Hacking Growth with Airtable
How our team saves over $10,000 a year using Airtable to managing it’s marketing experiments.
Hacking Growth by Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown is the best business marketing book I’ve read. It simply has more valuable ideas per chapter than you’ll find on the whole shelf of popular marketing books.
I first heard about Sean Ellis when an associate of mine directed me to his work on testing product-market-fit. These guys are just full of really useful ideas. Sean developed a single survey question designed to give you an objective metric to determine if scaling your product or service is the right decision.
How would you feel if you could no longer use [product]?
-Very disappointed
-Somewhat disappointed
-Not disappointed (it isn’t really that useful)
-N/A — I no longer use [product]
On his blog, Sean explains:
If you find that over 40% of your users are saying that they would be “very disappointed” without your product, there is a great chance you can build sustainable, scalable customer acquisition growth on this “must have” product. This 40% benchmark was determined by comparing results across 100s startups. Those that were above 40% are generally able to sustainably scale the businesses; those significantly below 40% always seem to struggle.
Product-Market-Fit at White Rabbit Express
We put Sean’s survey idea to the test for our Japan-based proxy buying service.
A survey of over 400 customers indicates very positive feelings about the money they’ve spent on our service. It’s time for us to scale!
Organizing your Growth Hacking Experiments
Hacking Growth lays out a systematic plan for formulating, prioritizing, executing and measuring ideas to grow customer acquisition, activation, retention, referrals, and revenue. Altogether, the approach gives purpose and direction to marketing efforts by providing a framework of ideas to ensure efficient, data-driven marketing experimentation.
The creators of Growth Hacking developed an online application called “Projects” for organizing your growth hacking efforts with an very steep annual price of $10,188.
Our team found the Projects UI to be awkward and tedious and set about finding a more flexible and affordable solution. In less than an hour, we built a feature-complete alternative using our free Airtable plan.
In a world filled with increasingly specific and rigid apps, Airtable takes a radically different approach by giving you (yes, you!) the building blocks to create your own way of organizing anything from film projects to apartment hunts and customer lists.
Ideas
First we took the Project Ideas view. A basic table for your Idea, Lever, and Scoring metrics.
Recreating this in Airtable took only a few minutes.
Assigned is a “Collaborator” field type, which allows us to add (and notify) collaborators to our records.
Lever is a simple drop-down selector.
ICE Score fields (Impact, Confidence and Ease) are simple numeric fields. The Score is a formula field which calculates the average:
Sort, Filter and Group like never before
One of the things we like most about moving our ideas to Airtable is the power to group, sort, and filter the data in ways which were previously not possible in Projects.
Adding a filter for Score greater than or equal to 7.0.
Finishing touches for our Ideas view
Next we added extra fields for Metric to Measure, Hypothesis, Attachments, and a Status field. Here we diverged from Project’s nomenclature (Up Next, Active, and Ready to Analyze) opting instead for Backlog, Ready, In Progress, and Complete.
Adding a Kanban board
Projects uses a Kanban board for Tests records.
You can add a kanban board to any Airtable with a few clicks. Simply add a kanban view and you’ll be prompted to select a grouping field.
Our Ideas board as a kanban board (below)
Objectives and Tests were easy enough to add. Just create new tables in your base for them. You can then create a special field which allows you to link your record to a record in another table. Here we used linked fields to link our Test record for a Facebook ad to the “Create Facebook ad” idea.
We’ve only scratched the surface on the power and flexibility of Airtable. Our marketing team has found it to be much more useful than other solutions which cost hundreds of dollars a month. Link to Airtable.com
