Focus on value, not on metrics
I have just moved to a startup that I think is pretty cool. In this startup I was put into the Growth team. Growth is almost like a sacred thing for a startup, especially so for their investors. However, I realized at the beginning that I didn’t know that much about it.
增長對於創業公司特別是投資者來說非常有吸引力。
Is focusing on a metric and trying to grow it at any cost a legitimate way to achieve growth? My previous company seems to think so and I didn’t think things went that well for them. It was an e-commerce site, and the North Star metric there was GMV (Gross Merchandise Volume). Sean Ellis said a North Star metric is the single metric that best captures the core value that your product delivers to customers. It makes sense, right? The core value of an e-commerce site should be its capacity to generate matches between buyers and sellers in the form of transactions. The problem is they kept trying to increase the metric in artificial ways that doesn’t actually increase the product’s capacity to do so. Fake it until you make it? What if you never did?
死盯數字不一定行之有效。我們做過一個購物網站，制定了「商品總量」這樣的指標，這一指標被認為最能體現商品給顧客帶來的價值，這聽起來合情合理，但不盡然。購物網站的核心價值應該是整合賣家和買家間交易的能力。
If you have a product or service, you would want your customers to use it more often, right? Not just use, pay for it. You want more users to pay more, in increased frequencies. In essence, you want more people to make more decisions that your product or service is giving them value for money . This is a key thing in my opinion. We sometimes get lost in the numbers and statistics we forget that these are all real people — unique individuals that somehow made the collective decision that it is a good idea to pay for your product.
如果你有一個產品或服務，你會希望你的用戶盡可能多地使用，然後付費。本質上，你希望更多人為你的產品或服務給他們所帶來的價值掏腰包。這是問題的關鍵。而我們有時候會迷失在數字和統計中，卻忘了我們面對的是真實的人和這些不同的個體為何會不約而同地自願買單你的產品。
How do people arrive at that decision? For some products it seems there are clear, trackable tell-tale signs — called the a-ha moment . For facebook it is 10 friends in 7 days, for Slack it is 2000 messages sent between team members, for Dropbox is one file in one Dropbox folder in one device, the list goes on. These are lagging indicators of people who have found value for your product and helping people get to these as quickly as possible helps. However, this doesn’t mean that after the a-ha moment they will always make a decision to use your product . They will make that decision every day, and at times they may decide to use your competitors’ offerings instead.
如何才能讓用戶掏腰包？很多產品有一個清晰、可追蹤的故事線—— Facebook 是在七天內交了 10 個好友， Slack 是團隊間發送了 2000 條訊息， Dropbox 是在一個設備的一文件夾里有一個文件……這些都是足以說明人們發現你的產品給他們帶來價值的滯後指標，但是這並不代表他們總是會繼續使用產品，有時候他們可能反而決定去使用你對手的產品。
So what is there to do? How can we get to sustainable growth and do it in a way that makes sense? I suggest we shift our focus from the lagging indicator, growth, and onto the root cause — Value. The whole reason that startups look so much to growth is because it provides validation of the better value they try to provide through technological or other means of innovation. If you build value, growth will come. Enter value hacking.
我們應將焦點從滯後指標、增長轉向根本問題——那就是價值，致力於「價值駭客」，你若創造了價值，便會帶來增長。
What is Value Hacking, anyway?
Growth hacking needs product-market fit . Product-market fit means that the market has already given you some validation of the value you’re providing — some small but loyal user base that means that your product is actually solving a real problem. After that, you can do experiments and iterate on solving pain points for your existing user and introduce new users to the solution you have, adding more pain points for you to solve.. Congrats! You’re now a growth hacker!
市場已經認可了你提供的價值——有種子用戶基礎，你的產品確實能夠解決問題，你不斷試驗，為用戶解決痛點，再引入新的用戶，解決更多的痛點……你已經是一名增長駭客了！
If you continue on that path, eventually you might arrive at a place where you’re not growing as much as you have been. You’ve tried every idea, every UX permutation, every clever promotion, but you struggle to move the results of your experiments to significance. Way to go! You’ve now hit what’s known as a local maximum .
