How LG CNS Haruzogak used Mixpanel to launch a new product and instill a growth culture

Haruzogak is a personalized life management service by LG CNS, an IT affiliate of LG Group. It is the first MyData service, a South Korean government-led program aiming to allow citizens to manage personal financial data from different financial institutions on one platform, by an IT company. They help users track down their personal information through a single mobile app and consolidate data on people’s financial and health activities by collecting data such as credit card usage and their actions on online platforms like YouTube and Google, with their consent. Most recently, they introduced a new feature that automatically writes a user’s daily diary, using ChatGPT, based on their data.

When new products were first launched in the company, there was usually a disproportionate focus on user acquisition. This resulted in a surge of new users following the marketing launch, but ultimately led to poor retention and failed products. Haruzogak saw the importance of breaking away from that trend by focusing on new user activation and using a growth hacking process to drive user growth and verify product-market fit.

LG CNS Haruzogak implemented Mixpanel to support their growth hacking process by helping them hypothesize, experiment, measure key metrics, and break down user data. By using Mixpanel, they were able to make data easily accessible to various teams, which assisted them in embedding a growth culture within their organization.

• Improved their product launch process with data-driven insights
• Increased new user activation rates by 11%
• Democratized access to product analytics data

What was the problem you were experiencing?

In most of the new product development processes we have experienced, the idea for the new product usually comes from the top down. The strategy and research department will kick off the process by conducting consumer surveys and research on the idea, and the product team will then start developing the product. When the product is launched, there is usually a huge focus on marketing to acquire new users. Most of the products we launched experienced a huge surge in users at the start due to the effect of marketing activities. However, once users try the product and fail to experience value, they start to leave, resulting in poor retention numbers.

Haruzogak was a little different from the previous products we launched. There were no successful references for similar services in Korea, so we could not get a lot of data about the needs and wants of users. Do users need this solution? Our biggest challenge was to ascertain our product-market fit. We wanted to verify marketability and lay the groundwork for sustainable growth through growth hacking. Therefore, our main focus at Haruzogak became new user activation, amongst other growth areas.

How do you define new user activation?

Haruzogak’s activation is about getting users to the point where they experience an “aha” moment. We define our aha moment as when users experience the value of recording their day easily through the AI auto-recording feature.

How are you using Mixpanel to track and improve your key metrics?

We set the number of weekly users who experience the aha moment as our north star metric, and monitor this daily on Mixpanel. To improve conversions, we come up with hypotheses on how to improve our metrics, set up experiments, receive feedback, and then improve the product based on the feedback. Since using Mixpanel, our new user activation rate has improved by 11%.

We also break down our users into cohorts, based on core actions they take. We are constantly monitoring daily, weekly, and monthly retention for each cohort. It is straightforward to create a custom cohort, and it’s user-friendly for the team to check data and conduct breakdowns easily on funnel, retention, and insights reports.

What are some challenges of instilling a growth culture in your team?

There were two main challenges:

1. Convincing the decision makers – we had to take time to explain and persuade them about the methodology of growth hacking, the process, why it was necessary, and the overall roadmap.
2. The engineers were also unfamiliar with growth hacking through constant experimentation and iteration and took some time to get used to it. To internalize this, we conducted several training sessions and gradually expanded the number of engineers familiar with the growth hacking methodology.

How did you encourage the team to start embracing a growth culture?

The biggest persuasion point for the team to try growth hacking was empowering each person to initiate their own projects. In the past, when top-down culture was more prevalent, there was a habit of passively executing instructions from those with more experience or seniority, even if they didn’t agree with them. With a growth mindset, individual employees can proactively gather data and find evidence to convince others of their ideas and take the lead in their projects.

What are some steps taken to establish a growth culture?

These three points form our key process for establishing a growth culture:

1. When starting a project, start with an evidence-based hypothesis.
2. Have clear metrics to judge the success or failure of executing that hypothesis.
3. Organize a post-mortem session to share with the team what was learned from the successes and failures.

Mixpanel has been an invaluable tool throughout the process. Whether it’s hypothesizing, experimenting, looking at metrics for points of improvement, or slicing and dicing different data points, Mixpanel has helped us instill and embed our growth culture. Team members from both marketing and product teams can easily dig into data they are interested in and share it with their team.

What advice would you give to others who are still trying to find product-market fit?

If you’re in a large or even regular-sized company where there is little growth and you’re thinking about internalizing the methodology of growth hacking and bringing it into your culture, the first thing is to be less ambitious and eliminate the desire to go fast. Growth hacking is not a skill – it is a way of working. The people who are doing it have to adapt, and the reasons for doing it have to be clear. Thus if you’re starting from zero, it’s better to start small and aim for quick wins with a smaller team, rather than try to train the whole organization.

More specifically, try to introduce growth hacking first in areas where there is the greatest need to change and improve. We organized a small growth task force to conduct growth hacking, and within that team, we started running small experiments that were not too complicated. We recommend sharing the results and learnings from these experiments with members outside of the task force, and this will help to spread the growth culture out little by little.

In our case, the first experiment we conducted for our first growth sprint was to change the color of the call-to-action button or add a tooltip to try and increase the click-through rate. As this experiment was very simple to set up, it was beneficial for team members who were running growth experiments for the first time.

In summary, if you want to introduce growth within the organization, you must first receive the support of decision-makers. Second, it would be a good idea to continue creating small success stories of growth within the organization and build on those successes to gradually spread the word. 

Read the interview in Korean here or watch the interview video here.

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