Welcome to the 3rd edition of the GrowthXNewsletter. Every Tuesday & Thursday I write a piece on startups & business growth. Today’s piece is going to 95,300+ operators & leaders from startups like Google, Stripe, Swiggy, Razorpay, CRED & more
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If you are new, here’s what Growth Story is all about.
Every week I pick a tech product, spend time using it, talk to it’s customers, understand how are they growing today & recommend 3 bets that will help them grow faster, cheaper & profitable. I am doing this to sharpen my own approach. Outcome on the newsletter and everything is a big bonus :)
Let’s get started 🚀
Product of the week | mmhmm
mmhmm helps you create phenomenal video instantly. It’s live (say on a zoom call) & it can be recored (like loom but much better).
Here’s Phil Libin (Cofounder @ mmhmm) explaining how mmhmm works 👇🏻 The best product explainer video I have seen after the Dollar shave club ad.
Some back story
mmhmm started during Covid & has raised a total $140 million in venture & angel funding. This is astounding amount for something that sits on top of existing tools such as Zoom, WebEx, Microsoft Teams & Google meet etc.
Observations
Considering the product is in early growth stages (they launched 18 months ago), I spoke to a bunch of ideal users for the product, showed them the product, asked them few questions.
The ideal customer is a professional who typically has to do a lot of presentations. Think sales folks pitching to sell software or founders trying to pitch their fundraising deck.
Too much cognitive load The mmhmm app looks like a full blown video editing app.
Website landing experience. It says “phenomenal videos, simply produced” on the very first fold.Users failed to understand what is the product. 57% of website visitors will spend time on first fold than rest of the website.
Cumbersome to handle zoom + mmhmm Users find it hard to manage their live conferencing software (say zoom) & mmhmm together. It’s a lot of work.
The Experiments
Post the user calls, pulling traffic & engagement data about the website, here are the three experiments that can help mmhmm get more paying customers.
#1 | Landing page experience
Help website visitors understand the product in the first go. Create a simple gif that explains what the product does under 10 seconds. Current version (1st fold of the website)
Proposed version (1st fold of the website)
Proposed experiments 1. Run an A/B experiment to see if the gif version makes more users signup for the trial. More trials → more paid subscribers (if trial to subscriber ratio remains consistent). 2. Run an experiment where there are two variations of the same landing pages for individual users & business owner.
#2 | Referral program
The problem There is no referral program that exists today. Atleast I couldn’t find it from the website.
The hypothesis This is a signalling product. It will make users stand out from others.
Proposed experiment Build a referral program right inside the product experience. 1. Incentivise users to bring a new user to the product. This incentive could be either extended premium subscriptions (currently it is only 14 day trials) or add on features (premium templates) 2. The way zoom grew had a lot to do with the zoom meeting entry and exit branding. Same way how intercom does chat bot branding. Think through how you can allow participants to know about mmhmm before, during & after the presentation.
#3 | Infrastructure as growth lever
The problem The current product requires a flagship system to run smoothly, such as Macbook M1. This has come up in every user call. Most users know about mmhmm but either not tried due to the lag or have stopped using after frustration.
Proposed experiment (s) Create a simple (lite version) of the main app. Only launch this for countries where most users will have a lower power systems.
That’s all on mmhmm. Enjoyed this issue? Discuss this issue in your company slack channels, your team will get better at solving growth problems, that’s my personal promise :)
Share this issue on your LinkedIn / Twitter & write your own take on how will you grow mmhmm. Tag me!
Top 3 thoughtful post(s) will get a 1 month supply of sleepy owl coffee
