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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?

#151

Post by [deleted] »

rsweeney21 wrote: post #115
cynusx wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

did you guys use experienced sales people?

Prior to product market fit, the founders need to be selling. Once you have product market fit, you need people who already know how to sell your type of product into your target market. That was a mistake that we made. We started by hiring smart people and trying to let them figure out how to sell. I strongly recommend NOT doing that. In startupland, time is your greatest enemy and you don't have time for people to…

[deleted]

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

#152

Post by DrScump »

rsweeney21 wrote: post #142
zepolen wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This goes completely contrary to your original comment. Your growth hack/shortcut was in the end, to poach a sales guy from a competitor who had clout with a bunch of customers in your field.

He didn't have any clout with customers in our field and certainly didn't bring a book of business with him. In sales, your current and prospective customer list is considered IP of the company you work for. What he brought was his skills in selling SaaS B2B, which comes from experience. I don't think hiring someone with experience is normally considered a growth hack. It's probably common sense, but we were too dumb…

There were no customers common to both populations?

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

#153

Post by 1290cc »

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.

Love your product. I use it to sign up for everything from mortgage applications to forums to absolutely anything that I never want to be bothered with again.

My account is johnconnor@mailinator.com

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

#154

Post by beaconstudios »

zanek wrote: post #120
beaconstudios wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

true, but marketing is not superseded completely by product quality and product/market fit. You also need to make people aware of your product and make a strong value proposition.

I know everyone may say these are outliers, but Google, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, etc all had ZERO marketing and acquired millions of users. Part of me thinks that alot of what people are saying about marketing applies to companies with a weak product or little differentiation. A monster, highly wanted product does appear to be the the exception

Google was the first actually-decent search engine - it allowed people to access the internet. All the others are social networks and largely rely on the network effect and being the one that becomes trendy, and thus aren't valid comparisons.

If you can spot and build the next Google then you may not need marketing, but those opportunities are rare.

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

#155

Post by xiaoma »

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…

Congrats! It sounds like you found the right channels for your business (at least for a while).

Direct sales and paid ads are both solid channels. Others that I've seen work are SEO, Content Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Partnerships, API Integrations, Meetups, Conferences, Engineering as Marketing, Viral Design, Affiliates, PR, Newsjacking, Branson-style Stunts, User Incentives (like Paypal giving people $20 for signing up), etc...

What works depends a lot on what your price points are, what your competition is doing and your stage of growth. The worst thing is when a startup's ideal channel—and it usually is just one or maybe two channels that will work really well—happens to be one that the founders dismiss without even realizing it. In fact, a lot of technical founders would dismiss the exact kind of direct sales that worked so well for you.

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

#156

Post by logicallee »

paskster wrote: post #132
logicallee wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

We tried raising money for 5 months last year and we talked to partners from about 20 European VC, but we were not successful. We got no or low-balling offers at best. I guess we were missing what people call "social proof". This was our pitch deck by the way (not meant for marketing but for context): http://www.instaff.jobs/download/InStaff_Pitch_Deck.pdf We don't need money, because we have been cashflow positive a…

Thank you - I knew it. :)

You don't have to follow up, but if you do: what valuation were you seeking and what's the highest low-ball offer you received?

For me the lowest valuation given your numbers and model would be $10m - but I am certain you were seeking a much lower valuation, and did not even get that. So what were you seeking and what offer did you get?

(By the way, the way I analyze your story it's not a social proof question: it's that you weren't in silicon valley.)

If you don't want to reply here you can email me at the address in my profile. Thanks.

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

#158

Post by brilliantcode »

throwawaydbfif wrote: post #129
brilliantcode wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

another actionable gem this is great stuff!

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

#159

Post by minhajuddin »

mazlix wrote: post #38
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!

Happy to hear that. Do you have any feedback on how it can be improved? I am currently planning on spending some time to make simpleform better.

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

#160

Post by urahara »

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…

What specific coding skills do you think a marketer should have and what kind of things to code?
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