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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?

#121

Post by paskster »

logicallee wrote: post #112
logicallee wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I notice that you have made EUR 3 million in 2016 using a scalable hands-off model where you can turn adwords directly into cash without needing to own or touch any inventory, meet anyone, or have any infrastructure beyond a website, which you have built. You have also solved the chicken and egg problem, since high-quality companies will only take the time to craft thoughtful and serious searches if you have a pool o…

The replies I mentioned have been (rightfully) detached from this thread. I am adding this reply to make crystal-clear that the above is SATIRE about how hard it is for European companies to raise money from European investors. (I'm not a European VC.) You guys are killing it. I hope investors believe in you too.

Thanks ;)

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

#122

Post by logicallee »

paskster wrote: post #121
logicallee wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The replies I mentioned have been (rightfully) detached from this thread. I am adding this reply to make crystal-clear that the above is SATIRE about how hard it is for European companies to raise money from European investors. (I'm not a European VC.) You guys are killing it. I hope investors believe in you too.

Thanks ;)

As for my guess - is it true raising money is way harder than it should be, given your numbers? (And huge market.)

Or did you not have too much trouble and got fair valuations, terms, could close quickly etc?

(If you don't mind sharing.)

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

#123

Post by siquick »

twothamendment wrote: post #96
throwawaydbfif wrote: post #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 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.

Growth Hacking is more a technical version of marketing/user acquisition using techniques that a 'standard' marketer wouldn't be able to able to use because of a lack of programming skills.

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

#124

Post by petercooper »

garysieling wrote: post #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.

Thanks for the mention! :) However, people who email us with something to include tend to do even better with making it in or even getting highly featured. We are increasingly finding things we get first and feature then end up on HN or Reddit the next day, so we want to encourage that ;-)

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

#125

Post by exolymph »

brilliantcode wrote: post #62
rsweeney21 wrote: post #23

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…

holy shit this is by far the most valuable comment I came across of all time on HN

Allow me to make your day: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=patio11

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

#126

Post by thibauts »

shostack wrote: post #49
throwawaydbfif wrote: post #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 profi…

As a fellow experienced marketer I would implore you to not use the term "marketing guru." The word "guru" has a really bad connotation with all of the info product snake oil salesmen and wannabe marketers out there. The reality is that marketing is an increasingly specialized and technical domain requiring knowledge of coding, data, etc. and it can be hard enough as it is to help people trust we're not all scammers…

As a programmer I'd be really interested in knowing what kind of coding skills are useful to marketers. Could you give me examples of use cases and useful tools / languages ?

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

#128

Post by sparkzilla »

normster wrote: post #37

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.

I like your product. Very handy.

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

#129

Post by throwawaydbfif »

brilliantcode wrote: post #100
nanijoe wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What did you do to turn things around though?

I highly suggest this thread to be "stickied" or made aware of in someway. It's literally gold and this is exactly why toiling the jungles of HN comments is worth it-you discover gems that you can put into action.

:) I checked out your site, looks great...Very similar to our setup.

Two things I noticed. Your site can be made more optimized for highly impatient types. I recommend always showing a phone number that leads directly to a sales line with no wait, and a live chat bubble for those too skittish to give you any information.

I always found best results putting the phone number big at the top of the page and again near the contact form. Make it show a special tracked number when users come through ads and the business is open for calls, your regular office number for visitors that didn't come through ads, and a disposable phone number to your cellphone for people that originally came through an ad but tried to call when the business is closed. Make all calls coming through ads go directly to a real person. The justification for all this work is that you already paid good money for anyone that comes through ads so its financially worth a little spam to give them a direct line to a real person. You want your conversion rate as high as possible once you've already paid. If you are a local business use a local area code, 800 # for anything advertised nationally.

For the live chat bubble, make it automatically come up and say something friendly to anyone that has browsed site for more than X minutes or seen more than X pages. Make sure it only shows up when real people are available. Add something near to contact form like "or chat with us now" that automatically opens the bubble and notifies a real person of an incoming request.

In my experience you'll get around 20% of initial contact from calls and maybe 30% from live chat. A decent percentage of these will be people too lazy, paranoid, or old school to fill out your contact form. Email forms are increasingly used for annoying stuff like permission to view the rest of an article, so many users are weary of giving you a direct contact without knowing if their please will go into a black hole. The ability to contact immediately, through phone and especially live chat alleviates these concerns. It makes you real, legit in their minds, immediately.

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

#130

Post by johndavi »

We priced our product appropriately for our customer base and the value offered by our product: which is to say, an order of magnitude more costly than a typical VC-subsidized, "make it up in volume" startup approach.

This certainly resulted in the opposite of growth, raw-customer-count-wise, but it's led to a legitimate, sustainable and growing business; streamlined our maintenance and support costs; and focused our product roadmap.

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