I’m also a fan of Mac’s The SaaS Bootstrapper newsletter which I recommend you check out.

Aware is a LinkedIn engagement & analytics tool that makes engaging and social selling on LinkedIn easier.

Before we start

Wanted to let you know that there are two ways I can help you.

• Want your SaaS to be in our next audit? Just respond to this email with your link and biggest growth problem

• Need a 1:1 Consultation? Book a FREE 30-minute consultation here

• Follow me for more tips on LinkedIn and Twitter

Now on to the audit!

The Brief

Where previously I just go through a site and decide what I think are opportunities for growth.

This time Mac could give me insights on their growth challenges and what I’ve learned is that:

1. affiliates & referrals drive growth and needs doubling down on

2. need to improve user onboarding to successfully convert users

Quick Intro to Social Selling

After trying out Aware myself, I got introduced to the concept of social selling.

I’m not happy with the definitions that rank on Google so I’ll give my own understanding of it.

Social selling is basically interacting with people on LinkedIn (or other social networks) to build relationships and “pull” potential customers to you through thought leadership, answering questions, etc.

Aware basically helps you do social selling and this context will be helpful for reading this audit.

Strategy (new!)

Dominate Social Selling conversation through the Social Selling Academy

Hubspot basically grew their business by coining, promoting and dog-fooding the concept of Inbound Marketing.

Social Selling is something that hasn’t really been owned by anyone yet save for LinkedIn with its Social Selling Index.

But while difficult to rank for according to ahrefs, the companies currently ranking for ”social selling” keywords barely have anything to do with it.

Turns out they’re already sort of doing this with co-founder Alex Boyd’s Social Selling Course.

However I think there’s a way to drive this conversation further a la Hubspot Inbound Marketing style.

💡Experiment 1: Acquisition

A free social selling course hosted IN Aware’s site a la Hubspot Academy

Googling “What is inbound marketing” which has 3.6K monthly searches will show Hubspot as one of the top results.

You land on an article directly answering the question but the hero banner drives you to one of their lead magnets which is their inbound marketing course.

You get users emails, dominate the conversation AND get a lot of real estate to sell Aware’s product via nurturing campaigns and IN the course material.

Aware can copy this approach by creating articles that rank for social selling keywords and upselling them to the free social selling course.

💡Experiment 2: Acquisition

Repurpose course into webinars, pdfs and promote in other channels like Product Hunt or LinkedIn webinars

LeadDelta does a good job of this with their free resources.

Anything they produce they also promote on Product Hunt for more exposure, and more backlinks.

Similarly, looking for Social Selling webinars on LinkedIn I found this one organisation attracting 38K attendees for their upcoming webinar. Webinars are a great way to establish trust and it’s a captured audience you can upsell to your product.

💡Experiment 3: Activation & Retention

Create a loyal community on Discord

After attending the course or the webinar, students can be funnelled into a Discord server. Having a two-way communication with students on a closed community on Discord could establish Aware as THE authority on social selling.

Here we can take a look at Small Bets as reference where influential community members can co-organise webinars WHICH can be made exclusive to Aware customers as a special privilege. (We’re running a business here, not a charity)

💡Experiment 4: Activation

Replace onboarding tour with quick set up onboarding

As someone not familiar with social selling I was given a proper education on the concept with the tour.

It taught me to create a list of influencers I should comment on, showed me my top engagers so I can return the favour, and identified engagers who are likely going to be receptive to a sales pitch.

However, this was all a prompt based tour where all you have do is click NEXT, I didn’t actually use any of the features like creating a list so when the onboarding was done I was a bit confused with what I was seeing and what I’m supposed to do.

I would recommend to create a separate quick set up experience similar to how Google Ads does it. Once you’ve created your first campaign, you won’t ever see this interface again and it’s designed to get people familiar with the features and set up.

💡Experiment 5: Referral

Segment users based on affiliate partner potential

Any user onboarded on Aware sends a lot of LinkedIn data over like Views, Engagement Rate, etc.

