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

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

#2
For us, running http://fairpixels.co (a logo design boutique), the one thing that generated the most leads and projects by far was one of our side-projects called: http://logodust.com, a place where we started open sourcing unused logo designs. It quickly got featured by some major publications and it provides a steady stream of clients.

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

#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 profitability was even more than that.

The problem is finding a great marketing expert is just as hard as finding good coders. The company blew through countless consultants and 3 "marketing majors" with no returns until they found me and we turned it all around.

I would say marketing and coding are equally important for a start-up, easily the two most important things. If you have two founders one should be a marketing guru. If you don't your first employee should be.

Another thing is don't hire any marketing expert that can't code. The actual marketing setup is more than 50% coding. You need to find a coder that loves marketing

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

#9

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…

What did you do to turn things around though?

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

#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 customers via SEO and about 10 % via Google Adwords. We don't do any direct sales.

Our #1 growth strategy was creating well designed and highly targeted landingpages for all relevant keywords. For example if potential customers search for certain type of jobbers in certain German cities, these are some of our landingpages:

https://en.instaff.jobs/fair-hostesses-agency/frankfurt

https://en.instaff.jobs/fair-hostesses-agency/berlin

https://www.instaff.jobs/promotion-agentur/stuttgart

https://www.instaff.jobs/catering-personal-agentur/hamburg

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