Power Ab-users ?? I got flashbacks ??
Hi Folks! I've recently read in Kyle Poyar's Growth Unhinged newsletter (again, no sponsorship - I just like Kyle???) that Clay (the hottest sales data enrichment tool of 2024) has been struggling with the fake account problem:?
It gave me instant flashbacks to the times I worked on a 100% self-serve, PLG tool with an ARPU of ~ $15 per month.? Team Postfity (a social media scheduling tool like Buffer or Hootsuite)?thought they had a lot of?power users... At least based on their activity levels.?
You see: when you log into Userpilot’s dashboard, you can take a sneak peek at the trend of your active users:?
Team Postfity noticed that some users had a lot higher activity than others.
A lot.
It seemed that some users were logging into the app several times per day!
The first reaction was to cheer at how much the “power users” were enjoying the app.
But it wasn’t long before the reality check came.
Soon enough, some Postfity users started alerting the support that the shortened links they were sharing via the app were not opening on social media or any major browsers.
As it turned out - Postfity’s link shortener's domain got blacklisted.
The team quickly traced the issue down to...the people whom they once thought were the “power users”.
It turned out that the users who had so many web sessions were actually up to no good. Looking at their account activity more closely one could quickly notice that despite the high number of web sessions, most of these users didn’t in fact post anything.
Some of them didn’t even add a single social media account. What did they use a social media scheduler for though?!
Spam other people with Gift Links to Farmville, concealed with Postfity’s link shortener.???
Spam recipients reported the messages repeatedly, and ultimately got the domain blacklisted.
Which obviously took a lot of work to undo, and taught Team Postfity a hard lesson.
While this example is quite obvious - it illustrates a bigger issue: usage metrics are not a good way to identify a power user.
What is then?
You need to look really at?what?your users are doing inside your app. But doing this in an unstructured way is not going to help you.??
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Enter the Product Engagement Scorecard:?
Let's face it: some events are more important than others in your app.? For instance: you're not going to get a terrible lot of value out of Slack if you don't invite any team members.?
So you can get how much value your users get out of your app by assigning a weight to each of the 'key events' in your app and multiplying by how many times per month your different segments of users actually perform them.
Cross-reference that with account activity?et voila!??- you have a pretty good idea who your "power users" are.?
Sounds complex? Instead of a scorecard, you can build bespoke activity trend reports for different events?(up to 10 at a time) with Userpilot in minutes:?
+ You can nudge your "regular" users to perform the key events more often with in-app experiences.? And if you're a fully self-serve, product-led company with a low ARPU - you probably should.
As per our latest?SaaS Benchmarks Study - PLG companies perform worse on every major metric than sales-led ones.
The SaaS community seems to be waking up to the realization that just 'leaving the users to their own devices' doesn't cut it anymore. You need to work?extra hard on activating your self-serve users inside your product?to see revenue growth from your self-serve motion.?
Wanna increase your free users activation rates and improve conversion rate??See how to do it in Userpilot?- let's jump on a call and?we'll?show you how to do it!?
P.S. Any product folks in Dublin?
Join us for our first in-person event in our Dublin office?on 6 June at 6:30 pm? - where we'll be discussing the results of our benchmark study with top product thought leaders from Microsoft, Zoom and Workhuman!?
Hope to you all there!?