Growth Stacks - A quantitative look at the tools growth teams use

Recently, Greylock Partners hosted our fourth Growth community event which is comprised of individuals running growth teams or working in growth teams at top startups in Silicon Valley.

For the event, we wanted to get an in-depth look at the tools (both 3rd party and internal) various growth teams are using across the stack. Taking cues from Andy Carvell’s post “The Mobile Growth Stack,” we broke up the full stack into three main components: acquisition, retention, and analytics. Next, we issued a survey to growth teams at startups including Docker, Pinterest, Survey Monkey, Eventbrite, and more to get a better sense of team structure, tools, and challenges.

Here are a few key highlights from what we learned.

Reporting structure:

37% of the growth teams are their own divisions within their respective companies.

Growth teams which report to other functions (product, marketing) wish they were their own divisions because that makes it easier to have full control of the data, which they need to accurately run growth experiments.

Acquisition Stack

In the bucket of acquisition, the top tools used include:

Attribution — AppsFlyer and Adjust
SEO — MOZ and Sensor Tower
Virality/referral tools — 80% of growth teams built in-house.
One tool to note is Kenshoo which is used across the full acquisition stack by larger companies 100M+ users.

One pain we noticed throughout the full stack is that many of these tools are in disparate places and not well integrated. Many teams are using different tools for web and mobile, and pulling all of the data together is challenging.

Retention Stack

Retention is typically more company specific making it difficult to productize this portion of the growth stack. Top tools included:

CRM — Salesforce, and 27% built in-house solutions
Emails (both newsletter and transactional) — SendGrid, ExactTarget, and Mailchimp
Push Notifications — 70% of growth teams built in-house.
A few up-and-coming tools to look into are Appcues (onboarding) and CommandIQ (behavioral targeting).

There are also a lot of privacy concerns given the sensitive user data information.

Analytics Stack

An interesting note is 90% of all of the companies are using a 3rd party tool for analytics. Very few attempted to build their own analytics in house.

In the bucket of retention the top tools were:

Analytics — Google Analytics and Mixpanel were #1 and #2.
User Testing — No surprise, “User Testing” is the top tool.
A/B Testing — Optimizely and in-house solutions
Dashboards — Tableau and 42% built in-house solutions.
An up-and-coming tool to look into for analytics was Looker which is used for both collecting user behavior and seeing the impact of changes (dashboards, reports, etc).

Biggest Challenges

Here are the biggest frustrations of growth teams:

Growth teams typically need to get alignment from engineering/product/etc to get the data they need and roll out new tools. This is especially painful if your growth team is not its own division.
Most of these apps across the stack are not integrated with each other. Teams are using Zapier and Segment.io to try to more tightly integrate them.
Lack of good cohort analysis tools. *Google Analytics recently just released their new cohort tool
On iOS/Mobile it’s hard to iterate quickly and there is a lack of control and transparency on the individual app pages.
In general current metrics don’t predict future growth. It’s hard to see the effects of optimizations over long periods of time.
If you are currently working on a growth team hopefully these findings will help give you a perspective of what other growth teams are using and thinking about.

Here are our complete findings:

Link to presentation: https://www.slideshare.net/cmccann77/greylock-partners-growth-tools

A big thank you to Adelyn Zhou, Noah Jessop, Jonathan Cheng, and all of the members of the Greylock Growth community for sharing their insights and helping us with the survey.