In this compelling episode, Coco Sellman sits down with Viktoria Kharlamova, a seasoned growth advisor with a powerhouse track record. Viktoria shares her insights from helping major tech companies, like Miro, scale to unicorn status through her expertise in product growth strategies. 

WHAT YOU’LL GAIN BY LISTENTING IN:

As a visionary woman founder looking to build a high-impact, high-growth enterprise, you’ll walk away with actionable insights on optimizing customer onboarding, activation, and retention. Viktoria also highlights how a product-centric culture and strategic experimentation can be key to achieving sustainable growth and prosperity in your business.

Chapters:

00:00 - Introduction to the Wisdom of Women Show

00:03 - The Impact of Women in Business

01:35 - Introducing Today's Guest: Victoria Karlamova

08:19 - Victoria's Journey in Product Led Growth

15:05 - Understanding User Onboarding and Activation

14:13 - Key Tactics for Boosting Retention and Virality

21:31 - Common Onboarding Mistakes and Solutions

18:40 - The Importance of Data in Growth Strategies

36:50 - Final Words of Wisdom for Women Founders

50:40 - Closing Thoughts and Resources

Takeaways:

• The future of business relies on women leaders who can drive both impact and profit.
• Understanding user onboarding is crucial for activating and retaining customers effectively.
• User research is essential for identifying bottlenecks and improving product growth strategies.
• A holistic approach to product growth considers activation, retention, and monetization as interconnected systems.
• Effective onboarding goes beyond the first session and includes long-term user engagement strategies.
• Creating a culture that prioritizes user experience is vital for successful product growth.

BURNING QUESTIONS ANSWERED:

1-What are the fundamental components of user onboarding, activation, and retention, and why do they matter?

• Discover how user onboarding extends beyond first impressions, influencing long-term user success.
• Learn the distinctions between onboarding, activation, and retention, and how each contributes to user growth and satisfaction.

2-How can founders identify and solve growth bottlenecks using metrics and qualitative insights?

• Viktoria shares her process for diagnosing product issues through funnel metrics and user feedback.
• Explore ways to blend quantitative data with user behavior to uncover the ‘why’ behind growth challenges.

3-What are the keys to cultivating a product-centric culture that drives growth?

• Understand how aligning your team around the product’s core value fuels innovation and user satisfaction.
• Learn why regular user research and hypothesis-driven experimentation are essential for long-term growth.

4-What are the most impactful strategies for driving user virality and monetization?

• Viktoria discusses tactics for leveraging existing users to attract new ones through organic growth.
• Get her insights on creating value propositions that align with user needs and local payment systems for effective monetization.

5-How do experimentation and hypothesis formulation contribute to product success?

• Viktoria explains the role of A/B testing and why early-stage startups should prioritize various experimentation methods.
• Hear about her recommended framework for formulating hypotheses focused on user behavior, scaling insights across your product.

FAVORITE QUOTES:

“User onboarding starts long before users interact with your product; it begins with the first touchpoint and goes all the way to the moment they derive true value.” - Viktoria

“Growth is a puzzle, and solving it requires clarity on what aspects of your product need attention—only then can you innovate and move forward.” - Coco

“Metrics tell you what’s happening, but qualitative data from users reveals why it’s happening. You need both to truly understand user behavior and drive growth.” -Viktoria

CLOSING THOUGHTS:

This episode sheds light on the complexities and nuances of product growth. Viktoria emphasizes that building a sustainable growth strategy is about seeing the bigger picture, aligning all parts of the growth system, and listening closely to your customers. Coco’s insightful questions help reveal the depth of Viktoria’s expertise, making this a must-listen for any woman founder seeking to propel her business forward.

Tune in to this episode and get ready to unlock the secrets to building high-impact, high-growth enterprises that make the world a better place. Remember, your vision is valid, and with the right insights and support, your business can reach unicorn status too!

FREE OFFERS:

Free Report:  The State of Product Onboarding:  https://onboard.report/ 

CONTACT INFORMATION:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/viktoriakharlamova/

Website: https://vickikharlamova.com/ 

Substack: https://substack.com/home/post/p-146388841

Viktoria’s Prioritization template: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15mP2S9QgPhUDstAMlMKZ-ZbdhrDRNEFXyhJQMCLe2TQ/edit?gid=0#gid=0

Check out “Self-Serve User Onboarding 000for Rapid Product Growth”: 

https://maven.com/growth-course/self-serve-onboarding 

Follow the #WisdomOfWomen show for more inspiring stories and insights from trailblazing women founders, investors, and experts in growth and prosperity.

YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/yja3w7nh

Spotify: https://tinyurl.com/4tak8ajk 

Amazon Prime: https://tinyurl.com/366syddj 

Apple Podcasts: https://tinyurl.com/bdhananz 

RSS Feed: https://feeds.captivate.fm/womengetfunded/ 

Coco Sellman, the host of #WisdomOfWomen, believes business can be a force for good, especially with visionary women at the helm. With over 25 years of entrepreneurial experience, she has launched five companies and guided over 500 startups. As Founder & CEO of A Force for Good, Coco supports purpose-driven women founders in unlocking exponential growth and prosperity. Her recent venture, Allumé Home Care, reached eight-figure revenues and seven-figure profits in just four years before a successful exit in 2024. A venture investor and board director, Coco’s upcoming book, *A Force for Good*, reveals a roadmap for women to lead high-impact, high-growth companies.

Welcome to the wisdom of Women show.

Business is the most powerful, innovative force in the world.

And with visionary women leaders at the helm, we can lead in both impact and profit.

Today's world needs the wisdom of women in business.

This is why we are here to help women grow.

Are you already a successful, visionary woman founder leading a high, high impact company?

The Wisdom of Women show is designed just for you.

We are a community of women founders, investors and leaders who want to see you rise.

Join us as we unlock opportunities and prosperity for women led enterprises.

The future of business is women.

Are you ready?

Welcome to the wisdom of women show.

We are dedicated to amplifying the voice and wisdom of women in business.

A new model of leadership is emerging and we are here today to amplify the voices of women leading the way.

Thank you for joining us today as we illuminate the path to unlocking opportunities and prosperity for women led enterprises by amplifying the voice and wisdom of women.

So today I have a very special guest for you that I curated.

I looked for because I really want to be able to bring to this conversation what Victoria Karlamova has to offer us.

So Victoria is a powerhouse growth advisor with a track record of driving impactful product led growth.

Through innovating, onboarding, monetization and retention strategies for your customers, she has transformed the growth trajectories of high profile tech companies including RASC AI, Taskaid, Panda, Pandadoc and Grammarly.

At Miro, Victoria was a founding member of the growth team where she spearheaded key innovation initiatives in activation, monetization and virality.

Don't we all want that where our products and services just find their way to the perfect customer?

So over her five year tenure, she led over 200 growth experiments.

Because I really want to get in there, Victoria, and learn about what that means.

To have a growth experiment, she doubled virality and launched major features that significantly boosted user engagement and revenue.

We want that.

A sought after mentor, Victoria has elevated product managers from industry giants like Semrush, Apple and toptal help helping them achieve better business outcomes.

She's also a maven course creator.

She empowers others by sharing her expertise on user onboarding and activation.

And outside of work, Victoria is a relentless adventurer.

Was just catching up on her doing her major travels right now.

Having traveled to 53 countries and scaled peaks like Kilimanjaro, she's a sports enthusiast.

She thrives on new challenges from wake surfing to snowboarding.

Holy moly.

Welcome Victoria to the wisdom of women's show.

Thank you Coco.

Happy to be here today and super excited to share my knowledge about product with girls and other stuff.

Wonderful.

So as I always like to ask at the beginning, because we need more women to show up at the top of the business channels, and maybe you don't have a business book you're going to recommend, but what is one book written by a woman that has significantly influenced your life?

I actually.

That's a great question.

First of all, I would say that I was thinking about that one week when I got that, and I couldn't choose one.

So I really wanted to share two books that really influenced my life a lot.

The first book is defining decade from 20 to 30.

That is the book from Meg Jain.

And that was a great book that I read when I was 21 or something, and that really influenced how I behave in this time period of my life and how I invested heavily into having a lot of experience in tech and product growth and other.

And there is another book which is not, like, business focused.

It's rather the book that I read when I was about 15 years old that's Gone with Wind by Margaret Mitchell.

That really was my favorite book when I was that age, and now it's also one of my favorites.

And Scarlett was a real inspiration for me.

She was just unstoppable into getting what she wanted, and that was a real inspiration for me.

So that's why I also wanted to highlight that one.

I love it.

Victoria.

So I have a book club, the wisdom of women book club, and I always like to take, I always put up different books.

Every week we launch a new book.

And so I love to take these recommendations from these interviews, and then I often include them in a future week.

