business, which is important to know which one you're building for, because that drives the way that your product team is going to think about this and the way that you're going to build systems to acquire users if you're trying to focus on just immediate retention for it. Superhuman is focused on activation and retention whereas what's another example of a tool. I don't know, there are other tools.
Matt Bilotti:
A newer app might just be focused on getting signups in the first place to prove that they can get that flywheel going and then they help make those people successful over time. So just think about it in the context of your own business. So quick refresh, find your role models. These are some of ours, but you might have different ones in different contexts that work really well for you. So just think about it like that. And then the core strategies are market alignment channels that were great, acquisition flows, Viral Loops and remarkable products. And it's important to get aligned with your team on which ones of which of these you're trying to focus on, because the reality is, and this is something that I just mentioned, don't try to do every single one of these at once.
Matt Bilotti:
Some of the best products out there that are built for product led growth and this sort of virality or acquisition funnels, they get three to four of these right. They crushed three or four of these. If you can crush them all, then you're some crazy unicorn product, but this is really, really hard to do. So find the ones that you're going to be able to build, double down on and go from there. And that's it. So again, my name is Matt. My Twitter handle has been down there the whole time. It'd be cool if you send me any thoughts, questions, feedback, whatever it might be. I'd be happy to hear it help talk or whatever it might be. So feel free to reach out. My email is mattbilotti@gmail.com, or if you want to reach me at Drift, it's just Matt at Drift.
Matt Bilotti:
And then within Drift, I host a Growth Podcast and I'm usually sitting in his room with this microphone. And this actually isn't me, by the way, it's just a sticker that looks so much like me, that I had to put it on my laptop. Anyway, I don't know why that was relevant. So go ahead and check out the podcast. I've had some really cool people like the head of Growth at Adobe and Facebook and a few other places next door, and we talked about some pretty cool stuff. So go ahead and tune in. If you have any other questions, anything at all, you know where to reach me. Thanks so much for tuning in and listening to this talk. All right. Good bye.
