Community Spotlight: Diogo Matos
Growth marketing is a discipline that combines marketing, product, and engineering. It's about finding new ways to grow your startup or business by leveraging data, technology and people, across whatever channels it takes to get the job done.
Growth marketers are multi-talented. They are highly skilled at using data analytics to stimulate growth, but they are also imaginative and able to think outside the box. They're comfortable with technical jargon but know how to communicate with non-technical audiences. They're able to run experiments and analyse results quickly — even if that means pulling an all nighter, tweaking creatives for a paid campaign or going deep into the numbers.
And that is what Diogo does, and is. He has more projects under his belt that can fit in two hands. Not that they’ve all been a hit - his platform for mentoring university students went bust in 2021 - but that’s the thing. Finding the right strategy to grow a product is a nuanced game of building, testing and iterating. And the faster you iterate, the highest chance you have of winning.
"In my first job I did a bit of everything: Content, SEO, Paid Ads. But what kept me up at night was going after experiments, tracking them, and coming up with creative solutions that keep work exciting."
One of his latest projects - Growth Tips - is a curated list of the tactics that the fastest growing startups of today used to get early traction. Published here as a public spreadsheet, the list has 2 purposes: act as a helpful library of inspiration for other growth marketers, and showcase the type of projects Diogo likes to help companies with. And that’s where Rows comes in.
A spreadsheet with +400 growth tipsHelping companies grow
Sean Ellis from GrowthHackers created the ICE Scoring Model as a way to quickly prioritize work with a 'good enough' level of accuracy. The model is based on the idea that growth experiments should be prioritized through a simple framework across these 3 axis:
Impact: How much an experiment affects key metrics like revenue, active users, etc.
Confidence: The level of confidence in the experiment’s success. It acts as a measure of risk.
Ease: How easy it is to implement.
ICE scoring sheetThe ICE Scoring model is one of Diogo’s go-to frameworks for growth. He uses the Rows Live mode to share the sheet and collaborate with his clients. They add the growth experiments pipeline, score it on the ICE parameters, and report on its progress.
Interactive elements like the dropdown to report status make the scoring sheet easy to update anywhere, even if “anywhere” happens while Diogo is pacing between a meeting pod and his desk in a coworking space somewhere in Europe.
Duplicate the ICE Scoring spreadsheet →
"Every time I need to look at data, I open a spreadsheet. And when I need to put together a dashboard, especially if the data comes from Google Analytics, I always do it in Rows."
From his experience, every client wants access to numbers at the end of the day, and having the confidence of knowing they can filter, analyze or dive into data from their business with spreadsheet flexibility is important.
And thanks to the Rows integration with Google Analytics Diogo imports data about website performance, conversion rates and bottlenecks to growth without leaving the spreadsheet, installing any add-ons, or doing any manual work.
One of Diogo’s favorite dashboards is this City Takeover report. He uses it in products where growth is heavily reliant on expanding the product's presence in a city/country (e.g. Uber). The dashboard has 2 components that work in tandem:
Targets: A list of the target cities coupled with a list of important KPIs relevant to the business - population, number of habitants of the ideal customer profile, etc - and a growth target for that city. Following the Uber example, this target would be the number of rides served in a city by month “x”.
Dashboard: This is where the rubber meets the road. A dashboard with the city by city stats of the previous 3 weeks, and its progress towards the goal. The stats are automatically imported from Google Analytics every week using the Rows’ Schedule action. Each city is classified according to how much it has been “conquered”
Taken over: >100% of city target KPIs reached
Rising city: 50%-100% of city target KPIs reached
Low presence: <50% of city target KPIs reached
The city takeover dashboard"One of the biggest advantages of Rows is speed. In Google Analytics if I want to add a filter it takes 5 seconds to load, changing a data range takes another 5 seconds, etc. Rows is very fast. I import the data, adjust any parameter and get the updated report almost instantly."
From here, Diogo and the client’s teams plan which new growth experiments to run in the following 2 week cycle, and add it to the ICE Scoresheet.
Duplicate the City Takeover dashboard →
Spreadsheets = Growth
Spreadsheets are a powerful tool to help you make well-informed decisions. They help you organize your thoughts and visualize data. Whether you are working with a small marketing team or a large one, learning to use spreadsheets effectively on your growth marketing projects will make you a better marketer.
As for Diogo, he’s working on a new side-project (keep an eye out for that) and looking for great products to help grow, one spreadsheet at a time.
Inspired by Diogo's story? See what else our Community is brewing and sign-up to switch to a modern spreadsheet that you’ll love to use.
