We’re back with Sarah Stockdale, former Director of Global Community Growth at Tilt.com (acquired by AirBnb) and principal at Sarah Stockdale Growth Consulting. In this episode, learn the fastest way to grow your startup-up, the story behind the acquisition of Tilt.com’s by AirBnb and Sarah’s tips for doing growth experiments. She also shares her tips for anyone trying to get into growth marketing.
The more you focus on targeting a specific localized demographic, the faster you’re going to be able to #grow. – @skstock Click To TweetWhat You’ll Learn in This Episode
- The northstar metric that the Tilt.com growth team looked at
- The fastest way to grow (hint: it’s not a spray and pray approach)
- The story behind the acquisition of Tilt.com by AirBnb
- An experiment that really worked well for Tilt.com
- Sarah’s tips for growth teams who are doing experiments
- Tips for anyone trying to get into growth marketing
Tweet Some Quotes from This Episode
For @tilt, the one metric we rallied the #growth team around is how often people are actually using the Til.com platform. We had a tipping point when it became viral. – @skstock Click To Tweet For the market penetration of a campus, the metric the #growth team looked at is the number of students on Tilt versus active on Tilt versus the population of undergraduate students – @skstock Click To Tweet The more you focus on targeting a specific localized demographic, the faster you’re going to be able to #grow. – @skstock Click To Tweet I love Canadian startups. The first startup I worked for was homegrown. I want to see Canada’s tech industry thrive. – @skstock Click To Tweet One of the most common mistakes I see is a lack of structure on how to conduct #growth experiments that point us in the right direction, is time capped and has a logical hypothesis. – @skstock Click To Tweet When you say the word #growth #experiment, what does that mean for your organization? How are you being intentional about that? What are you doing with those learnings? How are you going to gain value from things that don’t work? –… Click To Tweet The structure for your growth team really depends on your company. At @WaveApp, we had the #growth team seat with the product team. – @skstock Click To Tweet My growth framework involves: asking how you’re framing your hypothesis. What is the baseline metric you’re trying to move? What is your starting point and target? – @skstock Click To Tweet You need to have month over month goals as a #growth team. It sounds silly. But not everyone is there yet. – @skstock Click To Tweet If you’re trying to show a #growth experiment around trying to increase your email open rate, that’s not all that useful. All that experiment is on the subject line. They’re not actually taking an action in your product. – @skstock Click To Tweet If you want to get into #growth #marketing, build a thing, an audience, a userbase, an email list, Shopify store, anything. Show that you can get people excited about a thing. – @skstock Click To Tweet The education system is not building entrepreneurs. Through the education process, it’s being reinforced that there’s a path that you’re supposed to follow. If you’re note rewarded, you are failing – @skstock Click To Tweet You’ll never build anything useful if you don’t take a risk. – @skstock Click To TweetAbout Sarah Stockdale
Sarah Stockdale is a growth veteran, with 7 years of experience growing and scaling early stage technology companies. With experience working at venture-backed companies out of both Toronto and Silicon Valley, Sarah has grown companies from scratch and led large growth teams. Past experience includes Product Marketing and Business Development at Wave and most recently, Sarah led a multi-national growth team at Tilt as the Director of Global Community Growth. Sarah mentors with Venture for Canada and 500 Startups, and has taught and spoken at Ryerson, Queen’s, Brainstation, HackerYou, McMaster, George Brown and Mohawk College.
Show Notes
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03:23
The first ones [university] that she went after in the beginning
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04:03
Tilt acquisition
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06:49
Experiments that worked well at Tilt
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07:57
What she’s doing now
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10:22
How she coaches startups with experiments
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11:50
How she would structure a growth team
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12:57
Framework for experiments
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16:20
Her tips / advice to people who want or just started growth
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17:54
People who desire to build something but have a fear that it’ll be useless
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20:41
Where to get in touch with her
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21:04
Companies she would want to work with
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Links
In next week’s episode, we have Richard Wong, VP of Marketing at #Paid.
Music By The Passion HiFi www.thepassionhifi.com.