Fabrizio Ballarini — Scaling Organic Growth by Building Products (Turing Fest 2018)

Building products with engineers is the most scalable way to drive organic growth. I will introduce briefly the disconnect I found between marketing and product/engineering from my past consulting experience, cover the basics on how we setup autonomous and independent growth teams and ultimately dive into how we drive growth by building products with engineers. In the “building products” deep dive I will give an overview of our framework to generate products ideas from search data, provide some tactical examples on how building custom CMSs allows us to quickly validate MVPs, why we invest in infrastructure to scale acquisition and what we learned so far by building products that solve customers problems across the entire funnel.

Transcript

1. 

   Scaling organic growth
   by building products.
   

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2. @Pechnet
   Link to slides
   seowi.se/turing-fest-18
   

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3. UK Mortgage approvals
   

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4. 2.4M average
   monthly searches
   for mortgage
   calculators
   

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5. Here is what they see on Google...
   

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6. Disconnect between marketing and product
   

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7. Disconnect between product & engineering
   

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8. Software hardware
   Problem solving dilemma….
   

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9. Users grow as fast as your team ships stuff
   

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10. Over 3M customers.
    

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11. £2 Billion
    per month.
    → Saving our customers £2 million every day!
    

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12. Word of mouth
    Is the biggest
    driver of growth.
    

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13. Build a 10x product.
    

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14. Tell the world about it!
    Google Trends
    

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15. Example of a piece of content that doesn’t
    drive sustainable organic growth
    Paid marketing.
    

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16. Flat Organic growth beyond WOM.
    

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17. We work in autonomous &
    independent teams that
    focus on KPIs that make a
    difference to our
    customers and drive our
    growth.
    

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20. Full stack organic growth team
    SEO Specialists Full Stack Devs Frontend Devs Designers Copywriters
    Editors
    Translators
    Publishers
    Product/Analysts
    

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21. Money without borders: instant,
    convenient, & eventually free
    

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25. Organic growth team mission
    Users Problem
    ?
    Search Answer to users
    problem via
    products or
    content
    

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26. 3 years later…..
    1 2 4 3m+
    1.6m+
    1.5m+
    Suite of
    research &
    monitoring
    tools
    Custom content
    management
    platforms
    Products Indexed pages users a month
    visiting our
    website through
    our products
    from search alone
    Notifications
    users receive
    each month
    

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27. 3 years later…..
    

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28. Indexed Pages

    Traffic

    Customers
    

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30. Start with an empowered autonomous full-stack team…
    1. Build platforms & tools to launch MVPs in minutes
    

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31. SEOWise project: Research and cluster queries
    

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32. Cluster what users search for into product features
    Search Data
    Scrappy old way
    Fancy scalable future
    

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33. Estimate quickly opportunity
    medium medium
    hard easy
    

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34. Talk to customers and colleagues who regularly do
    

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35. Meet “Lienzo” and build a new landing page in 1 minute
    

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36. You don’t need an actual product to validate a search intent
    Price comparison v0.1 (Lienzo)
    

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37. Publishing content & landing pages
    Copywriters
    Editors
    Translators
    Publishers
    Keyword Data
    Article
    Landing Page
    

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38. The Average Handling time (AHT) is normalizing. In average it takes around 15-18 days for each of the
    production stages. Overall it takes us 2 - 3 months to publish an article from the moment the brief for
    it is created.

    Scaling by building efficiencies in publishing operations
    Publishing
    Analyst
    

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39. Scaling linearly by publishing via CMS
    Time
    

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40. We already know what we are going to build in 3 years time
    2017 2018 2019 2020
    Core products
    Validate MVPs (no dev resources) Launch new products
    

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41. Start with an empowered autonomous full-stack team…
    1. Build platforms & tools to launch MVPs in
    minutes
    2. Invest in infrastructure that will help you scaling
    

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42. From unstructured to structured data
    

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43. 1000+ new pages DONE!
    Step 1: We plugged our CMS to Metabase
    We incentive teams to hack our CMS
    Step 2: Understand template in JSON
    Step 3: Edit template, concatenate JSON Step 4: Inject data in in PosgreSQL
    

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44. Can be faster?
    I’m going to
    lock the
    platform!
    

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45. Scale search intents via products
    Engineers
    Product/SEOs
    Designers
    Copywriters
    Keyword Data
    Product /
    Landing page
    

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46. Deeper product integration with core product
    

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47. We created this open source library
    Scaling global launches and localisation
    Add open source library to
    your application
    Configure your mapping Translate & go live!
    

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48. Scaling pages with modularised services
    Frontend Widgets Homepage
    Landing Pages
    Price Comparison
    Comparison
    Service
    Data
    Collection
    Service
    Invite a friend
    

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49. Scaling by building products with engineers
    Time
    

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50. Modularised products can also help you amplify
    grow across entire funnel
    

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51. PWA
    Search
    Get
    notifications
    “Install”
    Depend less on acquisition from search
    

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52. Start with an empowered autonomous full-stack team…
    1. Build platforms & tools to launch MVPs in
    minutes
    2. Invest in infrastructure that will help you scaling
    3. Iterate on products that truly solve customer
    problems to drive growth
    

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53. Indexed Pages

    Traffic

    Customers?
    

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54. Acquisition Education/Conversion
    Research &
    Validation
    Launch
    MVP
    Scale
    acquisition
    Improve
    product
    Education
    Conversion
    

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56. 36 Rounds of coffee shop testing….and still room for improvement!
    

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57. Data is the essential part of the product without data we don’t have a product, not a 10x one.
    

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58. Build a 10x product that didn’t exist before
    

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59. Start with an empowered autonomous full-stack team…
    1. Build platforms & tools to launch MVPs in
    minutes
    2. Invest in infrastructure that will help you scaling
    3. Iterate on products that truly solve customer
    problems to drive growth
    

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60. @Pechnet
    Link to slides >>
    seowi.se/turing-fest-18
    Money without borders
    TransferWise.com/borderless
    Join us >> TransferWise.com/
    jobs
    Thank you
    

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