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What I Learned as the Head of Growth at a Startup
How we got our first 1,000 users, what we did right, & what I'd change
Ish Verduzco
November 28, 2023
What’s up y’all!
Formally introducing the newsletter: The Social Blueprint 🔷
Every Tuesday, I’ll be covering all-things social media, growth, & startups.
I’ve worked in tech for 10 years now (LinkedIn, Snap, a16z, startups) and I plan on sharing what I’ve learned along the way (plus random experiments I’m testing or things I’m obsessing about as it relates to growth).
In the last edition, I shared my social strategy template for LinkedIn & Twitter/X.
Alright, let’s dive into this one.
In my last role, I led Growth & Marketing at an early stage startup (Crave It, a social app for food lovers).
After 2 years in the role, we built a total brand audience of 100,000+ (email + social), drove thousands of downloads, and and scaled the app to 800+ cities.
Here’s how we grew the app and a few things I’d change if I had to do it all over again.
Crave It: The Social App for Food Lovers
What Worked (aka how we grew the app)
Organic Social
We leveraged Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, & LinkedIn.
Instagram and TikTok were great for reaching a wide audience but didn’t convert as well as Twitter. Our Instagram & TikTok strategy consisted of producing highly shareable food content (dishes, restaurants, city-specific recommendations) and gently nudging people (via the caption/comments) to check out the link in our bio if they loved food as much as we did (to download the app).
Twitter/X was very high signal for us even though we only had about 2,000 company followers. We were able to drive more downloads/signups on here via tons of outreach. This consisted of thousands of DMs, 1v1 replies, and hours of weekly calls with users/prospective users.
I’d leverage Twitter search bar to find foodies in specific cities that we were ramping up to launch in (like SF/LA/NYC), engage with their content from the brand account, then reach out via DM from my personal account to ask if they’d like to be part of our private beta (before anyone else in their city had access).
Worked like a charm.
Here’s some of our Twitter/X content and community mentions
.
LinkedIn was mostly used for company updates and reminding people of what we were up to.
Our founder, Bomani did a great job of providing weekly status updates which talked about the product, team, and company as a whole. I consistently noticed an increase in app usage whenever we’d share a status update on LinkedIn.
Something worth noting — I led a small but mighty marketing team of three. That’s 3 people to cover email, design, 4 social platforms, acquisition, events, blog, retention, and more.
One thing that I think we did very well was split up the social accounts amongst the team.
I managed our Twitter account and LinkedIn accounts, Cristina on my team owned Instagram, email, and design. Jason on my team owned TikTok and supported different functions that we all shared.
As a team, we all tackled events, retention, & acquisition. But by separating the social accounts by owner we were able to each go very deep, building wide audiences and established tons of 1v1 relationships (through comments, DMs, platform-specific content).
If I ran marketing at a startup again this is one thing I’d keep the same. Maybe have a social lead and a few highly specialized part time employees who are the best at what they do — Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter/X, etc.
Something worth noting - Our first 1,000 users/downloads mostly came from organic social.
We launched Crave It at the beginning of the pandemic and were able to grow it through events.
Crazy right? Here’s the catch though — we actually leveraged virtual events to produce cooking experiences, live mukbangs, fireside chats with influencers in the food industry, and more.
For every event, we collected emails and built our highest converting funnel for driving users. I guess it makes sense — people opted to sign up for an event, attended, got value in some form, and were probably foodies too, so it made sense for them to download the app without hesitation.
Another great thing about virtual events: They scale.
We could collect tons of signups and even if all of the people didn’t show up, we could still follow up and ask them to be part of our foodie community.
Our growth loop:
> Social to promote the events
> Events to collect emails
> Post-event email with download link
> In-app referrals
> Social to remind people about app updates & more events
> Repeat
This sorta ties into both of the above but given how impactful it was for us, I thought it was worth highlighting separately.
Tapping into our personal brands is really how we bootstrapped our initial social audience, sourced event speakers, got our RSVPs, and landed first hundred users. We tapped into my personal social accounts, our founder accounts, and even a few of our team members volunteered to share with their networks.
We made it a weekly effort to share personal updates about what we were building. I went on a few marketing podcasts and talked about how we were growing the app, and where people could learn more if they were foodies. Not everyone was our end user, but this at least allowed people to self-select or even better, refer their friends/family who were just as obsessed about food as we were.
When you’re a bootstrapped marketing team with zero or a very lean budget, tapping into your existing audience can really help solve the cold start problem that you’ll inevitably face at the start. Think of it this way: At least one person in your network knows someone who might want to use your product. You’re doing yourself a disservice by not sharing it with them through your personal accounts and social content.
What I’d change (if I had to do it over again)
Be more focused on retention
Since we were very early stage (launched the alpha, private beta, and public beta) my team was mostly focused on acquiring users and keeping the other marketing channels alive. I think we should’ve spent a bit more time speaking with our most active users, those who dropped off, and those who downloaded but never signed up for an account.
If each person on the team just spoke to 5 users every week, I think we could’ve gotten more people to come back to the app (especially as we were initially launching.
We did our best to onboard people in person but COVID made things a bit difficult. Seeing people download the app, sign up, share their first post, and engage in the feed would’ve helped us better understand where we had a leaky bucket (and where people might be dropping off).
Work more closely with Product & Engineering
My team should’ve worked a lot closer with our head of product and engineering team (not just me).
Since we also acted as the customer service leg of the company, we had the most qualitative data from our users.
I did my best to share consistent themes, report bugs, and highlight pressing issues that our users were experiencing but looking back, we should’ve done a better job of documenting everything that we were hearing from our users. Including: what people loved, hated, general feedback, social mentions, user interviews, etc.
This would’ve helped the team prioritize which bugs needed to fixed since resources were limited. It would’ve also provided motivation and encouragement to the broader team since we did receive at on of love from our online community.
Wait for better Product Market Fit before Scaling
Almost the entire time our app was available, it was still invite-only (meaning, you needed an invite code to get in and create an account).
We did this so we could control the flow of people in case there were major bugs that needed to be fixed or product updates that needed to be made.
The issue here is that we actually grew too quickly at the start (I know, crazy problem to have).
We got our first 1,000 users in about a week.
Then we kept growing and introducing invite codes for users to invite their friends a few months after that.
We really should have paused at the first 1,000 users to learn exactly what was ruining the user experience (and fixing these issues before allowing anyone else to join), as well as removing inactive accounts (or individually reaching out to these people before booting them).
In short, we should’ve waited till we had better product market fit and fixed major bugs before expanding.
Final Takeaway
When you’re working at a startup, growth is everyone’s job.
Roles should be incentivized and highly aligned with at least one function of growth.
Everyone should know exactly how their daily work ties back to the growth of the company.
Instead of “I do social media for our startup” your social media manger should think “I’m building our brand via social, which will help drive awareness, app downloads, and advocates.”
As a subset of growth, everyone should have a good understanding of retention and what success would look like here.
Then, reverse engineer your day to day tactics + long term strategies to meet retention goals.
If you enjoyed this piece, I would really appreciate a share!
Cheers,
Ish
Something I loved this week:
A final thank you to my Crave It team. 🫶🏽
Startups are crazy but I enjoyed every moment working on the project with you all. And a special shoutout to Bomani for believing in me, coaching me, and allowing me to join the ride. The marathon continues. 🏁
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