What’s common with companies that build the most successful products?

They build great products, and they build great growth and distribution strategies. A growth strategy will make or break your company. A great product growth strategy is enabled by a solid engineering strategy that builds primitives and accelerators of growth.

I recently completed the Reforge Growth Series, and it is hands down the best growth product content and community out there. I learned a ton of fundamentals on product strategy-led growth, which I wanted to capture here (credits to reforge for all the product content below).

As an engineering manager and engineer at heart, I also wanted to add tips on engineering strategies to enable and effectively execute the growth strategy. This will cover high-level pointers on systems to build, and in-depth detail may be covered in a future post.

Why Growth

Growth is the winning sauce for companies because:

• It creates defensibility
• Attracts more resources
• Enables quick and deep learning
• Growth is self compounding

Growth systems

Growth systems allow hypothesis-driven experiments that uncover the truth on what drives activation, retention, engagement, and monetisation. They are systematic, deterministic, sustainable and repeatable.

I will cover below the fundamentals of retention and engagement in this first post and cover activation and resurrection in the follow-up post. I will also interleave high-level engineering strategies for each after the product fundamentals.

Part one: Retention

Why retention? It separates the top one per cent. Retention powers acquisition, engagement and monetisation.

Also Read: Behind the product: How Igloo plans to support insurance sales intermediaries with its new platform

• It increases viral touch points to acquire more users (think slack, dropbox, LinkedIn, Medium)
• It increases LTV, which allows us to invest more in new acquisition channels.
• It improves conversion rates for subscriptions, ads, transactions and premium services
• Ultimately, increased retention brings more engagement and leads to higher monetisation.

Retention is the silent killer

If not paid attention to, it will slow down the growth and ultimately kill the product.

• We can have fast top-of-funnel growth, but if we have poor retention, LTV, DAU/MAU will die down.
• Poor retention is easy to cover up as it is easy to use the wrong metric, has a long-term view and can be deprioritised.

Retention is the output

Retention = (Activation + Engagement + Resurrection)

Common mistakes when setting up Retention

• Wrong Frequency of usage
• Choosing the wrong core action
• Optimising for the wrong audience

Qualitative Definition of retention for your product

At a high level, our goal is to build multiple use cases based on the main use case and push users into a habit zone

Retention metric

Setting up the quantitative definition of retention metric:

• Make sure to align with a direct and natural frequency of usage.
• Do not combine multiple actions into your retention metric. It can easily mask issues and give false positives.
• Do not optimise for revenue. Monetisation is the output of retention.

Determining the right usage frequency:

• Select a use case or the core action.
• Create the action histogram-
• Analyse distribution, daily/weekly/monthly, and so on.

Validating the Core Action:

• Form groups that performed the core action.
• Create a cohort chart and compare the retention curves.

Ultimately the retention curve is the output of how you performed through the inputs. Activation, engagement and resurrection.

Engineering tips

As shared above, retention is the output and is usually a lagging indicator. Most of our engineering foundations will invest in engagement, activation and resurrection. However, there are a few areas where teams should invest in setting the right foundations (in no particular order).

Experimentation: Invest in a scalable and configurable experimentation framework that allows us to validate or invalidate your hypothesis quickly. Great experimentation tools speed us up instead of slowing you down. It’s a red flag if the A/B testing setup is easy to trip on or takes too much time to configure and roll out tests.

Analytics and event tracking: This will form the basis of collecting data that will help us understand current baselines. The shelf like amplitude, google analytics etc are good starting points, and we can build in-house once we have reached the inflexion point of the scale. If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it

Scalable data platform: This depends on scaling up experimentation, analysis, machine learning/personalisation and leveraging data to create new use cases. As our user base and data grows, having these capabilities in-house provides a step function change on how we can transform data and tools to meet our needs.

Also Read: How to pursue a product idea into a successful business

Dynamic content: Build or integrate with a platform that allows serving content like strings and media without new releases. This will unlock experimentation velocity and serve the ultimate purpose of validating the hypothesis quickly.

Part two: Engagement

Engagement is non-binary, unlike retention. It’s a spectrum of depth. It’s a measure of how “engaged” is your user base with the product and features. Once a user is engaged, they have formed the habit and are in the “loop”. There are two main habit loops, organic and manufactured.

