10 Growth Marketing Lessons for African Startups

Last week made it 1 year in founders Factory Africa, and also 4 years working in Marketing with startups across Africa. so I decided to note down some foundational learning that might be beneficial to your startup's journey.

1 Test test test… It’s all an assumption until proven otherwise.

2. Don’t just stick with familiar channels and miss out on gold mines: Focusing on channels you are good at or your team is good at can blindside you from other potential channels. Make sure you keep an open mind when deciding on the channel to test, that is why we advise founders to use the traction framework and be systematic with how to focus on channels.

3. Retention and Active usage are core metrics for Early Stage Startups: Looking at impressions, website visits and sign-ups can be good but should not be your core. When you have your MVP make sure you focus on how your first set of users is using your platform. Are they coming back to use your platform? How many features do they utilize? What’s the sentiment around your product? The hypothesis here is if you can have 100 customers that love your product most likely when you scale you can scale sustainably.

4. Focusing on the gaps in your funnel can make a drastic effect: Using the AAARRR framework and your analytics focus on gaps in your funnel. You might have a good acquisition flow but get a huge gap in activation or retention. At that point instead of focusing on putting more people in the acquisition funnel and losing them due to low activation rate. You need to focus your growth and marketing efforts to fix the activation holes to make sure you are not pouring water into a leaky bucket.

5. Let the data direct you — Be data-driven: Data trumps personal opinion or expert advice. You must look at what the data is saying and align your strategy with the data. Knowing and understanding your core metrics is a priority for your team.

6. Talk to customers. Talking to potential and current customer is VERY important (sorry for screaming). We’ve seen massive hockey stick shifts just because we talked to customers and listened to their needs and understood their pain points. Most times we try to imagine the need of our market without actually talking to them. Talking to customers is also a continuous process not just before launch. You need to talk to people currently using your product (power users) to understand their motivation, talk to people that are signed up but not using your product (dormant users) to understand friction, talk to your target market using your competitors' products to understand how you can be better, and talk to people that are not willing to use your solution and understand the why.

7. Have a good analytic view of your product: Once your product is live, you need to have an eagle’s eye view of users using your product. You can use product analysis tools like Mixpanel or Amplitude to see how users are moving through your product and if they are actually using the product the way it was intended and getting the core value of your product.

8. If possible, invest in a growth team: Having a team or someone with a growth mindset can be massively beneficial to your startup. Don’t start with an intern but with a top/mid-level growth or marketing expert. You need to get it right first at the strategy level before execution starts to avoid shadowboxing for growth.

9. In experimentation, we embrace/expect loss because of the learnings we get from them: The best “growth hacks” came from many failed experiments. Don’t get discouraged when an experiment does not perform as you hoped, but make sure you keep pushing and running data-driven experiments, most likely when one works it makes up for the failed experiments and more. And also note down learnings from a failed experiment, your learning make you better at running experiment and seeing more wins than failures.

10. Be Open and Collaborate more: Don’t allow your growth, product, or engineering team to work in isolation, but you should encourage collaboration, especially sharing learnings from experiments and ideas on experiments to run. We’ve seen great ideas coming in from other team members that have helped the growth team scale up growth.

Let me know if you found this valuable, and please do well to share if you do feel free to ask me any questions for clarification.

To your digital success.