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.”
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.
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.
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
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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.
Now Is The Perfect Time To Be A Women Entrepreneur
“Women who walks with purpose doesn’t have to chase people or opportunities. Her light causes people and opportunities to pursue her.”
Dr. Farrah Gray
In Silicon Valley, the percentage of women entrepreneur starting technology companies is astronomically low, at a rate around 3 percent. Of privately held companies, only 6.5 percent have a female CEO, and 1.3 percent have a female founder. How is this the case, when women are earning more than half of all bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate degrees for the first time in history?
Despite these disappointing numbers and the gender issues, there is good news too. Women who are in tech are doing well and getting noticed. Recent data has shown that women-led technology companies are more capital-efficient, achieving 35 percent higher return on investment. Companies founded by women also represented a record 13 percent of venture capital deals through the first half of 2013, up from only 4 percent in 2004. In other words, investors are starting to notice that it pays to have a woman in charge.
As a women entrepreneur and sole founder and CEO of a venture-backed digital healthcarestartup, I’ve experienced a positive shift in how I’m treated as a woman in tech compared to the horror stories of women who came before me. This leads me to believe that now is the perfect time to make the leap into entrepreneurship as a women.
Women entrepreneur are being recognized as powerful leaders
Heavy-hitting women such as Marissa Mayer, Sheryl Sandberg and GinniRometty are in C-suite roles, running major Fortune 500 companies. Their leadership, and the headlines they garner, have popularized the image of women in high-level roles and opened the door for a conversation about the need for more female leadership in tech and beyond.
Fortunately, women outside of the spotlight are also excelling and being recognized for their outstanding leadership skills. A 2011 study in the Harvard Business Review evaluating men and women in the workplace found that:
“At every level, more women were rated by their peers, their bosses, their direct reports, and their other associates as better overall leaders than their male counterparts — and the higher the level, the wider that gap grows. Specifically, at all levels, women are rated higher in fully 12 of the 16 competencies that go into outstanding leadership. And two of the traits where women outscored men to the highest degree — taking initiative and driving for results — have long been thought of as particularly male strengths.”
Considering it wasn’t very long ago that women were relegated to the home and shunned from the boardroom, that is a pretty amazing and inspiring update. And for enterprising female entrepreneurs, the timing of this shift couldn’t be better.
With strong women entrepreneur at the helm, something interesting (but unsurprising) is happening to their businesses: They are growing at a higher rate than their traditional, male-led counterparts. Over the past 10 years, the growth in the number of women-owned firms with $10 million or more in revenues has increased by 56.6 percent, a rate 47 percent faster than the rate of growth of all $10 million-plus firms.
Women in leadership roles also seem to be key in driving the success of an enterprise. The failure rate of startups with two or fewer female executives is 50.3 percent, but with five or more women in high-level positions, the success rate jumps to 61 percent.
In particular, women are emerging as key players in healthcare, both on the ground and in the C-suite. Women entrepreneur account for 73 percent of medical and health services managers, making them the face of healthcare to the general population. And over the last decade, not only has the number of high-revenue, women-owned healthcare and social assistance firms nearly tripled, but those companies are growing at an impressive rate – 54.9 percent across all healthcare and social assistance firms, and nearly 183 percent for firms with over $10 million in revenue.
With healthcare in the national spotlight, women are emerging as successful leaders capable of shepherding America into a new era of health and wellness. Skylab Apps recognizes this trend and has partnered with healthcare professionals creating “Skylab Medical” a Skylab Apps incubator partner company. See more about this here.
The VC snowball effect
Women entrepreneur firms are succeeding and in turn, attracting more venture capital investment, leading to even higher growth. During the height of the dot-com bubble, venture capital investments in women-led businesses lagged pathetically, receiving less than 6 percent of total funds invested in the U.S. between 1997 and 2000. But between 2000 and 2011, that number shot up to 41 percent.
Combine that with the fact that when venture-backed, women-led technology companies bring in 12 percent higher revenue than male-owned tech companies and you have a Pandora’s box of potential.
As VC firms continue to be positively rewarded for investing in women-led companies, they will be more open to future investments. I’d be hard-pressed – and reluctant – to stop this snowball from reaching warp speed.
The women-supporting-women movement is just starting
There are more women entrepreneurs supporting younger and less-experienced female entrepreneurs today than ever before. For example, I had a mentor who had a huge impact on my growth and success, so I’m paying it forward.
Over the past year, I’ve been mentoring a young female entrepreneur who recently raised $1 million for her own startup and was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 List. The great thing is, 80 percent of female tech entrepreneurs reported having mentors and, in my experience, that bodes well for their future success.
There are more women investors looking for women-led companies, or great companies to invest in and add women to their leadership teams or advisory boards because the numbers don’t lie — the odds of success with women calling the shots.
“It is important to take an active role in shaping our personal and professional networks in order to live the most fulfilling lives possible.”
Introducing Skylab Apps, the “white labelsocial media platform
In early 2004 Facebook was formed and the social media was becoming a household name. There were manynaysayers who were convinced that Facebook didn’t stand a chance against the Social Media giant.
In 5 short years Facebook took over the social media space and became a household name. Well it’s been 14 years, a bunch of mergers and buyouts later with multiple victories against the many who have tried to take on the social media juggernaut to no avail.
So who or what is going to infiltrate and disrupt the social media space and gain some market share?
