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

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101–110 of 187 posts

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

#101
For https://www.findlectures.com, I've found writing articles for other places helpful. E.g. dev.to has a big twitter following, which leads to things getting passed around.

Similarly, if you write something that does well on small subreddits, a lot of times they will make it into Cooper Press email lists later.

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

#102

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.

Some people are product visionaries... while I agree with your approach for market-driven products, what would your advice be for people who start with a product instead of a userbase?

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

#103

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…

I'll agree with your statement - "Growth hacking" is just a SV koolaid rebranding of marketing. Growth hacking = marketing. Life hack = common sense - or what used to be common.

It didn't used to be.

Growth Hacking used to mean Marketing+Coding+Statistics

Now it just means marketing.

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

#104

Our 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…

did you guys use experienced sales people?

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

#105

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…

I'll agree with your statement - "Growth hacking" is just a SV koolaid rebranding of marketing. Growth hacking = marketing. Life hack = common sense - or what used to be common.

Depends. In my dictionary, "common sense" mostly means suboptimal things people do because they don't bother to think about what they're doing. A lot of the "live hacks" I've seen are things that fly in the face of lots of people, who would implore you to "stop doing silly things".

Or maybe I just grew up in a bad, uninventive environment.

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

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll agree with your statement - "Growth hacking" is just a SV koolaid rebranding of marketing. Growth hacking = marketing. Life hack = common sense - or what used to be common.

It didn't used to be. Growth Hacking used to mean Marketing+Coding+Statistics Now it just means marketing.

But good marketing pretty much always leveraged statistics. Growth hacking seems to be simply marketing applied to marketing itself - a rebranding to include the word "hacking", because word "hacking" is hot, and all the cool kids these days like it.

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

#107
post #69

For 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…

Can confirm, BetaList is entirely worth it. We were just on it not too long ago. Our conversion rate from BetaList traffic was in the mid 30's. My coworker ended up writing about it on /r/Entrepreneur, and then our blog ( http://blog.twist.io/our-launch-on-beta-list-what-we-learned... ).

Keep in mind though that Reddit's hard to predict and quality of feedback varies. If you post something to Reddit, it's worth taking your time to write something useful with hard numbers. Even then, there's a chance the random question about drop shipping submitted just ahead of you will get a ton of responses and you might get nothing but crickets.

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

#108

I've been promoting Opps Daily (a daily software opportunity newsletter) by sharing our growth stats weekly. You can check it out here http://www.oppsdaily.com/blog . I share the stats on hacker news, indiehackers, reddit, and the solo founder slack chat. Its been effective so far!

I signed up the other day. How often do you send out an email?

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

#109

Would 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…

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13551754 and marked it off-topic.

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

#110

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 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.

See: PartneringForCommunityCare.com for the pilot program the price point was $20/month (individuals) and $15/month (business with 5+ employees enrolled). The copay is $10 to see a P.A./R.N.P. or $25 to see the M.D.

Concierge/Direct Primary Care is a model of healthcare where the doctor cuts out the middleman (insurance companies), more and more primary care and pediatricians are considering these business models for their practice. Benefits generally include less staff, no billing/coding, no appeals to insurers, and generally less patients/more time with patients.

The practice we worked with believes it could easily grow and sustain 2,000 patients per location and we could replicate the business fairly easily by converting existing practices (more complicated due to legal and ethical concerns of existing patients using insurance) or scaling providers in-house, say like UBER with/without brick & mortar locations.

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