David Woodworth of Hilokal on Product/Market Fit, Mobile Ads and Community Growth [#1]

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Hello there, how’s it going? Today I’ll be chatting to David Woodworth, CMO and Co-Founder of Hilokal, a drop-in language learning social app. David has grown the app from zero to 200,000 users with a highly engaged community.

We discuss his journey from where he pivoted out of his brick-and-mortar business into a technology-based application with significant month-over-month user growth.


Timestamps:

  • [00:04:45] How to know if you’ve actually hit product-market fit before you scale
  • [00:06:00] Why group audio beat 1-on-1 calls
  • [00:08:30] Why $800/day in ads nearly killed their community
  • [00:10:45] What viral growth actually means and how to engineer it
  • [00:13:30] How they created compounding community growth
  • [00:17:00] Mapping the full funnel and finding your real growth bottleneck
  • [00:20:00] Why downloads are a vanity metric and what to track instead
  • [00:26:00] What’s next for Hilokal

Key links:

  • The Cold Start Problem by Andrew Chen
  • Growth Hacking by Sean Ellis
  • Hilokal app / David Woodworth on LinkedIn