And I have to tell you, I had another founder on a few weeks ago, brand Mayer, who was the founder of Baby Quip and a co founder of Match.com.

and her book was Gone with the Wind.

And we talked about Scarlett.

And so I think there's something to be said for that.

And it's a book I might have to pick up again, I don't know, defining decade from 20 to 30.

And I'm going to totally check that out.

And there's some young women, women in my life who I think could be really, really turned on by that idea.

And I love to hear that it was a profound impact for you.

That's wonderful.

So thank you for that.

Yeah.

Happy to hear that Gone with the Wind is, was mentioned by somebody else and affected somebody else's life.

Yeah.

Because that's great.

I love it.

Yeah.

Scarlett is an avatar for, for all of us, I think, in different ways because she was really ahead of her time.

Right?

Yeah, that's true.

No problem for power and being bossy.

I love that.

Right.

So tell us, Victoria, you have such a specific knowledge that I think is hardly missing in many, many companies, especially companies where growth is stalled.

And I have a saying.

I like to say that growth is a puzzle you can solve, but you have to have clarity about what those puzzles are and then how to create innovation cycles and solve them.

Right.

And when I learned about you and what you do, I was like, oh, this girl, she knows how to solve the puzzle of growth.

So tell us about you.

You have a deep background in product led growth, and just tell us about your story and how you got to where you are now and why you do this kind of work.

Yeah, that's great question.

And let me tell my story.

I guess that I'm in the product growth for about like eight years.

And I started my journey at the cloud startup.

That was not big, but it was focused on B.

Two B.

And I started like a marketing manager as well as partly covering some growth and product initiatives.

And then I moved to Miro.

I joined Miro when it was a small startup, so about like 50 people or something.

And I was the founding member of the growth team.

So the first growth product manager, I was leading the whole funnel like activation, monetization, retention, virality, everything.

And by that time, I really got a lot of experience and the founding experience in my father journey, just because I realized that growth is something that I'm passionate about, growth is something that really make me really inspiring in terms of, like, previously, actually, I was thinking about joining McKinsey and I even got the offer from them, but I decided to move into it and not to lose the opportunity at Miura.

And when I got this extensive experience in product led growth from a startup to Unicorn, I decided that I really want to scale it and try to help other companies to get value from that, to grow their revenue, to grow their products, and to provide value to more users.

And when I was still working at Miraev, one of the product managers from Pandadog just reached out to me and asked to help with the onboarding experience.

It was about like two years when I've been working at Mira and we tried to had several sessions that worked great for them.

And I realized that why should I spend all my time, all my focus just on growing one product, if I could help different products grow?

And that was the time when my advising journey started.

So, focusing on mirror growth, I was also helping other companies to grow their products by implementing great user onboarding experience, by implementing effective monetization, driving retention and virality, and also helping them to hire great product leaders to their companies.

And two years and two months ago, I left Mira and I had a really complicated question.

So if I want to join other company in order to try product growth, I actually had several offers by that time from flow, I had discussions with canva, with notions, so pretty big companies.

But something was not like it was a sign for me that I don't want to join full time position.

Maybe I should give advising a chance and try to build my life in this way.

By that time, I also read a great book, designing your life.

And I just realized that I should design my life a little bit differently or at least try and give it a chance.

So I decided to try advising for one year as a main focus plus mentorship of the product leaders, because it's also something that I'm passionate about.

And then I realized that it worked and I really want to follow this path, a kind of like passive path from the beginning, because there are not a lot of growth advisors who are working on with different products.

And it was in use here.

I kind of.

But after like two years and two months, I realized that that's exactly what I want to do and that's exactly how I want to work, at least now, helping different companies, helping different product leaders around the world to drive better business outcomes, to provide more value to the users of the products they work on.

And that's how my, how it really helps me to drive better outcomes from my time and from my life, because I could provide results in different companies as well as like, it fits ideally with a lot of travel, which I'm passionate about as well.

Oh, I just love that your story weaves in how you are, you know, how you want to live and what your mission is as a person and how you can create this all in one.

It all comes together.

We don't have to choose between one or the other.

Sometimes we just have to be creative and innovative, and then suddenly we can do what we imagined we'd want but didn't know how.

So I want to also just point out that I agree there's very few women in this particular field.

And I had to look for you.

I searched for you because I really wanted a woman to be this voice, of course, because that's what I do, right.