This means that Aware has all the means create segments based on what it determines to be a likely candidate for a successful affiliate partner or likely to be tire kickers, etc.

Have email drips sent out to users who fit the referrer ICP that look something like this

1. Fits criteria but didn’t sign up for affiliate program → Invite with special offers if they don’t sign up after a few sends

2. Signed up for affiliate program but no sales → Further incentivise the first referral, provide tips on how to sell the program

3. Tiering system for → More referrals = higher share of the revenue to further incentivise top performers

4. Churned referrer → Identify users who haven’t had a new referral in some time and offer more incentives

And that’s a wrap for this week’s audit! Let me know what you thought!

Truth is it’s very time consuming to identify a SaaS to do an audit for, then when I do find them I have to then identify the potential growth opportunity. That involves going through their acquisition channels (or lack there of) then going through their user onboarding by signing up for the app. Only then can I start compiling my audits.

Treating this like a funnel

We’re all about funnels here. As I’ve outlined above, my funnel to creating content is basically 3-steps.

Find a SaaS → Find problems of SaaS → Write recommendations for SaaS.

My funnel has basically been breaking down with the first two steps. So how can we fix that?

The Reddit Experiment

I’ve recently tried something different on Reddit where I ask founders what their main growth challenge is.

This got a lot of responses from founders and I also managed to create a lot of recommendations in a 24-hour time span.

Why this worked is it essentially took out the first two steps of finding a SaaS to audit, and then finding the problems by outsourcing it to the founders.

Redditors would give me a link to their SaaS and tell me exactly where they’re seeing a challenge with growth.

I’m probably gonna further repurpose the whole post on Indie Hackers as well.

Anyhoo without further ado, here’s the 5 best growth challenges posted to me on Reddit.

SafeTalk.space - Vertical SaaS for mental health professionals

Shavkat asks,

“Problem with growth: onboarding new users. During november/december we got many leads(many for this niche + where we are based) reaching out and requesting for a demo. It's was almost like 1 or two leads per week. But not a single one converted to an actual customer until today.

When i follow up with them, half do not reply emails/messages.

Potential issues that could cause this(assumptions only)

• our onboarding is too complicated

• the product message on the website does not match the demo content

The sample size is kind of too small to make any hard conclusions as well, but i have kind of been going crazy, figuring out what could be the issue.”

Answer:

Onboarding was too complicated as it required scheduling a demo.

Ideally with nontechy people, you want something self serve and lean on product led growth. Check out how Scout does this for dog walkers. No demo in sight.

What I recommend you do is remove the request demo part.

BUT if they indicate they're part of an organisation, you can tailor your onboarding flow and welcome sequence to encourage them to sign up for a demo. It'd be better if you add another field on how many therapists that way you can limit demos to really high value clients.

Your onboarding IMO is also a bit confusing. I just land on the dashboard where I see zero clients and it's a bit cluttered. Maybe consider a quick start onboarding flow that forces them through the profile completion and get to their AHA moment faster. Again check out how Scout does it.

Result: They seem to have implemented this recommendation already as now the Demo is optional.

Coresonate.com - Group Accountability for Entrepreneurs

Kyle asks,

I am putting the finishing touches on our platform, coresonate.com. We built this beautiful platform and now wondering how we get testers. Where should we go fishing?

Answer:

Accountability would be an easy sell here on this sub (r/SaaS) if you make a good post and on Indie Hackers.

Also be on the lookout for people talking about "now what?" "burnt out" "how to stay accountable" on this and other entrepreneur subs. You can check out F5Bot for Reddit keyword monitoring.

Also consider building a Discord community you can funnel into this? I was part of the one mentioned in this Reddit post. Try to replicate their post.

Also - that Discord is actually inactive. I can reach out to the Discord mod for you and ask them to promote you.

You can find other accountability Discord channels and try to convince the mod to promote you OR pay for that on getwildfire.gg who specialises in connecting brands with Discord communities for a minimum of I think $5,000.

