Yuka: how to build user growth with no growth team
Solving a focussed yet scalable problem, product with a 3 step to value for users, multiple revenue streams (no ads!), giant growth with a small team
Tl:dr
Find a focussed and scalable problem (within an industry).
Yuka’s Product
JTBD: An information scoring system for food and beauty products.
Incredibly insightful for food products in the same category.
Opportunities to create features in cross-category product comparison with added personalisation.
Business and revenue
Yuka does not collaborate with brands in any way.
Yuka generates revenue through premium subscription, seasonal calendar and Book. Generated ≈ 1 million in 2021.
Growth
12 person team, 40 million users and 12 countries.
Heavy focus on word of mouth with product differentiation.
Creative product led growth (PLG) with referral program and user contributions.
Find a focussed and scalable problem (ideally within an industry)
If I had an hour to solve a problem I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.
- Albert Einstein
I worked for two years in a food, nutrition and wellness startup. Our main focus was: help design nutrition plans, prepare food based on those plans and deliver to our users.
A crucial part of de-boarding users was to help them stay on the nutrition plan. We observed that it was NOT easy, even for highly motivated users.
The key problems (not exhaustive) are:
There are too many additives, nutrients and ingredients to understand in a single packaged food product.
How could consumers add context to the information to understand what is good or bad for them?
Numerous startups are tackling the above two problems in their own ways. Think: healthy food delivery, nutrition + fitness trackers, personalized nutrition support etc.
Takeaway thought 1: A focussed scalable problem within an industry could be tackled in numerous ways. If you feel short of growth ideas, find a parallel startup in the niche that interests you, deep dive into how they are solving the problem.
Takeaway thought 2: When businesses tackle key problems within an industry, it unlocks users with a common purpose -> unlocking the most powerful growth arsenal: word of mouth.
This takeaway directly ties to community building 101 from the book - “Get Together”.
In today’s essay we are going to talk about an app which falls in the nutrition niche and has unlocked word of mouth like no other.
Share with friends to let the world know you are getting smarter about growth 😉
Enter Yuka!
Yuka is an app which allows users to scan packaged food (and beauty) products to get a nutritional score, facilitating wiser purchase decisions.
⚒️Product
The app provides value in three simple steps:
Scan a product barcode.
The app returns a “score” out of 100. It lists the positives and negatives about the product nutrition and environmental impact with reasoning around it.
It provides alternatives to the products.
Takeaway thought 3: 3 steps to value in consumer apps is as crucial as the 3 steps checkout processes. When users receive value without any fuss, they retain and engage more with the product.
The scoring system adopted by Yuka leans towards the precautionary side, warning users of controversial additives even if the risk is suspected and not proven. The products with additives or risk elements have a max score of 49/100
The score solves the #1 problem really well by informing users about the product ingredients.
Yuka solves the #2 problem to a large extent but not completely.
The scores justify comparison between two different food products in the same category: eg. Tyrell’s Chips v/s Yuka recommended Crackers.
The top suggestion for “snack crackers” by Yuka gets a score of 78/100.
Where can Yuka scores fail its users?
The scores may not be the best measures for comparison between two different food categories:
Does this mean that the Yogurt is a healthier snack option than the snack crackers? No.
In this case, Yuka considers the calorific content of the crackers as a negative, which leads to a biased and non personalised score.
Yuka does a brilliant job of being an informational system by scoring food (and beauty) products.
Cross category comparison simply does not seem to be the product’s scope.
How does this help us understand growth?
It demonstrates how you could apply the takeaway thought #1 in action.
It gives an insight into the users psyche of how and when users are using Yuka.
💰Business
The next fascinating aspect of Yuka is how the app makes money and the small giant behind it.
The business does NOT run ads, sponsored content, favour brands or any business activity which could lead to a conflict of interest - it shows how the business is weaved around the user interest.
The revenue comes from: calendars, book sales and a premium subscription to the app.
Calendar: sold exclusively in France and Spain, a calendar of seasonal fruits and vegetables. It costs 14.90€.
Book: titled “Guide to healthy eating” is available in France, Germany and Italy with tips for choosing the right ingredients and 36 healthy recipes, sold at 24.90€.
Subscription through premium version
It works on a “pay as you want” plan ranging from 9.99 to 19.99€ annually. It unlocks:
Offline mode: users can scan products offline.
Users in supermarkets barely get a phone signal.
Search feature: users can search for products.
Eradicates the need to have the product in their hands.
Food preferences: users can flag items based on their food preferences.
user personalisation like vegetarian, gluten, lactose, and palm oil etc.
The fun part is: Yuka does all of this with a 12-15 person team.
Congratulations on making to the halfway point 🎉🎉🎉
📈Growth (users)
Yuka does not have a dedicated growth team. Instead, the team is focussed heavily on customer service (5/12 members) and communication (2/12 members).
It begs the question: how did the app grow to 40 million users and expand to 12 countries with bare minimum resources dedicated to growth?
💑Is your initial thought that they are a viral sensation on social media?
Yuka has a following of 100k+ on instagram and <5k on TikTok => Social media is not the primary driver for Yuka’s growth.
The graph shows how users(desktop) arrive at the Yuka website.
Direct and organic search being high reveals “word of mouth” is at play here. (assumption because we do not have access to app user data)
Yuka serves two audiences:
Users who are conscious about their nutrition.
Users who are conscious about healthy beauty products.
We also know that users would rather scan the product than read the nutritional label (guilty).
Word of mouth
The Users who are conscious about nutrition often have friends who also care about nutrition, likewise for beauty products.
I interviewed 10 Yuka users and all of them found out about Yuka through word of mouth.
Takeaway thought 4:
The job to be done for Yuka is “scan and know if a product is good/bad”. Yuka’s ability to focus and solve one key problem unlocks “word of mouth”.
⭐Users do not require any threshold knowledge to use the product.
It’s not just Yuka, several startups like Warby Parker, Sweetgreens etc have been able to exhibit this characteristic. I wrote an essay on Sweetgreens if you like learning about growth.
Product led growth (PLG)
PLG is the ability of a business to drive acquisition, retention and monetisation of users through the product. Think “refer a friend”.
Yuka does it incredibly well.
Refer with no strings attached to unlock “real” value
Pain point: users who care about nutrition are always looking for better options.
What could be better than to find them on the tool you use to gauge packaged products’ credibility.
Yuka allows users to access the “top products” in food and beauty categories, thus saving time and simplifying the purchase decision.
Caveat: users need to invite a friend.
I admire Yuka here because it unlocks the “top products” independent of the referee downloading the app (quite selfless).
Takeaway thought 5:
Does referral work better if users are able to unlock product features without the referee being acquired as a user?
⭐Referral systems often incentivise users with financial rewards, but Yuka awards by solving a problem for the users.
User contributions
Users on the Yuka app are also able to flag products which they might think are not consistent with the facts.
Takeaway thought 6: Ability to co-create a product, contributes enormously to engagement and retention -> also known as the “lego effect”.
How could you allow users to contribute to improve the value of your product?
Conclusion:
Yuka personifies a startup working on a meaningful problem, creating value for the users, with a scalable positive impact, and all of that with a small team.
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Until next time,
S R
Past essays on growth you may find interesting: