< 1000 users --> 3 million users

Wharton MBA and ClassTag founder Vlada Lotkina started ClassTag to connect parents and teachers in her New York school district. With early traction and a massive vision for a venture-backed, hyper-growth startup, she turned to me for growth strategy, marketing execution and customer/user insights.

Initial Challenge

When I started with ClassTag, they had fewer than 1,000 users and were essentially running a local pilot.

With no proven growth strategy, marketing channels or marketing insights, ClassTag was relying on local in-person networking to persuade teachers and parents to use their product.

The very first challenge was to strategise and find at least one scalable acquisition channel.

Approach

I conducted video interviews with current users and ideal users and created detailed persona documents. This uncovered hidden user and market insights which we were able to leverage in our marketing.

I found that the key to growth was tapping into how teachers make decisions: through in-person recommendations from their colleagues.

I decided that we must scale and digitise that through our marketing strategy.

After building initial momentum through paid media (Facebook and Google Ads),I applied this principle across every channel and campaign; constantly leveraging real teacher quotes, teacher-to-teacher referrals; micro-influencer campaigns with teachers on Instagram; photos of real teachers with real quotes as ad copy on Facebook ads, and more.

Results

As Head of Growth/Marketing, I ultimately brought in over 3 million users for ClassTag, supporting a $5m fundraise in the process.

But this brought a new challenge…

Next Level Challenge | Activating, Retaining and Leveraging Users 

ClassTag had a development team and CTO, but no product manager. I acquired a large number of new teacher users, but with poor onboarding and first-time experience on the product side, and little product-marketing automation, classrooms weren’t sufficiently activating and adopting the product.

We needed to justify the marketing spend and leverage our teachers to generate 30+ parent referrals and at least some teacher referrals within their school.

That meant completely redesigning:

• First-time user experience for both teachers and parents

• Engineering virality into the product

• Clarifying, mapping and then guiding users through the optimal user journey

Deliverables Round 2

• User interviews, user research, heatmapping, sophisticated app analytics and measurement planning

• Product roadmap, product management, first-time experience redesign with UI/UX team

• Marketing automations in Intercom and ActiveCampaign | Building a series of 30+ emails; push notifications, etc.

• Viral prompts and flows to generate more referrals

Final Results

I was able to take the activation rate for new teacher users from 2% to 34%.

With each activated teacher bringing in 30+ parents, this led to viral hypergrowth in product usage, ultimately enabling the sale of large corporate sponsorships to those audiences.

The end result: over 3 million ClassTag users, and ClassTag Inc. being acquired by SchoolStatus.