Demand Curve - The Growth Newsletter #143

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The Growth Newsletter #143

143k Followers in 9 days, Bowling-Alley Framework, Sh*tty Clickthroughs.

Welcome all you growth-loving founders and marketers!

Variety of random things to tell you. I discovered that ChatGPT thinks "Canada" has multiple M's in it. I tested it myself and the results are hilarious. 

I saw a powerful admission from Jensen Huang (cofounder and CEO of NVIDIA) that if he could go back, knowing all the pain & suffering he'd endure, he wouldn't start NVIDIA again.

Topics for today: 122k Followers in 8 days, Bowling-Alley Framework, Sh*tty Clickthroughs.

Let's dive in 🐙

– Neal

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1. 500 to 143,000 followers in 9 days

Insight from Chewy Thompson.

Chewy Thompson, a 17 year old, started a daily fitness challenge on his Instagram 8 days ago. Here's his follower progress:

• Day 1: 520 followers
• Day 2: 526 followers
  
• Day 3: 535 followers
  
• Day 4: 644 followers
  
• Day 5: 1938 followers
  
• Day 6: 16000 followers
  
• Day 7: 50,000 followers
  
• Day 8: 88,000 followers
  
• Day 9: 122,000 followers
• Current: 143,000 followers

The premise of the fitness challenge is:

• For every 1 follower total, he walks 1 inch each day.
• For every 1000 followers total, he does 1 pushup each day.
• At the end of each daily video, he says, "I'm deleting this channel in (365-X, where X is days into the challenge) days unless I reach 1 million followers."

At 1 million followers, he'll be doing nearly 1,000 push-ups and walking 15 miles per day. He struggled even just doing 1 push-up.

I think this works so well because:

1. It's gamified. The more followers the more he has to do.
2. People love watching people suffer. MrBeast's most popular and highest retention videos are of him suffering (in a box underground).
3. It's a heroes journey and people get to follow along and see him get fit.
4. He has this big goal of working out with John Cena, and people want to help him.
5. There's stakes. He'll delete his account if he doesn't hit 1M followers.
6. He's only 17 years old and we want to see him turn his life around.

Of course, there's more to it. Here are the 6 core ingredients of viral content.

2. Improve onboarding with the Bowling Alley Framework

Insight from Wes Bush from Product-Led.

40~60% of users who sign up will never actually use your product.

So, nailing the onboarding experience is a key way to increase conversion and retention.

Wes Bush shares what he calls the "Bowling Alley Framework." Here's what that means:

Wes breaks this down in 3 phase:

Phase 1: Build your straight line path

Your user signs up, and hits the product (current state). You want them to get to the "magic moment" where they discover the value your product brings them (desired outcome).

1. Step 1: Map out the current path they take from Current State to Desired Outcome.
2. Step 2: Label each step as Green (necessary), Yellow (advanced features, can be introduced later), and Red (can be removed completely, like a phone number field).
3. Step 3: Remove all Reds. Delay all Yellows. You want nothing but green lights.

Phase 2: Create Product Bumpers

These are elements within the product that push people towards the desired outcome.

1. Welcome Message: Welcome them in, restate value props, and motivate them.
2. Product Tour: This is a step-by-step tour that hand holds them to the Desired Outcome. Let people opt out if they don't want that.
3. Progress Bars: Show their progress to being fully up and running to illustrate they still have stuff to step up. It gamifies onboarding.
4. Checklists: Similar to progress bars, show a checklist of the steps remaining.
5. Tooltips: Have tooltips pop up to show them where to click next.
6. Empty states: If parts of the UI aren't ready to go yet, have a message that explains why it's empty and link to what they need to do it fill it.

Phase 3: Create Conversational Bumpers

Product bumpers only work if they're actually in the product. Often, people will sign up and then bounce.

Conversational bumpers are to bring them back into the product.

This includes a lot of different email types, like onboarding, welcome, case studies, trial expiration, and post-trial surveys.

For a deeper dive into all 3 phases, check out Wes' full article.

3. 4 ad types to increase click-through rates

Insight from Andrew Chen and Neal / Demand Curve

The first banner ad in 1994 had a clickthrough rate of 78%:

Now the average is ~0.35%.

A 222x decrease!

Andrew Chen calls this the "Law of Shitty Clickthroughs." Essentially, a new marketing tactic's effectiveness will be short lived. We're drawn to novelty (like the flashing banner ad), but as soon as it becomes common, we tune it out and it stops working.

That's why with any marketing, you need to stand the f*&k out (as Louis Grenier would say). 

But this is particularly true with ads where you're blowing money on every impression.

You need to not trigger the "this is an ad" reflex.

Here are some ad types that currently help with that:

1. Customer reactions

Show a user (or actor's) reaction to using the product. 

• Dramatic expressions grab attention.
• A lower quality "iPhone" shot or video feels more organic. 
• You can showcase your product's "wow" or "magic" moment.

2. Customer testimonials

Social proof is powerful. Share customer text reviews or testimonials. Even better, share a video testimonial. We use Testimontial.to to collect ours—like this one from Alex M H Smith about Unignorable.

3. Unboxing

People love unboxing videos. Oddly, even if it's for a product they know nothing about. There's built in mystery and curiosity, and opening up new products is a pleasurable moment for people so we have positive associations with them.

Cut your video to highlight the most exciting moments in the first few seconds.

4. Product walkthrough

Have a customer, influencer, actor, or just a team member do a selfie-style walkthrough using the product. It feels natural and let's you show off the product.

With all of these, make sure to have a good "hook" to get people invested quickly.

And if you're a startup spending <$50k per month in ads (or looking to get them started), our new service, Ad Labs, we can run the ads for you.

News and links

News you can use:

• YouTube added Spotlight Moments, an AI-powered ad tool to enhance advertising opportunities.

  X/Twitter is launching two new tiers of Premium subscription.

  YouTube launched a new feature that allows creators to add timestamps to the products they tag in videos.

  Google AdSense launches related search for Auto Ads, helping improve target precision of ads.

• In case you missed it, I broke down the entire marketing campaign for our $251,643.20 cohort of Un-ignorable.

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*Sponsored by Rewardful

Want to be featured in front of 83,660 founders and marketers? Learn more here–booking into November.

Something fun

tbh not sure if he's joking or not based on his name.

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In case you're new: Who's Demand Curve?

We’re on a mission to help make it easier to start, build, and grow companies.

We share high-quality, vetted, and actionable growth content as we learn it from the top 1% of founders and marketers.

How we can help you grow:

• Read our free playbooks, blog articles, and teardowns—we break down the strategies and tactics that fast-growing startups use to grow.
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See you next week.

— Neal and Justin

Neal O'Grady

Justin Setzer