Growth Hacking Lessons Learned

The Bimotics team spent early July learning about Growth Hacking from Aaron Ginn at Stumble Upon hosted by Refresh Miami. I honestly had to Google what it meant, but I was excited to get perspective from the Valley nonetheless.  I went in thinking that the principles sounded a lot like marketing so i figured it was just another buzzword going around the geeks to make the even more exclusive.  But I learned that the Growth Hacking was much more essential than that.  And indeed it has a place between product engineering and marketing that is focused on what matters most to investors- growth.

5 key takeaways from the event:

1. Growth Hacking relies heavily on Lean Startup Principles such as sprints and measures
2. User Accounting:  new users + reactivation - churn - deactivations = user growth
3. When performing experiments, aways solve for the down case. So if the test case didn't work, then you have learned something.  You can learn why it failed.  True scientists are always trying to prove for the null
4. The goal is to find what are the people in your channel are thinking and how they are looking and interacting with your product
5. The data science role, assists product manager in determining areas to focus on by identifying new opportunities and communicating the long run effects of the A/B tests

For now, Growth Hacking is mainly focusing on more of the B2C business models and products that make money from ads and replay on shares and links.  This makes sense as these applications need to get as many users (millions of active users) as possible clicking through their stuff. However, the basic tenets and lessons such as creating a metrics oriented culture, running a lean organization and focusing on actionable metrics definitely apply to B2Bs as well.!

Our 7 Whys of Bimotics

I am an avid follower of David Cumming's Blog on Startups. Any entrepreneur with a technology startup can benefit from a quick read of his posts, especially if you have a SaaS. The content that posts each week is both easy to read and often timely. Recently, there was a post on the questions entrepreneurs should ask themselves frequently. This is how Bimotics answered: 

1. Why are we doing this?

@Bimotics our mantra is shine a light on the path that leads to that "Good to know!" moment. We truly believe that we can strengthen and improve small and medium sized businesses by giving them real-time analytics and information about their activities and operations- what we in the industry call business intelligence software. Our developer tools enable big data analysis as well.

2. Why is now the right time to do this?

The time is now for Bimotics because non-technical people have begun accepting and using cloud technology in their daily lives. Cloud technology has finally evolved to the point where thousands of people can access extremely vast amounts of data at lightning fast speeds. These two conditions make it the right time.

3. Why are we going to win?

We built a solution that seasoned developers said was impossible. We now have a track record of proving our naysayers wrong. We have a growing list of businesses that are signing up for our service even when others said that it would never happen. We are listening to these customers and steadily improving our product line. With our persistence and support from a highly qualified team, we are going to win.

4. Why aren't we doing even better?

Fund raising has been slow; and we need to sharpen the way we communicate our offering. We are improving how we reach the right people but we can do it better.

5. Why do employees want to work here?

Our team is excited about our position on the leading edge of innovation. They are also good people who believe that a robust and profitable business can flourish while maintaining a positive mission statement and the highest standards of ethics.

6. Why is this the right product?

From the very beginning, our analytics software has been tailored for the small and medium sized business specifically. We didn't simplify a product that was built for enterprise needs.

7. Why do customers love us?

Our customers have said that Bimotics has become an invaluable tool to them in their day to day business. That's "Good to know!", and we couldn't be happier!

Bimotics 2014 in Review

2014 has been a productive year for Bimotics. While we have put in the long hours, as founders, we feel the work is never done.  Armed with optimism, we look forward to reaching new milestones in 2015.  2014 was full of challenges and successes and we have learned from all of them.   Reflecting on the year that was, here is the recap of our top 3 wins in 2014.

3. Implemented Marketing Automation: Set up flexible inbound and social marketing infrastructure  that the team could maintain and edit.  After evaluating several options, we chose  Hubspot as their inbound marketing and social media focus synergized well with our business model. With our increased marketing activities we were able to fully engage two campaigns which led to consistent growth in site traffic and lead generation.  We have really increased our visibility.  We are now receiving over 600 visitors a month to our website.  We are developing our marketing strategy to effectively hone in on even more channels to spread the word and gain further traction.

2. Became among the first Google Cloud Partners: Last year we became newly minted technical partners with Google Cloud Platform. We then got invited to their pilot certification program. In the first quarter, our technical founder Roberto completed the vigourous process of becoming among the first Google Cloud Certified Partners. With this new status, we have gained additional credibility within technical and investor circles.   More importantly, the relationship allowed us to successfully build a fully HIPAA compliant cloud environment for a client.

1. Launched our big data application,  marvin.:  Without having to code, our app gets your data warehouse on the world’s most powerful cloud in just minutes. marvin. is just the first step in realizing Bimotics’ vision of analytics for all businesses, but we are  on our way! Since launching in the fall we have attracted over 30,000 visitors and gained almost one user per day. We have learned so much about getting to market and we will continue to build on this early success.

With these accomplishments under our belt, we have the much needed stepping stones to keep Bimotics going into 2015. Business planning is well underway for next year and in our next segment we’ll outline some of our New Year’s Resolutions.  Until then, we wish you all a wonderful holiday season and a prosperous New Year.

Related Blogs:

marvin. now available in the Chrome Store

5 things we are looking for in our next employees

Our 7 Whys

I am an avid follower of David Cumming’s Blog on Startups. Any entrepreneur with a technology startup can benefit from a quick read of his posts, especially if you have a SaaS.   The content that posts each week is both easy to read and often timely. Recently, there was a post on the questions entrepreneurs should ask themselves frequently. This is how Bimotics answered:

1. Why are we doing this?

@Bimotics our mantra is shine a light on the path that leads to that “Good to know!” moment.  We truly believe that we can strengthen and improve small and medium sized businesses by giving them real-time analytics and information about their activities and operations. Our developer tools enable big data analysis as well.

