From £28K to £343K MMR in 18 months

Hi there 👋,

It’s been almost a year since I left Heights. Yet, the further it gets away, the more I learn about how it shaped my approach to growth.

Often people want the secret to Heights’ success or growth in general. For me, there is only one key secret:

Don’t see growth as just your marketing channels.

The most fundamental impacts on getting from £28K to £343K MMR were not channel tweaks, but shifts in how we approached growth.

Here are a few of my favourite growth lessons from scaling Heights that aren’t channel ‘hacks’:

1. Extreme social proof can hide fundamental issues

Now don’t get me wrong: I believe in social proof. Some of the biggest lifts I’ve seen from experiments at Heights were thanks to doubling down on social proof.

Social proof is one of the first things I fix on landing pages, BUT… extreme social proof can drive huge growth waves without solving the underlying issues.

At Heights, several of our best months came from high-trust activities: our founder was on the Diary of a CEO podcast and several big influencers featured us on Instagram.

We had the golden combination of authority x relevance x reach, which results in 20%-30% growth in several months.

However, without it, many of our marketing attempts fell flat. Growth plummeted when those extreme social proof moments were over.

We became reliant on them rather than testing/improving fundamental areas first: messaging, price and customer journey.

I’m glad for the growth slumps that followed because they forced us to focus on the foundations that drove a lot of the later growth, but I wish we’d done it sooner.

Those moments could have delivered us at least 4x - 10x if we had worked on those areas first.

2. Don’t combine brand with the growth team

I’ve shared this before, but it is one of my biggest mistakes at Heights.

When you treat brand as growth and force them to follow the growth process, you cause several issues:

• You kill room for bigger brand awareness ideas - They require more than 2 weeks and don’t score well on most growth prioritisation frameworks.

• You focus on only conversion-related metrics - Discounting softer brand awareness metrics such as branded search and engaged audience.

Don’t get me wrong: I encourage companies to have a brand representative in the growth team or at least the growth meetings. Brand leads to growth, but you need to give it the room and freedom to do so.

Those extreme social proof moments I mentioned?

The growth often came 1 - 3 months after the initial exposure moment. People would start following us on social media or join our newsletter; only then would they convert. That type of impact takes time, more time then the growth process always allows for.

But there is another unexpected type of person you need in your growth team.

3. You need planners to drive growth

I used to believe all people in growth were Explorers. You know the type: risk-seeking, rapid experimentation, push the status quo types.

So when I joined Heights and discovered that several growth team members were big-time Planners, I had a little internal groan.

They were the opposite of me: super organised, perfectionists, and not too keen on my crazy big ideas.

I soon realised you need a mix of both to get the most out of your growth process.

Our planners in the team were a blessing in disguise: If you only have Explorers, you end up in a chaotic mess of endlessly trying out new areas.

Having Planners allowed us to get more out of existing growth areas as well as stay focused:

Recommendation

In every newsletter, I also share a related book, individual or newsletter to check out related to the week's topic.

I only briefly skimmed the topic of planners and explorers. There is more to it than I can cover here.

I’m excited to announce that I’ll be speaking at the Growth Marketing Summit 2023 on 22nd June in Frankfurt with some other incredible speakers from Morgan Brown to Colin McFarland from Netflix.

I will share the 3 principles to get the most out of your experimentation process and the planners and explorers in your team.

There are still 98 tickets left of the Super Early Bird ticket meaning you can get a ticket for €599 instead of €989.

Hope to see you there,

Daphne

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