Growth Mindset: 10 Principles to Growth: Skylab Apps Case Study

Many people begin to experiment and fail to see the desired results. They’re often missing on the key ingredient: The Growth Mindset. Let’s apply this method to Skylab Apps.

Skylab Apps was founded in 2015 by Dean Grey. He has the vision of growing a global company motivated by the idea that people would adopt the technology built by his company. Skylab Apps makes a white label community building platform that allows the app owner to track, train, grow and monetize their user, customer, clients, follower or fans.

“Company owners want to grow and they have a vague idea of how to get there. But, they lack the key principles to achieve their goals. They lack of a general understanding behind the practice.”

Dean Grey

What if you could increase your Growth rate? What if you could finally start to optimize your processes? Growth is the answer to these questions…

This article is about to give you a few principles to help guide you into your quest for Growth. It is a guide that we have lived by here at Skylab Apps, always testing, poking around and customer/client-centric.

The Infographic : You must be busy. So instead of having you read a ton of text, I distilled the main principles in the following infographic:

1. Learning from experience

Growth is all about testing hypothesis. “Testing hypothesis” means running a battery of tests to see what works and what doesn’t.We test a hypothesis because we believe that no one else has the answer to our questions. What may work in another business, will not necessarily work with yours.

When Dean Grey, Founder of Skylab Apps started Zooplr, his vision was to build a state of the art mobile platform that would allow companies and brands to engage, track and train all of the community member. After successfully exiting Zooplr, and Tags, he continued on with the same vision to build Skylab Apps. Except this time, he was going to take it all the way home

When you test something, you can either validate or invalidate your hypothesis. Most people see this through a success / failure lens. There is no such thing as a failure in Growth because you want to learn. Success happens when you learn, failure when you don’t.

It’s that simple. If your experiment failed and you’ve gained a ton of new insights, that’s a success.Learning allows you to make better educated guesses and to launch even more successful experiments.

Don’t expect to have a lot of success at the beginning but the more you understand your product & customers, the more successful your tests will become. In the case of Skylab Apps, learning from experience didn’t necessarily mean failure. In fact, as mentioned before, exiting the two prior companies successfully set Dean up on the correct pat to launch Skylab Apps with all oh the experience and data from his two prior companies.

2. Data-Driven

Running a digital business enables you to measure every step of the way. You can easily track what everyone is doing on your app.You know more about your consumers than anyone else in business. Use these insights! The best Growth people use that to their advantage. You need to use data in every decision you take.

When we speak about data, most people think about analytics tools such as Google Analytics or KISSmetrics. Never forget about other valuable sources of insights that you have available.

Customer interviews are a perfect source of insights, to help you drive Growth & Product Development.

Make sure that you invest into your Analytics stack early on to avoid learning about the wrong things… (Invalidating the wrong hypothesis will have disastrous impact on your business)

3. Innovative Testing

Growth is all about testing innovative and creative ideas. Don’t limit yourself to what your competitors are doing, you have the freedom to do whatever you want. Be innovative and challenge the status-quo: it’s not because you always had a 3-step signup process that it is necessarily the best process.

Look for flaws in your current processes and improve them until you’re satisfied with the results.

Growth is all about being innovative. If you just copy what’s going on in your space, you’ll limit your potential results terribly.

4. Always go further

Growth never stops. Even if you have a conversion rate from Trial to Paid of 95%, there are always things that you can improve.

When you think everything is optimized, take a one-week break. Go back to work and think again: Where are we losing most of our users? Where can we have more impact?

You should never be satisfied by the Growth you’re getting. You can always go further.

5. Process first

Launching experiments in only one part of the story. The process is what actually makes everything possible.

6. Authentic & Sustainable Growth

As Brian Balfour said,

“All Growth is not equal”. Are you looking for MAU (Monthly Active Users) or are you looking for long-term customers?

You can’t really sustain your Growth efforts without a process. You’ll start to launch experiments but you’ll soon fail because you’ll lose track of what’s happening. The process is what allows you to create a repeatable, scalable and predictable machine. Without a process, you’ll fail to show results over the long-term. Design your processes early on. They won’t be perfect but iterate and improve them as you move forward. Don’t think about Growth as something that can yield enormous result for the short term. It certainly can. However…
Look at Growth as a way to build your business over the long-term. Launch experiments that can have a long-lasting impact on your growth.

7. Start Small – MVT

You generally don’t have to go through 100 hours of development to test your hypothesis.

If you want to launch several tests per week, you’ll need to launch “Minimum Viable Tests”. In other words: What’s the minimum test that you can launch to test an hypothesis? You need to understand that Growth is an iterative process. Starting small will allow you to build up on your success (or lack thereof). If you launch a small test and it fails, you’ll have a greater “Time to Learning” than if you redesigned your entire on-boarding. Starting small may be be counter intuitive. But it’s the only way that you can create a positive impact on your business.

8. Customer-Centric

If you fail to be customer-centric, you’ll only be able to drive short-term. Your customers will be annoyed and you’ll fail to retain them over the long term.

Increasing your Growth is only one part of the equation. If you squeeze out every dollar of your customer’s wallet without delivering more value, you’ll piss off more than a few people. The best way to be customer-centric is to examine their desired outcome. Are your experiments helping them to achieve their mission, their goals?

9. Ethic

Some people really don’t care about ethics and that’s a mistake in terms of brand image.

The dating sector is a quite good example. They’re basically creating fake profiles and generating discussions with you so that you start your paid membership. A beautiful person of the opposite sex will strike up a conversation and show interest in you. You can only chat back if you start a paid subscription. But, wait! There is no one on the other side… It’s just a bot! Even if this trick is increasing their Growth, are they delivering value? What would people think about that? Having some sense of ethics is imperative if you want to seek Authentic Growth and avoid damaging your long-term brand.

10. Company-wide mission

This is a team sport and everyone should be involved. Everyone should be able to contribute their own ideas to your backlog.Relevant people should also be able to get involved into discussions on specific ideas. You’re designing a new onboarding flow? Talk to the person who designed the last one. If you don’t involve people within your company, you’ll get into political issues and they’ll slow down your efforts.Involving them can only be a good thing. The worse that can happen is that they’ll share valuable insights and help you launch better experiments.

Growth. Growth. Growth.

These principles should help you to get started with Growth. Don’t waste too much time and start experimenting as soon as you can. However… Make sure that you set yourself up for success by creating customer-centric, ethical and long-lasting growth…

Skylabapps.com enables to grow your community thanks to the Gamification Engine which uses Gamified features.

Check out Skylab’s Clients websites & apps. They’ve trusted us for growth.

http://www.allysian.com/ – http://www.amway.com/ – http://www.centerpointe.com/v2/ https://www.goodlovinfoods.com/ http://www.alticor.com/ http://www.eastwestartists.com/ http://www.mindmovies.com/ http://www.xterraplanet.com/ http://blowbunny.com/ http://www.betterplanetpaper.com/

The Growth Mindset: 10 Principles to Growth