And it reminded me of how important it is that we look for talent beyond the ones that just come up first, we have to look for talent that is a different voice because it doesn't mean just because you're not at the top of the list.

I mean, McDonald's doesn't make the best burger in the world, even though it sells the most, right?

So if you want to find the best burger, you kind of have to look for it.

And so I was excited when I found you and I could tell by what you were doing in the world and that you have some real chops.

So tell us.

At Miro, you contributed the company's unicorn status.

So going from a smaller company to unicorn status by driving virality and retention, could you share some specific tactics that founders can use to boost their virality and retain their users?

I would say there are.

I would also add that at Mira, I was also focused a lot on activation.

And for me, like, retention is just impossible without proper activation.

So, coming back, so tell us what all these words mean.

Like, give us some definitions, right?

Like, start from scratch.

So that somebody who's never heard activation, onboarding, you know, like give us some, like the 101 of your, of your world, of your empire.

Yeah, sure.

Cool.

So first of all, like, onboarding is the experience of the user.

When onboarding activation journeys, like when the user is just starting getting to know the product, getting the first value.

And activation is about creating a habit around core value propositional product.

So let's imagine like Spotify.

It's about like listening to music.

And in case we talk about the onboarding experience, it's like starting on the app store, then you're downloading the app, you're registering the app, you're having a first session, you're trying to find the music you want to.

And that's where first session onboarding keeps ended.

Because you found the music, you'll listen to that.

But activation journey is much longer because it's all about creating a habit around listening this music on the app.

And that's where activation is happening.

If you're coming back to retention, retention is like when the user is returning to the product and getting this value virality.

It's a different thing.

It really depends on what kind of virality.

But overall it's about when one type of users, who are already your users, acquire more and more users to your product that are relevant one.

So I would say that's the short vocabulary of what I'm doing.

Wonderful.

And so walk us through each piece and share with us.

Like when you meet with a new company, what are the questions?

You ask, what are the things you're thinking about?

How do you analyze each of the steps and how do you help make them better?

Yeah, great question.

So I usually start with metrics, just because metrics is something that could tell you what is happening much better than anyone else.

So usually I check the regular funnel of the metrics, such as conversion rate, registration funnel of activation metrics, retention metrics, conversion rate to pay churn, and usually depending on the difference here, depending on business model, depending on products, I could say if this metrics are fitting the benchmarks or where does the product have gross opportunities and growth averages?

Because usually it's pretty obvious where you should focus on.

And I could say that in the majority of the cases, the problem is in the onboarding and activation, just because onboarding and activation are really the base for your product growth.

And if you're implementing product led growth, you really should start, like, you should start from product culture and other stuff, but user onboarding and activation are the base for your growth because monetization, reality, retention, nothing is possible without great user onboarding and activation.

So usually we focus on that, building some customer journey maps, identifying, like, opportunities and metrics.

CGM is helping us understand what kind of problems users facing and explain.

So numbers could tell us, like, what is happening, but only users could tell us why this is happening.

That's why it's really important to enrich our data with user problems in order to understand what exactly we should do in the products.

Makes sense.

So what if you don't have, at the beginning of that, you talked about metrics.

So how important metrics are from the very beginning, you can't really diagnose or see where the funnel is blocked.

Right?

If you don't have the numbers.

So what's a first good step for founders to help them get their numbers in order?

Do you experience that?

Do you ever experience that?

Where you come in and they're like, I don't know my numbers.

I don't have all this data.

Where do I get this data?

Does that happen?

You know, I would say every company I've worked with has problems with data every.

Because, like, it's not perfect everywhere.

And the first thing that every founder should remember, that's, okay, 20% of the data is usually getting you, giving you like, 80% of information, and that's enough.

Yeah, you don't need perfect data in order to grow your product.

You just, it's not possible to have it, like, perfect.

And I would say that you should have the main metrics along your funnel just to be sure that everything is working correctly and monitor them.

Such as like what I mentioned, conversion rate, registration, activation funnel dividing into three main setup moment, aha moment and habit moment.

Conversion rate to pay to as well as like chore metrics and retention metrics.

That's the basic that you should have.

And on the go you will add more and more based on kind of questions you are asking on a regular basis.

But be sure to have these ones even if you don't have it.

Sometimes I start working with companies and they don't have activation metrics and that's okay just because sometimes if you just take a look at their onboarding flow and say you need to do to fix this and this, just because I know that it's working not effectively and I don't need numbers for that, it's kind of like experience.

