Marketing Insights To Extract From Ubiqi Health’s Journey

In the summer of 2010, I recorded a series on the profiles of promising startups, of which, two companies, (Baydin and Peekaboo Mobile), have since gone on to secure funding. This made me want to get updates from other profiles that I had covered too. As such, I decided to join Jacquiline Thong, CEO of Ubiqi Health for coffee. Since our last meeting, this company has completed its Alpha phase of funding successfully. Jackie then shared her excitement over how many people had stepped up, to become evangelists for the alpha product, or as people generally know it- the MVP. 

This reminded me of what Steven Blank has termed ‘earlyvangelists’, and their importance for startups as these are the people eager to find solutions for certain problems that it motivates them to bear through an MVP. 

After this success, Ubiqi Health became public, now facing the challenge of acquiring users that match a similar passion as the ‘earlyvangelists’. With my background in marketing, I figured- I could be of some help, and here is part one of my conversation with Jackie, where we discussed how to go about setting up a user acquisition system. 

Looking Beyond Departmental Or Individual Goals

One of the first things we discussed is that startups need to foster a culture where bigger tasks, such as user acquisition, need to be understood as a team-wide or company-wide responsibility, not just a marketing department task. Acquiring users for SaaS product companies especially is a big challenge which demands critical thinking of the whole team. Drawing from my experience, I urged Jackie to pursue uniting the entire Ubiqi team’s interest towards key user acquisition and retention metrics. With this regard, Jackie was already sharing metrics like new user signup numbers and retained and active user metrics with the entire team weekly, which is good, but needs to be leveled up. 

I suggested building a complete AARRR dashboard, that offers in-depth user metrics insights from the top to the bottom, providing a holistic view of user activity. The acquisition, activation, retention, referral, and revenue (AARRR) dashboard helps align the effort of the entire team, by simply involving everyone in the process of selecting the most critical metrics within each funnel phase, and assessing their necessity. Early stage startups can begin with sharing information on a whiteboard, and as the concept and practice becomes routine, this can be easily moved onto a spreadsheet, or a wiki page, or any other digital or other platform which is accessible to all. 

Tracking User Clusters For Origination and Activity

Jackine’s revealed that Ubiqi’s first user acquisitions came from the conventional consumer development methods like surveys and partnerships with migraine user groups, among others. The team took on the task of transforming survey respondents (for problems about migraines), as well as migraine user group leaders, word of mouth (WOM) practices to find the early bunch of users for the platform. The team also actively worked on PR outreach through ‘blitzes’ or helpful comments on leading platforms like the NYTimes blog posts, among others. 

I further suggested established systems which can tag new users by referral source at the point of signing up, which optimizes the acquisition process. This data can be fed into the CRM system at Ubiqi, becoming part of the user’s record, facilitating simpler followup of the user lifecycles and monitoring the ROI of the channel. From my perspective, simply relying on external third party tracking tools is not the best idea as it will not help in completely assessing the channel ROI. Alternatively, even a simple JavaScript code that stores Google Adwords offers greater in-sights. 

Working Out Analytics Issues

We discovered that Ubiqi had some initial challenges with using the free Google Analytics tool. The company was using it for web and product monitoring, but the challenge emerged in the form of 24 hour data delay, which led to the loss of valuable data. While it is free, I think the 24 hour lag is a major drawback, and I thus recommend that startups realize that despite GA being useful for web traffic analysis, and upfront acquisition analysis; other tools like KissMetrics are the real deal for more thorough acquisition analysis. MixPanel is another useful tool for retention and usage metrics analysis. 

We continue this conversation in Part two, where we discuss driving new visits and users through the system. Stay tuned to learn about it.

Learning: This discussion reveals the importance of market acquisition for any new startup, and how the complexity and critical nature of this task makes it a company-wide priority, and not something only one department must handle. From laying the groundwork of bringing all members up to speed about key metrics to inviting useful insights, this practice proves a gamechanger for early-stage startups.