This is a very sincere and honest question,
one that few start-up founders,
if they look deep inside their hearts,
would have a top of the hat answers for.
Yet, it beleagers start-up critics such as TechCrunch
and people interested in start-ups in general.
While there are no cookie cutter answers
Ask HN: What's your top growth strategy that helped grow your startup?
61–70 of 187 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's your top growth strategy that helped grow your startup?
#62Our strategy was to not try and find a shortcut or hack to grow our sales. We just ground it out by cold calling/cold emailing, paid ads, etc. The problem with shortcuts is they are usually not repeatable or scalable. For example, a viral video or website can provide a boost of growth, but you can't predict if the next thing you produce will also go viral. What you want to find is a predictable way to generate sales…
holy shit this is by far the most valuable comment I came across of all time on HN
Re: Ask HN: What's your top growth strategy that helped grow your startup?
#63You're obviously going to get a variety of answers because it really depends on your product and market. Saas vs hardware, consumer vs smb vs enterprise, mobile vs web, etc.
My advice is to read Traction and apply the framework to test out as many possible strategies as possible. There are tons of other blogs and strategies about growth but I find Traction to have the most practical and actionable format. Plus, I like having a hard copy. I've probably bought 5 copies of it for friends.
Create a Trello board to track your experiments and progress. You will find something that moves the needle–BUT it might not be what you expect. For example, I've had tons of success at trade shows in past projects.
Good luck.
Re: Ask HN: What's your top growth strategy that helped grow your startup?
#64I have found that the maximum propensity to gain
is to set your priorities right
and then sit back and watch the river flow
I don't mean that as a fishing analogy
but more as a "let your ideas evolve in a organic way"
So you would expect
that you would achieve your top priority the soonest
and lower priorities later
How much you achieve is a rate issue
and I don't think there are any fixed answers for that
Obviously the are ways to accelerate your rate of progress
through an analysis of the data
and this is typically what the pundits vouch for
But this a grey area.
Since most start-ups are driven to grow revenues
rate acceleration is very typical
but that is a more a matter of business than engineering
Re: Ask HN: What's your top growth strategy that helped grow your startup?
#65You're obviously going to get a variety of answers because it really depends on your product and market. Saas vs hardware, consumer vs smb vs enterprise, mobile vs web, etc. My advice is to read Traction and apply the framework to test out as many possible strategies as possible. There are tons of other blogs and strategies about growth but I find Traction to have the most practical and actionable format. Plus, I lik…
Traction is an easy read and an excellent jumping off point into the "growth strategy" space.
Re: Ask HN: What's your top growth strategy that helped grow your startup?
#66Would 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 h…
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Re: Ask HN: What's your top growth strategy that helped grow your startup?
#67Our strategy was to not try and find a shortcut or hack to grow our sales. We just ground it out by cold calling/cold emailing, paid ads, etc. The problem with shortcuts is they are usually not repeatable or scalable. For example, a viral video or website can provide a boost of growth, but you can't predict if the next thing you produce will also go viral. What you want to find is a predictable way to generate sales…
No, cold calls are something my father did. I am a Growth Hacking Ninja Rockstar.
Re: Ask HN: What's your top growth strategy that helped grow your startup?
#68https://www.mailinator.com Provide a exceedingly useful free service that naturally lends itself to aiding QA. We weren't clever in all this, the customers found us. We did however react when the opportunity presented itself. We added features to make their use case easier and better. The free service takes a good deal of infrastructure but the brand and value provided make it worth it.
I have been a long time user of Mailinator but recently needed to run a gambit of email tests wanted to avoid typical Mailinator blocks and also would have preferred the emails to persist longer. I started Googling options, considered just registering quickly for a domain and email service, etc. but then I realized I could pay for Mailinator to get exactly what I was looking for.
Consider this a testament to how exceedingly useful your free service is. I was actually able to run my whole gambit of tests with the free service, probably using 100+ addresses, and used one of the alias domains to avoid blocking, though it took a few tries before I found one.
Now a paying customer :)
Re: Ask HN: What's your top growth strategy that helped grow your startup?
#69For us ( http://www.startupdaybook.com ) a few things have been very effective -- but it did take a lot of trial and error to find those few things.
BetaList and Reddit have been a big driver of signups as they have the exact audience we are looking to help (startups) and a wide audience.
Blogging has also been a big part of getting signups. Creating helpful posts on Medium with a small product mention at the bottom brings in a good amount of the right people.
Twitter is great for driving traffic to the blog posts which then in turn gets people interested in us and our product. Buffer is awesome, and Quuu is a great service that has a community retweeting your tweet for a nominal fee.
Overall our landing page conversion rate is 29.8% right now, so driving the right traffic really matters.