Drift

The end to end customer experience has become a priority for both customer acquisition and retention. There have been significant trends as of late highlighting the importance of establishing an official community as part of the growth strategy. Matt sits down with Emily Lonetto, Head of Growth at Voiceflow, to discuss how this collection of power users of a product can be your company’s greatest asset. They address creating a space for these deeply integrated customers to communicate with each other, the difference between community and word of mouth, and successful ambassador programs. You will finish this episode inspired to give more attention to your community goals, target the demographic of people who are obsessed with a product, and invest in experimenting within your community.

Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Matt and Emily on Twitter @MattBilotti @EmilyLonetto @HYPERGROWTH_pod

Leveraging Community As An Accelerator For Growth

Traditionally startups will establish their product market fit and then focus on rolling out a growth team. There are a lot of hurdles with this sequencing, specifically when companies don't invest in growth until after becoming a more established organization and are growing quickly. Matt and Hila Qu, VP of Growth at Acorns, discuss their experiences with being the first growth person at a company. They talk through how to confirm alignment to earn growth buy-in and trust from leadership, goals to set as a growth leader, and experimentation and levers to improve retention. You will gain a stronger sense of timelines for introducing growth at your organization and how reshaping existing teams to be holistic growth teams can accelerate your group to the next level.


Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Matt and Hila on Twitter @MattBilotti @HilaQu @HYPERGROWTH_pod

Establishing A Growth Team At A Company That's Never Had One

Historically, data-driven cultures are formed once the organization has built momentum. Now, companies are focusing on empowering their early selves to integrate metrics, set quota goals, and leverage user results from the start. Matt breaks down how and what it means to be a growth minded company out of the gate with Datacamp’s CRO, Weston Stearns. They talk hiring for data and for impact, the best tools to train your team to make data driven decisions, and design optimization parameters. You will be inspired to evaluate your organization on the basis of leveraging funnels and experimentation, annualized total lifetime value, and decentralized teams as part of a growth toolkit.

Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Matt and Weston on Twitter @MattBilotti @WestonStearns @HYPERGROWTH_pod

What Is A Growth Culture & How Do You Build One?

SEO has continually proven to be both a significant opportunity and challenge for start-ups and larger organizations across industries. Matt sits down with Drift’s very own Bill King to learn more about SEO in a variety of contexts. They dig into search optimization and growth — how to innovate across an abundance of search platforms, work cross functionally to support strategic initiatives, understand traffic patterns and consumer behaviors, and understand the complicated system of algorithms that rank your sites. You will walk away feeling empowered and ready to devise creative solutions that work well for you and your team.

Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Matt and Bill on Twitter @MattBilotti @inboundy @HYPERGROWTH_pod

What Role Does SEO Play In Growth & Why Is It Important?

Scaling internationally is a common vision for any sized software organization. When and how to go global is not always as clear of a path. Join Matt in a discussion with Joe Wilkinson (Lucidchart's Director of Growth) where they discuss exploring target markets and metrics, localization, the competition, reacting to unpredictable outcomes, and solving for the unknowns.

Going Global: When & How To Do It Successfully

Most growth conversations out there are focused on software...but what about retail? In this conversation, Matt chats with Lauryn Isford (currently on Facebook's Internet.org growth team) who spent some time at Blue Bottle Coffee when they took on spinning up an e-commerce presence. They talk all about how Blue Bottle Coffee approached this expansion opportunity, measured, made decisions, and doubled down on growth levers along the way. Tune in to hear what lessons Lauryn picked up from that experience and what her views are around the future of the retail > e-commerce space.

Here's How A Beloved Local Brand Successfully Applied Growth Principles To Retail

Growth and product design – are they really all that different? Turns out, it’s not a yes or no answer, so Matt sits down with someone who straddles both worlds. Amanda Yee is a product designer AND growth designer at Drift, and in this episode, she talks about the challenges of designing for products with roadmaps vs. designing for experiments, how working on the growth team has helped her get better at analyzing quantitative data, and the process she uses to uncover new features and identify new opportunities.

