The Repeatable Formula for Increasing User Engagement

Sep 8, 2020 4:43:01 AM
Author: Kieran Flanagan

In this episode of the GrowthTLDR, we talk to Pulkit Agrawal, the CEO and Co-Founder of Chameleon.

Chameleon provides companies with tools that help drive better product success via onboarding, feature adoption, and better upgrades.

We talk to Pulkit about the repeatable formula to improve user engagement, why product marketing needs to be more accountable to user onboarding, and how product-led growth will change how we build products.

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Time Stamped Notes:

[3:25] - Chameleon has ten employees. It's a remote-first company with 1 to 10 million in ARR. They took some investment from True Ventures via a seed round.

[4:00] - Chameleon provides you with tools that help drive product success - like onboarding, feature adoption, and upgrades.

[4:45] - Chameleon is a remote-first company. Pulkit's original plan was to have all remote employees in the same timezone (Pacific). Since then, they've hired someone in Europe, and other employees have moved to different timezones.

[6:40] - To work across timezones, you need to have great documentation habits, make it easy to find and navigate around documents, and excellent project management practices. 

[8:00] - Pulkit has seen more and more product teams adopt a tech stack to operationalize product-led growth. 

[10:25] - One of the formulas that Pulkit sees improve user engagement time and again is:

Action = Motivation - Friction

People will take action when motivation is high, and friction is low. 

[13:40] - All users start with some motivation via marketing channels - an Ad, a referral, a google search. Once a user enters the product app, friction begins to erode that motivation, until the user reaches an 'Aha' moment, that adds more motivation. 

[16:15] - Pulkit feels that product-growth teams also need to be responsible for adding motivation. They should make use of things like case studies, content on how the product solves their problems.  

[19:00] - Pulkit feels Product teams can do the following to add motivation via in-app tools:

a. Empty State screens: these are an excellent way to highlight the value of the product. These are similar to landing pages for features that are within the app.

b. In-product prompts: When a user reaches a point of friction, in-product prompts allow you to add motivation via social proof or content to highlight that feature's value.

c. In-product copy: Have an expert copywriter review and update all copy within the product.

[22:15] - In a product-led world, the product marketing team can take on some responsibility for the user onboarding. 

It's more common for users to bypass a lot of the marketing material on the companies website and decide to get started with the free product. 

Product marketing can bring more of that material into the onboarding and help users understand why they should care about the product, how it helps solve their problems.

[27:25] - To create a unified customer experience across the user journey, teams need to cross-pollinate information, research, and data with each other.

[29:25] - We talk about the dangers of becoming too reliant on quantitative data and not relying enough on qualitative data. The qualitative data is critical to teaching you about the why of users' expectations. 

[31:30] - Pulkit talks about the value of doing micro-surveys, which are one-question surveys available in your product. Micro-surveys are triggered by user actions within the product, meaning their engagement is very high.

[34:00] - Pulkit feels product-led is moving us to a more interactive experience. The product will need to create an interactive experience aligned across the entirety of the user journey.


– Pulkit on Twitter / LinkedIn
– Kieran on Twitter / LinkedIn / Medium
– Scott on Twitter / Linked / Medium

Topics: Podcast, Founder, User Engagement

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