Yeah, experience and expert assessment from my perspective.

But in case you want to work on the long time period and get great results in numbers, we really need to understand what numbers are now because we need to move from this point a to point b.

But in order to move to point b, we need to understand what is point a.

That's why numbers matters a lot here.

Sure.

And what do you see in the onboarding piece are the tactics that often need improvement?

What do you see are the common adjustments that you advise in the onboarding piece?

Yeah, great question.

At the same time, it really depends on the company's size, company like focus area, everything.

Let me share something generic in you kids and then we could specify it a little bit.

So first of all, every person who's working on a boarding experience should remember onboarding is not the first session.

And that's the main mistake that I've seen everywhere.

So first session onboarding, some tooltips or tutorials, that's just a tiny piece of your onboarding experience.

It starts on the Google search, then it's website, then it's registration.

First session, path to first value and path to habit creation.

And user onboarding ended when the user became paid.

And there is customer onboarding and it's also onboarding.

And onboarding to the new features.

It's also onboarding.

So you should remember that you need to think about long term education a lot.

It's not about just tooltips on the first session.

And you need to look at this experience holistically just because in order to drive, for example, habit creation, you need to start working from the early beginning, from the Google search, from the website and everywhere in order to communicate your main product value properly.

That's wonderful.

It's really, it's really exciting to hear you talk about it and to know that you exist in the world and can help us, all of us, with this kind of specific journey.

So if you are a company, you're a founder, and you need help with this, what do you.

So you have your onboarding and then you.

So talk to us more about what activation looks like and how you enrich activation.

Like, what are the mechanics of that?

Yeah, sure.

So, first of all, activation, this is the metric that could be pretty complex on the later stages of the company, but in case you're on an early stage, I would recommend to highlight it as an aha moment and use just this metric.

And this is the metric and the time when the user experiencing the core value of the product, for example, like coming back to Spotify, you listen for the first time for the seven minutes, some kind of music, and that's where the user is getting this value.

And in order to define this metric for the first time, first of all, you need to, I would say every founder and every, like, company member should know, like, what is the value of the product when they just start creating that.

So it's your hypothesis, it's your search of the users, because you need to ask the user what they think is the main value and where they're getting that.

And in case you have data, it will be also great, just because in case the users reaching this aha moment, the conversion rate to pay is much higher for these users, as well as long time retention.

So sharing it, in a simple words, in case I experience the value, in case I listen to music for seven minutes, I will have much higher probability to start paying for this company.

And I have much higher conversion to returning in two months, in three months, in six months, and further.

Wonderful.

And it sounds like you would make a hypothesis about what you think your value is, and then you continue to iterate and experiment.

So you talk about you've led over 200 growth experiments in your career.

So what does that mean for companies just starting with experimentation?

What are the most critical experiments they should prioritize to get going?

Yeah, all that experiments, I would say it could even more than 300 at mirror.

So the majority of these experiments were a b test.

But it doesn't matter that every company should run a b tests, because in my opinion, experiment, it's just a b test, is just one of the ways you could experiment.

It could be just launching the feature, it could be a better test group, it could be any other option of the experimentation.

And in order to run these experiments, right, I would say you should remember that.

But you shouldn't run ebitdas, just running ebitdas, because in case you don't have enough users, that's okay.

Use other options first thing.

Another, you, you're not here to run experiments, you're here to drive your protocols.

So don't forget about the main thing you're here to do.

And sometimes you, you can test several hypotheses and several solutions at once, especially in case you're an early startup and you don't have some time to get these results.

So use the qualitative methods, just because they could give you a lot of information.

So be sure.

Like user research, I would say that in case they're onboarding and the activation is the base of your product growth, even the base of the base is the user research.

And just because in order to grow your products in the long term period, you really need to know exactly who are your users, how they behave, how they react on these or that changes in the product and why.

And this understanding of the why will definitely help you drive your product growth.

As for coming back to experimentation, I would also add two things.

So in case you need to prioritize some experiments, prioritize experiments on your user and body in activation, because you will not mistake with that, because you will always have something to work on here.

And about prioritization, I would also recommend not to use rice framework.

I'm sorry, not to use what?

Rise framework.

Rise framework is the framework for prioritization, so reach impact, confidence and efforts.

I don't like that just because it's so subjective.

One person could say like, I'm confident about that seven, or I'm confident about that three.

And there is no a lot of reasoning behind that.

And that's why I could actually share my framework for prioritization.

And maybe you could also add it somewhere to the materials just because I believe it's working great.

And I implemented that into more than 20 different companies.

Just, just feel free to copy that and change it a little bit by yourself.

Because confidence, they are defined by different sources of user research.

And different companies have different sources.

It's okay if you have like sales team and they provide you with a lot of different insights, customer success team, support team, or any other sources.

So every framework I really believe should be personalized based on the company needs.

Happy to share that with you later.

We would love that because I think so much of the time we're trying to figure out which puzzle to solve and having a set of priorities and depending on how big your company is and how much resources and your team, because a lot of times if you don't have one of the recommendations I always make and I put in my book is around, you need a data file on your team at the beginning.

At the beginning, like, find somebody who is good at collecting data, because you need to have the data and it needs to be consistent whether you're collecting daily or weekly, you know, you need to be looking at data and you can't unlock those puzzles if you don't have the data.

The other thing, and I'd love for you to speak to this a little bit, is like, whenever I talk to founders who don't collect a lot of data, there's a lot of assumptions around what is working and what they should do and where they should spend their money, right?

And usually it's more leads at the top.

And in my experience, when you actually have the data, it tells a very different story.

You want to talk to your experience.

There are some examples around, around that.

Yeah, I absolutely agree with you.

At the same time, I would divide data into two buckets.

So the first one is metrics and the second one is qualitative data with users.

And you really need to collect both in order to try your protocols, because, like, what is happening, why this is happening, and you're understanding what you're going to do with that.

That's wonderful.

So, like, you might think that you need.

So there's the numbers and then there's quality, right?

So you might have tons of new subscribers, but if they're not taking the next step and understanding and taking value and opting into whatever, then the number is not important, right.

So you might need a much smaller number in order to get the value.

And so what I've found, and I'll explain, like, in my experience, it's different than a product.

That's your, like a product product.

It's a technology product.

I have a healthcare company, right?

And one of the, our biggest constraint is hiring enough nurses.

And so we have a funnel that is all about recruiting, right?

And so everybody who doesn't study data immediately says, well, you just need to have more ads for the, for the, for the jobs.

But yet when you look at the data, what ends up happening is you start to see, well, the first step is that they find the ad.

Do they click on it?

Is the job posting of value to them, or do they leave?

Then, gosh, they actually apply, then do they actually.

How quickly do we interview them?

And what's that interview experience?

And what's the experience of them signing up to interview?

Right.

And do we, do we get tons on here but then they stop because the interview signup experience is so bad that like, you know, keep pouring more on top, it's not going to help.

Right.

You got to fix that piece to make it easier for them to make the interview.

And then.

Oh, like in our business, what we found is that we got really good performance up until the day they had to come to orientation.

And then it was like this huge block of like fall off.

So before we put a lot of money into the top of the funnel, spending more on ads for the recruiting, we needed to fix this middle where they were dropping off because they weren't coming to orientation and getting out into the field.

Right.

So totally different business model, but same.

Yeah, I think the problem is just describing the same way.

You have a bottleneck and you really need to find out why they is happening.

Yeah, that was, I think it's working almost.

Some things are the same in different products because I, in all my experience, I've been working with more than 40 different kind of products and some things are the same for every.

And some things are really different based on the type of the product, business model, industry and everything.

But understanding this, why in order to grow, understanding where is the bottleneck is the approach that is working everywhere for sure.

I love that.

Because then once you solve it, then you can start to decide where to pour money in.

Right?

Yeah.

Right.

And then.

And then you can see the results start to happen.

Right.

And.

Yeah, yeah.

That's true.

I would also add here that the biggest thing that you could do as well is to scale this knowledge to the whole funnel.

Let me explain one of the examples that I had at Mira, a pretty obvious one.

So when we've been running some usability tests in interview, we noticed that users don't see the tutorials and tips that we've been showing the first session on boarding just because the content on the board was really colorful, but the tips were white and nobody seen that.

And that was happening for some time periods.

And we had this hypothesis and coming back to the growth, I really want to focus everybody on how to formulate hypothesis correctly.

So everybody is usually like formulated hypothesis.

Like if we do something, we will get this, but in order to grow your product, it's better to focus your hypothesis on the users and it's better to formulate hypothesis.

We believe that users do something because of the reason.

And this reason is the most important thing.

And for example, coming back to the example from Mira, we formulated the hypothesis, we believe that users do not notice our first session on boarding because the content on the board is too colorful and our tutorials are white.