Introducing the “white labelsocial media platform.”
I know what you’re thinking, “why would I go to another platform besides Facebook or Twitter?”
Well it’s simple; if the people, companies and or brands that you religiously loved and followed offered a dedicated community to you that offered special and exclusive content, education, events and maybe even a direct line of communication to them would you be interested in their app?
Of course, who wouldn’t?
Exclusivity is is what Social Media is lacking these days but in order to exist this day in age you need to be online and represented on trending social media platforms to appear relevant and hip, especially if you are a business or a brand. What if you could use existing social media to push your clients, customers, followers or fans to your own private social media community? What if, you could create and control 100% of the way you engage with your community without all of the silly rules put in place by the existing companies to make sure you are not cutting into their advertising revenue at the expense of you and your users experience.
Well, now you can, introducing Skylab Apps white label social media platform.
CEO Dean Grey started Skylab Apps with a vision deeply integrated mobile platform based community that was simple for users to navigate, communicate and take actions.
The Skylab Apps platform has all of the great features you would find on social media like Chat, recognition walls and different ways to communicate, but Skylab Apps has taken those concepts and innovated on them deeply transforming how companies and brands will use social media technology. Below is a comparison chart created by Skylab Apps. In it you can begin to see how in depth the Skylab App Platform goes.
Mike Pine, the GM of Integrated Partnerships for FanDuel said it best:
“Skylab Apps Gamification allows major brands to laser target consumers, eliminate marketing clutter while building new incremental revenue streams. Most all of consumers feel they are unlocking rewards vs being advertised to.”
– Mike Pine
Just to give you an idea of what some of these features look like, here is a quick list to some longer posts about some of the incredible Skylab Apps features.
Since Skylab Apps inception in 2015, they have been taking the mobile app space by storm quietly and effectively. Some of their clients include Amway, Allysian Sciences (Apolo Ohno) and Good Lovin Food the original creators of Bitchin Sauce. There list of clients is growing too! About 16 enterprise clients in 2016 alone.
Along with their stealth approach to market Skylab apps assembled an ambassador and advisory board of rockstars. Here is the shortlist:
If you are interested in finding out more about what Skylab Apps can do for you, or your company, please visit us at Skylabapps.com and schedule a demo today!
The ‘governator‘ discusses with graduates his ‘golden rules’ to leading a successful life and career. These rules can be applied to anything in life and show the drive behind a man who has accomplished each and every task he set out to achieve when he burst onto the bodybuilding scene over 40 years ago.
Apply Arnold’s golden six rules to a successful life to whatever you plan on doing today, we guarantee it’ll help you make the most of your current situation.
“Remember these 6 rules. Trust yourself, break some rules, don’t be afraid to fail, ignore the naysayers, work like hell, and give something back.”
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Arnold’s 6 Rules to Success:
1. Trust yourself
Many young people are getting so much advice from their parents and from their teachers and from everyone. But what is most important is that you have to dig deep down, dig deep down and ask yourselves, who do you want to be? Not what, but who. Figure out for yourselves what makes you happy, no matter how crazy it may sound to other people.
2. Break the Rules
Break the rules, not the law, but break the rules. It is impossible to be a maverick or a true original if you’re too well behaved and don’t want to break the rules. You have to think outside the box. That’s what I believe. After all, what is the point of being on this earth if all you want to do is be liked by everyone and avoid trouble?
3. Don’t Be Afraid to Fail
Anything I’ve ever attempted, I was always willing to fail. So you can’t always win, but don’t afraid of making decisions. You can’t be paralyzed by fear of failure or you will never push yourself. You keep pushing because you believe in yourself and in your vision and you know that it is the right thing to do, and success will come. So don’t be afraid to fail.
4. Don’t Listen to the Naysayers
How many times have you heard that you can’t do this and you can’t do that and it’s never been done before? I love it when someone says that no one has ever done this before, because then when I do it that means that I’m the first one that has done it. So pay no attention to the people that say it can’t be done. I never listen to, “You can’t.” (Applause) I always listen to myself and say, “Yes, you can.”
“Being able to let go of outdated ways of thinking and moving on when you have nothing else to learn”.
You never want to fail because you didn’t work hard enough. Mohammed Ali, one of my great heroes, had a great line in the ’70s when he was asked, “How many sit-ups do you do?” He said, “I don’t count my sit-ups. I only start counting when it starts hurting. When I feel pain, that’s when I start counting, because that’s when it really counts.” That’s what makes you a champion. No pain, no gain.
But when you’re out there partying, horsing around, someone out there at the same time is working hard. Someone is getting smarter and someone is winning. Just remember that. Now, if you want to coast through life, don’t pay attention to any of those rules. But if you want to win, there is absolutely no way around hard, hard work. Just remember, you can’t climb the ladder of success with your hands in your pockets.
6. Give Back
Whatever path that you take in your lives, you must always find time to give something back, something back to your community, give something back to your state or to your country.
Here at Skylab Apps, we agree with these rules. In fact, these are rules that any start-up should follow! Ambassadors of Skylab Apps like Dave Vanderveen and Jeremy Wong all share the same sentiment. Even the Skylab Apps CEO and Founder Dean Grey would agree wholeheartedly.
If you are interested in the ways we have applied this advice in to our own business. Check out the Skylab Apps blog here for some inspiration!
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.
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.
for success by creating customer-centric, ethical and long-lasting growth…
