MBA1698 Guest Teacher – Piyanka Jain – How to Growth Hack Using Data

Let me tell you about Intuit QuickBooks. When I was starting out my business, I remember sitting at my desk late at night not working on my business but cleaning up numbers, tracking and reconciling payments and wondering how this became my life. But once I automated the admin side of things, of my finances, those nights had disappeared and I felt a whole lot better. Outdo it with intuit QuickBooks QuickBooks is the trusted end to end solution that businesses rely on for getting paid, managing finances, paying employees, finding new customers and more. QuickBooks provides a team of AI agents and trusted experts. So doing it yourself no longer means doing it alone. Their payment agent gets you paid faster, their customer agent finds leads, follows up and secures more sales, and the accounting agent automates and categorizes transactions. Get your critical business jobs done with QuickBooks on the Intuit platform. Ready to save on new tech? It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Perks include Dell rewards, free shipping, premium Support and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel.

Core Ultra processors will help you do.

More faster and with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals.

Hey, welcome to the $100 MBA show. Helping small businesses like yours build better every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar MBA, a complete business training and community online over at 100mba.net. Today's lesson is a guest teacher lesson where we bring on a guest teacher to teach their area of expertise. Today we have Bianca John and she's going to show you how to growth hack using data. Growth hacking is not just for big companies like Google. In fact it's actually one of the most cost effective ways to grow your business today. And today's guest teacher Piangajan is going to walk us through what exactly is growth hacking and how you can use data to your advantage to learn how customers behave so you can reinforce that behavior and help people love your product and tell other people this lesson is practical, useful, something that you can implement right now. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

Looking for a Valentine's gift she'll truly love. 1-800-flowers.com knows what she wants. For 50 years 1-800-flowers has helped guys like you get it right. Delivering millions of fresh Valentine's roses nationwide. We1,800 flowers offers premium fresh cut flowers backed by their 7 day freshness guarantee plus same day delivery when you need them on time. Valentine's is coming up and bouquets are selling fast so don't wait on this order today at 1-800-flowers.com sxm that's 1-800flowers.com sxm.

Today's guest teacher, Priyanka John is a Amazon number one best selling author and has spent over 15 years as an analytics leader. We're talking data literacy and culture, machine learning, technology, data science and analytics. She's geeked out on this so you don't have to and she's going to give it to you on a silver platter today. She's been a regular contributor to Forbes and the Harvard Business Review and she's here today to show you how to use growth hacking and utilizing data to make it all work. I'm going to pass it on to Pianca now, but I'll be back with my takeaways and to wrap up today's episode. But for now, take it away pianca.

