Growth Newsletter #140

Snapple's surprising stats, a PLG invite email, and 7 LP questions.

October 3, 2023

Welcome all you growth-loving founders and marketers!‍

Fun fact of the day:

I live on an island ~25% the size of England, but with ~1.5% of the population. It would take ~6 hours for me to drive to the other end non-stop. #Canada 🤪

But anyway, the real topics for the day: Snapple's surprising stats, a PLG invite email, and 7 LP questions.

Let's dive in 🧞♀️

– Neal

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This week's tactics

7 questions to answer in your landing page

Insight from a talk I saw at YC... and can't remember the speaker.

A lot of startup landing pages are extremely confusing—particularly software.

Way too often I hit a website and have no clue what they sell—even if I stick around and read all the features and benefits on the homepage.

Confused people bounce and never return.

A landing page needs to answer these questions to be successful:

1. What is the product?

What does it do and how does it solve a problem they have? Be extremely obvious.

Don't use fluffy filler words. Explain it like you would to grandma or nephew at Thanksgiving.

2. Is it right for me? Am I the target audience?

A tool that helps you "be more productive" is completely different if it's for a single parent, a corporate executive, or a solo creator.

Be clear whose problem the product solves—they'll feel more confident buying.

3. Is it legit?

Or does it look like a phishing/scam site to get your credit card info?

Invest a little in design. 80/20 is fine. Question 4 also helps

4. Who else is using it? (Social proof)

People are more likely to buy if people and companies they respect are also customers. "Oh if Airbnb and Microsoft say it's good, it must be!"

And if you add links to tweets from real accounts, it'll be verifiably legit.

5. How much?

Tell them how much it’s gonna cost them.

It's a waste of everyone's time if someone expects to pay $50/mo and gets quoted $5,000/mo after a 30-minute sales demo.

Bonus: Find clever ways to position it so that the price seems like a deal.

6. Where can I get help?

You can't anticipate every question, and no one reads every sentence on the page or FAQ.

Make it easy and obvious to contact you so you can answer their questions.

This also makes it seem more legit and that support is readily available. Use common questions to fix the copy on your landing page so fewer people ask it.

7. How do I take action?

What is the next step that you want the person to take? It should be obvious.

Bonus: Match the CTA to the "temperature" of the lead.

If they're coming in cold, don't ask them to buy immediately. Get them on a newsletter or free trial. If this is a landing page for a retargeting campaign or email, drive to a sale.

CRO

Lessons from Snapple's surprising stats

Insight derived from Contagious by Jonah Berger and various sources.

1. Only 1 in 2000 startups raise money
2. Solo founders take 3.6x longer to scale than founding teams of 2+.
3. The average age of a successful startup founder is around 45.

We love surprising facts. They trigger a surge of dopamine. And we're dopamine fiends.

In fact, surprising facts are how Snapple was able to boost sales in 2002. They put weird facts under the lids of their drinks. It was a smart campaign for a few reasons:

Variable reward. Slot machines are addicting because we never know what's coming next. Sometimes it's a win. And it's different every time. The ever changing facts under the lids kept people guessing and wanting more.
Social currency. Sharing interesting facts makes us look cool, smart, or interesting to our peers. So people were incentivized to share the stats, and talk about Snapple.
Ritual. As discussed in a newsletter a few weeks ago, having a ritual around your product can increase people's satisfaction with using it. Much like reading fortune cookies after a meal at a Chinese restaurant, people opened the lid of a Snapple, and read the stat to their friends.

Surprising stats are also effective hooks in social posts. For example:

If you hit people with a surprising fact, they'll instantly be hooked. And even the best content will be ignored if it fails to hook people.

If you're growing your personal audience, and want to go deeper on how to create content that makes you unignorable, join the Un-ignorable Challenge.

Enrollment closes in 2 days. Join 241 entrepreneurs learning to grow their audience.

Copywriting

A strong "product-led growth" invitation email

Insight from Elena Verna.

Product-led growth has been all the rage for the past few years. The concepts are simple:

Have a great product
Make sure the product gets better when others use it too
Let people customize their experience

When you have those elements, a product grows itself and becomes hard to leave.

Individuals will often start using it and then invite their coworkers until eventually everyone in the company is hooked.

Think tools like Slack, Dropbox, Figma, Airtable, Miro, Canva, Superhuman, and Zapier.

Part of PLG is nailing the invitation email so that coworkers more readily sign up too.

Here's Elena Verna's breakdown of Slack's invitation email. Use it as a template:

Community Spotlight

News and Links

News you can use:

Google Bard is introducing extensions in their latest update.
YouTube launched video view campaigns—a campaign type that leverages AI to help advertisers target relevant audiences.
TikTok launched an AI-powered "Creative Assistant" that you can chat and work with alongside content creation.
Reddit is removing the ability to opt-out of ad personalization.

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Something fun

This one isn't "funny," but it's a fun reminder to only build a fancy system if the old system is blocking the next stage of growth:

Something fun

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