Organic  habit loop

Manufactured habit loop

Successful products can build great manufactured habit loops. It has four steps:

• Manufactured cue or trigger: Products use data and opportunity to create them. We can choose a combination of these triggers to engage the user per our product. The data foundations built based on the product growth strategy will enable these loops. There are five broad categories: time-based, location-based, update/change-based, network/peer-based, and programmatic.
• Channel: Medium is used to communicate with the user. Email, notifications (push or browser), in-app, digital ads or traditional mail.
• Action: The core action we want the user to perform in response.
• Reward: Reward for the user taking action. There are three major types of rewards: extrinsic (time, money, information), intrinsic (completion, mastery, joy), and social (recognition, confirmation, competition).

Pro Tips

• Leave the user with one more trigger.
• Combine loops. Create the core loop and create supplemental loops to fuel the core loop.
• For example, LinkedIn core loop: New Connection. Supplemental loop: job update, recommendations, people you may know, skill endorsement, messaging.

Engineering tips

• Communications platform and delivery time/channel optimisation: Invest in a communication platform that enables different channels as discussed before (email, push, in-app, ads etc.). The efficacy of lifecycle comms starts to increase when we optimise the choice of channel and timing of the delivery.
• Targeting system: Build a targeting system that allows cherry-picking users to match a certain set of attributes for specific actions. Since engagement is a spectrum, the same message and action will not work for all users alike. It is imperative to understand where each user is in their journey and then communicate with them appropriately.
• Personalisation and ML: Personalisation is a muscle that every product needs to build over time. This will touch and serve multiple aspects of product and engineering systems. Invest in building a decoupled and composable system that can be deployed to learn and personalise the user experience. Users use a product to solve their unique problems at the right time.

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Last week on Thursday, ClavystBio, a company that aims to accelerate the commercialisation of life sciences discoveries and innovations, announced its launch in Singapore.

Established by Temasek subsidiary CLA Real Estate Holdings, the firm is led by CEO Dr Christopher Laing, who is transitioning from his role as Vice Dean at Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Duke-NUS Medical School, and a board that is chaired by Dr Fidah Alsagoff, Joint Head of the Enterprise Development Group (Singapore) and Head of Life Sciences, Temasek.

Despite its recent launch, ClavystBio has made US$220 million in investment commitments to six early-stage companies and three venture partners in life science space.

One of the companies that it invests in includes CoV Biotechnology which is developing booster vaccines and therapeutics that are effective against variants of SARS-2 beta coronavirus. The company’s booster pan-sarbecovirus vaccine aims to protect against future variants and future crossovers of related coronaviruses from animals to humans.

In its work in supporting life sciences innovations, ClavystBio intends to focus supporting early stage companies in the areas of cell and gene therapy, biomarkers and digital health.

Also Read: The role of biotech in taking India from developing to developed

In an email interview with e27, Dr Laing explains the characteristics that the firm is looking for in a potential investment.

“ClavystBio looks to invest in early-stage companies with strong potential to deliver health impact. This usually includes great science, a disruptive platform technology and a committed team with potential to collaborate that can be anywhere from only scientific founders (seed) to a management team with strong experience and skills (Series A and beyond),” he writes. “We are active partners and bring our networks and capabilities to our investees.”

In addition to funding, ClavystBio also provides a holistic support system for startups to achieve success. Dr Laing explains the firm’s approach as follows:

Collaborate: To create programmes with private and public partners that address common critical developmental needs of life science companies, such as access to industry and market expertise, or frameworks for collaborating on intellectual property translation.

Venture: In addition to funding, the firm also helps to secure leadership talent, access resources, and connect with strategic partners and follow-on investors.

Build: To develop a purpose-built innovation district with collaborative life sciences and tech infrastructure and specialised facilities, together with a vibrant community of academics, investors, startups, industry, and professional partners supporting all stages of company growth.

“Startups need more than just capital to maximise their chances of success. We have identified three critical areas where ClavystBio has strong potential to contribute to Singapore’s life science ecosystem and accelerate commercialisation and startup growth. These align with the three pillars of our integrated approach: ‘Collaborate, Venture and Build’,” Dr Laing elaborates.

Also Read: How biotech is changing the global agriculture game for investors

On the future of life sciences

In a statement, ClavystBio highlights the prospect of life sciences as a “key driver” of Singapore’s economy in the future. The firm says that a deep commitment to public research and training has resulted in a rich source of technologies and scientific talent, and today the sector employs 25,000 workers and contributes to about a fifth of the country’s manufacturing GDP.

But there is nothing like a challenging time that encourages innovation in various sectors. In the past two years, in line with the COVID-19 pandemic and the measures taken to tackle it, the world witnessed a heightened global focus on health security has accelerated the growth of the life sciences sector.

