Our Head of Growth and business development at Silkdrive, Patric Sawada, has completed multiple courses at Growth Tribe Academy. He received diplomas for completing training on topics like Growth Hacking, Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Marketing and Growth, Blockchain and Cryptocurrency for Business and Advanced Growth Hacking. Growth Tribe’s content marketer Sabrina Popescu requested to interview him.
Below is the interview in three parts, each with an audiogram and the transcript below. In short the following is discussed:
- Becoming a growth hacker
- Key drivers for growth and product or customer centric approaches
- Best ways to measure growth and KPIs
Becoming a growth hacker
Growth Tribe Interviewer:
Hey there, I’m Sabrina Popescu content marketer at Growth Tribe, and this is a series of short talks with our fellow alumni.
In this episode, I’m talking to Patric Sawada, Head of Growth and Business Development at Silkdrive. Patric completed six courses at Growth Tribe. Obviously we needed to interview this guy.
Patric, welcome back to Growth Tribe for the seventh time. Tell us a little bit about your journey to becoming a growth hacker?
Patric Sawada:
Becoming a marketing manager I wanted to do a lot of online and part of the attraction was that you could actually see what was happening, as opposed to when you do offline, you have good feedback on what is the effect.
I was really looking for something that would give me instant feedback on the activities that I do as marketing manager. And when I found growth hacking, this was exactly that type of process that would give me that on a very short timeframe.
Currently I would like to think of myself as head of growth or growth hacker. And the transition I made here is that it’s not all about user acquisition or awareness, like often in marketing where there’s a lot of focus on that part.
A very important part is actually product and user retention. If you look at a company, they will typically have marketing and sales separated.
Now I like to think from the product. And talk to sales, see how their clients are performing , maybe giving them a call after sometime just to make sure that there is retention because it’s quite difficult to get new customers and it’s not as difficult to keep your customers if you keep them happy.”
Key drivers for growth: product focused or customer centric?
Growth Tribe Interviewer:
What are the key drivers behind growth and what is the difference between having a product focused approach versus a customer centric approach?
Patric Sawada:
There’s a lot of talk about product market fit. In the end it’s your consumer or end user that really needs to fall in love with the product. That will enable you to really be successful. Everything else is just an effort to spin this flywheel faster and faster.
If the product is faulty or not good enough, you can still have quite a successful business, but you will never really get to that big success that we are looking for.
I think it’s important to have a product focused approach, in the sense that you work to get the best product for your customer, and you use feedback from your customer to improve the product.
But you also also need to have some sort of vision. especially if you have some kind of new product or new service, it might be that you are trying to disrupt some market with a new platform, for example, this really requires some vision , because maybe in an old fashioned market, consumers would not be ready to use your platform yet, you need to sort of educate them.
Product market fit is crucial to growing. However, it’s not the only fit that you need. You can also look at maybe the channel, how you’re selling, et cetera, taking into account the context of the product and how you try to bring it to the market you need to have a fit on all of those.
Without it, it’s going to be very difficult to grow because people will not be in love enough. And they might like it, some people may buy it, but it will not enable you to really create a wow moment. People to be advocates for your product and to get some kind of virality going.
Best ways to measure growth and key metrics
Growth Tribe Interviewer:
What are the best ways to measure growth and what are the key metrics to look out for?
Patric Sawada:
The metrics to look out for depends on your key objectives and there’s difference names for it. You can define your North Star metric and your One Metric That Matters (OMTM) for the time being, but basically it comes down to, okay, what are your goals and how we measure them?
There’s lots of vanity metrics used by companies , managers who would be happy to hear that you increased the number of followers on their Facebook accounts, which could be a great thing if that’s your goal, but most of the time it isn’t.
So there is no ideal KPI for growth, because it’s different for each company. It is different for each growth project and you need to determine it together, but you need to be real that you are looking at the right things. And I think looking at how many customers actually perceive the value of your product is a very important one.
So not only looking at the number of users, but also look at retention, do some qualitative KPIs where you would actually ask people, how are they receiving the product? And maybe have them score how dissatisfied they would be, if they could not use the product anymore.
Growth Tribe Interviewer:
So this was the last episode of the talk with Patric Sawada.
We hope that you liked it. If you did click the like button or share it with your network, thank you for tuning in.
We have more episodes coming. So until next time.