Hello. Welcome everybody. Thanks for joining me. My name is Priyanka and today I'm going to teach you how you can use growth hacking to grow your own business. So before I start how you can use growth hacking, let me start by describing or explaining what growth hacking is. And for that I'm going to read an excerpt from my book Behind Every Good Decision. So here it goes. Growth hacking is a discipline within an organization with the singular focus of driving scalable growth. Growth hacking team typically consists of product development, design, analytics and marketing and it uses a pull strategy to attract customers. That is they include engagement driving experiences within the product by understanding users motivation and behavior and provide immediate value to engaged customers versus the traditional modular approach of marketing department reaching out to engage customers after the product team has built a version of the product. This again is excerpted from my book Behind Every Good Decision for those who are interested. So now you guys are thinking, some of you, maybe you have a million dollar business, you have a few team members and you're thinking, okay, you're talking about a multidisciplinary approach with product development, design, analytics, marketing. And here is I'm a team of three or team of one and no worries folks. What we are trying to what this is trying to say is that essentially the growth hacking needs input from different aspects of business. So it needs product input, it needs design input, it needs analytics and marketing input and it can be done by that same person. And I'll show you what are the key components of growth hacking? So there are four key components of growth hacking and I'll go through one one by one. And as I go through it, I'll also showcase this with an example from Facebook and how Facebook did that. So the first component of growth hacking is build a must have product. So first you need a product or service that is currently able to engage majority of your consumers already coming to your site and that is your base products. And so you must understand. So growth hacking can take you from it cannot take you from 0 to 10. You know, if you already have a 1, you've already taken your website, you have some engaged user, you already have, you've already taken it 0 to 1. Growth hacking can take you from 1 to 10. That is the kind of exponential growth. If you do it systematically, it can be enabled. What does it mean, for example for your product? You already have a product or service that your end users are quite enjoying and they're coming back to your site over and over. That is your must have product. The second component of growth hacking is understand must have experiences. What does that mean? So you need to understand your most engaged consumer and through research analysis, figure out what their needs are, what they love about their site. This would include finding growth drivers, for example, things that users do which engages them. We use a framework called three Key Questions Framework when we go and do this work for our clients or when we teach through our courses, entrepreneurs like you of how do you understand, how do you unravel the growth drivers for your own business? And that's called three Key Questions Framework. This by the way framework is also there in my book behind every good Decision for those of you who are interested. And the book is available on Amazon and other places. And the chapter you're looking for is under leadership section, it's called three Key Questions Framework. So what essentially the three key questions framework is is there are three pillars, three key questions you ask. The first question you ask your data, your business is how am I doing? And through asking this question, you're defining the key metrics with which you're going to measure the success of your business. The top KPIs. The second question you want to ask are what are my business drivers and dynamics? What drives how am I doing that? You answer by portfolio analysis. And these will help you unravel the key drivers for your business. So for example, if your measurement how you're doing is measured by growth and profitability or maybe ebitda, then the drivers of business could be maybe it's an acquisition strategy, maybe it's retention strategy and so on. So you'll need to figure out for your own business and the third component of or the third part of the third part of the third key question is who are my customers? How do I engage them? So once you use this approach, this will help you unravel the must have experience that is the driver for growth. So for example, for Facebook, what they found was at that point when they so first block was 45 million customers already when they established a SWOT team for growth hacking. And one of the things that that team found was that they realized that as people created accounts, if they added their seven, they added seven friends fairly quickly after opening the account within 10 days, then they kept coming back to use Facebook. So what they found out was the must have experience was seven friends in 10 days in order to drive stickiness of their product, in order to drive engagement, you may find something similar to that as well. Now I understand some of you are also thinking where is my data for me to be able to do this? I mean, you all have access to data. It's probably sitting in in your Google Analytics or in some of your servers and some of the systems that you're using to enable the E Commerce Shopify and others, there's a lot of data there. If you have a systematic way of asking questions of your data, like we talked about the three key questions framework, you will be able to unravel the must have experience. That was the second component of the growth hacking was understand must have experience. The third component is incorporate those must have experience into your product now. So for example, once Facebook found that the seven friends, adding seven friends actually makes users come back, which they of course proved by testing, then they basically started incorporating recommendation system like connect your contact list right away so that they can recommend you might know this friend. And these are the things they incorporated so that more and more people started adding friends within very first few days and thus they started getting habituated to Facebook. And you would do something similar where you would once you figure out that this is what is driving growth or this is what drives stickiness for my product or drives retention, drives growth. Whatever your must have experiences are, you would look to incorporate that through some kind of input, some kind of nudge to your customers that they can follow through from there, then the last step for the four components of growth hacking is remove friction from your must have experience. In addition to incorporating growth drivers into customer experience, anything that creates friction and distractions from the must have Experience should be taken out to drive further growth. Again, analytics and testing is used iteratively to find those distractions and make product changes. Now, for example, Facebook may have found out that a tutorial on how to use Facebook may have distracted users from adding friends and so that is what they would take out from that experience. Now, I don't know exactly what was the case in Facebook, but this is something I'm hypothesizing. So with that and just summarizing, this is how you would go and growth hack your business. The four components of growth hacking is build a must have experience, understand the must have experiences using of course the three key questions framework or something like that. Basically using data science, using analytics and testing. Then incorporate those must have experiences into the product and lastly remove friction from must have experience. And for those of you who are looking to incorporate this into your business, you can learn this skill yourself. There are many places this skill is not a rocket science skill. This is a citizen. This we would call a citizen analyst skill and you should be able to learn it. And for those who are interested in following through, you can go on our website. I teach this course as well on ehring.com under academy. So ayring is a R y n g airing.com if you go under Academy there is a specific course for you. It's called Data Science for Small Businesses. And in that course we teach various frameworks along with the Business analytics framework and the three key questions framework that will help you peel the onion of your business to understand the must have experiences and incorporate those must have experiences. And the only prerequisite we have for that course is for you to take a aptitude test so we can make sure there is a good fit. And once you have the minimum score you can enroll in that course and start learning. And for limited time folks, we have a 50% off on all of our courses on academy. So academy.aing.com has 50%. You can use Covid 50 as you check out the courses to get that 50% discount. So again, ehring.com and going to Academy, there is a course specifically for you called Data Science for small businesses nonprofits. And you can, you know if that's not a fit, but there may be some other courses that may be a better fit. But make sure to invest, invest some of your time to learn these necessary skills because data is the new currency and being able to leverage it to drive growth, to sustain and retain customers, to sustain scalable growth, all of those things are going to be very, very important in the post Covid world and through Covid world. So that's it folks. This is Priyanka again. Thank you so much for joining me today. And over to you.

