Mind blowing stat we don't talk about: 47% of free signups turned out to be *fake* accounts 🤯🤯 This was at Clay -- the hyper-growth startup that you probably know of & might be using for sales automation. Signups went from 10-15 per day a year ago to 1,000 (!) per day now. But of these signups: 1️⃣ 20% were repeat signups 2️⃣ 19% were fakes 3️⃣ 8% were bots This makes conversion data nearly impossible to discern. It leads to sales & marketing resources wasted on folks who won't buy. And it could cause a startup to either abandon or water down a #PLG strategy. I unpacked this in today's Growth Unhinged: https://lnkd.in/gM-Q66CV We covered how to figure out if you have a problem & how to solve it (without adding friction for your real users). Shoutout to Yash Tekriwal, Eric Engoron, and Henry LeGard at Verisoul for their contributions here. #growth #gtm #marketing
iuliia shnai
2mo
Where the fake signups come from? And I don’t also understand why? Interesting 👀
Henry LeGard
2mo
This was a fun one - thanks Kyle Poyar, Yash Tekriwal 🤔 and Eric Engoron for the partnership! It takes a really confident team to share data like this!
A nice way to tackle this would be: - Accept only Microsoft / Google OAuth - Business domains only - Enrich with clearbit before admitting inside or ask them to book a demo.
Andrew Capland
2mo
In the early days, growth teams usually just want more signups. But after you start getting tens of thousands of signups/month - this challenge starts becoming too large to ignore. Implementing a spam detection/monitoring tool isn't a sexy growth project, but usually necessary. Good breakdown Kyle!
Aakash Gupta
2mo
Insane stat. Shoutout to Clay for sharing this data.
Ryan Glushkoff
2mo
I disagree that my yahoo account that I haven't checked in ~20 years and continue to use as a collector for junk mail to this day is a "fake account".
Tom Barragry
2mo
It's crazy how often this happens! I feel like I've learned to be pessimistic by default with these sorts of things! "OH WOW, OH WAIT" is all too common of a phrase in my head.
Cayden Meyer
2mo
We, added $5.7m in ARR for a single customer by converting repeated signups last year, the opportunity size is huge and I don't think people realize that these people are willing to pay. We see people of all demographics and products doing this from B2C with typically wealthy customers all the way through to high end B2B. The funny thing that came up in our experiments were that if you offer them a discount to welcome them back (a code that works on any account), they are unlikely to take it. Instead they feel like they got caught and run back to their original & legit account to pay full price. If people want to see how big this problem is for themselves, let me know we can get you setup with Upollo in 10 minutes and start seeing how big that opportunity is.
Simon Jackson
2mo
Can confirm - bots have been a huge problem at every large tech company I've worked for. E.g., when I was at Booking..com we had a dedicated and fully-staffed team (mostly eng + MLE) just managing bot detection, and making the user-level predictions available to all other teams to use for many reasons. Main one tended to be around removal to improve data quality for analyses, A/B tests, etc.
GM CMO • Growth Advisor • 3x exits • McKinsey, HBS, HLS alum
2moKyle Poyar, one approach to address the fake signups... add a short (e.g., 5 question survey) post sign-up. Fake users likely won't complete it, and you can also construct the survey to help detect fakes based on the answers. The nice thing is that the survey doesn't add friction because you can add it after the initial sign up. And it can be used to collect information that's useful for determining how to follow-up. What are your thoughts on that approach, Kyle?