Growth Hacks: La Briqueterie — Accelerating Growth Brick by Brick
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La Briqueterie — Accelerating Growth Brick by Brick
La Briqueterie — Accelerating Growth Brick by Brick
Beyond helping the early stages of startups, accelerators also play an important role by mentoring, educating, and supporting them financially. It’s because of these accelerators that companies such as Airbnb, Twitch, Stripe, and Dropbox were able to breakout growth.
In order to help startups to thrive while working with a limited timeframe, adopting a growth mindset became crucial for accelerators and incubators like Techstars, Mucker Capital, and La Briqueterie to succeed.
In this growth study, we talked to Pierre Levi (Head of Growth), and Clotilde Reynier (CPO) to dig into La Briqueterie’s approach, learning how they have balanced and organized their own growth team and, more importantly, how they have standardized their expertise in a way that, regardless of the startup, of their objective or their needs, they can track and execute growth at scale.
La Briqueterie, “brick factory” in French, is an accelerator dedicated to digital technologies in Marseille, South of France. Specialized in digital products, they work on its entire life cycle, from its conception and PMF, up to the scale and traction phase.
Background History
In February 2018, Rémi Arnaud and Thomas Favre created MellonMellon agency, an IT development agency working on complex products, including information systems, and business tools.
In September 2019, from the desire to break down the barriers of knowledge surrounding digital products, La Briqueterie was born to be the place where entrepreneurs and makers could meet in order to move their projects forward together.
Recently, they’ve launched the No-code Agency to help new entrepreneurs creating their digital product in 4 weeks, at a very competitive cost.
It became, therefore, obvious to create a hybrid service offer around the digital product, including:
- An IT development agency to design and build products;
- Project mentoring based on the growth hacking methodology, and;
- Execution to help business.
Building the foundations for digital products
Thinking about those real enthusiasts, dreamers, and experts who work or wish to evolve in the world of digital products, La Briqueterie has as its main goal to transform them into “Makers” or “Doers”, or to use their own words, enable them to catch the bricks they desire.
So, La Briqueterie is in a certain way a building, the aggregation of all the bricks.
But what bricks? And why?
Pierre said that they chose this name because they see the digital product as a set of several building blocks with the Vision to make it happen and bring it to life, the Design to think and optimize it, the Tech to build and construct it, and Growth to share it and expand the vision.
Early-success
At la Briqueterie, they have 3 offers: product building, mentoring, and growth consultancy.
In less than 6 months, they built a training catalog around the digital product with 3 main categories (Web marketing; Product & No-Code, and; Outbound Marketing & Growth) that now represents 60% of their revenue.
Regarding production, dozens of projects came to life thanks to their IT Agency including a mix of startups and big French companies like SNCF, France’s national state-owned railway company, and Alstom, a French multinational rolling stock manufacturer operating worldwide in rail transport markets.
In order to execute their mission of helping businesses gain traction, scale, and find innovative ways to achieve sustainable long-term growth, La Briqueterie has partnered with GrowthHackers by using Experiments to manage their growth operation for multiple digital products
Methodology
If each startup that joins the program started to report their progress (inputs and outputs) in a different way, it would become nearly impossible for the accelerator to track and help it. So, as soon as a new co joins their program, they create a workspace for that startup:
This allows La Briqueterie to respect the multiple and different strategies that each startup might need at the moment (product development, new channel validation, message and positioning, fundraising, and more), while still having access to their initiatives and being able to collaborate in a singular way.
Once the workspace is created, it’s time to get down to the . Which basically consists in helping each startup define their
On the B2C side, We App, a dating app, hit the mark of 15K active users since their launch in March of this year, and Kelvin, an app that tracks ecological habits, whose one of its objectives is to organize fundraising of 400K, has already tripled the number of employees since their creation.
Here is an example:
On the B2B side, Bonami is a product that was built from scratch and has gone from 0 to 1,5K MRR in one year by making life easier for private nurses. Ottho.Tools is another big hit in France, the number #1 no-code training platform that raised in 2 digits their number of active users after being mentored by La Briqueterie. And ready to be launched in September with a mature growth mindset, Zideeup is a B2B Solution for continuous Improvement & lean management for corporates and big groups.
By having a clear and holistic vision of how each startup is doing, not only in terms of revenue but also in value delivered, growth, customer feedback, and overall progress, La Briqueterie is able to intervene whenever they know they can add value. With its cross-functional approach to growth and a passionate vision for business creation, they have seen a lot of success.
Growth Engine
At La Briqueterie, their growth team is a mix of professionals performing multiple roles. In the beginning, they were mostly a team of developers and programmers — so the product background was well covered. Adding a layer of market-knowledge and growth methodology to it has allowed them to make sense out of the well-known ideation > prioritization > testing > analysis framework.
An Accelerator North Star Metric
La Briqueterie has identified as their NSM the “Number of Vision Unit Concretised” matching their vision to realize the entrepreneur’s vision with digital technology.
“We’re trying to take off the ‘financial aspect”’of the NSM in our organization and all the startups that we mentor because we’re truly convinced that money should never be the end goal of the business. Our main focus in the NSM is more about the vision of the organization, how we can track and truly measure the impact they have on their market / ecosystem,” said Clotilde.
To put some numbers on that, based on their 3 main offers, they ponderate it with the number of successful mentoring, training and certifications, and the number of “User Stories” developed in code or No-code products by the team.
To achieve this NSM, their objectives are defined based on a mix of short term ambition: MRR and the desire of the team on how they want to drive the business.
The success of these objectives is dictated by: