I am lucky to be in a position to have a free version of the app (https://getsimpleform.com/) before building a better paid version https://liveformhq.com/ . Most of my conversions come from the link on the free version of the site.
Ask HN: What's your top growth strategy that helped grow your startup?
21–30 of 187 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's your top growth strategy that helped grow your startup?
#22Distribution is a hard problem for many startups. It's not enough to make something that people want if they never know about it. We started publishing an annual Agtech investing report at the beginning of 2015. This put us on the map and in the media.
Re: Ask HN: What's your top growth strategy that helped grow your startup?
#23Our 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 where the economics work. The economics work if the cost to generate a sale is 1/3 or less of the lifetime value of the customer. Even if it takes a lot of effort to generate the sale, if you have a predictable way to generate leads, and you know how many leads you need in order to produce a sale, and you make a good profit on that sale, you are golden. You can then ramp up your lead gen and you know your sales with grow faster. It doesn't take any luck to display more ads, send more emails or hire sales reps.
This is the strategy we used to grow from $0 to $1M in ARR in six months. We could then go to a VC and tell them that if they invested $X, we could turn that into $Y in ARR. It made fundraising pretty simple for us.
tl;dr Treat sales and marketing like a science and design a repeatable process.
Re: Ask HN: What's your top growth strategy that helped grow your startup?
#24My best tip is to not try one thing to grow your startup. Try everything.
This means that you have to do things very, very cheaply. Think of each growth hack as a single tactic. Execute in You cannot know what will work, before you try it. What worked for others won't necessarily work for you.
How do you live in a world where any one thing you do is 90% likely to fail? You do a lot of 'one things', very cheaply, and when one of them hits, you exploit it.
Growth is a process, one very much dependent on speed. Think in terms of a growth system, not growth tactic or hack.
(this is what I call a strategy)
Re: Ask HN: What's your top growth strategy that helped grow your startup?
#25We 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…
So include glamour shots of young attractive women on your landing pages when possible. Got it! :)
I can't remember what Madison Avenue Ad man (aka Mad Men) is responsible for the quote "in tits we trust". Ogilvy ? It's a tasteless quote, but I can think of many companies, like GoDaddy, that use this strategy shamelessly at first. The links above are by no means that extreme, but I suspect it did help your marketing success.
Thinking of my own marketing, I don't even have a photo of a human being using our product. I'll work on that.
edit: added Mad Men reference.
Re: Ask HN: What's your top growth strategy that helped grow your startup?
#26We've used a mixture of cold emailing and social media to generate growth in the past. The trick with social media is figuring out how to make your content both engaging and relevant to your product.
We're experimenting with Instagram stories on our latest project: JQBX (https://www.instagram.com/jqbx.fm https://www.jqbx.fm). Having good content lets you get more eyeballs on your stories which, so far for us at least, haven't driven people to unfollow since the feed content is of a high quality.
Re: Ask HN: What's your top growth strategy that helped grow your startup?
#27I use synthetic facebook, twitter and other accounts and assign them to bots that mimic humans. The bots then communicate with users and recommend things and conversation they agree to while also redirecting to my site. I've acquired millions of MAUs this way. I used to do this with MySpace and Friendster. Before that IRC.
Re: Ask HN: What's your top growth strategy that helped grow your startup?
#28We 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…
So include glamour shots of young attractive women on your landing pages when possible. Got it! :) I can't remember what Madison Avenue Ad man (aka Mad Men) is responsible for the quote "in tits we trust". Ogilvy ? It's a tasteless quote, but I can think of many companies, like GoDaddy, that use this strategy shamelessly at first. The links above are by no means that extreme, but I suspect it did help your marketing…
We are mainly targeting short term jobs for exhibition, events and promotion right now. 80 % of the time, customers book young females for these jobs. So your are right, that we show "young attractive women" on a lot of landing pages, but this is more a result of our business model. The comparison to GoDaddy is not fair, since it has no relation to their business model, that they show young females.
And we make sure that our jobbers not only upload high quality pictures but also write their personal experience in a targeted and concise format. For example we now started other verticals such as temporary chefs and on these pages you see mostly middle aged men with cooking experience:
https://www.instaff.jobs/koeche-mieten/frankfurt
edit: same content but better english
Re: Ask HN: What's your top growth strategy that helped grow your startup?
#29We've used a mixture of cold emailing and social media to generate growth in the past. The trick with social media is figuring out how to make your content both engaging and relevant to your product.
We're experimenting with Instagram stories on our latest project: JQBX (https://www.instagram.com/jqbx.fm https://www.jqbx.fm). Having good content lets you get more eyeballs on your stories which, so far for us at least, haven't driven people to unfollow since the feed content is of a high quality.
Re: Ask HN: What's your top growth strategy that helped grow your startup?
#30the mix of luck (lots of it) and timing