How Is Growth Design Different From Product Design?

What seems like a negative customer behavior for your business can be flipped on its head and turned into a new opportunity. This happened to the team at NationBuilder and they built a brilliant new use case around it. In this episode of Growth, Matt talks to Annie Mosbacher (VP of Customer Success & Growth Marketing) and Jason Meer (Director of Product) to see how they turned this challenge into a big opportunity for NationBuilder. Find out how Annie and Jason worked together to roll out a new use case that helped NationBuilder decrease churn and increase upsell and reactivation potential.

Building a New Use Case to Unlock a Growth Lever

Understanding the core psychological drivers behind the humans using your product can supercharge your growth. And you’re definitely leaving money and product usage on the table if you’re not employing them. So on this episode of Growth (recorded live at HYPERGROWTH Boston), Matt sits downs with Dan Benoni and Louis-Xavier Lavallee, founders of Growth.Design, to talk through some foundational principles of psychology – like mental models, priming, and dark patterns – that will help you design and run better experiments. You'll get a rundown of what each principle means, examples of how other companies are using them, and suggestions for how you can test them out in your next growth experiment.

The 8 Most Important Psychological Principles That Growth Teams Should Know

One of the trickiest things to figure out and get right is your pricing. And is it ever really...right? On this episode of Growth, Matt sits down with Hannah Chaplin, Director of Product Management at Pendo and former CEO of Receptive, to discuss some of the experiments her team has run on pricing. Hannah and Matt talk about the biggest lessons they've learned along the way and give their best advice on how to approach pricing with a growth mindset at each stage of your business.

How To Think About (And Experiment With) Your Pricing

With customer acquisition costs creeping up higher and higher, a new go-to-market strategy has emerged: product-led growth. In this episode, Matt sits down with Wes Bush – the guy who wrote the book on the subject. Together, Matt and Wes talk about the three things that have contributed to the popularity of product-led growth, examples of SaaS companies that have successfully implemented product-led growth tactics, and why you should think about adding a free trial to your current model. Want to hear Wes's advice for creating an onboarding experience that helps boost conversion? Listen to the full episode.

What Is Product-Led Growth Anyway?

It's the #1 question growth teams ask other growth teams: What's your process? Because maybe you're struggling to get your team onboard, or you're having a hard time keeping up with your projects and experiments, or something's not quite working, or maybe you just feel like you're not going fast enough. The good news? You're not alone. Everyone gets stuck. So on this episode of Growth, Matt shares a few ways to think about the growth process and useful tools to stay organized, plus he explains why buy-in is so critical and the process that Drift's growth team follows.

Building a Growth Process That’s Right for Your Team (and What We Do at Drift)

We all want to build products that acquire users. But it's way easier said than done. Or is it? Yes, the marketplace is getting more crowded every day, making it challenging to find new opportunities for growth. But there are still companies that have managed to cut through the noise and win new customers. What's behind their success? On this episode, Matt digs in and shares five tried and true user acquisition strategies inspired by product role models like Dropbox, Zoom, Evernote, Google Analytics, Notion, and Superhuman.

How to Build a Product That Acquires Users (with Strategies from Dropbox, Zoom, Evernote & More)

When you’ve already unlocked growth in the enterprise, the only thing to do is to keep going upmarket, right? Wrong. So when Travis Kaufman's (VP of Product Growth at Gainsight) team noticed their data showed a huge drop off (read: huge potential) in the small business segment of their lead funnel, they decided to make their first attempt to go downmarket with a free offering. On this episode of Growth, learn how Travis and his team moved quickly, structured their downmarket experiment, chose the levers, got the rest of the company aligned behind them, and kicked off their journey downmarket.

Using Growth Tactics to Go Downmarket: Lessons From the Trenches

Setting goals is hard. And setting goals for your growth team is no exception. So on this episode, Matt shares an inside look at how Drift's growth team thinks about goal setting – including why it's important to get alignment on strategy, how to measure the actual impact of a team, and the role failure plays in goal setting.

