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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?

#31

Post by adamqureshi »

paskster wrote: post #28
louprado wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 ;-)

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

#32

Post by DenisM »

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…

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.

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

#33

Post by paskster »

adamqureshi wrote: post #31
paskster wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 based in New Work and who have marketing experience. And in addition you show your platforms USP on this page and create Call-to-action button on how to get in contact with an "oldster". You obviously have to check yourself what kind of businesses are in your target group, what keywords they would search and what kind of landingpage could attract them.

edit: same content, but reworded my english

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

#34

Post by adamqureshi »

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…

I thank you so much. ;-)

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

#35

Post by adamqureshi »

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…

Daym! its a free strategy brief! Thank You.

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

#36

Post by 79d697i6fdif »

DenisM wrote: post #32
79d697i6fdif wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

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

#37

Post by normster »

https://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.

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

#38

Post by mazlix »

minhajuddin wrote: post #21

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.

I just want to thank you for making getsimpleform. I've used it in multiple projects and recommended it frequently!

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

#39

Post by will_brown »

Vblood.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 referrals, SEO and some Google ad word spend. Liquidation event.

Partnering for Community Care - Low cost concierge/Direct Primary Care for a physician office. Specifically not meant to cannibalize the existing practice/patients, but experiment to determine fit of business model/moving away from insurance based practice. Word of mouth to uninsured patients. Local hotel/restaurant owners caught word and filled up the available ~100 slots very quick.

MedicareMTM.com - patent pending practice management for medication therapy management (MTM). Initially had a 6 month pilot green lit by Walmart (thru LinkedIn cold contact), this was stopped due to a conflict. Currently, set up a pilot with an independent pharmacy and about half dozen local providers, the pharmacy owner started a network over ~1,000 Indian owned independent pharmacies...so again the natural word of mouth approach.

These are just some examples, and I know they may not fit into the true definition of startup. Still I think it is important to keep an open mind about the specific industry of the startup/business and not apply a one size fits all approach.

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

#40

Post by kamphey »

REFERRALS: 90% of my new clients come from current customers. Not only do I provide a good service that is rather hard to find but also only really applicable to certain people. (It's good to know your customers), I also send out little reminders every few months that I'm open to referrals and gladly give a referral fee or a month free of my service.

I find that people also refer me the first week they sign up. Which is something that is a bit of a hack. I heard this advice a couple years ago and I thought it was crazy but it totally works and is awesome. Someone finally made the decision to buy my service and it's at that point that they are most excited about it and love to refer people.

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