181–187 of 187 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hi, I am a coder and want to get better at marketing. Can you shoot me an email as well? Thanks!
At this point I think I'm just going to start the blog I always planned but never did :). I've got about 10 pretty long articles buried in my docs folder about marketing and a bunch of other nonsense. I was never CEO/VP of a company but I've always done my best to "see the forest through the trees" with this kind of stuff.
I'm not sure whether you'd count me: I went from 0 to 10 people in about 5 years (hardly massive growth), there was no secret, just a process of being conservative, slowly growing each year, attempting to full utilize all resources we have, and trying to bring in contracts which will support us both now and in the future.
10 employees or customers?
My 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…
(In marketing, the world of "everything" is pretty substantial, and few of the channels can be properly tested cheaply: paid and organic search, paid and organic social (which includes many different platforms), email, old-school (e.g., print, radio, and TV) media buys, ...the list goes on.)
A smart and experienced marketer will know the tools and techniques for deconstructing what channels are the most successful for direct competitors. They'll also be able to figure out the niche channels where the target audience "hangs out" that competitors haven't yet discovered.
tl;dr: Don't try everything. Hire a marketer who will help you skip the guessing game and target the already-proven channels in your market.
I'm not sure whether you'd count me: I went from 0 to 10 people in about 5 years (hardly massive growth), there was no secret, just a process of being conservative, slowly growing each year, attempting to full utilize all resources we have, and trying to bring in contracts which will support us both now and in the future.
10 employees or customers?