Simple product frameworks: Frequency

Frequency is the lifeblood of sustainable growth

Years ago, before I made the leap into software engineering I was training as a lawyer in Edinburgh. I sent one cold email to the CEO of the hottest unicorn startup in the country and astonishingly he replied, inviting me for a coffee.

We chatted about a great many things, largely around what fundamental skills a tech entrepreneur should be building. However the part of that meeting that sticks in my mind most acutely was the diagram that he drew on the back of a napkin. “Frequency is everything”. Its growth, its habit, its the great unlock. Over the years I heard different framings of the same guidance with googles “toothbrush test” and alike. However this model was always the cleanest representation for me.

For over ten years i’ve been meaning to write this up in the hope that the lesson he taught me that day would in some way be helpful to others. It’s guided a huge amount of how I think about building product over the years. I often shared this post below as a PDF with other execs and PMs that worked for me, i’ve kept it as raw as possible.

It’s deceptively simple by design.

Frequency

Understanding the relationship between the frequency with which a user interacts a given service (and extracts value) and the percentage of the population to which that service applies can help give an indication of how quickly that service will organically grow.

The broad rationale is similar to that of general marketing psychology when brands look to create awareness with impressions.  The more front-of-mind your brand or service, the more people think about it, speak about it etc, the faster it grows.

At its very simplest:  Services with a broad appeal that provide utility very often, will grow faster. 

Consider the following graph, along the Y axis, we plot the % of a given population that can draw value from a company’s service.  Along the X, how often users extract value (It's worth noting that the nature of these interactions are key, for example email spam is likely to have the inverse effect).

On first pass (very roughly) it’s simple to drop technology companies from across the spectrum.  

linkedin is an evolution of the CV website monster and the high frequency social content helped drive its growth

In the top right you have a clustering of the tech hyper-scalers.  These ‘category 1’ companies are unlikely to have been envisaged in a world without the internet, now, without mobile, they apply to very broad bases of users and sit at the heart of many peoples lives. They become verbs, they typically see explosive hyper-growth.  While they often have a high frequency core model they fall back on, they are aggressively executing on a strategy to increase the frequency of interaction with their services, diversifying their offerings continually. Amazons prime is there to give you a single hook to hit their services across multiple touch points. Meta MnA strategy is to acquire any free touchpoint you might have social interaction even if they are individually loss making.

The next band down, the ‘category 2’ companies are businesses that are either relatively specialist and have not yet broadened their appeal, or are revolutions of traditional industries.

The final ‘category 3’ companies are web enabled businesses. Largely a replica of an offline business model, they could be considered a bricks and mortar business with a website.

Of particular note should be the evolution that some models are capable of going through.  For example a recruitment site like monster.com, was evolved by Reid Hoffman into linked-in, as they leveraged the network effect of your professional network to crowd source content and drive high value, high frequency interactions. To move from being a CV site that you would update every 10 years between jobs, into a network used daily. 

The example we always referenced at Skyscanner was the Edin-bus app (effectively a scheduling app for the bus). Within the population of Edinburgh, this product, which had a frequency of twice a day, grew at multiples faster organically than the Skyscanner flights app, which people used a few times a year.

Put simply, if you want to grow without paying google, one of the cleanest and simplest north stars is frequency.