Customer Acquisition: The Black box

Background: I am one of the Co-Founders and CEO of www.pratilipi.com, which is somewhat like Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing but for Indian languages. Pratilipi team got together on 6’th Aug 2014 and as of last month we had over 300 authors from 8 countries who published more than 2,000 books, stories and poems on the platform. We also had a little more than 37,000 unique readers who collectively read over 40,000 content pieces (3,50,000 page views) in last month alone.

Many of my friends and juniors have often asked me about Customer Acquisition and my views on how to go about it. This is a very short post intended to help them -as well as others- build a background into it. For a detailed discussion, feel free to give me a call / message me here. The cost for all such discussions would be a cuppa chai whenever we personally meet.

Introduction:

Customer acquisition (and related terms like Growth Hacking, Virality, Customer Development, Business Development or the more general word: “Sales”) is arguably the most critical factor for any business; and yet, it is perhaps the one least understood. The primary reason why it is so difficult to understand, is probably because we focus too much on the answers and not enough on the right questions. We always talk about building the right customer acquisition strategy and then implementing it to perfection. As a result we attribute all results to one (or one set of) actions, we start believing that growth should be a nice, smooth exponential curve.

Ask anyone the secret behind Hotmail’s success and the answer is likely to be “P.S. I love you”, Dropbox: “referral mechanism”, Airbnb: “Craiglist”.

My take:

Customer acquisition is an iterative process; no company, not even Linkedin or Facebook goes from 0 to 100s of millions customers because they set the perfect strategy in stone and implemented it. Instead of a nice, smooth curved growth, it is often a combination of hundreds of small, dirty looking curves.

Remember when Steve Jobs said you can only connect the dots looking backwards? That is as true for Customer Acquisition as anything else.

Customer Acquisition (and related terms) look like a black box because we only look at the bigger curve. Once we start looking at the smaller curves, we will see hundreds of growth experiments. Many of them will fail, some will succeed.

The key here, is not to decrease the failed experiments, the key is finding the right trade-off between maximizing experiments (many of which will again fail) and asking the right questions. Why did an experiment fail or succeed? Is the experiment repeatable? Scalable? Expensive?

In simple words, experiment with all possible customer acquisition channels that seem potential avenues to you, including the newest channels (like this Linkedin Post) and the oldest ones (like actually picking up the phone and cold-calling people). Ask questions after every experiment: what was the result of the experiment? Why? Could you change one parameter of the experiment to change the outcome?

Focus on insights and anecdotes and back them with data. Do not assume whether something will or won’t work, experiment and see from your own eyes.

It’s okay to write a big fat number you want to reach in four years time, but remember four years is made up of 208 weeks and 1461 days, and each one of these days, each one of the little experiments, and each one of the dirty little curves are important to build that large, smooth exponential curve.

Best Wishes,

An eternal Salesman

* The only thing that is more important than acquiring customers is retaining them, if you spend 24 hours on acquiring customers, spend 240 on delighting them.

** I am still in the very beginning of my journey and like most others I am most probably wrong, so just read this through and then do what seems right to you.

*** Do let me know your thoughts on customer acquisition in the comments, would love to see your take on this.

# Article originally published on linkedin