Linktree has had a very busy year.
In March, the Melbourne-based company announced a $45 million funding round and plans to open an office in Los Angeles. In August it acquired Odesli, a startup that specializes in automated music link aggregation. That was quickly followed by news of a high-profile partnership that brought PayPal payments to users of Linktree’s “Commerce Links” tool.
Taken together, these moves signal that Linktree has aggressive growth goals. Indeed, the company has said as much, with Jess Box, head of growth, telling Business Insider in an August interview that she thinks Linktree could be “like the next Canva in Australia.” Whether those lofty heights are reached — Canva was valued at $40 billion this past September — will be determined in no small part by people like Hannah Douglas, growth lead at Linktree.
As growth lead, Douglas helps the company better understand how users move through its product funnel, with the goal of both optimizing each step of the journey and getting users to complete it quicker. This requires the patience to take a deep dive into data and user research and the agility to quickly act on those findings and implement experiments.
The work of Douglas and the Linktree growth team is crucial to ensuring Linktree’s big moves in 2021 lead to sustainable, long-term growth. Built In Los Angeles caught up with Douglas to learn more about how her work is designed to achieve just that.
Tell us about the work you do as a growth manager. What does a typical day look like for you?
As growth lead, I work across the growth flywheel: acquisition, activation, conversion, retention and the overall speed of our flywheel. My work focuses on how fast our users and our platform itself refers new users to our product. I look into performance at each stage to understand how we can grow, optimize and move users along their journey. I start each day by checking our core vitals and metrics and then I move onto our live experiments to monitor performance and provide feedback to the wider team.
At Linktree, the growth funnel team is part of the wider growth function, which owns the product growth funnel, performance, region growth and expansion, product marketing, strategic partnerships and growth insights. Hiring is a big part of my role as the team is constantly growing, and we are looking to hire specialists across each stage of the funnel. If you have a keen interest in growth and experimentation, reach out!
We keep a certain agility about our team so that we can act and adapt to experiments to improve performance and results.”
Growth managers touch a lot of different areas of the business with their work and there is typically no shortage of growth opportunities to be found. How do you determine where to focus your efforts for maximum impact?
When we’re planning the roadmap, we ladder up our initiatives to the company OKRs that align with product and user growth. We have a backlog of experiments that we assess for potential reach and impact against each of these OKRs and goals. It’s always good to have a healthy balance of initiatives across the product funnel with user growth, AKA acquisition, and revenue, AKA conversion, as a priority.
We rely a lot on our wonderful data analyst team to analyze the potential reach and impact of our initiatives and ensure we’re set up to measure and report on the experiments we’re running. We keep a certain agility about our team so that we can act and adapt to experiments to improve performance and results.
What is a project or campaign you’re working on right now that you’re particularly excited about, and why?
It’s actually a project that we just finished working on. It was a “micro test,” meaning that it was low lift and required only 30 minutes to implement, but the incremental changes from this micro test and the impacts on our bottom line have been huge. In my role, experiments like these reinforce how accessible experimentation is and the possibilities this presents really excites me.
Another really exciting project we’re working on is improving our activation rate by increasing the rate at which new users see their first “value” with Linktree, whether that’s easily connecting all of their social media accounts, growing their followers cross-platform or monetizing their audiences. We’ve just completed a deep research project on activation and what are the key high-value actions users need to take to get to first value at a faster rate and how we can work this into the product as a seamless user experience. The follow-on effects from increasing this metric will be huge for the rest of the growth flywheel stages as the more users we have activated the more we have using the product.