And we actually created several solutions to this hypothesis.

We decided, hey, we could make the tutorials and tips like dark blue, we could make some hovers, we could change the color or make it like gray or any other, and we decided to make it dark blue.

And we actually not just made it dark blue on the first session, but we made it on the whole product.

And we've noticed that the impact was not only on the first session that users started to notice more tutorials and more tips and engage with them and that influence activation.

But this knowledge really helped us to scale to the whole funnel.

So the users who are having customer onboarding, they also seem these tips better as well as like any other onboarding of the new features.

So in order to grow your product, it's really important to formulate hypothesis in this way because you could scale the knowledge, not only impact one part of experience, but all others.

Wonderful.

I love this.

So, okay, so what is a final piece or nugget that you would like to offer, you know, to those women founders listening who are struggling to grow, what would you be like to share as your final words of wisdom?

That's a great question.

I would say there are a lot of things, but I would define three main so first of all, when you're thinking about your product growth, think about it as a system.

And every part of the system is working and depending on each other it could be activation, like acquisition, monetization, retention, reality, everything is working together.

And when you're working on one part, think how it could affect other parts of because it's a real system and it's a real complex system.

Another thing is we didn't touch monetization.

So I would also add a couple of words about that.

Yes please.

When working on monetization, remember about four main things.

So first of all, your business model should be optimized for your products.

Industry use case and users provide enough value, but not enough to make users start paying you.

You need to design your plans.

When monetizing users based on the ideal customer Persona and provide them with clear differentiators, be sure to use localization in your monetization.

It's like sounds strange, but at the same time, in different countries, in different regions, there are different payment systems, the different behaviors of the users.

So be sure to use that in your monetization as well.

And the third thing I would say in order to build an effective product led cross there are three things you should be taking care product culture when everybody in the company and everything is built around the products and the product is the main value that you're producing.

Not sales, not like support, nothing but the product.

Second thing like user research is your daily work, especially on the early stage.

Be sure to run it correctly, be sure to do it on a regular basis and use different sources of user research like usability tests, interviews, session recordings.

All that matters a lot in order to see the full picture because all of them could provide you parts of the picture, but only all of them together could make you understand the user behavior fully.

And last but not least, I would say that take care about your use cases when you're working on the product and there's the value that you are providing to the users.

Check it before building.

Mvp that the use case you have is have a real frequency is pretty good just because based on that you could build a product that is subscription based that could be growing fast and easy to use and providing a lot of value to the users.

Or in case the frequency is not so regular, for example Airbnb, it's not so regular.

A lot of other examples not so regular that will need more effort from your site.

And in this case, think about different use cases.

So your product could be more horizontal and cover several use cases.

Yeah, that's the three thing that I wanted to share.

I love it, you know, and so, so how can people start to find out more about all these wonderful topics that you've brought to us?

I know you have a free report on your website, right?

And it's the state of product onboarding and we'll put this in the show notes.

Can you tell us what that is?

Yeah, sure.

That's the research that I ran together with my colleague on the onboarding and we researched more than 80 different companies, international companies around the world in order to find best practices, in order to find what worked, what didn't work, what are the products with the best onboarding experience, what are the insights they got, how usually the growth teams are built, and everything around that.

So it's pretty extensive information set about user onboarding.

I also have my blog on the substack.

Just remember about that.

I also share some useful information there and soon I'm going to post the article about hypothesis.

So that could be also useful for everybody who's working on product growth.

Just because as I mentioned, the framework that you use for the hypothesis formulation really defines all your cycle of experimentation and all your product growth.

Wonderful.

So you can find that on substack, and I'll put a link in there for.

In the show notes as well.

And you have a website, correct.

And I'll put that in as well.

And you have a course on Maven, and I'd love for you to talk a little bit about that course because it could be a really wonderful entryway for a lot of our, of our listeners.

And I am considering this course for one of my employees.

Yeah, that's great.

Happy to hear that.

So this is the course that I created together with my colleague Kate.

We've been working together.

She mostly focused on design and was focused on the product, but together we've been focused on growth in order to create best in class on boarding experience for Miraev.

And then we decided to gather all our knowledge on activation and onboarding experience and share it with others.

And the mission of this course is to help others to create great user onboarding experience and activation as the base of your product grows.

So we have a three weeks course where we have some interactive sessions with invited guests with us, where we share a lot of frameworks, a lot of cases from our practice.

