Hi I’m Otto. I’m the VP of Growth at Builder.ai and I’m OBSESSED with all things that drive business growth. Every company is different and I’m not claiming to know how to run yours, but hopefully you will find some golden nuggets of wisdom from how we have approached things differently at Builder.ai, achieving growth of 230% since last spring. I’ll also be sharing what’s next in our journey as we focus on product-led growth squads and hiring across all fronts. Our mission is simple: to empower enterprises, small businesses and entrepreneurs to build, run and scale their software.
What is Builder.ai all about?
A few years ago, it was virtually impossible to innovate because building software needed an advanced degree or technical training. It was simply too expensive, too complex, too risky, and ultimately, too inefficient. That’s why only 16% of projects were ever completed on budget and, worse yet, 78% failed. Fixing all that, Builder.ai now lets you order the perfect software to help you solve all manner of business problems, whether you’re a bakery in Riyadh, a nursery in London, right the way through to large Fortune 100 companies like Pepsi or massive organisations like the BBC.
Growth Team
Back in 2019, I joined the rockstars at Builder.ai - I was the only member of a brand new Growth team, and the overall business was recovering from a legacy of having been burnt by negative experiences with agencies and contractors. The task was clear - grow revenue and kickstart demand-generation at Builder.ai. Fast-forward two years to spring 2021, we have grown over 200% YoY, and more than that, 80% of our total revenue comes from demand created by the Growth team, via both paid and organic channels.
This Growth team, for the first 6 months, was split into three sub-teams: Acquisition, Lifecycle and Analytics. Shortly after, we realised the importance of sales handover and the efficiencies we could reach there, so we added a fourth team, specialising in Sales Operations. I won’t lie, at the outset it was REALLY HARD. The team was junior, the tech stack was far from ideal, our product positioning and messaging was quite confusing, and hiring great people was super difficult (don’t get me wrong, it still takes time!). Additionally, our product category was brand new (not many other companies were flipping software development on its head 😉) and as a result, we couldn’t simply mimic what had been done before. Instead we focused on velocity - moving fast, failing fast. We had very little social proof, messy data and a VERY basic website - trying to ship and revamp acquisition and lifecycle campaigns while at the same time tapping our feet impatiently, waiting for the future Head of Design to join us. He eventually landed, and is pretty awesome by the way.
Four key things we have realised along the way:
The art of saying “not now”: I won’t sit here and pretend we got everything right immediately; like many other businesses we started with a scattergun approach. I look back and I can see that we were too ambitious and wanted to test and try everything (from new channels to testing all parts of the funnel) #skyisthelimit. Then the lightbulb moment: don’t focus equally on every single channel, every single product, every single customer segment. To give you an example of the before-and-after, pretty early on we launched a v1 of our referral programme. It was a lot of work, and admittedly it brought in a fair few deals, but did it achieve the Uber / Airbnb effect that we were hoping for? - not exactly. What it did achieve though was a set of invaluable learnings, firstly around how to package and message the scheme, which channels worked best, secondly which incentives work for existing vs new customers and thirdly what our strategy around social proof & recommendations should be. Looking back, it’s clear that we just didn’t have the resources to spend huge amounts of time on “will-they-won’t-they” levers, so instead we pivoted to where we could see clear, significant wins. (Yes, we will be revisiting our referral scheme next quarter 😉)
Choose the right Growth tech stack: I can’t stress this enough. Long gone are the days where the marketing team would be focusing solely on messaging and pushing some ‘cool’ brand campaigns on TV, and then keeping its fingers crossed that it would bring some deals in. Now it’s all about identifying your audiences, creating content that is super relevant across the entire funnel and automating the lifecycle journey end to end. Marketing technology is the cornerstone of that but it needs to be underpinned by decent data. We recently did a tech stack review (something you should be doing every quarter) and we use 30+ software solutions every day just for marketing growth purposes (I’m not even counting Google Docs, Slack and other company must-haves). Looking back, we were slowed down by certain pieces of software and their clunky integrations (message me to find out which 🤭) and I definitely aged at least 10 years dealing with failed integrations, writing dozens of support tickets and explaining to my boss why ‘this simple integration’ couldn’t be done in a week. Honestly, choose the best, even if it’s slightly more expensive; your team, your family and your therapist will breathe a massive sigh of relief when you stop spending hundreds of hours trying to fix the unfixable.