Other factors such as “prevailing megatrends” (i.e the emerging global middle income, rapidly ageing population, and rising chronic disease burden) will also drive increased biomedical spending in the next decade with the biopharmaceutical market projected to reach US$65 billion by 2026.

So what is the opportunity that ClavystBio aims to tap into? Dr Laing begins by stressing that Singapore is well-positioned to achieve this due to a number of reasons.

“Many years of strategic investment have produced world-class universities and health systems with a strong research and talent base. Furthermore, the pace of innovation in biomedical sciences and medicine continues to accelerate due to the convergence of biology and technology – and Singapore has a strong data and tech foundation. Over the past decade, we’ve seen a burgeoning community of early-stage ventures in Singapore backed by great science and technology that can transform healthcare,” he says.

“However, the translation of life sciences discoveries into clinic-ready solutions has always been challenging due to several factors including the length of time of the process; access to smart and patient capital; availability of strategic partners and experienced entrepreneurs to scale commercialisation; as well as the lack of purpose-built innovation spaces to support the growth of life sciences companies,” Dr Laing continues.

Also Read: Is a career in biotech right for you?

According to him, ClavystBio’s integrated approach seeks to address these challenges holistically, and build Singapore’s life sciences ecosystem to create the optimal environment for such companies to thrive and achieve commercial success globally.

But what kind of challenges do life sciences startups face? Does a life science startup have a similar growth journey to startups in other tech sectors?

“All startups share common features and challenges in their journey – the need to validate the utility of a potentially great idea, the need to attract the right talent and experience, and the need to find investors who will not only provide capital but will open doors. But life science startups can have some hurdles that are different from other tech sectors,” Dr Laing answers.

“Health is a heavily regulated industry, often requiring very long lead times and expensive trials to demonstrate the safety and effectiveness of solutions. This can mean the need to access highly specialised facilities (wet labs, clinical sites), and the need for multiple collaborations. Business models for healthcare can be complex, involving multiple parties (patients, hospitals, government, insurers). And as life sciences increasingly converge with digital technology, the needs and interest of investors and partners can become blurred.”

In 2023, as part of its effort to continue on supporting the life sciences industries, ClavystBio aims to open new spaces and announces new partnerships. The firm is also looking forward to expanding its portfolio companies in the life sciences sector.

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Fundraising or preparing your startup for fundraising? Build your investor network, search from 400+ SEA investors on e27, and get connected or get insights regarding fundraising. Try e27 Pro for free today.

Image Credit: ClavystBio

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TrueFoundry, a machine learning (ML) developer platform, has announced the completion of a US$2.3 million seed funding led by Sequoia India and Southeast Asia’s Surge.

Eniac Ventures and prominent angels like AngelList Co-Founder Naval Ravikant also participated.

Other participants include Deutsche Bank Global CIO Dilip Khandelwal, Head of GitHub India Maneesh Sharma, Greenhouse Software CTO Mike Boufford, and Kaggle Founder Anthony Goldbloom.

TrueFoundry will use the funds to expand its specialised technology team and further product development. 

Headquartered in the US, TrueFoundry was founded in June 2021 by Abhishek Choudhary, Anuraag Gutgutia and Nikunj Bajaj.

During their stint at Facebook, the Co-Founders recognised that smaller companies in the market required a significantly longer time to build and deploy machine learning models than big tech companies. This led to the founding of TrueFoundry, which automates repetitive tasks in the ML pipeline to accelerate ML deployment and live endpoint monitoring.

Also Read: How machine learning really impacts us in our daily lives

Machine learning offers immense business opportunities, yet the development and launch of ML models is a time-intensive and complex process for software engineers, ML engineers and data scientists.

As a result, almost 90 per cent of ML models do not end up in production. For the models that make it to deployment, 50 per cent fail due to the absence of monitoring systems, and 30 per cent have to be reverted due to scaling and latency issues often overlooked during the data training stage.

While large companies can bridge this gap by deploying large, high-end ML platform teams to design and launch ML models, it is less feasible for smaller companies and startups to commit such high investments while building their companies.

TrueFoundry aims to transform the process by automating parts in the ML pipeline that can be automated and empowering ML developers to test and launch models in production quickly and with as much autonomy as possible.