How To Set Goals For Your Growth Team

Today on Growth, Facebook Messenger's Head of Growth, Darius Contractor, joins Matt to talk through experiment development, design and tracking all using a system Darius developed called EVELYN (Experiment Velocity Engine Lifting Your Numbers). With EVELYN growth teams can input and prioritize their experiments as well as track them all the way from initial specing and design to build and completion.

Matt and Darius also talk through Darius's background in growth, time spent investing, his work at Dropbox and now his tenure as Head of Growth at Facebook Messenger.

This Framework from Facebook's Darius Contractor is the Secret to Faster Growth

On this episode of Growth, Matt sits down with Dan Laufer, the Director of Growth & Partnerships at Nextdoor – and he's also the person behind what Matt calls the best, most contextual acquisition campaign he has ever seen. We asked Dan to share some background on the campaign – where the idea came from, how they got it up and running, and how the team has optimized it over the last seven years. Want to know what Dan says how to figure out the right offer (and the right channel) for an acquisition campaign? Listen to the full episode.

The Best, Most Contextual Acquisition Campaign I’ve Ever Seen

On today's episode of Growth, Matt talks about all things activation with Thibault Imbert, Director of Growth for Adobe Creative Cloud. Thibault explains what activation looks like at Adobe – how they define it, set goals around it, and measure it (hint: it's not just about the quantitative).

Then Matt and Thibault take it a layer deeper and discuss a topic near and dear to Matt's heart – experimentation. Thibault shares his advice on how to come up with ideas to experiment and test against the activation metric, how his team thinks about leading vs. lagging indicators, and how they make sure they're not doing something that will hurt retention later down the funnel. Want to find out what Thibault says is his team's north star for activation? Listen to the full episode.

28 Days To Get People Hooked: How Adobe Thinks About Activation

Looking to become a data-driven organization? Well, there's no silver bullet, but there are definitely some tricks that Dan Wolchonok, Head of Product and Analytics at Reforge, has picked up along the way. Before joining Reforge (an e-learning company that provides growth masterclasses for product and marketing pros), Dan was a founding member of HubSpot's sales product growth team, and later went on to form the company's product analytics team.

On today's episode of Growth, Matt throws his toughest data questions at Dan. They talk about how to approach historical data and data tracking, how to pick reporting tools, and who should own analytics. Then Matt and Dan go deeper and talk through the thing that separates the top one percent of the companies from the rest – good retention. To hear what Dan has to say about retention curves (and the best way to analyze them), listen to the full episode.

How To Think About, Set & Track Product Metrics (Plus The Biggest Pitfalls To Avoid) with Reforge's Dan Wolchonok

On this episode of #Growth, host Matt Bilotti sits down with Greg Skloot, President & COO of Crystal, to discuss a whole new level of personalization. We all know we're targeted online based on past browsing history and offers are often personalized with our name and sometimes location. But are we on the cusp of a whole new level of personalization? One that takes into account personality type and how we might want to be interacted with? Greg and Matt discuss the future of personalization on this episode. Be sure to tune in.

Is this the future of personalization?

Today's episode of Growth is all about testing. Matt Bilotti is joined by Drift's growth tech lead Vignesh Mohankumar. Together Matt and Vig discuss the ins and outs of testing products. How should you test the products you're building? When should you test? And equally important – when shouldn't you test? Matt and Vig dig into the considerations you need to keep in mind when testing products and they share real-life examples from building and testing products at Drift. Don't miss out.

How We Think About Product Testing At Drift

On today's episode of #Growth, host Matt Bilotti is talking all about testing – A/B testing to be exact. He breaks down the best ways to test, teaches us all about Bayesian Statistics and chats through this and more with Guy Yalif, co-founder and CEO of Intellimize.

A/B Testing & Bayesian Statistics with Intellimize's Guy Yalif

Today on #Growth, Matt is talking all about experimentation. Specifically how to approach changes you might make to your site or product – bite-sized or incremental changes vs. going all out with big swings. Matt breaks this down with a real-world example you've probably faced yourself – updating your homepage. There are pros and cons to both and Matt lays it all out here.

