Growth Newsletter #278

Let's start with some math that might look appetizing on paper, but was actually limiting doopoll’s growth.

Right before they joined the Growth Program, enterprise contracts made up 75% of doopoll's revenue. These were great deals for the Welsh startup (multi-year commitments, low churn, high value) but each one required one of the co-founders, Marc or Steve, to personally close it. This meant non-stop meeting prep, flights, and handshakes to make sales.

The other 25% of their revenue came from SMEs paying between £9 and £100 per month. This segment had potential for systematic growth, but the founders had been too busy flying around to meetings to stop and figure it out.

That’s when Marc had the realization they could either keep grinding on big enterprise sales, or they could build a system that sold to the masses while they slept.

They chose the system.

Step 1: Getting Outside Help

In early 2019, Marc did something smart. He admitted he didn't know how to build a growth engine.

He’d read about Gil Akos at Astra going through the Demand Curve Growth Program and spoke with him after reading our guides.

The entire program cost about the same as four days of consultant time, so he joined.

"We were fairly green to this model," Marc wrote.

They set three goals:

1. Find a channel that reliably brings in paying customers.
2. Keep customer acquisition cost below lifetime value.
3. Increase conversion from website visitor to paying customer.

This made sense, but they didn’t know how to do it without wasting months on avoidable mistakes. Enter the Growth Program.

Step 2: The Value Prop Reality Check

So many startups struggle to develop clear, compelling value propositions. This is one of the fundamental building blocks for growth, and it’s why we help founders build the systems to convey value in an effective way.

Strong value propositions can be the difference between stumbling out of the gate and having people beat down your door to buy what you’re selling.

And like so many founders, Marc thought he knew why customers bought doopoll. He’d pitched hundreds of them personally. But when he reviewed his work with his Demand Curve coach (a resource available for VIP Plan subscribers), the feedback was harsh but enlightening.

The final version of the value prop worksheet was “almost unrecognizable from draft 1.”

It became the foundation for the rest of the work. The copy changes, funnel fixes, and pricing decisions later in this story all stemmed from these clarified value propositions.

Step 3: Competitor Intel

Marc spent two full days going deep on analyzing competitors.

He signed up for each one of them, captured full onboarding flows, analyzed ad copy, documented their pricing psychology, and more.

"There were things that were bad and things that I loved about each of them," he wrote.

He said SurveyMonkey's Genius tool was "genuinely something I’m jealous of."

Founders often skip this part because it’s time-consuming, and they think they already know the space. But Marc’s teardown of the competition revealed real gaps and opportunities for growth.

Step 4: Finding What’s Broken

This is where Marc discovered how broken their funnel actually was.

He installed Hotjar to watch user behavior. Then he did a first-time user test on himself.

His painful observation was that users were confused. "It's not obvious that I can create surveys. Our buttons say 'poll' but our marketing says 'survey.'"

Super basic stuff, but it was killing their conversions.

Then he watched Fullstory sessions from people who didn't convert. It was rough. Users clicked around, got lost, and left.

"You have no idea how hard your 'simple' product is to use…until you’ve watched users (who didn't make it) try to use it."

Step 5: Rewriting Everything

Marc started his career as a journalist. He could certainly write, but at the time, he didn’t know how to write copy for an effective landing page.

He drafted a new landing page and sent it to his Demand Curve coach for review. It came back covered in edits.

"It stung," Marc admitted. But the rewrite pulled directly from the refined value props. It might not have won any points for creativity, but it was extremely clear and compelling.

The results were immediate, and they saw conversions jump.

Step 6: The Failed Tattoo Campaign

Before joining the Growth Program, Marc tried cold outreach. It involved sending emails with the subject line:

"I want to work with you so bad I got a {firstName} tattoo on my arm."

The responses were...mixed.

A few loved it. Most ignored it. Others were actively hostile toward it.

