Metigy's bringing back one of Forward Thinking's classic episodes from 2019: Growth Marketing – How Anna Cheng Grew Spaceship to $100m in 4 months. 

In this episode with Brendan Hill, they cover a wide range of marketing topics including activation, onboarding and her use of pirate metrics. Anna also deconstructs exactly how she built a pre-launch viral waitlist that resulted in 40,000 contacts.

For any business owner who is looking to take their growth marketing strategy to the next level, this episode is a must-listen.

Resources mentioned in this episode

• The difference between growth marketing and growth hacking
• Pirate Metrics – The AARRR Framework (acquisition, activation, retention, referral, revenue)
• 25% increase in your activation metric will lead to a 48% increase in your annual recurring revenue.
• How to improve activation
• How to improve your user onboarding
• Develop customer personas
• Why analysing competitors can save you time and money
• How Anna grew Spaceship to $100m from being employee number 3
• Why it’s important to phone new customers and get their feedback
• Using waitlists to get 40k people on prelaunch list
• Don’t try to scale when you’re not ready to scale

• Mailchimp onboarding process
• Asana
• Spaceship
• SEMrush
• ahrefs
• Canva
• Mike Cannon-Brookes
• Robinhood
• Segment.io
• Mixpanel
• Autopilot
• Brian Balfour
• Sam Zheng
• Andrianes Pinantoan
• Curious Thing

• Traction by Gabriel Weinberg
• The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
• Predictably Irrational  by Dan Ariely

I think if we were to avoid like the obvious answers, which are getting monopolies over resources that everyone needs like water and housing and things like that, I would probably open the first bank there. I think the best way to make money is to help other people make money. I was thinking about this question, with so many business opportunities that you can capitalize on, the best way to do it is just to give people the capital in order for them to achieve those particular dreams that they also might have in regards to what sort of businesses they want to open.

The first thing I’d open is probably a bank or an investment firm or something like that, which basically allows people to borrow or give up some of the equity in order to build out their first businesses, which might be that monopoly of water or that monopoly of food or the next Amazon.

• Anna on LinkedIn
• Anna on Twitter