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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?

#71

Post by 79d697i6fdif »

blakes wrote: post #50
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…

This is good stuff. I feel like a lot of these strategies could be used with small bootstrapped businesses with some tweaking. Especially #5, appearing legit is too often ignored in smaller businesses.

We were bootstrapped :) . Old school company that had been around for 20+ years, just needed a kick in the pants since advertising/marketing has changed immensely since the dawn of the internet.

#5 is a killer for so many places, maybe the most common big mistake. This is one place where "fake it till you make it" is absolutely mandatory for success. Selling yourself as a "freelancer" devalues everything you do. Selling yourself as a startup is similarly dangerous. Having the cutesy small business/startup vibe might sound appealing to customers and the valley but it makes you look disorganized and unstable to big successful businesses. These are the very customers willing and able to throw lots of money around.

I cringed at GitLab's unnecessary transparency recently because it makes their vulnerability and management missteps all more apparent. Their mistake is the kind of shit where the better choice from a business perspective is to be reasonably honest then give all your customers a free month or two so they stop talking about it. Their absolutely transparency exposes a lot of internal politics and missteps, especially mentioning people by name, A HUGE no-no in any kind of big business. If I was fortune 500, hell even INC 500, I would run away as fast as possible.

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

#72

Post by 79d697i6fdif »

antoniuschan99 wrote: post #53
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…

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.

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

#73

Post by devopsproject »

adamqureshi wrote: post #35
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…

Daym! its a free strategy brief! Thank You.

Isn't most of this common sense stuff?

1) Modern website with seo

2) produce compelling content

3) reduce redundant tools and streamline processes

4) advertise your product

5) advertise your business

6) knowing your customers and decision makers and advertising appropriately

7) understanding your competition

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

#74

Post by paskster »

olkid wrote: post #44
paskster wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Can you comment more on the Call-to-action button. Does the button at the bottom of the page get the most clicks? Thank you for sharing your strategy.

There is a lot of content on the internet about proper call-to-action buttons (short: CTA). But I will try to give you my experience:

1.) The first CTA should be above-the-fold, visible to users right away without scrolling.

2.) If it is a longer page, the the page should contain multiple CTAs, so the user does not need to "scroll back" up.

3.) The CTAs should be visible and standing out from the rest of the content

The label of the CTA is very important. We use "Unverbindliche Buchungsanfrage" which can be roughly translated to "Non-binding booking request". We try to convey, that clicking on the button is risk-free and free-of-charge.

The first CTA on the page gets the most clicks, since a lot of customers do not scroll down.

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

#75

Post by brilliantcode »

79d697i6fdif wrote: post #36
DenisM wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

please email me too! mine is in profile.

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

#76

Post by brilliantcode »

devopsproject wrote: post #73
adamqureshi wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Daym! its a free strategy brief! Thank You.

Isn't most of this common sense stuff? 1) Modern website with seo 2) produce compelling content 3) reduce redundant tools and streamline processes 4) advertise your product 5) advertise your business 6) knowing your customers and decision makers and advertising appropriately 7) understanding your competition

you'd be surprised at how little of common sense is applied in the real world.

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

#77

Post by ezekg »

sedzia wrote: post #16

Sending out coupons, kidding. For a niche API platform like ours ( https://voucherify.io ) getting SEO right seems to be the best "growth hack". Other than that, top-notch customer service does wonders.

I really like your site. I have an API-based service for software licensing. How important has language bindings/SDKs been for developer on-boarding? Just curious, as I don't have bindings ready and have detected a little bit of friction because of it. I also don't have an admin dashboard yet. Joys of releasing a beta early. :)

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

#78

Post by detaro »

throwaway-6006 wrote: post #47

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…

Having an gmail address in your profile that contains "HN" or "YC" really isn't "falsely suggesting a YC affiliation".

It suggests "I want to keep my real address/identity private and created on specially to be reachable on HN", which is a completely sensible thing to do.

And even if you really weren't sure, just asking (or contacting the mods) would have been the thing to do.

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

#79

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway-6006 wrote: post #47

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…

[deleted]

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

#80

Post by logicallee »

detaro wrote: post #78
throwaway-6006 wrote: post #47

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…

Having an gmail address in your profile that contains "HN" or "YC" really isn't "falsely suggesting a YC affiliation". It suggests "I want to keep my real address/identity private and created on specially to be reachable on HN", which is a completely sensible thing to do. And even if you really weren't sure, just asking (or contacting the mods) would have been the thing to do.

Thanks.

I think it's not so bad that he didn't initially notice the satirical angle, so I did edit the original comment to clearly reference my reply which explains it (in case anyone missed it). But I wish he'd edit his comment to be more fair.

For what it's worth, another comment I made recently (on "An Email Thread Between a Developer and Gigster") was in earnest, i.e. I would not mind getting that exact email as a developer, but could be taken as satire.

So I think it's always fair to ask for satire to be pointed out explicitly. See Poe's law.[1]

In this case though I was just making a satirical point about raising money from European VC's. (To me it is obvious and I just don't feel the need to edit it in any way, as explained in my reply.)

There are always a few clues as to whether something is being written in earnest or as satire, and if you read carefully you can usually figure it out. In this case, you can tell it's satire due to the glowing praise and then complete and final, non-sequitur hard pass, in a way that doesn't make sense in the context of the thread. It has to have another layer of meaning. I considered adding something obvious but I wanted the satire to remain fair and nuanced. This may be why it was taken seriously.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law

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