How to Approach Experimentation: Bite-sized Changes vs. Big Swings

This week on #Growth, host Matt Bilotti is talking all about data – space data, agriculture data, data science – with the self-proclaimed "data queen" herself, Lauren Moores, VP Data Strategy and Data Sciences at Indigo.

Lauren has spent her whole career chasing data and finding answers to the toughest questions for industries that have undergone significant transformation. Matt and Lauren talk about the evolution of data science and how much it's all changed in just 20 years.

Lauren also shares her pro tips on how to structure data teams through periods of massive growth.

How To Scale Data Teams The Right Way with Indigo's Lauren Moores

On today's episode of #Growth, host Matt Bilotti and Drift's VP of Growth, Guillaume Cabane, answer the million dollar question – when to make your first growth hire (and how). Here are a few hints: Make sure you've found product-market fit, a proven way for people to buy your product and a true customer base.

Growth teams are the most effective when they're able to reduce friction in your acquisition funnel. If there's no funnel...you don't need a growth person. So before even making your first hire, be sure to establish demand and educate the market about your offering.

Also in this episode – how growth teams should communicate with other areas of the business, setting up feedback loops, goal sharing and more.

When & How to Make Your First Growth Hire

On this episode of #Growth, host Matt Bilotti dives deep into the product onboarding experience of Superhuman, an email client and the "fastest email experience ever made."

No matter if you're in B2B or B2C this episode and Superhuman's unique, 1:1 onboarding experience is full of lessons you should steal for your own. Why? Because without stellar onboarding and activation, users will never pay you, stick around or tell their friends about your product. Be sure to catch all this and more on #Growth.

The Most Remarkable Product Onboarding I've Ever Seen

This week on #Growth host Matt Bilotti sits down with G aka Guillaume Cabane aka the Mad Scientist and Drift's VP of Growth (and Matt's boss – no pressure). 

Today they're talking all about tools – how to use them to accomplish tasks that others might do for 10x the cost or 4x the time. G talks through how he finds new tools (and why always being on the look out for new ones gives him and Drift a competitive edge) plus favorites in his stack and much more in this episode of #Growth.

How to Spend 10X Less But Do 10X More. Drift’s Mad Scientist & VP of Growth Weighs In On Must-Have Tools.

What's most important when running any growth experiment? Establishing a control group! Sounds simple, but if you've ever conducted any kind of experiment, you know it's easy to mess up. After all, without a control, you have no way of knowing if your experiment actually made an impact. In this episode, host Matt Bilotti runs through how to set control groups and why they matter. Plus how to accurately measure your experiments without getting lost in a web of intertwining growth hacks.

The #1 Thing You Need to Make Your Experiments Successful

On this episode of #Growth, host Matt Bilotti walks us through how to pick, plan and execute a growth experiment. Most crucial to getting started? Make sure the experiment you choose gives you a statistically significant dataset from which to start, run your experiment off of and ultimately base your conclusions on.

This experiment framework can apply to all parts of your business. Ready to get started with your own growth experiment? Tune into #Growth now.

How to Pick, Plan and Execute a Growth Experiment So You Can 10X Product Activations

Welcome to #Growth, a brand new podcast from Seeking Wisdom hosted by Matt Bilotti, Senior Product Manager on Drift's Growth team. On our first episode, Matt digs into choosing the metric that matters. Plus, Pirate Metrics, mapping out your funnel and more. 

In this season you can expect to learn how to run growth experiments, get exclusive interviews from growth leaders and everything else you need to run a successful growth team.

Choosing the Metric that Matters, Pirate Metrics & Mapping Your Funnel

What is growth and growth marketing anyway? This is the podcast where we figure it all out together. On Growth, hosted by Drift’s Matt Bilotti, you’ll learn how to run and optimize experiments, approach your funnel with a growth mindset, step by step plays for product onboarding and more. Plus we’ll bring you exclusive interviews with the best growth leaders out there so you can get hands on advice for running your own growth program. Catch a new episode of Growth every other Wednesday right here.

Episodes