Product Growth Strategy: Driving product adoption with a ‘Highway’
The answer to the question; “how do I get users to keep using me? Or keep using more of me?”, can be found in a one-liner: give your product a point of contact. Build a highway.
Also called ‘product loop’.
These loops could be rewards, leaderboards, gamification, content or community.
What does it mean to give your product a point of contact? Let me try to explain it.
It means once you build a product that solves a user need and get some PMF, you should start thinking of a ‘highway’ to your product. That is a path that leads your users to keep using your product or use more of your product, depending on your preferred metrics — MAU or AAU.
Think Dropbox and its referral system and Dropquest where users go through puzzles and a scavenger hunt.
Gmail and the incredible amount of free storage until they make us start paying for it.
LinkedIn has learning, post a job, community, service marketplace and is expanding the salary feature.
Bringing it home (closer to Africa), see what Paystack is doing with media. So much so they hired a managing editor.
Building for growth…
After acquiring customers/users, the next phase would be retention or managing churn. How do you build a long-term relationship with them? Today’s best products do this in two ways: removing friction within the product experience or adding features (product loop/highway) that engage customers and keep them coming back to the product.
Let’s take a peep at Paystack and its highways:
+ Paystack Monthly RoundUp: A business newsletter, with more focus on the companies using its product.
+ Decode Fintech Newsletter and Podcast: Amazingly, nothing here talks about Paystack. Instead, it shares information to educate and celebrate the tech ecosystem, economy and continent.
+ Paystack Music — the monthly mixtape: Haha!!! I’m sure when they started, we thought — what’s this? Why entertainment and tech? Well, they’ve been releasing different versions of mixtapes monthly. And recently, told us how.
+ Commerce: allowing anyone to set up an online store and sell while accepting payment through Paystack.
+ And then you have ‘ArtWork’: providing business tips for African creators. That’s what the website says.
Let’s analyze…
You can quickly see how value is driven, shared and explored with all the highways built into Paystack.
Other companies are using the ‘highways’ strategy to drive product usage — adoption and growth.
+ Tech Cabal: webinars, events
+ Flutterwave: stores, wave podcast, grow, capital
+ Risevest: content, events, advisory
What you can do…
+ Ensure you have a great product. This cannot be overemphasized.
+ Think of your users and how you can make your users happy, their lives easier etc.
+ Allow your mind to wander. Be creative. Think! What business does Starbucks have with workspace and banking? Clear?
+ Don’t be fixated on parallel or vertical products. Think solution. Don’t allow features to be the first idea you implement.
“Growth has to be built into the product,” says Aatif Awan, Ex-VP, Growth, LinkedIn.
The highway wheel…
Product Loop (rewards etc.) — -> Behaviour (the ‘why’ of the loop)
— -> Benefit (what the user gains)
Now that you’re thinking of growth, start with removing friction before tinkering with product loops.
In our next post, we will expand on the highway wheel.
Photo by Artem Beliaikin from Pexels
