The Challenge

When Broadstone first approached us it was very clear that they had many of the pieces of the puzzle needed to build a great technology business: smart founders with plenty of domain experience, a capable and hard working engineering team and a product that very clearly solves a problem that no other product on the market today does.

But perhaps what wasn’t quite so clear was how they’d find the people to populate their marketplace.

The serviced security market in the UK is huge - estimated to be worth £5billion. However, how they would find the guards to populate the marketplace wasn’t as obvious. Broadstone’s team had history of being stung by the usual agency advice of ‘do some SEO, buy some AdWords’, and they were adamant that this wouldn’t be a trap they’d fall into again.

That’s why they chose to employ Wunderkind, an agency who specialise in helping tech businesses grow their core business metrics, to help kickstart their user acquisition.

The Solution

Enabling the business with everything it needs to rapidly conduct data-driven growth experiments

To get things started, we needed establish the ability to measure the impact of our work. This meant being able to track users from acquisition to revenue and understand the performance of different segments and cohorts.

To do this, we guided Broadstone through a full-implementation of Mixpanel. Mixpanel doesn’t only allow Broadstone to build reports based on any activity that happens within their ecosystem, but take action on it too.

With Mixpanel, we were able to attribute the campaign that generated the acquired user. The results were eye opening. [something about mixpanel]

Once we were confident that we would be able to quickly establish whether an experiment was a success or not, we started growing those numbers.

The first traction channel unlocked came on the back of work from Tom - he’d found a way to source highly qualified users at a competitive cost. The only problem being that it required a lot of manual work. To scale this channel, we built a tool that grabbed the information from the source, added it to a central database and automated marketing communications to them. By scaling this channel, we were able to reach the first 1,000 users relatively quickly.

With the data we’d gather from the first batch of users, we were now able to make more informed decisions about our acquisition efforts. We had an idea how many users would become activated, and we had an informed idea how much revenue those users would be worth to Broadstone over the course of a year. With this knowledge in hand, we could explore paid media with a large amount of risk mitigated.

Facebook Ads were added to Broadstone’s acquisition mix, gradually scaled from a small budget until their CPA and the quality of the users sourced was validated. We ran two types of campaigns over the next few months:

Whilst we were waiting for the SDK to be added into the Broadstone app, we needed a way where we could attribute success to Facebook Ads without being able to see it in the platform. To overcome this, we chose to run Facebook Lead Ads with an enticing offer to incentivise signup: a free t-shirt.

T-shirts can be purchased relatively cheaply in bulk, and the campaign allowed us to associate Facebook Ads leads with acquired users so that the cost-per-acquisition could be properly calculated.

All in, the acquired users were less than £8, so within Broadstone’s economic model (especially when blended with organic growth) and opening up another traction channel for us to build on.

The second type of Facebook Ads campaign we ran was more straightforward - cost per install campaigns. Once the SDK had been installed, Facebook was able to report on acquired users in the app. We built retargeting, lookalike and interest audiences (making good use of Facebook’s Audience Insights feature) and the size of these audiences allows us to have these ads running as an always-on campaign.

The cost per acquisition was again below £1.

The third successful traction channel uncovered for Broadstone was a mixture of community outreach and incentivised signups. In mind of client confidentiality, I won’t go too far into how where we promoted this campaign as it’s a competitive advantage. But from the beginning of our work with Broadstone, we had highlighted large, active communities of security guards but hadn’t settled on a scalable way of marketing to them within community guidelines.