Growth is not marketing

If you're building an app and growth feels stuck, your first instinct is probably more marketing. More posts. More ads. A bigger launch.

Sean Ellis would tell you to look somewhere else first. He led early growth at Dropbox and LogMeIn, and he's the person who coined the term "growth hacking". He recently wrote Why Systems Thinking Matters for Startup Growth, and it's the clearest explanation I've read of what growth actually is.

This guide walks through his argument and how to use it on your own app.

Growth is a system, not a department

Ellis writes that when he talks about growth, "people often assume I mean marketing."

He means something much bigger. Growth is every step between a stranger hearing about your product and that person bringing in the next stranger. These are the questions he asks about any product:

• How do people discover it?
• What promise brings them in?
• When do they first feel the value?
• What keeps them coming back?
• What makes them bring in other people?
• How does each of those feed the others?

Marketing answers the first two. Everything after that happens inside your product.

So growth is not marketing. Growth is a good product. Growth is people coming back. Growth is people sharing it. Marketing is one part of a bigger picture.

Small builders can see the whole thing

Ellis points out that early startups have an advantage here. At a big company, each of those questions belongs to a different team. Each team gets very good at its own piece, and almost nobody can see how the pieces fit.

You can. If you're building alone or with one other person, you write the post, design the first screen and read the reviews. Nobody is better placed to see where the whole thing breaks.

Start with a guess

Ellis doesn't begin by digging through data. He says that gets overwhelming fast. He starts with a rough guess about how the product grows, then updates it as the numbers and user conversations come in.

He likes it when the data contradicts him. It means he found something he didn't expect, and the picture just got more accurate.

You can do the same in ten minutes. Write down how you think people find your app, what makes it click for them, and why they'd come back. It doesn't have to be right. It only has to give the facts somewhere to land.

First, someone has to need it

Before anything else, Ellis checks whether the product is a must-have for someone. Who would be upset if it disappeared, and what exactly do they value?

Everything else is built on that. If nobody needs the app, better marketing brings in more people who also don't need it.

The gap that holds most apps back

This is the part of the article I'd pin to the wall.

In most companies, marketing brings people to the door, and the product team improves things for the users who are already inside. Nobody owns the stretch in between: getting a new person from the promise to the moment the product actually delivers on it.

Ellis says that stretch, activation, is usually the biggest thing holding growth back, because every other step depends on it:

• Referrals depend on it. People who never got the value have nothing to recommend.
• Marketing depends on it. Every post and every ad dollar sends people into a product where most of them leave before it clicks.

His example is LogMeIn. Activation went from about 5% to 50% in three months. That is what let their paid campaigns scale, and word of mouth picked up with it. The fix was in the product, and the marketing got better as a result.

I found the same thing on a much smaller scale. Prospect Ping, my baseball alerts app, has over 2,500 users, and I've never paid for one. I assumed the next step was more traffic. Then I checked: close to one in five people had never followed a single player. The app sends alerts about the players you follow, so those people installed it and got nothing. More marketing was never going to fix that.

Turn it into a loop

Ellis's system is what the growth map on this site is built from. I think of it as five steps in a circle:

1. Find. How people discover your app, and the promise that brings them in.
2. Get started. Whether they reach the moment it clicks.
3. Come back. Whether it becomes a habit.
4. Share. Whether your users bring in the next users.
5. Pay. Whether it earns enough to put money back into growing it.

The fifth one is my addition. Ellis's article stays on the first four, but for an app builder with no budget, revenue is what pays for everything else.

Each step feeds the next one. And you grow at the speed of your worst one.

Find your weakest step

Ellis works backwards. He imagines the company's main number growing ten times in a couple of months, then asks where that jump would most likely have come from. More people arriving? More of them reaching the value? More of them referring? Then he checks it: if this one step doubled, what would happen to everything after it?

For a small app, four numbers get you most of the way:

1. Of the people who install, what percent do the one thing your app is for?
2. How many are back the next week?
3. How many have invited or told someone?
4. How many pay?

Fix the lowest one first. Then run one small experiment at a time and write down what you learned. Ellis describes this as swapping your to-do list for a to-learn list.

What this doesn't mean

It doesn't mean marketing is optional. If nobody finds your app, you can't test any of the other steps.

It's about order. Before you spend another month on content, make sure the people you already reach are getting what you promised them. Ellis ends on the same point: working on the system beats one-off campaigns that ignore what's actually holding it back.

His article is written for startups with teams, so skip the parts about alignment meetings. The way of thinking works just as well for one person and one app.