Best of 2022 from Inside Startups
Every creator on the internet is sharing their “best of 2022” list.
This motivated me too to share mine as well😅
This year Inside startup newsletter gain almost 75% of total subscribers.
I know the total subscriber base still hasn't touched the golden mark of “1000” yet I’m pretty happy about the quality growth of subscribers.
To close out the year I revisited all of my past posts and picked out the Top 8 (divided into two categories), based on views, likes and comments, which you’ll find below.
Happy New Year 🎉, and thank you so much for reading and supporting this newsletter🙏
Best of 2022 | Ads Teardown
"Is this a Swiggy ad?" 🤔
And the next moment appearances of Virat and Anushka with Dental equipment surprised me!
I realised it's a toothsi ad 😃.
Often you’ll see dental tech ads be serious, informative, and filled with abbreviations and jargon.
But this ad ditched the rulebook and presented the “boring” information in a witty way.
2. Product Ads Teardowns ft. 🎧BoAt & INDmoney 📈
Here's a TL;DR Version for you in form of lessons learned:
Pick an Influencer that understands the Ins-out of your brand's target group.
Nail the first 8-10 seconds of your ad by answering WIIFM i.e “What’s in it for me?” for the Viewer.
Your advertisement is nothing without a strong call to action(CTA). A good CTA should evoke an emotional response using strong action words.
Focus on benefits over features. If you noticed, the INDmoney ad never wasted a second talking about features, instead, they shared benefits like “Zero brokerage”, “Invest in fractional share” etc.
3. Product Ads Teardowns ft. RazorpayX, CRED and StockGro!
Here's a TL;DR Version for you in form of lessons learned:
Centre your video ad around a story rather than a specific selling point. Customers don’t tend to like hard sells.
Humans like to laugh. The use of humour with interesting, real-life visuals helped to make the content memorable and entertaining.
Identify the 2 to 3 core pain points of users and include them in your ad before revealing the solution.
Avoid using jargon or excessive info. that doesn't contribute directly to the overall message of your ads.
Best of 2022 | Product & Growth Teardown
1. GTM Insights 🚀 from Fampay, Ola, Unacademy & more!
Do you know how top Indian hypergrowth Startups like Ola, Unacademy, Fampay, Jar, Wint Wealth, Trell got their early users?
That’s what we gonna discuss today!
Around 5 months back I spent almost 30+ hours (~ 2 days) researching GTM strategies of 30+ Indian startups and published all the insights on Gumroad.
And in this post, I’m covering GTM insights from 6 startups included in the same document.
So, without further ado, Let’s dive in!
2. How Jar App🪙Scaled 5 Mn+ Users With Product-Led Growth
Since the majority of Indians don’t clearly understand financial instruments such as Stock Market and Mutual funds, Jar is making gold accessible on a large scale.
The app allows you to buy Gold in small sachets for a fraction of the cost of physical gold, which requires large purchases at a Jeweller.
You don’t have to pay any making costs while buying a piece of any digital gold from any portal. As a result, your total investment cost is reduced.
I spoke to around 6 Jar app users and asked them a few questions to understand their motivation behind using the app & levers that help the Jar app to grow quickly.
In this post, I shared 4 levers that are primarily responsible for Jar’s product-led growth.
3. How Kuku FM reached 1 Mn paying subscribers?
The popularity of audio content in India is driven by several factors including:
An increase in the no. of smartphone users.
The impact of covid-19 drove people indoors.
Increase in no. of first-time internet users.
Low data packs (especially true for Tier-2,3 users).
But there’s one more important factor that attracted Gen Z and millennials towards audio content.
That is increasing screen fatigue.
People look forward to stepping away from their screens - Whether to take a break or to unwind at the end of the day. Listening to podcasts or audiobooks became an easy escape from too much screen time.
This insight led founders Lal Chand Bisu, Vinod Meena and Vikas Goyal to start Kuku FM in 2018.
Kuku FM primarily targets the off-screen time of a user and fills the gap with on-demand audio content in categories such as motivation, comedy, self-development, love and horror etc.
With the massive adoption and growth, Kuku FM recently announced that it has recently crossed 1 million active paying subscribers 🤯
I was a bit surprised since ‘Bharat users’ are not well-known for paying for subscriptions. That made me curious to understand How Kuku FM reached 1 Mn paying subscribers? What’s the growth strategy?
The answer is not easy as it seems, but after a lot of digging, I’ve shared the factors responsible for their growth, in this blog.
4. Blinkist📚User Onboarding Teardown: 4 Lessons to Replicate in Your Product
Acquiring users takes a lot of effort and time. You expect these users to get retained for a long period so you can extract maximum value from them.
But what if these acquired users get churned within 2-3 days?
You would be frustrated, right?
Using your product for the first time is a special moment for a new user.
An excellent first impression of your Product will get them excited to use it again and again!
However, a bad one will frustrate and confuse them to the where they stop bothering.
That’s why smooth user onboarding is important for your new users.
I tried the Blinkist app — A product that offers users quick actionable insights from the book in the form of text & audio bases summaries.
In this case study, I’d focus solely on the lessons we can learn from the Blinkist User onboarding journey.
5. User Journey Analysis: Lessons from Miro Onboarding
This time, It’s a B2B SaaS product — Miro.
During the pandemic, most businesses all over the world didn’t have any idea how they can take up manual creative brainstorming and complex project planning online.
My company was also in the same boat.
But, fortunately, we discovered Miro at that point in time.
Miro is an online collaborative whiteboard that lets remote and distributed teams do anything from brainstorming to project planning.
Even, we also managed to pull off a couple of our projects using Miro :D
In this post, Let's have a closer look at Miro’s onboarding and activation experience from the lenses of a new user + a PM.
That’s all folks!
See you in 2023 :D
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