When his coach suggested trying cold outreach again, Marc was skeptical. But their approach was going to be different: short, plain-text emails to well-targeted segments.

Results improved. People replied without the backlash, but it still didn’t clear the bar. They didn’t have a repeatable growth engine yet.

Step 7: Turning the Ad Faucet On

Setting up Google Ads and Facebook Ads took 21 days. Then Marc hit "go."

"The rush of seeing a huge stream of people from all over the world was hypnotic and addictive," he wrote.

For 14 days, traffic poured in. They doubled their ad spend to get meaningful data.

Then reality hit: very few actually converted to paying customers.

Marc described it perfectly, "The come-down is a killer."

Step 8: The Power of the Pause

Marc was panicking and burning cash with just a few sales. He asked his Demand Curve coach for help.

His coach’s advice was to turn off the ads. Fix the funnel. Then turn the ads back on.

"Taking that advice was one of the smartest things I've ever done," Marc wrote.

With ads off, he could turn his focus to why people weren't converting.

See the actual email from their Demand Curve coach below.

Step 9: The Freemium Model Breakthrough

Their data revealed the core problem: the 14-day trial didn't match the way people actually used doopoll.

For example, event organizers set up surveys weeks ahead of time, but the 14-day trial ended before they saw any value come to fruition.

Marc switched to freemium:

• Create unlimited surveys: Free
• First 10 responses: Free
• Pay when you see value: £39/month

Within 30 minutes of launching, they got their first conversion. Then another. Then another.

"We used to have a Slack bot that pinged us 'Tuscan Leather' by Drake when someone paid through Stripe," Marc wrote. "We had to turn it off. We were getting too many notifications."

Step 10: The Testing Cycle

Marc developed a systematic approach:

1. Form a hypothesis and ship a change
2. Run ads for 1–2 weeks to bring in ~200–300 users
3. Pause ads
4. Measure behavior and conversion
5. Plan the next test

He was starting to practice what the Growth Program teaches: sustainable growth comes from stacking small, repeatable improvements, not going all-in on one silver bullet.

Step 11: The Big Swing

For one of their first major A/B tests, they didn't test something minor like CTA button colors. They completely rebuilt the landing page.

Marc stole inspiration from Notion's template gallery approach. "Hands up: we took heavy inspiration from what they did," he admitted.

The test ran for one week. The new page converted at 14%, up from 4%.

That's a 250% improvement from one test.

The Numbers That Matter

After six months (September 2019 to March 2020):

• MRR growth: 800%
• Monthly customer growth: 75% average
• Conversion rate: 4% → 14%
• CAC:LTV ratio: Around 1:1.5-2 (target was 1:3)
• Founder involvement in sales: Zero

But what matters most is this growth came from low-touch acquisition. The founders only talked to customers after they'd already paid. They no longer had to be in the room, selling to large clients only.

Three Lessons from Marc's Journey

Marc shared these three key takeaways from his transformation:

1. Growth is about systems rather than hacks​
"A lot of people end up with poor results because they focus on tactics that worked for people they know. Strategy is more important, and a systematic approach to strategy is best of all."

2. Most people don't grow astronomically overnight​
"It's usually the accumulation of small gains over time that makes an impact. If you take a systematic approach to growth, you don't need to get hung up on rapid growth figures."

3. Growth for a SaaS project is a whole business project​
"Opportunities get missed when growth work isn't driven across teams, including product, marketing, sales, and customer success."

The Lesson For You

A lot of founders will read Marc’s story and go back to grinding out the wins. But grinding harder in a broken model doesn’t fix growth issues.

What worked for Marc (and what works for basically every founder we’ve met) is building a system that compounds. Not a huge heroic pivot or a lucky hack, but rather a steady run of the right changes, stacked week after week.

And that’s exactly what we teach in the Growth Program 2.0: many of those same frameworks Marc used to turn doopoll into a sustainable growth engine.

​Gil Templeton​
Staff Writer, Demand Curve