WorksApp - Jira for Marketers

Alex asks,

Getting customers! Spending a lot of time on product and marketing while also trying to do sales outreach.

We're using Apollo and LinkedIn for sales pitching with limited success. Perhaps we should do more manual outreach but again, time. Meanwhile the Marketing e.g X, email etc isn't adding any customers but is at least helping drive traffic to our website.

Answers:

Potentially introduce freemium instead of free trial. Alternative to this would be Trello which has a free plan. This might increase your sign up rates then have to double down on your free-to-paid conversion rates via prompts, notifications, feature gating, etc.

BuiltWith says you have Hotjar, have you looked at session recordings and heatmaps to see how they behave on the site?

Are they clicking "free trial" and dropping off in the pricing page? You could potentially skip the pricing page and just go straight to reg and sign them up to the top plan or the lowest plan.

In terms of driving traffic there's a decent amount of search volume for "marketing project management" and low keyword difficulty.

I would fix your SEO score. Google "SEO grader" and these free tools will tell you what you need to do. You can check this one I had done for you with SiteImprove score for Works App

While you get SEO sorted, according to Google Keyword Planner you can bid as low as $3 for "marketing project management tools" so I would definitely test Google Ads.

2 ways I can help you

• Want your SaaS to be in our next audit? Just respond to this email with your link and biggest growth problem

• Need a 1:1 Consultation? Book a FREE 30-minute consultation here

I didn’t get to write last week and I promise I’ll try to be more consistent.

Anyway if you don’t already know, AARRR, which stands for acquisition, activation, retention, revenue and referral, is a growth framework popularised by Dave McClure. It is especially popular among big tech companies.

This week, we take a look at SellerTerminal.com, a service that helps Amazon sellers get reimbursements they are owed by Amazon.

On average Amazon owes its FBA sellers 1%-3% of their annual revenue. If you’re making $1 million a year, that’s up to $30,000! Considering that most Amazon FBA sellers make less than 25% profit margins, sellers can’t afford to be leaving that kind of money on the table.

This is where services like SellerTerminal come in.

Without further ado, let’s look into how we can further grow this business.

💡Experiment 1: Acquisition

Answer questions on Reddit & Quora

A lot of people are asking about how to get product reimbursements on Quora & Reddit. Even old posts on Quora still show up on Google Search so worth commenting on these even today.

On Reddit, you could do this as well for old posts but be warned Redditors will probably hate you for it.

A quick search shows there are roughly 22 questions on Quora related to this service and even Getida only shows up 4 times. Definitely something SellerTerminal should get into.

💡Experiment 2: Activation

Reimbursement calculators

I actually like their Get a free audit CTA button on their home page but what’s disappointing though is it directs you to a generic sign up page.

How I would improve this is by including a calculator in the home page that lets visitors calculate how much they could be owed.

Given that on average Amazon owes up to 3%, you could just ask for annual revenue and then return 3% of that.

Having spoken to a few service companies, these type of engaging lead magnets definitely has a massive impact on lead generation.

I’d also start asking for their emails ASAP so I would be able to send retargeting emails who dropped off at any point in the funnel.

Experiment 3: Activation

Address objections in hero

Knowing your prospects’ potential objections & addressing them is key to improving activations.

To get an idea about what these possible objections are, a good resource would be Reddit.

If you check threads on the topic of Amazon reimbursements, there’s some sentiment that third party services like SellerTerminal don’t really add value and is no different than what you can do yourself on Amazon.

Getida has done a good job of addressing this in their hero copy pointing out that working with them means you have a team who is on top of this whole business process which means more audits, more claims, more wins.

💡Experiment 4: Activation

Send nudge emails early

After authentication you need to connect your store by signing in with Amazon Seller Central.

Naturally I don’t actually have one so I didn’t get to finish this step.

But it has been a few hours since I signed up and I have not received a single follow up email encouraging me to connect my store.