{Data x Perfection} must not subtract from Velocity: Whenever I’m hiring (and I hire a lot) I’m always trying to see how well a candidate balances having a dedicated growth mindset with an obsessive curiosity for data and insights. Here at Builder.ai, we’ve always been data-led and hypothesis-driven, ever since the word go. But the obstacles have been daunting: good data is often hard to get our hands on, and when it is forthcoming, the quality is sometimes, how shall I put it? - questionable. To overcome that, the quality that I actively hunt for in future team members is the ability to make quick decisions on limited data. Don’t obsess about perfect strategy and impeccable data insights - ship those MVPs and let’s get learning through the process! This actually works - we were testing a TON and had a huge number of wins which translated into success against company-wide KPIs. This felt amazing and the team felt empowered to continue testing.
Acquisition: I could write a doctoral thesis on this topic, but (you’ll be pleased to hear) I’ll keep it short and sweet. Getting your future customers into the funnel is crucial, there’s no denying that. That said, doing it efficiently is really difficult and getting a decent return on ad spend is really tough. We had a head-start because the volume of potential customers searching for app-build solutions was and remains really high. However, it’s a competitive market, and our rivals were already leagues ahead of us in SEO. So, rising to this challenge, our Acquisition team did a fantastic job at quickly figuring out which channels, audiences and segments work for us. (They also worked out which are 💩 - although I haven’t given up fully on them, and we will be re-testing them for sure!).
Why product led growth?
Now we know that trust and status quo bias are two of the main factors that prevent future customers from getting an app or new software. It makes total sense - why would a busy plant shop owner who has been selling through their website and maybe a bit of Instagram be considering getting their own app? They must be thinking, “this will cost me a fortune, it will take forever to get up and running and surely it will be a massive hassle to manage on top of focusing on what drives my business, i.e. sales”. That’s why for Studio Store, our small business product, we want our future customers to experience the product first, the idea being that 15 mins self-serve experience will replace dozens of sales and project calls. For Studio, we will be soon fully launching an AI powered conversational assistant to be guiding you through the process real time.
So what’s next for us?
The Growth team has grown from one to 18, with another 8 roles to be filled in the short term. We have run tests, had some wins, brought in $$$, generated some learnings but now we are ready to take it to the next level. We knew we needed a small Conversion Rate Optimisation team to change from a top down, “manager’s hunch” approach (I raise my hand, I was often guilty of this! 🙈) to a bottom-up, data-led, hypothesis-driven way of working, and we cannot WAIT to welcome our first dedicated CRO Lead shortly.
Our product portfolio has grown in the last two years and that has multiplied our customer acquisition and conversion paths. Now, we actually offer free prototypes - yep COMPLETELY free of charge, you can create your own clickable prototype in just a couple of minutes. We believe this will get our future customers excited about the prospects of ordering an app as they will be able to see how their business idea will look in the real world (rather than just boring project and design presentations).
This opens up an exciting world of product qualified leads (PQLs) for Builder.ai and our new mission will be to make sure PQLs get the best and most frictionless journey possible. That’s why we’re recruiting heavily into our Product Growth Team so get in touch with me to find out more! We’re building a squad of Product Managers looking after growth strategy for each product - accountable for driving key KPIs across activation, conversion and retention. So what does the next chapter of our growth hold? - well I’m glad you asked: pairing sales and self-service for the best result. This will help us determine which of our potential customers may need a little more time, and which of those PQLs are bang-on ready to speak to our lovely team straight away!
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