Ovarn Valentine's planning starts now. Get ahead of the game with 1-800-Flowers xoxo sale and save 20% on gifts for the ones you love. For 50 years 1-800-Flowers has made Valentine's special by delivering millions of high quality roses with unmatched reliability. Right now save 20% on premium bouquets on all backed by their seven day freshness guarantee. This Xoxo sale ends February 5th so don't wait. Save 20% at 1-800-flowers.com sxm that's 1-800-flowers.Com.

Sxm what a great lesson from Bianca John on how to growth hack. I love when she gave the example of Facebook with them knowing that when people have seven friends, they tend to hang on and use the platform. What this basically means is your mission is to find out who are your best customers, who are your best clients, what do they look like, what do they do, what makes them your best clients? And what I like to tell people is choose three actions that they take that you can encourage all your users to do so. They can become just as good as a client, just as good as a user. You can perfect your onboarding and help the growth of your business. When people win with your product or service, they can't help but tell other people because they have found something that works and that compels people to talk about it. For example, in tomorrow's episode, we're going to be talking about a new app called Clubhouse. A lot of people have been talking about it. They feel compelled to tell other people, hey, I'm on Clubhouse. Come and meet me. Of course I had to check it out so I can give you a solid lesson tomorrow on what it's all about and how you can use it in your business. But also, I was also so curious about why they were gravitating to the app and why were they so compelled to tell other people about it. I actually reverse engineered it and I'll talk more about it later. But I wanted to see the people that were talking about it on Facebook and saying, hey, come to Clubhouse. I actually looked into their profiles and tried to figure out where they've been on the app, where or what groups are part of or what they've attended, who they're friends with, try to mimic their experience to understand what the appeal is. What's the talk of the town all about, right? What is all this raving about? You want to do the same for your own business, your own customers, so that you can make sure everybody's having a fantastic time telling other people more about Clubhouse in tomorrow's episode. That wraps up today's Guest Teacher lesson by Pianca John. Thank you so much Pianca for that lesson. Make sure you check out the links that she mentioned and check out her book Behind Every Good Decision. That wraps up today's lesson. Make sure you smash that subscribe button and share this episode with your friends and family over on Social. Thank you in advance for doing that. Before I go, I want to leave you with this you often hear data is power and data is priceless. What does that all mean? What really means is that it's facts. It's information that you can use to help you grow. Any kind of information that you can gather with the consent of course, of your customers is like gold. One of the best things you could do is to conduct customer interviews where you just get on a call and you ask them a bunch of questions to understand who they are, why they are a customer of yours, what they like about your product or service, what they don't like, how they found out about you. All these kind of questions allows you to get data points on what makes a great customer, how you can find customers just like this person so you can have more and more amazing customers in your customer pipeline. A lot of people think that data science is just like tracking and zeros and ones, you know, in some sort of algorithm. But sometimes it's as simple as asking your best customers some questions. We've done this at Webinar Ninja a few times and it's helped us tremendously craft a better product and serve our best customers better. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

Of what do the steam engine, electricity and AI have in common? They don't just change how we work, they transform entire economies. Where the Internet Lives is an award winning podcast from Google about the unseen world of data centers. This season we're going inside the AI revolution. From farmers using AI to analyze soil data to researchers discovering new medicines, a new era of AI innovation is here. Listen to where the Internet lives. Wherever you get your podcasts.