A mobile growth workshop with a touch of Silicon Valley

Those magic micro-moments. (Image via Nagi Salloum)

in5
Innovation Centre hosted the Mobile Growth Academy workshop
with Nagi Salloum, founder of the academy and global head of
marketing at TangoMe, on December
13.

Targeting startups and local entrepreneurs, the
workshop highlighted the checklist necessary for a successful
mobile app growth and development strategy.

Salloum stopped by Dubai on his way to Beirut,
and said the interest in his seminar at Dubai’s ArabNet 2015
prompted the launch of the Mobile Growth
Academy.

“I hadn’t
interacted with startups then in the Middle
East,” Salloum said.
“Initially six seats were filled, then an hour
later the entire room was filled and then they asked the presenter
after me to push the presentation.”

Soon, Salloum realized the demand for the same
information from people in Silicon Valley, which led him to put the
content on a website and have the information accessible only to
members.

The urgency of the Valley

At the beginning of the workshop itself, Salloum
established that the key difference between Silicon Valley and the
MENA region was the mindset, beginning with the sense of urgency in
Palo Alto.

“In Silicon Valley
there’s so much energy in the place that
you always feel behind whether there’s a
deadline or not,” he explained.
“There’s also a sense
of urgency to push people forward. Here people are laid-back, you
don’t see people pushing on how to
dominate the industry. In Silicon Valley, they immediately think
how can we dominate the world.”

Originally from Beirut, Lebanon, Salloum worked at Google in
Dubai before moving to the US.

By the time he joined TangoMe, Salloum had more than a decade of
experience in marketing and mobile, but found himself sourcing
expertize to build a mobile growth strategy.

“I couldn’t find a single resource that simplified the
information I needed. I did not just need tactical notes, but also
details on the best practices I had to learn,” he said.

What began as a personal compilation of curated
content eventually turned into a detailed and actionable
presentation on mobile growth strategy.

Great #mobile #growth talk from
@nagisalloum @in5centre checkout the mobile
growth academy for more pic.twitter.com/szJA31lKY8

— Wrappup (@justwrappup) December
14, 2015

The workshop

The four hour workshop offered a macro level
insight into strategy touch points for any mobile
marketer.

From offering general tips on marketing models
to unpacking reasons why an app is not attracting or retaining
users, Salloum rounded off the workshop with a breakdown of the
four stages of growth: positioning, acquisition, activation, and
retention.

“These are the four stages every
app needs to go through when they’re
thinking about marketing,” Salloum
said. “Divide your marketing system in
these stages and optimize for micromoments i.e. [make sure] every
touchpoint in the app is designed to captivate and capture [the
user’s]
attention.”

An entrepreneur himself, Salloum punctuated the
workshop with his personal experiences. For Kristine Lassam,
managing partner at digital marketing agency Pink Entropy,
that was something that elevated the value of the
workshop

“What I really liked, more than his
corporate background was that he is an entrepreneur like most of
the attendees at the workshop,” Lassam
said. “It’s a
different school of thought or place you operate from, and what he
shared comes from these two venues- the corporate one and the
entrepreneurial one- which are both insightful and immensely
practical.”

Alper Celen, founder and managing partner of
Enhance, a holding company for online businesses, attended the
workshop to better understand the marketing tools available as well
as discover ways to improve his business.

“With online businesses, most of
our money is spent on different aspects of marketing and those that
win in the end are the ones that are doing it
better,” Celen said.
“This is very timely for us.
We’re launching a new marketing stack, so
we can include a combination of these tools and its potential
uses.”

According to Salloum, the mobile growth academy
is directed at “any serious entrepreneur
that wants to know how to maximize the
business”.

Salloum will also be hosting a workshop December 16 in Beirut at the UK Lebanon Tech
Hub.