What is Growth Hacking and What Does That Mean for Startups?
Let's take a look at the top five growth hacking software techniques. I want to talk to you about the top give growth hacking strategies. When we say growth hacking, what do we mean? Growth hacking is when you can spend the least amount of money and get the biggest amount of return. By return we mean the number of people that will go to your website and actually purchase or learn more about your company. A growth hacker is someone who understands optimization and knows how to test variations on websites.
A growth hacker really understands the importance of connecting to the consumer in a short amount of time. Because you only get between 5-10 seconds, to capture the attention, desire or want of the consumer, a growth hacker has to move quickly and adapt to make the consumer want to buy the product.
You can actually spend $0 dollars and have an optimal return of people buying your product. Here are the five free growth hacking strategies. Number one, add social proof to your website. Social proof means showing case studies of people that have used your product and what the results were.
Growth Hacking: what startups can spend the least amount of money to get the biggest amount of return.
You need to go find somebody who can become a product evangelist for your product.
You might not have already sold your product. You need to go find somebody who can become a product evangelist for your product. Maybe you're a subscription service or an online service. Maybe you're selling a product that is shipped directly to the consumer. You've got to find people that will use your product and ask them for a brief review on the website or have a video of a few consumers testifying about your product.
Social proof is something we identify. Even going back to intense marketing courses, you know that there's a bandwagon effect, where once someone sees someone else using a product, you want to do it too. Add social proof that literally costs nothing to do, other than finding people that you can profile on your website. That will give the end consumer an idea of how they might also benefit.
The second thing is create a 15 second signup process. That's the absolute maximum amount of time that you have to get somebody engaged and should be the maximum amount of time it takes for someone to sign up to your website. However, if you're charging for a website, meaning you've got a product they have to buy, and they have to sign up for it, it will take longer than 15 seconds. You should have a website and UI/UX apps, User Interface User Experience, process. It should take no more than 15 seconds for somebody to fully signup, get an e-mail and start engaging in your platform or website. Anything more than 15 seconds will result in a big drop off; the user just flees and is not interested. Get your signup process down to 15 seconds. You can test that with friends, with family, whomever. Make sure they're critical and honest with you about how long it took to signup.
Get your signup process down to 15 seconds.
The third thing is build in viral tools. Let's say you have a freemium site, and one of the ways in which the user can sign up is they go to your landing page. They say I'm going to subscribe with my e-mail, because this service, or this product looks cool. Well, you can create a simple and free landing page where in order for them to get off the wait list, they have to actually share a custom link that they get.
You can actually put up a landing page for your site and then have an e-mail signup box, which is free for the user. In order for them to get off the wait list, they have to share their link. They get priority access. A company that did a great job with this was Robin Hood, which is a stock trading platform. They actually built in a viral way to get thousands of users off their wait list. You signup for free. Get on the wait list and then share the custom link. Then you would get bumped up based on the number of people who signup. Look at viral tools and how you can use those for your startup.
The fourth thing is to write content. Particularly content that is worthy of being shared. Often, you have to spend money to make money by writing content about your particular niche, your industry, or whatever you're interested in. You will start to, not only be found on Google, but have other people share and identify you as the thought leader, or somebody who understands what they're buying. Write content. I recommend writing at least one article a week that has five to ten pointers about your particular industry.
If you think that if you build it and the customers will come without any effort on your part, then you're absolutely wrong.
Let's say you're selling lawn mowers. You need to become the expert on lawn mowers. You've got a site or a blog, and you're writing types of engines, types of motors, or the best type of gas. Write at least one article a week, which comes out to roughly 50 articles a year, that are optimized and shared on your blog or website.
Now again, the last of the top five free growth strategies is do things that don't scale. Now, you're probably wondering what I mean here, particularly because we're doing a course on startups, whose main goal is to scale and make revenue. I'll give you an example. AirBnB, which is now a multi-billion dollar company, actually had a brilliant and growth hacker mindset from the beginning. With just 5 or 10 people at their office, they had people that were literally going on Craigslist and finding people that were listing their location, their space to rent, their house or apartment.
They would reach out to them individually and bring up the fact that AirBnB was a great option. It took months. Everyone thinks that AirBnB was an overnight success. That is absolutely not true. AirBnB did things that did not scale. If you think this stuff just happens, where if you build it and they'll come, you're absolutely wrong. Every company - Dropbox, AirBnB, even bigger companies out there like Uber - had to hit the ground running and doing things that don't scale. I hope those were helpful in terms of growth hacking strategies.