2. Why is now the right time to do this?

The time is now for Bimotics because non-technical people have begun accepting and using cloud technology in their daily lives. Cloud technology has finally evolved to the point where thousands of people can access extremely vast amounts of data at lightning fast speeds. These two conditions make it the right time.

3. Why are we going to win?

We built a solution that seasoned developers said was impossible.  We now have a track record of proving our naysayers wrong.  We have a growing list of businesses that are signing up for our service even when others said that it would never happen. We are listening to these customers and steadily improving our product line. With our persistence and support from a highly qualified team, we are going to win.

4. Why aren't we doing even better?

Fund raising has been slow; and we need to sharpen the way we communicate our offering. We are improving how we reach the right people but we can do it better.

5. Why do employees want to work here?

Our team is excited about our position on the leading edge of innovation. They are also good people who believe that a robust and profitable business can flourish while maintaining a positive mission statement and the highest standards of ethics.

6. Why is this the right product?

From the very beginning, our analytics software has been tailored for the small and medium sized business specifically. We didn’t simplify a product that was built for enterprise needs.

7. Why do customers love us?

Our customers have said that Bimotics has become an invaluable tool to them in their day to day business. That’s “Good to know!”, and we couldn’t be happier!

Design Thinking: Observing Extreme Users 1

Last week we had the privilege of attending a training called Design Thinking.  The training establishment, Experience Point, created the entire training session on the methodology of IDEO, one of the most distinguished design firms that have come up with innovative designs we everyday like the Keep the Change program at the Bank of America.

A bunch of blogs and startup readings, have been about getting out of the building and talking to customers.  At Bimotics, we have constantly talked with small business owners of all types about almost anything- our business idea, our tagline, our data sources we want to connect.  Sometimes we got an excited response and sometimes the person simply didn’t get it.  Getting to talk to anyone that will hear us out was always appreciated, but I can’t say the talks were always helpful. There was continued ambiguity on how to put what a business owner was saying in a context that made sense.

In the design thinking training, I learned the concept of observing the extreme users.  Extreme users are those that fall outside of the normal 80% if you are looking at a normal distribution. The extreme user is on both sides of the 80%. The first group represents the users that love and have completely adopted and live the subject you are studying. The other group represents the users that never use or care about the subject.  

Observing these groups is the key to getting real insight. You can see the difference between each extreme user. This can help provide context needed to get more quality insight. Being able to observe the right group requires a bit of profiling and a clear understanding of what you want to learn. Observing is not just having conversations with random users.  It is almost opposite, it is about consciously being objective and simply trying to understand how the user ticks.  When you have a conversation you may instill bias unintentionally.  

Looking forward to applying design thinking principles to Bimotics.

Growth Hacking Lessons Learned

The Bimotics team spent early July learning about Growth Hacking from Aaron Ginn at Stumble Upon hosted by Refresh Miami. I honestly had to Google what it meant, but I was excited to get perspective from the Valley nonetheless.  I went in thinking that the principles sounded a lot like marketing so i figured it was just another buzzword going around the geeks to make the even more exclusive.  But I learned that the Growth Hacking was much more essential than that.  And indeed it has a place between product engineering and marketing that is focused on what matters most to investors- growth.

5 key takeaways from the event:

1. Growth Hacking relies heavily on Lean Startup Principles such as sprints and measures
2. User Accounting:  new users + reactivation - churn - deactivations = user growth
3. When performing experiments, aways solve for the down case. So if the test case didn’t work, then you have learned something.  You can learn why it failed.  True scientists are always trying to prove for the null
4. The goal is to find what are the people in your channel are thinking and how they are looking and interacting with your product
5. The data science role, assists product manager in determining areas to focus on by identifying new opportunities and communicating the long run effects of the A/B tests

For now, Growth Hacking is mainly focusing on more of the B2C business models and products that make money from ads and replay on shares and links.  This makes sense as these applications need to get as many users (millions of active users) as possible clicking through their stuff. However, the basic tenets and lessons such as creating a metrics oriented culture, running a lean organization and focusing on actionable metrics definitely apply to B2Bs as well.  

Hypotheses for early adopters

Late in June, I attended an event hosted by the new business incubator at Broward College.  Poormima Vijayashanker lectured on many lean startup concepts in her presentation “Will it launch?”. At Bimotics, we often pitched our startup as the “mint.com for small and medium sized-business”.  So I have to admit; I was a bit star struck to meet the founding engineer of the business we’ve strived to be like.  Turns out she is pretty cool and down to earth.  I’m going to ask join her Femigineer mentor group.

So the main takeaway I got  from the workshop was related to coming up with the right hypothesis for customer adoption- particularly for early adopters.  Bimotics is a cloud analytics company targeting small and medium-sized business, so here are the segments I hypothesize will be our early adopters. They are:

1. SMBs that were established in the last 5 years that already use other cloud based applications, like SalesForce and Quickbooks to run their business
2. SMBs that use Quickbooks but would like more analytical and reporting capability
3. Consulting companies with analysts and data scientists that need a software platform to deliver their results to their clients
4. SMBs with more than 3 resources running their operations (non-technical)
5. SMBs comfortable using online marketplaces and app stores to source applications for run their business
6. SMBs whose employees have begun to use mobile technology day-to-day, whether its a smartphone or a tablet
7. SMBs that use social media as a source for business news.

With these hunches, the next step is to confirm or deny that these are my customers in the most cost efficient way.  Since we are only in alfa, I cannot just prove usage of by these groups, I will need to try out the concept of “concierage MVP” also taught at the workshop.