5 simple growth hacks for your startup

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Feb 23, 2018 / by
5 simple growth hacks for your startup

If you’ve just founded a startup, your goal should be to maximise your growth as quickly as possible. The faster you acquire users and generate sales, the faster you can move onto becoming a mature, sustainable enterprise.

Sean Ellis once stated: “A growth hacker is a person whose true north is growth.” Unlike traditional marketing, growth hacking requires thinking outside of the box and trying new things in order to generate fast results. Here are some simple growth hacks that you can leverage in your startup to take you to the next level.

1 – Collaborate within your niche

Instead of thinking of all companies in your niche as competitors, consider that they could also be collaborators. If a company is selling to a similar audience, yet has different product offerings there is an opportunity to cross promote your products or services. As an example, a company selling fishing equipment could easily help a company selling fishing instructional courses. If both companies promote to each other’s mailing lists, this can drive an instantaneous growth in sales.

2 – Find buyers on Twitter

Twitter usersIf you’re selling a product such as cat food, you can put the term “cat food” into Twitter’s search box to find potential buyers. While you might find some good customers, you’re also likely to find a bunch of idle accounts and spam that won’t ultimately benefit your business.

As an alternative approach, try entering search terms that indicate buying intent, such as “need cat food” or “best cat food”. People posting this kind of content want to know the best food for their feline companions, at which point you can help them out by starting a conversation.

3 – Boost your sign ups

With the WordPress plugin Viral Sign Ups, you can create a sign-up form that encourages new users to refer their friends to your service. Naturally, you will need some form of incentivisation such as a free product, but if you give away something valuable to encourage referrals, you’re likely to accumulate lots of them.

4 – Random acts of kindness

There is a reason why SquareSpace offers a free extension on you free trial and Dropbox sometimes provides you with increased storage space for no additional cost. Lots of online betting sites also provide free bets to their engaged users at random intervals to keep them engaged. Behaviour like this helps you to establish a warm connection with your engaged users, which keeps them coming back.

5 – Tell stories

It can often be difficult for new customers to connect the dots in terms of how your product or service will actually benefit their lives. Especially if you’re in a mundane niche, it’s hard to get people to feel an emotional connection to your service if they haven’t already tried it. To combat this issue, you can tell stories about your existing customers.

Square is a payments processing system – not exactly the most exciting type of business. However, when you see an exquisitely shot video of Woody the barber and hear about his backstory, you become enthralled and then start to become curious about Square. Compared to a monotone video about Square’s functionalities and services, a storytelling video is vastly superior for driving engagement.

Conclusion

Whatever you do, it’s important to hit the ground running. Not every tactic will work but that’s okay, because you only need one or two good tactics to start generating momentum. Chris Dreyer, CEO of rankings.io advocates reaching out to your network in order to make your first sales. He states:

I landed the first client for my company (Rankings.io) by leveraging my sphere of influence. I sent messages out to my entire network on LinkedIn as well as my friends and family.


Marketing a new business to your network is a common tactic for a lot of companies and sales professionals just starting off. The people that are close to you are often the easiest people to convert because they already know and trust you.

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