Growth without trust is a leaky bucket

What signals should growth operators watch for to know that trust is broken before it shows up as churn?

There are a couple of signals you can look out for. One is NPS. I don’t think enough people pay attention to conducting NPS surveys. It’s one of the fastest ways to understand the level of confidence customers have in your product.

If customers say they’re happy to refer your product to a friend, it definitely means they’re enjoying it. If they’re indifferent, there’s probably a problem. Another signal is looking closely at how users actually use your product. If you enable payments, how many transactions are failing? If you’re an e-commerce business, how many orders are going unfulfilled? These things give you signals about customer experience and the level of trust between you and the customer.

Ultimately, every startup is offering value to customers. You need to understand how much friction exists between the customer and that value. More often than not, businesses wait for customers to report that they’re not getting value before they realise their product is broken.

I remember an exhibition we had early in our product’s journey. We had Google Sign-In enabled on Subify, but it wasn’t working. I was testing our onboarding end-to-end at the event to see what could go wrong, and I caught the issue.

At the same time, one of our sales associates was talking to customers about using the product. She came to me and said, “People cannot sign up.” But I had already identified the problem and escalated it to our CTO. We ended up taking Google Sign-In out immediately and decided we’d bring it back once we’d fixed it.

Continually use your product. Test its limits. Test edge cases. Don’t just test the regular use cases and conclude that everything works. I’ve seen situations where a customer complains and the developer says, “It’s working on my system.” It may be working on your system, but it may not be working on the customer’s system.

A customer might struggle with your product on day one, manage to get value, then struggle again on days two, three and four. Eventually, when a competitor offers them an alternative with a stronger value proposition, they leave. So you need to constantly monitor the friction customers experience and fix it before it becomes a reason to leave.

As the user base and transaction volume grow, what part of customer experience becomes more difficult to protect, and how do growth operators protect it at scale?

Customer experience is critical. Throughout the lifecycle of a product, from when you introduce it to the market, through the growth stage and into maturity, you need to continually optimise for customer experience. The person responsible for growth needs to protect that experience at every stage of the business.

Customers will churn. There’s little or nothing you can do about the fact that some customers will churn. Even the best products experience churn. So the focus should be on how to retain more users. That’s why the conversation at this stage isn’t just, “Is our app working well?” You start thinking about what other features and products can help retain your customer base.

You see companies adding things like bill payments, BVN payments, ticketing and other services because those additional offerings can help retain customers. And it’s not just a marketing conversation. You need input from product and customer success as well. I think customer success is where many brands in Nigeria lack at this level. We don’t really rate customer success or its contribution to growth enough.

To be honest, we live in a VC-led and VC-controlled growth world. Because of the returns VCs are looking for, there’s pressure to chase growth at astronomical rates. But ideally, the product itself should signal what needs to happen next. At Subify, I know that our next level of growth is offering more products to customers. Customers themselves keep telling us what they need.

When you see your month-on-month growth and the percentage isn’t increasing, that’s a signal. You know you need to do more and hit the next milestone. Your growth milestones should be informed by the product and your goals at that stage.

What do growth and marketing teams learn too late?

I think one thing people learn too late is that sometimes the numbers can be masking bad actors. Even when the numbers look good, you need to investigate. You need to understand why the numbers look good and make sure somebody isn’t taking advantage of your product.

People might be using your product for something completely different, including potentially harmful or nefarious purposes, and once they’re done, they leave. You can look at your numbers and think, “People are using my product. I’m growing. Everything looks good,” without investigating who these users are and what they’re actually using your product for.

Beyond bad actors, there’s another opportunity in understanding unexpected use cases. Sometimes you build your product in one direction and people use it in another direction. If you identify that, you can build around that use case, create additional use cases or develop similar products. That can also become a source of growth.

One of the things you discover at scale is that retention becomes harder. When you move from 1 million to 10 million users, you already have the user base. The question becomes how to keep a large portion of those users active. So the growth problem changes. From 0 to 1 million, you’re primarily thinking about acquisition. But from 1 to 10 million, the conversation isn’t just about acquiring the next 20 million users. You’re thinking about growth through retention and revenue.

Then lastly, build capacity. You have to build capacity as much as possible, to be honest.