Find a passionate community, make something awesome for them, get their contact info (email, twitter, etc.), stay engaged w them, improve and engage consistently. Have used this process for a number of products and it works very well in the beginning stages.
Ask HN: What's your top growth strategy that helped grow your startup?
51–60 of 187 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's your top growth strategy that helped grow your startup?
#52Would 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 herrin…
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Re: Ask HN: What's your top growth strategy that helped grow your startup?
#53Earlier 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…
Hi, I am a coder and want to get better at marketing. Can you shoot me an email as well? Thanks!
Re: Ask HN: What's your top growth strategy that helped grow your startup?
#54You want to grow your startup? It's much easier when you Make Something People Want.
true, but marketing is not superseded completely by product quality and product/market fit. You also need to make people aware of your product and make a strong value proposition.
Exactly. I often think of the famous Ralph Waldo Emerson saying, "Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door."
And I think Ralph Waldo Emerson obviously never built any mousetraps and has no idea what he's talking about.
Nonetheless, the saying does seem to apply well if you replace "Mousetrap" with "Donut" and "World" with "Portland".
Re: Ask HN: What's your top growth strategy that helped grow your startup?
#55I'm launching a file manager for programmers [1]. What helped immensely was to get it featured on BetaList [2]. This brought about 1000 new users. I'd definitely do that again.
[1]: https://fman.io
Re: Ask HN: What's your top growth strategy that helped grow your startup?
#56Would 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 herrin…
Hi - the above is very obvious satire: I am showcasing how insane European VC's are.
You can see another take from me on this same theme by reading this comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12198883
You can read that and then read my reply (scroll down to about the third comment), part of which I'll quote "you've given a lot of hard data but fail to draw the obvious correct conclusions, that the reason you haven't raised financing is because you're not located in Silicon Valley and don't have an office there."
Regarding the comment you just responded to: I purposefully made my comment extremely over the top (and insane), as satire. But I hoped the parent poster would reply by saying "if this is satire you are correct - this is exactly the reception we got. The last valuation we were offered is 1 million - and they wanted two thirds of the company." (Which would both be insulting, and kill the company.)
Anyway I am within my edit window but don't feel a need to edit my obviously satirical (by no means troll) comment.
Email me at the address I have listed (which likely on archive.org or elsewhere you can see has not changed in a long time), and I will confirm for you. I cannot emphasize enough that it is extremely obviously satirical - it makes fun of closed-minded European VC's. It was meant to evoke a sense of injustice. As clear and obvious satire - you can tell it's satire due to the facts it chooses to draw attention to, which are stellar. The "punchline", the second paragraph, is a total non sequitur. Given how - genuinely, really - amazing everything mentioned is, why would any VC want to rudely shut themselves out? Oh right - because they're a European VC, which was my satirical point.
Finally, even if for some reason you didn't get right away that it's satire, there is no other explanation because the parent poster didn't ask for anything, and even if they had this would not be the place to post a reply.
In case I have to spell it out, I'm obviously not a European VC and the post I replied to obviously did not try to contact me. I'd appreciate it if you made your comment less accusing.
Re: Ask HN: What's your top growth strategy that helped grow your startup?
#57Vblood.com - a vampire themed energy drink. I submitted a contact form on HotTopic.com (a Fortune 500 retailer) about my product, I received request for cost/samples, sales grew to 35,000 units/order. TicketTitan.com - Patent pending software for price (legal fee) determination on traffic ticket cases. Developed in-house for my former employer and cannibalized (automated) his business was gained through future referr…
Can you explain the Partnering for Community Care effort a bit more? That bullet point was general enough that I don't quite get what you were doing / trying to do.
Re: Ask HN: What's your top growth strategy that helped grow your startup?
#58We 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 o…
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Re: Ask HN: What's your top growth strategy that helped grow your startup?
#59SEO and I highly recommend Ryan Bednar at www.rankscience.com. They are in YC right now and doing a pretty amazing job.
Re: Ask HN: What's your top growth strategy that helped grow your startup?
#60[deleted]