Perhaps this is intentional as they’re trying to not encourage tirekickers but you could also be missing out on legit sellers who maybe signed up on mobile but only have their login on desktop.

Ideally SellerTerminal should trigger an email sequence 30 minutes to one hour after sign up if a user hasn’t connected their store. Not having a timely recovery email in place is leaving money on the table.

💡Experiment 5: Retention

Don’t use a generic sender name

The two emails from “support” are the emails from Seller Terminal.

I have absolutely no idea who Support is supposed to be. I do know who sent the other emails in the screenshot.

Make sure that email recipients know WHO is sending the email.

TLDR

1. Answer questions on Quora & Reddit

2. Engage better and get more leads with reimbursement calculators

3. Address potential objections in hero section of home page

4. Send nudge emails early

5. Don’t use a generic sender name

Thanks for reading!

What did you think of this week’s audit?

Reply to this email and let me know. And a MASSIVE thank you to all who made it to this point.

Until next week,

Anthony

3 ways I can help you grow your bootstrapped SaaS

• Want your SaaS to be in our next audit? Sign up to this form.

• Need a 1:1 Consultation? Book a 30-minute consultation here

I studied their onboarding as well as offboarding process and thought while there was room to improve, overall the whole thing was designed pretty well.

In particular their cancellation process which I’ll discuss at the end took at least 7 clicks before you can successfully cancel your subscription.

Activation: Abandonment Popups & Emails

Upon signing up for the free trial you’re asked to enter your credit card. This will likely lead to lower sign ups but higher quality leads.

To reduce abandonment, AdCreative shows an exit intent popup that only shows up when a user’s cursor starts to move towards closing the tab.

You also get an email the next day trying to further convince you to complete your registration.

Revenue: 50% off offer

Two days after signing up I get an upsell convincing me to upgrade today to get 50% off the annual plan.

I’m not sure if this was a segmented email or they just blast this offer to all new free trials. It feels like a shotgun approach.

That said there are a few things to takeaway from this

1. Nudge - Don’t wait for the end of the free trial to make an offer. If a user actually likes the tool and is on the fence, this is a compelling offer

2. No limited time offer - Given that it’s sent 4 days before end of trial, I’d have liked to see a limited time offer included to further nudge users to start paying before the end of the trial

3. Hitting above their weight - I think the goal is to get 1 month paid first. Annual plan seems a bit of a high ask. Offering 50% off 1 month might’ve gotten more conversions. That said it’s entirely possible they’ve tested this and concluded this is the best offer in terms of ARPU.

Retention/Revenue: Cancellation Sludge 101

Now I tried to cancel my subscription before I get charged anything. AdCreative’s offboarding implemented what is called in UX speak as a “sludge.”

DesignLabs defines a sludge as:

“…essentially the opposite of a nudge. While nudges try to push people to make better decisions by making certain choices easier than others, sludges make a process more difficult with the goal of creating friction, which makes the consumer less likely to continue the process.”

There are several ways to implement sludge in your user off-boarding, some sketchier than others. One of the simplest ways is to simply ask users to send you an email to cancel subscriptions rather than having an on-site user journey.

AdCreative’s off-boarding looks more like this.

First, you’re taken to a page that offers a 25% discount for 12 months. (Seems to lack some internal communication because I already got a better offer of 50% OFF.)

You’ll also get a popup that offers the same 25% discount.

But if you ignore these you then have to scroll down to answer a survey asking why you want to cancel.

Selecting any answer will then show a bigger discount of 50% for 12 months. I do like the increasing levels of discounting here. This way they can potentially get away with just 25% off before offering a sweeter deal.

If you decide to continue to cancel the subscription you’re then asked to confirm the cancellation.

Once you’ve gone through all of that, you’ll see a popup confirming cancellation but where the highlighted button lets you “Reactivate Subscription.”

I’ve ran similar popups in the past and I’m gonna bet that the number of people who accidentally reactivate subscription is relatively significant.

You also get an email confirming your cancellation with another subtle upsell to reactivate the account.

So throughout this sludge of an off-boarding, adcreative employed a lot of dark UX.

4 Things Before You Go

• Tell me what you think. Please let me know if you liked what you read. Your feedback means the world to me, and I respond to every email.

• Subscribe to the newsletter. If you haven’t already, please consider subscribing to our newsletter to get free AARRR audits delivered straight to your inbox every week.

• Want an audit? Shoot me an email with your SaaS and I’ll add it to the waitlist.

• Want to ‘unstuck’ your SaaS growth? Our consulting arm, launchexperiments.com, specialises in helping bootstrapped SaaS founders grow their businesses. Schedule a free call today.

Schedule a Free Consultation

If you don’t already know, AARRR, which stands for acquisition, activation, retention, revenue and referral, is a growth framework popularised by Dave McClure. It is especially popular among big tech companies.

This week, we take a look at how PDF generator CraftMyPDF.com.

For this issue we’re doing things a little bit differently because I found a lot of things that can be improved on just ONE page which is part of the Activation step plus one potentially juicy one for the Revenue step.

I think just by improving these steps in CrafyMyPDF’s funnel can result in massive CRO benefits.

💡Experiment 1: Activation

Go Plug Yourself

According to AHREFS, CraftMyPDF ranks #1 on Google for “c# pdf generator” with their article about 5 ways to generate c# pdf.

This is great content and is likely attracting high quality traffic. It also happens to be their 2nd top visited page.

So given that it’s

• A) 2nd most visited page, and

• B) likely to attract quality traffic, this should be THE place for them to sell hard.

What I would like to see them do is not shy away from plugging & linking to themselves.

In the list, they’ve listed “Using a Third-Party Cloud-Based API” as the 2nd option when that’s what they are.

I would make the following changes:

1. Move this to number 1 on the list

2. Include their brand name in the headline so it reads “Use a Third-Party Cloud-Based API (Like CraftMyPDF)” or change it entirely to “Use CraftMyPDF”

3. Hyperlink the headline and some of the body text to the home page or whatever landing page

💡Experiment 2: Activation

Give people what they want → Summaries

When people are searching for solutions, they really just want to be recommended ONE solution.

This is a win win because A, you can push your product and B, saves people time researching options.

So still on this page, summary recommendations are basically TL;DR.

How you do it is you create a list that goes something like “Best overall for c# PDF generation”, “Cheapest option”, “Easiest to use”, etc.

Then you add this summary before the actual list so people can just skim easily and quickly decide for themselves what their priority is.

See a sample below of how an article that ranks for “Best dog ear wipes” does it.

Experiment 3: Activation

Improve conversion rates with comparison tables

People love comparison tables and it’s a great way to help people come to a quick decision (hopefully about using CraftMyPDF).

You know who else loves comparison tables? Affiliate marketers!

If there’s one segment of internet marketers who know their conversion rate optimisation it’s affiliate marketers whose income relies on them improving click through rates and conversions.

Check out how Campaign Monitor did its own comparison table comparing itself to other email marketing companies.

💡Experiment 4: Activation

Capture more leads with pop-ups 

I’ve been on this page for a good while now and didn’t encounter a popup. That’s an unforced error.

We want to not only drive traffic to our site but also capture email information or better yet get sign ups.

Again borrowing some tips from the affiliate community here, you can introduce abandonment popups.

Abandonment popups (typically works only on desktop) only show up then the users’ cursor starts to move towards closing the tab.

If you get a lot of mobile traffic, you can use delayed popups instead.

💡Experiment 5: Revenue

Create alternative monetisation for their top visited (but less relevant) page

Based on the website copy, the target audience of this product are developers familiar with APIs. Their page that has the most traffic however is for generating free online certificates. 

While this is good for traffic and potentially backlinks, the audience for free online certificates which are likely educators and employers, are probably low quality in respect to the core product. 

