Hey! How are you?

Last week I was supposed to send an email but I was busy with my team as we took 1 week in Morocco!

I’ll share what happened and why I recommend you do something similar.

In today’s email we’re going to talk about:

• Our seminar with the team

• Shopify App Growth Blueprint: Improving your activation rate

• Crazy results with my partnerships platform

Let’s go! 🔥

Our seminar with the team

1 week together in Morocco.

We were supposed to be 5 but someone couldn’t join us.

So here we are, 4 people taking a flight from 4 different countries.

And we arrived in this big house near Casablanca with the biggest swimming pool I ever saw for a single house.

And to tell you how big the house was, every day we had to call at least 1 person to know where he was. Swimming pool? Roof? Bedroom?

Yup, it was that huge!

We were able to:

• Know each other even better

• Brainstorm face-to-face

• Handle problems together (as we launched one of our biggest feature)

• Learn other people’s culture

What’s even better is that I recorded the whole week! I don’t know if someone might be interested in watching a video about it, though.

If you have a team, Do something similar. You don’t need to go far or get the best house.

But spending time “in person” with your team will leave you money in the future:

• People work better because you become closer

• People stay longer with you

And on top of that, you’ve got to spend time with people that help you. How could it be better?

Shopify App Growth Blueprint: Improving your activation rate

When it comes to growth, most people want “more installs”. So they track only this metric.

But it’s probably the latest you should check.

You must increase your activation rate before increasing the number of installs.

This rate comes right after the install numbers.

Because it’s how many people will actually start using your app.

It happens even before generating revenue.

For example: Let’s say 10 users install your app. Then 5 people start using it (not just trying your app, but actually set up everything).

It means your activation rate here is 50% (not good)

Why is it important?

Let’s imagine you’ve got 100 installs this month. But you have only 20% activation (Really really bad)

They you’ll end up with 20 users. Even before getting money! That sucks right?

But if you were to get only 50 users, with 80% activation rate, you’d get 40 users.

Fewer installs, but more users. You see the importance of it.

And what’s incredible sometimes, is that this number is so low that it can be increased quickly.

This screenshot is for a specific day from my own app. That’s bad.

Imagine if I keep this activation rate to 65% for 3 months with the number of installs you see (40)

That’s 78 installs. But if my activation rate were 80%, it would’ve been 96!

I already know that if I were to be an advisor for your app, I would probably increase your revenue by 30% just by checking these kinds of numbers.

It wouldn't take me more than a month. Yet, if my goal were to get you more installs, it would take longer.

That shows you how important it is to improve it.

So! The first step is to track it. If you don’t know your activation rate there is a big problem.

Then we’ll see how to increase it.

In a future post, I’ll show you how to better track data with Mixpanel so you can connect activation rate with a specific segment, for example…

But let’s not make it more complicated today!

1) Tracking your activation rate

Before tracking it you have to understand what it is.

The activation is the moment your users set up everything. He is onboarded.

He has done everything he needs to do to benefit from your app.

It is usually at the aha moment, when your user understands the power of your app and sees it.

It’s also the time that if your user does it, he will likely continue paying.

So if you want to find it, you have to track the actions of your users:

• Them opening your app

• Them configuring a product or whatever

• Saving the settings

• etc.

By doing so, you’ll be able to determine what suit of action will likely make the user convert.

For example:

Start with a guess: “I think my activation is after someone did X”.

Then you can create 2 buckets: The people who did X, the people who didn’t.

For the people who did it, what’s the percent of people who started paying after that?

If it’s too small, it means you need to keep going.

As you go closer to your moment, you can start combining actions. For example: It’s when my user did A and did B

For example, for my app, it was the moment a user created an offer and opened the link to see how it appears in his store.

That’s my activation rate. And also the aha moment: “Oh! it works!”

Once you determined it (with many iterations) you know that if new installs do this, they’re “activated”.

So the % of people who this is your activation rate. You can track it with Mixpanel, which comes in another post (or Mantle which is specifically for Shopify Apps)

Then you have to see your activation rate:

• Above 80% it’s awesome

• Above 60% it’s good but you can improve it

• Above 40% there is a problem

• Above 20% it’s bad

• Above 0% it sucks

But don’t worry if it’s too low, it means you can quickly improve it and get more users!

2) Increasing your activation rate

When you want to increase it, it means you know what’s your activation. Otherwise go back to finding it.

You can’t increase something that you can’t track.

So there are a few things that explain why your activation rate is too low:

1. Your dashboard is too complicated to understand

2. Your app isn’t what people expected

3. Setting up your app takes too long

But good news, everything can be fixed.

Your dashboard is too complicated

→ Remove everything that isn’t necessary

→ Show more things as they onboarding (showing your analytics section when they didn’t even start isn’t necessary)

→ Add an onboarding (show them the steps to use your app)

For the last one, the goal of your onboarding is to get your users as fast as possible to the aha moment, your activation. But you should still show logical steps to go there.

Your app isn’t what people expected

If you’ve done everything above and it doesn’t change, maybe your app isn’t what people want.

To know it, as soon as someone installs your app, you should contact that person:

1. Trigger a notification (for example to Slack) whenever someone just installed your app

2. Install a live chat tool like Crisp

3. Contact the person who just installed it (Do it with the live chat)

4. Ask them about their expectations, what they thought about when installing, what made them install, etc.

Ask many questions! This is the best way to get insights and to know if you have to change something in your target, your listing, etc

Setting up your app takes too long

If everything above is fine, then try to speed up your onboarding. What I do is simple:

1. I track each onboarding step such as: app opened, bundle created, settings saved, etc.

2. In Mixpanel I check the time it took to go from one step to the other. I try to understand where it took too long

3. I change everything I can to make the process easier. I can even contact the people who just opened this page through live chat to find out if they need help with something so you can figure out the problems with your page.

Crazy results with my partnerships platform

So, you remember the platform I’m building to help Shopify Apps find partnerships?

Well, I had opened the waitlist a few weeks ago.

And you were soooo many to apply!

I opened 100 slots and the remaining people were placed on a waitlist.

I’ve had more than 300 people!!!

And so much engagement on the networks

On top of that, we don’t have only small apps that applied. We have some really big names inside that everyone knows 👀

So finding partners will be exceptional!

Ok so now what’s next?

We started working actively on the platform to get the MVP running soon. And we’ll keep working closely with the early users to ensure we build a platform everyone will love

Thanks for reading this email. Feel free to share it with a friend, a partner, or a customer.

So see you in the next email!

Mat 😁