How will our product grow?

I’ve just joined Chirr app as a partner and I’m going to be leading the growth effort.

Once I start diving into the details I will get lost and it becomes hard to see the big picture. I want to start a meaningful discussion about the big picture strategy around how our product will grow

Conventional growth work focuses on building and optimising funnels. Brian Balfour offers a refreshing take on the funnel approach and focuses on building systems of compounding loops instead.

The problem with funnel based growth is that you have to constantly pour energy, time and money into the top of it. Loops offer a more sustainable approach to growth because the output feeds back into process and compounds over time.

Everything starts with your core habit loop. This is the primary reason people use a product. For chirr App this would be based on the core action of publishing threads.

Every habit has three basic components: a trigger, an action and a reward. Our trigger is that people want to publish a thread on twitter. The core action would be using Chirr app editor to publish the content and the reward is that they a thread published to twitter without any hassle.

It’s a loop because if we do the job well the next time someone wants to publish a thread on twitter they will reach for us. Optimising this core loop means making the whole experience around publishing threads as hassle free as possible.

We have two other habit loops in the product. The first is around email reports and the second is around our chrome extension. The chrome extension is great for capturing content when you are reading online and adding it to your content queue. The weekly analytics report shows yo what performed well that week and lets you reschedule your best tweets.

The goal of a habit loops is to bring people back into the product and drive sustained product usage. It’s important to start with habit loops because acquiring more users is pointless if we cant retain them.

On top of our habit loops sit our acquisition loops. An acquisition loops is designed to drive people to the product.

We only have one acquisition loop at the moment, people who tweet our default editor text. A certain number or new users discover the product each week, some of them tweet out the editor placeholder text that contains a link to the product and then new users find us through those tweets.

Then on top of our acquisition loops we have linear input. These are sources of traffic that don’t compound. Our main source of traffic is SEO but you can have other liner input like press coverage or going to conferences and events.

Our system is fairly basic at the moment. The first step is going to be to optimise our existing loops. Then I’m going to look into adding new loops to each layer. The goal isn’t to have loads of loops, the goal is to grow. Building loops can be expensive, and one or two simple loops that work well are enough for a powerful growth engine.

The ideal outcome here is a simple, shared understanding of how our product grows so that we know how each thing we decide to work on connects to the bigger picture.