Given the above info and without having an inside peek at their analytics, I’m going to take a guess here that there’s not much sign ups coming from this page.

IF this hypothesis is true and we’re:

• A) likely not going to get sign ups from here but

• B) getting lots of traffic,

I recommend trying to monetise this page another way.

Given that the certificate creator indicates a max of 6 certificates for every 24 hours, it might benefit from creating a separate paid option for bulk certificate creation where users can just plug in several names and the app will generate as many certificates.

Also borrowed a tip from Harry Dry’s newsletter about reframing the price to something the target audience would likely relate to e.g. $3 is the price of 1 latte (I think? Not from the US)

TLDR

1. Go Plug Yourself

2. Give people what they want → summaries

3. Improve conversion rates with comparison tables

4. Capture more leads with pop-ups 

5. Create alternative monetisation for their top visited (but less relevant) page

Thanks for reading!

What did you think of this week’s audit?

Reply to this email and let me know. And a MASSIVE thank you to all who made it to this point.

Until next week,

Anthony

3 ways I can help you grow your bootstrapped SaaS

• Want your SaaS to be in our next audit? Sign up to this form.

• Need a 1:1 Consultation? Book a 30-minute consultation here

If you don’t already know, AARRR, which stands for acquisition, activation, retention, revenue and referral, is a growth framework popularised by Dave McClure. It is especially popular among big tech companies (like Skyscanner, where I used to work).

This week, we take a look at how cold email tool MailRush can boost its growth by focusing on customer acquisition, activation and retention.

💡Experiment 1: Acquisition

Launch Retargeting Campaigns

While MailRush has the Meta (Facebook) pixel installed, a quick search on Facebook Ad Library doesn’t show any active ads. You’ll get the same results on LinkedIn.

Remarketing is going to be a common theme during these audits, but it just works, and is a no-brainer. It should always be part of a traffic-generating startup’s first forays into paid marketing.

You’ve probably been retargeted before: You view an item on a site, leave, open Facebook, and find the product you were looking at being advertised to you.

Retargeting allows you to show ads to people who’ve previously visited your site, across the web and on platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, X, and others.

70% of users are more likely to convert when retargeted, so it’s definitely a channel you shouldn’t ignore.

💡Experiment 2: Acquisition/ Activation

Offer free email warmup as a lead magnet

I’m a user of one of MailRush’s competitors Instantly.ai after I discovered them on Google looking for a free email warmup tool.

This got me into their app where I can get exposed to their various upsells as well as their database where I can easily be sent targeted email campaigns to convert me into a paying user.

While a quick check on search volumes on SEMrush for "email warmup tools” shows roughly only a few hundred searches monthly, the keyword difficulty is relatively low. This is exactly the type of high intent long tail keyword that any business should try to rank for.

Offering free tools as a lead magnet is also a common tactic that the best in biz do. Check out Hubspot’s Website Grader and AHREF’s website traffic checker.

If MailRush can launch a landing page specifically for the warmup feature and try to get this to rank, this could be an easy way to add more sign ups to their app.

Experiment 3: Revenue

Display monthly prices for annual plans

According to SEMRush, a quarter visitors to MailRush’s site visit the pricing page, which makes it important real estate.

The key issue I have here is the plans show annual prices instead of monthly prices.

When I first got to their pricing page, I thought they were charging $449 per month for their Premium plan. Turns out that was the annual price.

This is IMHO a MASSIVE unforced error.

Most platforms display prices on a monthly basis even for their annual plans so MailRush runs into the problem of an unfamiliar user interface.

Users are expecting to see a monthly price and a good chunk are likely going to think they’re getting a much better price with Apollo’s highest plan of $119/month.

To prove my point, here’s a comparison between MailRush’s and Apollo’s pricing pages. you’ll notice that Apollo displays monthly prices for their annual plans. Check any popular SaaS’s pricing page and you’ll get the same result.