So in case you really want to create a system around how to create great user onboarding, in case you want to see what mistakes we've made and not repeat them, you can join this course for sure.

Yeah, no, I think it sounds really, really valuable.

And what I like about this course is that it's pretty.

It's a short period of time, it's three weeks, but it's very concentrated work.

So it's not like 1 hour a week.

It's a bulk of work, but you really focus your energy and dive in deep and come out on the other side with some actionable new ways of improving your funnel, your onboarding experience.

And I just think it's a great way.

Like I said, I'm thinking about having one of my teammates participate in this so that they can learn these new skills that can then amplify the growth of my company.

Right.

Yeah, that's true.

Right.

And so, and so for our listeners, that could be, they want to take it.

You want to get in there and try it out.

And then you work with people, right?

You are an advisor, so what does that look like?

Yeah, that's true.

So usually the companies coming to me in order to help with onboarding, with monetization, or implementing holistic product led growth.

I usually worked with founders or product leaders and help them.

Together we are defining where does the product have like growth opportunities, what exactly you need to build to create the system of growth?

What are the processes that are missing?

What are the processes that are incorrect.

So we are launching together a lot of experiments.

We are checking the results, we are learning more about the users, we are building cross models, growth strategies.

I would say it really depends on the kind of the company, product industry, everything.

So usually all we are doing is pretty customizable just because every product is unique and every users of every product are unique.

And you really need to understand both in order to understand what exactly should be done.

And the approach here is pretty simple.

We are having like one or two sessions per week and it's retainer.

And we are discussing different questions.

We are discussing like cross models, we are discussing what are the problems with onboarding.

And during this time period, founders or product leaders implementing everything that we are discussing.

And we are keep moving to the better outcomes of the matrix and providing better value to the users.

I love that.

Right?

So it's an accessible format for any founder, right?

Because then whether you're doing a bunch of the work where somebody on their team is, you can really get that coaching and support and the brilliance of you and your partner in helping really do this.

Is there a particular size of company that or like, what's the ideal moment for a founder to decide to work with you?

Yeah, that's a really good approach when you're hiring a person and a specialist who already went through the stages and as soon as you've been working with, it's pretty clear for me what kind of mistakes we could not make and what we should do in order to be faster into growth.

As for the companies, I would say when you reach the product market fit, it's when your retention just got to plateau.

And it's pretty obvious that the value that you're providing to users, they stick to the product, but you want to scale it and you want to have more users, you have to monetize more users, you have to onboard them better.

That's the time after like getting to product market fit when you should focus on the product led growth strategy in case your product is relevant for that.

Sometimes I could say that the problem could be earlier.

So your users are not retaining and stick to the product because you have not great user onboarding experience.

So if you are coming to user onboarding experience and like forgetting about PLG, user onboarding should be started working on like when you're just launching your product from the early beginning, because that could define if you are getting to product market fit or.

No, I love it.

I love it.

I'm so excited that we got to talk today.

Victoria and I hope that all of our founders listening will check out your free report, go visit your website, go to substack.

All these things are in the show notes.

And this maven course, I feel like is a really good idea, right.

To help us really break down what's working and what isn't and then see results.

Right?

See growth, have breakthroughs.

I think that's pretty awesome.

That's true.

Right?

We want to see more women founded companies become the unicorns of tomorrow, hopefully.

Right.

And, you know, my vision is the, you know, just as many Microsofts and, you know, Teslas and Walmarts are founded and led by women, and the Fortune 500 is half led by females and by other underestimated founders.

That's the vision, right?

Yeah, that's true.

I would also want to see more founders among women just because I would say that about 80% of the founders I'm now working with are men.

Just because it's not about me choosing, but just because of the reality.

And I'm excited and super happy in case we have more founders.

Women.

Yes, I agree.

We only have 3% of women who make it over a million dollars in revenue.

And there's more, almost twice the number of women starting businesses.

So there's a disconnect.

And I would say you and your program are the connection point to help overachieve those hurdles because we get stuck and we don't get to the next phase, and we are solving the problems of the world.

Victoria.

Yeah, it sounds great.

Yeah.

Happy to contribute to such a great mission.

Yeah.

Thank you.

So thank you so much, Victoria, for joining us on the wisdom of women show.

Thank you for illuminating the path of growth and prosperity for women led enterprises.

We value your experience and your wisdom.

The world is made better by women led business.

So let's all go make the world a better place.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you for having me here today.

It was a pleasure to share my experience.

Yay.

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