Nizam Uddin On How weDevs Uses AARRR Framework For Hacking Growth

weDevs is one of the largest home-grown bootstrapped software companies that has come out of Bangladesh in recent years. The company creates innovative tools to empower businesses around the world. 

While started as a small software company, today, weDevs has 9 revenue-generating products and 2 services. Some of these products have more than 15 to 20 add-ons. DOKAN, a marketplace solution from weDevs, is the world’s No. 1 Marketplace Solution used by over 50,000 Marketplaces around the world. More than 10,000 companies use weDevs ERP solution to run their day-to-day operations. More than 9,000 teams around the world manage their projects with weDevs project management solutions. Apart from these popular products, more than 2 lakh websites use weDevs plugins. 

weDevs products have combinedly been downloaded more than 5 million times. Wedevs has 3 different companies: Enzaime in the health sector, Tedfo in Export Marketing, and Sokrio in field-force management.

In a recent interview with Future Startup, weDevs co-founder, and CEO Nizam Uddin explains how weDevs has used the AARRR model to achieve extraordinary growth over the years. 

From Life’s Work: An Interview With Nizam Uddin, Co-Founder and CEO, weDevs:

As I mentioned before, we didn’t have a proper marketing team for the first 2/3 years and we didn’t spend a single penny on paid media. Now Alhamdulillah, we have a content marketing team of about 30 people and the scope of work has increased considerably. Our sales team does not work with the marketing team but rather with the support team. Our entire support team works as a sales team. We now have 24/7 live chat and support in 3 shifts, Alhamdulillah. The main sales target of the sales and support team is to convert customers from live chats and pre-sales questions.

Content, Digital Marketing, Community, and Business Development are some of the parts of our marketing team. 

We have one product champion and one site champion for each product from the content marketing team. The product champion is responsible for all kinds of digital marketing of that product. The site champion is responsible for all content published on the specific site. 

We have been using the AARRR model of Growth Hack Marketing for almost 3 years. We have customized the model to our needs. The AARRR model has five phases: Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue, and Referral.

In the Acquisition phase, we do a number of activities to bring users to our site. In this phase, we do these tasks:

1. We connect with bloggers, influencers like YouTubers, and/or influencers from different parts of the world and try to get users or traffic through them. 
2. We publish PRs in different presses.
3. We partner with associations in different countries, related products or services, agencies, course instructors, various popular tools, payment gateways, etc.
4. We do video marketing and Reddit, Quora, Medium, Instagram marketing, etc.
5. We do a lot of branding-related work 
6. We do keyword analysis and SEO 
7. We sponsor and attend international events
8. We regularly use growth hacks to come up with acquisition ideas, test them, and put them to work

In the Activation phase, we try to persuade our users in performing any activity on our sites. The special tasks of this phase are:

1. We make viral content, quizzes, contests, and giveaways.
2. We create articles, ebooks, press releases, white papers, infographics, guides/tutorials, and masterclasses to educate users.
3. We make informative articles for influencers, community-related articles, activity in forums, events, Shared Value Marketing, Interactive content, Webinars, Case studies /Customer stories to inspire and convince users.
4. Based on user activity, we try to find out AHA moments and WOW Factors
5. We work with WordPress.org reviews, Facebook reviews, Google My Business reviews, TrustPilot reviews, TrustRadius reviews, G2Crowd reviews, Capterra reviews, FinanceOnlines reviews, and GetApp reviews and Collect testimonials for our site to inspire users and increase their buying confidence.
6. Activation is a critical phase. Apart from these activities, we also do a lot of other activities with an ambition to engage our users with our products and services. 

The purpose of the Retention phase is basically to bring our users or customers to the site or product and make them our recurring customers. Customer retention is a difficult task. Some of the things that we do in this phase: 

1. We try to find out the NPS score and do different activities accordingly.
2. We provide feature suggestions from the marketing team by analyzing the data that we keep when the customer leaves and analyzing the market, and competitors.
3. We don’t think the work should be done just by software. We have seen that about 60% of the users do not renew their subscriptions the next year because they close their business for various reasons. If we talk about Dokan, the Marketplace is huge, so to run it fully, you need funds as well as the capacity to make strategies and execute. We are now creating resources for the customer to do everything from business plans to executions so that a business gets good guidance and can run the business smoothly and renew every year. We do all this work in this phase.
4. In addition to our clean and detailed documentation and tutorials, we regularly send them tips and tricks via newsletter.
5. We also have a community group on Facebook where we connect everyone who helps with retention.
6. We also do the work of translating into different languages ​​in this phase. 

Apart from all these activities, there are also many other activities we do.

In the Revenue phase, we do various activities for the users to buy our products. E.g.

1. We collect emails from free users and send them a series of emails to convert to paid versions.
2. We do a variety of email marketing including Fail Order, Abandon Cart Email, etc.
3. We offer special offers on various occasions including Black Friday, and Cyber ​​Monday which helps us generate a good amount of revenue.
4. Now we do Google Search Ads, Display Ads, Video Ad Campaigns, Bing Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Facebook Ads, and Twitter Ads.
5. We retarget custom audiences aggressively.

We also do a lot more, including how to reduce customer acquisition costs and increase customer lifetime value.

In the Referral phase, our main target is to turn our existing customers into advocates so that they invite others to buy our products. We also try to reach out to various agencies, influencers, and marketers to promote our products.

We have an affiliate program with about 800 affiliates. In this phase, we nurture our affiliates, provide them with marketing materials, and much more.

We have also launched our brand ambassador program this year, where we are hiring representatives in different countries who will help us to market our products. 

This story is an excerpt from our interview with Nizam Uddin, Co-founder and CEO of weDevs. Read the full interview here.

Originally published on 19 October 2020, updated on 17 July 2023