“TrueFoundry was born out of the idea that no business – big or small – should miss out on machine learning opportunities. With our automated platform, data scientists and engineers can deploy machine learning models at the speed and maturity of big tech, cutting their production timelines from several weeks to a few hours. Data is the new oil, and we want to enable companies to use machine learning faster and generate greater business value,” said CEO Nikunj Bajaj.

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Echelon 2022 aims to provide intimate and focused discussions on key topics and business matching services to facilitate business-driven connections during the two-day event. e27 will curate and invite key stakeholders of startups, investors, corporates, and ecosystem enablers to drive towards fruitful business outcomes at Echelon.

The 2022 Echelon edition will be co-located with SWITCH at Resorts World Sentosa from 27 to 28 October 2022. Learn more here. 

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Singapore-based homegrown direct-to-consumer (D2C) consumer electronics brand PRISM+ has secured SGD 45 (US$32) million in a funding round from TNB Aura.

The company will use the funds for geographic expansion and foraying into the smart home appliance space. It has set its sights on the Philippines market by Q1 2023.

Founded in 2017, PRISM+ offers lifestyle electronic goods and services. Launched as a display specialist, the brand expanded to include audio products and smart home appliances.

Last month, PRISM+ launched its line of air conditioner systems with the PRISM+ Zero Series. The brand introduced a full suite of aircon maintenance and installation services with this launch.

Also Read: ‘Economic crises become less important when investing with a longer-term mindset’: Qin En Looi

It will look to introduce more home appliances in the coming year.

The company is now venturing out of e-commerce into offline channels as it anticipates demand for a physical experience to touch and feel products before purchasing. While most brands shifted their businesses online during the pandemic, PRISM+ quietly prepared for the return of the offline retail experience. In 2021, it partnered with popular furniture retailer Hipvan for a permanent in-store PRISM+ pop-up at Suntec City.

The brand has plans to launch a chain of retail outlets in Singapore and Malaysia. It has already established three outlets in Singapore and plans to open six outlets by the first quarter of 2023.

In Malaysia, it recently launched its first outlet in Kuala Lumpur and will announce more stores in 2023.

Charles Wong, Founding Partner of TNB Aura shared: “We believe the regional D2C market has reached an inflexion point, with digital penetration, payments and fulfilment infrastructure increasingly able to support high-quality D2C offerings across both online and offline formats. PRISM+ is primed to become the regional champion of a market traditionally dominated by East Asian giants such as Xiaomi, Samsung, and LG.”

 

“In this post-pandemic landscape, we are seeing consumers return to malls and retail spaces in full force. People crave the personal touch that has been missing. The electronics industry has long relied on brick-and-mortar stores to sell the immersive experience of their products. We hope to shake up this age-old formula by showing customers that a premium home set-up need not come with a hefty price tag as we retain our direct-to-consumer approach across all our channels,” said Jonathan Tan, Managing Director of PRISM+.

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Respond.io, a Malaysia-based conversational commerce company, has raised US$7 million in Series A funding, led by global VC firm Headline.

AltaIR Capital, Smart Partnership Capital, Sterling Oak Group, and Calendula Ventures also co-invested.

Respond.io will use the funding to continue its push into large enterprises by extending its integration capabilities.

A portion of the money will also go into expanding from its home in Asia to build a presence in the Middle East, Europe, and Latin America.

Respond.io was launched in 2017 by Gerardo Salandra, Hassan Ahmed and Iaroslav Kudritskiy as an omni-channel messaging inbox. It helps businesses leverage this channel and reach their customers directly on WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, LINE, Viber, Telegram, and WeChat from a centralised dashboard.

Also Read: How SMBs can use conversational commerce to boost year-end sales

On top of that, the platform provides flexible automation via workflows — you can build chat menus, drip campaigns, internal pipelines, and invoke external actions. Managers can quickly pick up on any conversation and notice if any have been dropped. In turn, clients can enjoy competent and swift responses to solving their problems.

The company claims that over 10,000 companies in 86 countries use the platform, including Klook, Decathlon, Abenson, Yoho, Roche, ShareChat, and Bigo use respond.io. “We process over 140 million messages monthly,” said CTO Ahmed. 

Its revenue claims to have grown 25x since the previous round. 

‘The latest wave of digital commerce innovation was pioneered by small brands using Instagram. It uses social commerce to drive buyers onto tailor-made social accounts and enables consumers to accelerate their purchase decisions through WhatsApp & other messengers,” said CEO Salandra. “We’ve built a platform that enables multi-national brands to deploy that highly innovative strategy at a scale of a million conversations per day across dozens of teams.”

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