你繼續這一路徑，你最終會到達瓶頸，一個稱之為局部最大值的地方。
A local maximum/minimum is where you eventually end up if you start somewhere along a function’s graph, choosing to go up or down, and continue doing that until you find that you’re not going up or down anymore. Since growth hacking is essentially an optimization problem, you’re bound to hit this point sooner or later.
在一個函數圖形上，如果你從某一點開始向上或向下，當無法再更上或更下時，就有了局部最大/最小值。增長駭客歸根到底是一個優化問題，所以你遲早會碰到這一點。
How can you break out of this then? How does it all relate to value? Remember that a local maximum is specific to the function that we picked — so just pick a different function! In other words, look at our assumption on how we provide value and the audience that we’re impacting and try to come up with other ideas on how we provide value to a different set of audience. Everyone is different in their needs so the more people you’re trying to impact the more difficult it is. Look at your current audience, pick a subset that you think have similar idea on how they perceive value and optimize for them. This is what value hacking means — optimizing for each and every kind of value functions available in your market .
局部最大值取決於我們選取的函數。千人千面，你想影響越多人，這事就越複雜，審視你的用戶，分組分析。價值駭客的本質是針對市場上每個人和每種價值函數做最優化方案。
Examples of Real-world Value Hacking
McDonald’s was a strictly fast food place serving typical fast food items such as Big Macs, French fries, and soda. However, looking at the growth of specialty coffee shops, it realizes that it had the resources to also challenge the Starbucks of the world and they released McCafe to great success. They realized here that the value they can provide does not have to be tied with their current food offerings. By combining existing resource (brand, strategic location) with new offerings (espresso drinks, pastries) they could tap into a faster growing market with a different value function.
麥當勞的例子：整合現有資源另辟蹊徑打造了 McCafe 達成了快速增長。
When Valve Inc started in 1996 it could not have envisioned what it would become. It started as a video games developer delivering an immersive single-player game in the FPS genre. However as the genre evolved and the player base places more value in multiplayer and online communities, it changed with them and built Steam as the premier online platform for PC gamers . In its journey, Valve kept a close eye on what their user base really values and does not get stuck on the game developer business (Half-Life 3 is never going to happen, guys).
Valve 的例子。
The foremost hypergrowth company in the world, WeChat, started as a messaging platform but this eventually blossoms into payments and social media because they know that those are the ways they can leverage their network of users while simultaneously providing them with more value .
微信的例子。
What these companies have found to their advantage is that although they built their current user base with their initial product, there are other “adjacent” use cases that may open possibilities to a larger markets with better response to optimization efforts.
雖然這些公司為他們現在的用戶構建了最初的產品，但他們也準備好了為一個更大的市場開啟「另一個」用戶用例。
How to Start Doing Value Hacking
So where to begin? Here are some ideas:
1. Look at your data and identify different clusters of customers that exhibit similar usage patterns . Try to understand what, exactly, is their use case and how they derive value from your product. In your past experiments, have you done any that cater specifically for these users? Subsequently you have to measure your impact metrics as it pertains to them, and not the whole userbase. Small, focused experiment that confirm or deny your hypotheses about the value functions these segments have are key to success.
分析數據，分組有相似使用模式的用戶，理解他們如何從你的產品中獲得價值。量身定制，測量影響指標，建立特有的價值函數，證明假設。
2. Look at an existing use-case’s value proposition. Is there any technological or cultural change happening that significantly affects it? Traditional taxi companies in many countries have found that it is more profitable to augment the ride-sharing companies rather than to go against them. Go back to the drawing board and tweak your offering to fit the current situation.
審視現有用例的價值主張，關注技術和文化變化帶來的影響，調整產品以適應當前形勢。
Remember that pretty cool startup that I mentioned I’d joined? We have grown into a unicorn valued more than $3 billion in under 10 years starting from ride-sharing, to food, to online ticket sales , and many more. We have experienced our growth under these principles, even though we may not have realized this at the time. The market is still young, and there are definitely more markets, and more growth potential left to explore.
Disclaimer: This is my personal blog and the views contained within are my own and not necessarily those of my employers, or any other parties named.
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