ALWAYS. DISPLAY. MONTHLY. PRICES.

💡Experiment 4: Revenue

Spell out discounts more clearly

While we’re on the pricing page, I want to point out that MailRush actually offers MASSIVE discounts — as much as 57% for the Pro Plan!

The toggle between monthly and annual should spell out how much users stand to save (up to 57% off) and not just say “discounted.”

💡Experiment 5: Retention

Add a signup form before the checkout page

Selecting a plan takes you to a horrendous looking checkout page. More on this in the next section, but essentially, users are bombarded with information, and probably think that signing up is too much work.

In any given funnel, once we’ve driven people to our website (acquisition), we then want to get them to provide their contact information (activation) so we can then send them follow up emails (retention).

Apollo does a much better job of this:

As you can see, their sign-up process involves just an email address or even a Google or Microsoft signup. Low commitment is what we want at this stage.

The reason it’s crucial to get users’ emails early on in the user journey is that 70% of checkouts are abandoned for one reason or another.

If we have users’ emails, we can send them abandonment recovery emails that remind them to complete their purchase.

💡Experiment 5: Revenue

Remove Checkout Page distractions

The checkout page is chock full of distractions and opportunities to navigate away from the purchase.

Don’t even know where to begin here except to just do away with all the other options. The user has selected the plan they want, all they want is a way to complete the purchase.

See how SEMRush does it: no distractions on the checkout page, just a credit card form.

TLDR

1. Retarget, retarget, retarget

2. Offer free email warmup as a lead magnet

3. Display monthly pricing for annual plans

4. Spell out monthly discounts on annual pricing page more clearly

5. Move signup before checkout page

6. Remove checkout page distractions

4 Things Before You Go

• Tell me what you think. Please let me know if you liked what you read. Your feedback means the world to me, and I respond to every email.

• Subscribe to the newsletter. If you haven’t already, please consider subscribing to our newsletter to get free AARRR audits delivered straight to your inbox every week.

• Want an audit? Shoot me an email with your SaaS and I’ll add it to the waitlist.

• Want to ‘unstuck’ your SaaS growth? Our consulting arm, launchexperiments.com, specialises in helping bootstrapped SaaS founders grow their businesses. Schedule a free call today.

  Schedule a Free Consultation

If you don’t already know, AARRR, which stands for acquisition, activation, retention, revenue and referral, is a growth framework popularised by Dave McClure. It is especially popular among big tech companies (like Skyscanner, where I used to work).

This week, we take a look at SciSummary, a platform that uses AI to create easily-digestible summaries of scientific articles, and how we can boost its growth.

Acquisition

Paid Acquisition

According to its founder Max Heckel, SciSummary has a monthly traffic of 160k on its website. That’s a decent number, but on average, only 1-10% will convert to registrations. That means SciSummary is missing out on turning as many as 158,000 visitors into users.

💡Experiment 1: Launch retargeting campaigns

You’ve probably been retargeted before: You view an item on a site, leave, open Facebook, and find the product you were looking at being advertised to you.

Retargeting allows you to show ads to people who’ve previously visited your site, across the web and on platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, X, and others.

70% of users are more likely to convert when retargeted, so it’s definitely a channel you shouldn’t ignore.

Note 1: Before investing in any paid marketing, you’ll need to make sure the economics make sense by taking into account things like conversion rates from free to paid plans, and the individual platforms’ customer acquisition cost (CAC).

Note 2: A pre-requisite for retargeting is to install the necessary pixels. Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, etc. each have their own processes for doing this.

Activation

Now that we’ve acquired traffic for our site, we need to ‘activate’ these visitors.

Activation is the action you want visitors to take, and it means different things for different businesses. For Skyscanner it was searching for a trip. For SciSummary it can be a sign up or generating a summary.

Home Page

Currently, SciSummary users have to sign up BEFORE they can use the product.

This means that it takes users at least 4-5 steps before reaching their Aha moment.

