How to build meaningful partnerships by Janet Bannister - Quarterly Publication - Ed. 01 - Flipbook - Page 16
How to build meaningful partnerships by Janet Bannister
GROWTH
GROWING A VENTURE
IN AN EMERGING CHANNEL
BY EMILY LONETTO (HEAD OF GROWTH, VOICEFLOW)
I
n all honesty, growth in an
emerging channel is hard. It’s
really, really hard. This makes
goal setting, an open feedback
loop, and a willingness to experiment crucial components of our
growth strategy.
The first step to defining KPIs
when there aren’t any to benchmark against is communicating
effectively as a leadership team
and listening to your collective
gut about what you believe to be
North Star metrics or things that
will help your venture grow.
At Voiceflow, we took this step
then worked backwards: looking at our pre-existing metrics,
plugging into our community for
active feedback, and developing
campaigns and channels that both
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complemented and challenged
our hypotheses. Using this experimental framework, we’re able to
actively test and communicate
new ways to grow, while measuring its direct impact on both our
user base and company goals.
A big thing we’ve really been
going through, which I think is
very topical right now, is the transition from trying to build a tool
“anyone” can use to honing in on
our ideal target market and how it
fits in with a “freemium” model.
In a lot of cases, we’ve been
very fortunate enough to grow
through organic word of mouth
community. It’s been extremely inspiring to see what some of those
interactions look like, whether its
seeing VF communities pop up
around the world or tuning in via
social/our facebook group. At our
growth stage, its extremely important to be tuned in to both the
quantitative and qualitative side of
the business. With our community
– we’re able to do just that.
Now that we’ve experimented
with growing our free user base,
2020 is about figuring out what
our MRR and LTV can look like.
As we move into the new year,
our focus for growth shifts toward
converting ‘casual users’ to ‘power
users’, and individuals into teams.
This focus on retention and creating a multi-player experience for
our creators is a huge reason why
we launched real-time collaboration earlier this month.
LISTEN TO THE
FULL STORY
CRUCIAL STEPS VOICEFLOW
USED TO PROVE TRACTION:
Testing user
growth
Analyzing audiences
to understand targets
Attributing this data
to certain channels
Voiceflow “believes in a future where voice apps are as ubiquitous as websites”. Their solution empowers non-tech teams
to design, prototype and build voice experiences, Alexa Skills
and Google Actions without coding. Think InVision or any
other top user-experience tool but for the world of voice.
Since graduating Next 36 in 2018, they have raised over $5M,
including a recent investment round with the Amazon Alexa
Fund in participation with True Ventures and Ripple Ventures. With a strong focus on community, they plan to continue their growth in global communities going into the new
decade, including community meetups and hackathons.
Learn more
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