Ask HN: What's your top growth strategy that helped grow your startup? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What's your top growth strategy that helped grow your startup?

#41

Post by logicallee » Thu, Feb 02, 2017, 4:28 PM UTC

paskster wrote: post #10

We are creating an online marketplace for short term work in Germany ( https://www.instaff.jobs ). Businesses can publish their jobs on our platform, jobbers apply with their profile and then these businesses can book the jobbers online. We take care of quality management and employment overhead (working contracting, payroll accounting, etc.). We made close to 3 Mill. EUR revenue in 2016. We acquire 90 % of our custo…

I notice that you have made EUR 3 million in 2016 using a scalable hands-off model where you can turn adwords directly into cash without needing to own or touch any inventory, meet anyone, or have any infrastructure beyond a website, which you have built. You have also solved the chicken and egg problem, since high-quality companies will only take the time to craft thoughtful and serious searches if you have a pool of qualified candidates, and qualified candidates will only post thoughtful and serious listings if the are likely to reach serious companies they want to work for. Further, knowledge workers - the kind you connect with companies, as opposed to manual labor, comprise roughly $3 trillion in value and are among the most sophisticated job seekers and very likely to try your platform: even absent large economies of scale and network effects you have proven your ability to convert them and monetize them by offering both themselves and companies that seek them, value in an innovative and sustainable way.

As a European VC, this is not the kind of opportunity we are looking for. Please don't contact me again.

- Edit: see replies below.

Re: Ask HN: What's your top growth strategy that helped grow your startup?

#42

Post by nixy » Thu, Feb 02, 2017, 4:33 PM UTC

For B2B: be local. Have presence where your customers are. B2B relations are so much easier if you are local, so you'll be rewarded if you are able to open up offices close to strategic customers or in potentially big markets.

Re: Ask HN: What's your top growth strategy that helped grow your startup?

#43

Post by edoceo » Thu, Feb 02, 2017, 4:34 PM UTC

There is a book called Traction that outlines more than a dozen plans and emphasis on trying more than one to see what works for your case. What works for StartupA isn't what works for StartupB. Try and test

Re: Ask HN: What's your top growth strategy that helped grow your startup?

#44

Post by olkid » Thu, Feb 02, 2017, 4:45 PM UTC

paskster wrote: post #33

adamqureshi wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am experimenting with an idea to target experienced workers and will try your landing page strategy. Basically a recruitment platform to find experienced workers a gig / job. thank you for sharing. Have a look: http://tryoldster.com/ email me , i'd love to set it up in germany / partner with you. wink , wink ;-)

We don't do cooperation with other companies, since we want to be focused 100 % on our business model. But I wish you all the best with your platform and I can recommend you to also create highly targeted landingpages. For example (just out of the blue) you could have a page on the url: http://tryoldster.com/new-york/experienced-marketing-consult... And on this landingpage you show some of our "oldsters" who are base…

Can you comment more on the Call-to-action button. Does the button at the bottom of the page get the most clicks? Thank you for sharing your strategy.

Re: Ask HN: What's your top growth strategy that helped grow your startup?

#45

Post by adamqureshi » Thu, Feb 02, 2017, 4:56 PM UTC

79d697i6fdif wrote: post #36

DenisM wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you open to consulting? Either to help in hiring a person like you or in getting your help directly? My email is in profile.

only for free, current job prevents me from doing anything outside work :). I'll email you when off work

email me too. In profile. I wanna show you what Im working on.

Re: Ask HN: What's your top growth strategy that helped grow your startup?

#46

Post by karmajunkie » Thu, Feb 02, 2017, 5:06 PM UTC

The best thing we've done in the last year was start marketing, period. Previously, we made all our sales through essentially an enterprise model—get one national customer and pick up all their local affiliates. The sales cycle was long, and most growth happened word of mouth, but it wasn't fast. We had zero marketing presence aside from going to the relevant trade shows.

Last fall we finally hired a marketing consultant, built out a marketing website with a contact form, and are trying out some different pricing models. We've seen fairly consistent interest, which I'm reading as pent-up demand.

Lessons learned: I think the word-of-mouth angle was good for us at first. By keeping a closer control on our customers we were able to really make the product solid and understand the customer needs in depth, and how to segment the market with pricing and features. I wish we'd flipped the switch on the marketing website sooner, but there were benefits from waiting. The number one lesson if you're going to do that is give potential customers who hear about you a way to contact you—otherwise word of mouth has zero benefit. (I realize these probably seem obvious to most, but our market is a little niche and knowing that we wanted to market primarily to the national customers instead of their local affiliates pointed us in certain directions early on.)

Re: Ask HN: What's your top growth strategy that helped grow your startup?

#47

Post by throwaway-6006 » Thu, Feb 02, 2017, 5:10 PM UTC

Would someone please suspend this account already. He is not a "YC tech manager" as his profile implies (assuming he hasn't changed it just now). Based on comment history, he appears to be a troll that has hijacked a dormant account with high karma.

Frankly any account that falsely suggests a YC affiliation should be suspended without warning.

If you have 1000+ karma, please use a secure password. Warning: red herrings below...

Re: Ask HN: What's your top growth strategy that helped grow your startup?

#48

Post by heiki » Thu, Feb 02, 2017, 5:13 PM UTC

79d697i6fdif wrote: post #18

nanijoe wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What did you do to turn things around though?

1) Remade website to be more professional looking, faster, more focused towards SEO, mobile friendly. I could write many pages on this :) but following online guides will get you in the ballpark 2) Started writing interesting content. Truly good content is a PITA and you need to be a decent writer to make something compelling, but our first good article got us more traffic than the entire site with over 100 content p…

If you have a free moment, drop me an email. I would love to learn more about the different techniques you used :)

Re: Ask HN: What's your top growth strategy that helped grow your startup?

#49

Post by shostack » Thu, Feb 02, 2017, 5:15 PM UTC

throwawaydbfif wrote: post #8

If your product doesn't suck and it won't sell you suck at marketing. "Growth hacking" is just a SV koolaid rebranding of marketing. It wasn't a start-up but a consulting company I worked at that had stagnated for about 7 years. 6 months later we had redone our whole marketing setup. New site, new branding, new software, lots of advertisement $ shifted. A year later revenue was almost 3x. We raised our rates so profi…

As a fellow experienced marketer I would implore you to not use the term "marketing guru." The word "guru" has a really bad connotation with all of the info product snake oil salesmen and wannabe marketers out there.

The reality is that marketing is an increasingly specialized and technical domain requiring knowledge of coding, data, etc. and it can be hard enough as it is to help people trust we're not all scammers (particularly a technical audience such as this one) and that there are in fact good marketers who have ethics and deliver results.

Re: Ask HN: What's your top growth strategy that helped grow your startup?

#50

Post by blakes » Thu, Feb 02, 2017, 5:16 PM UTC

79d697i6fdif wrote: post #18

nanijoe wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What did you do to turn things around though?

1) Remade website to be more professional looking, faster, more focused towards SEO, mobile friendly. I could write many pages on this :) but following online guides will get you in the ballpark 2) Started writing interesting content. Truly good content is a PITA and you need to be a decent writer to make something compelling, but our first good article got us more traffic than the entire site with over 100 content p…

This is good stuff.

I feel like a lot of these strategies could be used with small bootstrapped businesses with some tweaking. Especially #5, appearing legit is too often ignored in smaller businesses.