What’s an ‘aha’ moment? Appcues defines an ‘aha’ moment as ‘a moment of sudden insight or discovery. In software, it’s the pivotal moment when a new user first realizes the value of your product and why they need it.’

I like how one of SciSummary’s competitors, Scholarcy, does it. With Scholarcy, it takes just two to three steps to get to the aha moment. It shows potential users the product BEFORE they need to sign up. This makes each ‘ask’ per step more manageable, because users know what to look forward to.

Here’s how Scholarcy’s user journey goes:

1. Just click here

2. Upload or paste a link

3. NOW give me your info / sign up

💡Experiment 2: Create faster a-ha moments

A/B test faster aha moment by letting users upload a paper before signup, then hide the final summary behind the registration process. Compare sign up rates between the tests to see what works better.

Pro Tip: Use an A/B testing tool

One thing we recommend before doing any tests on a site is to install an A/B testing tool. These let you compare performances between your control (your current site) and any variables (the tests you want to implement).

I recommend VWO.com, which has a free plan if you’re just starting out.

Retention

With retention, it’s important to segment your audience into life cycles, or stages in their buying journey. For this audit, I decided to look into 3 segments

1. Tirekickers - people who sign up but don’t use the app

2. Activated users - people who’ve generated at least one summary

3. On the fence - users who’ve reached their freemium/free trial limit but haven’t converted to paid users yet

Tirekickers

SciSummary uses a freemium model, so they’ll want to encourage users to continuously use the product.

According to a survey conducted by Lenny’s Newsletter, around 40% of freemium B2C users hit an activation milestone (in Scisummary’s case, this is summarising an article).

We can encourage the remaining 60% to hit this milestone by suggesting interesting articles to summarise via email.

💡Experiment 3: Email drip campaigns

SciSummary can send users a list of 5-10 articles per day that users can summarise. Use catchy headlines about relevant issues like ‘Study shows higher sperm counts in men who lift heavy objects’ or ‘A third of transgender children on puberty blockers suffered mental health problems, study reveals.’

Note: This same sequence can be sent to users who have activated but haven’t reached their limit.

Activated Users

After receiving their first article summary, users receive an automated email with the details of the original article, plus the summary.

These automated emails tend to have high open rates, making them a fantastic opportunity to transform free users into paying customers.

💡Experiment 4: Upsell with transactional emails

Brands can use transactional emails to upsell its premium service and encourage repeat visitors.

We’d recommend making these changes to SciSummary’s existing transactional emails:

1. Display the users’ remaining words and have an upsell CTA (e.g. ‘You have 2,000 words left. Upgrade your account now for unlimited article summaries.’)

2. Replace the full summary with a clipped preview that links to back to the site. You want to encourage users to come back to the site where they can see your upsells, and where they can upgrade their account.

Before After

On the Fence Users

Findings

We tried going through the process of summarising the article and made the following observations:

The Good: I received an automated email reminding me that our text couldn’t be summarised, along with a CTA to upgrade.

The Bad: The upsell email used the same subject line as the others, which meant it just got hidden under the same thread. Changing the subject line would help this email stand out more.

The Ugly: It’s been four days, and I haven’t received a follow-up email. Ideally, you want a sequence of emails spread out over a few days to encourage users to upgrade.

Recommendations

💡Experiment 5: Create an email sequence for users who’ve reached their limit

Sending at least 3 follow-up emails increases your chances of converting free users to premium. Email is an essentially free channel so there’s no reason not to do this.

TLDR

1. Retarget people who’ve already been on your site.

2. Get people to the aha moment faster.

3. Set up personalised & optimised email marketing campaigns to send users down the funnel:

   1. From sign up → To creating their first summary

   2. From creating their first summary → To reaching word limit

   3. From reaching word limit → To conversion into paying user

Revenue and Referral

Nothing here yet! If you’d like to get some tips on the revenue and referral stages of the AARRR funnel, sign up to our newsletter, and we’ll see you next week!

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