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

I can't remember what Madison Avenue Ad man (aka Mad Men) is responsible for the quote "in tits we trust". Ogilvy ? It's a tasteless quote, but I can think of many companies, like GoDaddy, that use this strategy shamelessly at first. The links above are by no means that extreme, but I suspect it did help your marketing success.

Thinking of my own marketing, I don't even have a photo of a human being using our product. I'll work on that.

edit: added Mad Men reference.

And we make sure that our jobbers not only upload high quality pictures but also write their personal experience in a targeted and concise format. For example we now started other verticals such as temporary chefs and on these pages you see mostly middle aged men with cooking experience:

https://www.instaff.jobs/koeche-mieten/frankfurt

edit: same content but better english

http://tryoldster.com/new-york/experienced-marketing-consult...

And on this landingpage you show some of our "oldsters" who are based in New Work and who have marketing experience. And in addition you show your platforms USP on this page and create Call-to-action button on how to get in contact with an "oldster". You obviously have to check yourself what kind of businesses are in your target group, what keywords they would search and what kind of landingpage could attract them.

edit: same content, but reworded my english

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.

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 herrings below...

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 where the economics work. The economics work if the cost to generate a sale is 1/3 or less of the lifetime value of the customer. Even if it takes a lot of effort to generate the sale, if you have a predictable way to generate leads, and you know how many leads you need in order to produce a sale, and you make a good profit on that sale, you are golden. You can then ramp up your lead gen and you know your sales with grow faster. It doesn't take any luck to display more ads, send more emails or hire sales reps.

This is the strategy we used to grow from $0 to $1M in ARR in six months. We could then go to a VC and tell them that if they invested $X, we could turn that into $Y in ARR. It made fundraising pretty simple for us.

tl;dr Treat sales and marketing like a science and design a repeatable process.

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 profitability was even more than that.

The problem is finding a great marketing expert is just as hard as finding good coders. The company blew through countless consultants and 3 "marketing majors" with no returns until they found me and we turned it all around.

I would say marketing and coding are equally important for a start-up, easily the two most important things. If you have two founders one should be a marketing guru. If you don't your first employee should be.

Another thing is don't hire any marketing expert that can't code. The actual marketing setup is more than 50% coding. You need to find a coder that loves marketing

The reality is that marketing is an increasingly specialized and technical domain requiring knowledge of coding, data, etc. and it can be hard enough as it is to help people trust we're not all scammers (particularly a technical audience such as this one) and that there are in fact good marketers who have ethics and deliver results.

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 pages.

3) New tools. everything linked together to see where our sales were coming from. Phone system, website, live chat, in person. All of our leads funneled into one system. We could see what was getting people and what wasn't

4) Online advertising. Locally first, expand AD reach as campaign becomes more nationally competitive. Make sure all the tools you setup continue to track where all these leads are coming from

5) Better "convincing" of clients that we're legit. Company T-Shirts and swag. Hotel-type exaggerated pictures of our team and office. Meet the team page. Professional website like I mentioned earlier. FB, google maps, yellowpages, wherever we could get a free listing. Automated scheduling systems for client meetings, phone tree for calls, tons of previous work repurposed as marketing material for clients to see. Listing our bigger clients on our website. 800 phone #. All the hallmarks of a big successful business even though we weren't exactly gave clients a much bigger confidence in our abilities and enabled us to charge more.

6) Marketing toward high value targets-- we needed to get the ear of C level and VP's. Concentrating on the fact that we were a US company without outsourcing. Marketing to wealthy areas "doctorville" we called it. Targeted marketing to business corridors. We went deep, going as far as checking the AS of your IP address and whether any services were running on it. A surprising amount of the time would could link an IP back to a company, so we could quietly market to your company just from you visiting our site.

7) competitive research. Found our biggest local competitors. Quietly outbid them on all their ad keywords. Even more quietly made sure we had all the backlinks they did on search. Got a list of their clients one way or another, marketed directly to their clients already knowing their weaknesses from our clients who previously worked with those competitors. One competitor hosted their own servers, so I figured out who owned the IP and tracked ownership of the company through their email server. Another put their email address at the bottom of all public sites they wrote, a simple targeted google search returned all/most of their clients' sites. Another had a "client login" page setup on all of their sites that had a redirect to their main page. Searching for backlinks using SEO tools revealed most of these client sites.

Lots more. It took a lot of creative thinking and some failures :)

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.

#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.

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

My advice is to read Traction and apply the framework to test out as many possible strategies as possible. There are tons of other blogs and strategies about growth but I find Traction to have the most practical and actionable format. Plus, I like having a hard copy. I've probably bought 5 copies of it for friends.

Create a Trello board to track your experiments and progress. You will find something that moves the needle–BUT it might not be what you expect. For example, I've had tons of success at trade shows in past projects.

Good luck.

http://tractionbook.com

BetaList and Reddit have been a big driver of signups as they have the exact audience we are looking to help (startups) and a wide audience.

Blogging has also been a big part of getting signups. Creating helpful posts on Medium with a small product mention at the bottom brings in a good amount of the right people.

Twitter is great for driving traffic to the blog posts which then in turn gets people interested in us and our product. Buffer is awesome, and Quuu is a great service that has a community retweeting your tweet for a nominal fee.

Overall our landing page conversion rate is 29.8% right now, so driving the right traffic really matters.

Last fall we finally hired a marketing consultant, built out a marketing website with a contact form, and are trying out some different pricing models. We've seen fairly consistent interest, which I'm reading as pent-up demand.

Lessons learned: I think the word-of-mouth angle was good for us at first. By keeping a closer control on our customers we were able to really make the product solid and understand the customer needs in depth, and how to segment the market with pricing and features. I wish we'd flipped the switch on the marketing website sooner, but there were benefits from waiting. The number one lesson if you're going to do that is give potential customers who hear about you a way to contact you—otherwise word of mouth has zero benefit. (I realize these probably seem obvious to most, but our market is a little niche and knowing that we wanted to market primarily to the national customers instead of their local affiliates pointed us in certain directions early on.)

This means that you have to do things very, very cheaply. Think of each growth hack as a single tactic. Execute in < 10 hours of work. Push into the wild.

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 when one of them hits, you exploit it.

Growth is a process, one very much dependent on speed. Think in terms of a growth system, not growth tactic or hack.

(this is what I call a strategy)

TicketTitan.com - Patent pending software for price (legal fee) determination on traffic ticket cases. Developed in-house for my former employer and cannibalized (automated) his business was gained through future referrals, SEO and some Google ad word spend. Liquidation event.

Partnering for Community Care - Low cost concierge/Direct Primary Care for a physician office. Specifically not meant to cannibalize the existing practice/patients, but experiment to determine fit of business model/moving away from insurance based practice. Word of mouth to uninsured patients. Local hotel/restaurant owners caught word and filled up the available ~100 slots very quick.

MedicareMTM.com - patent pending practice management for medication therapy management (MTM). Initially had a 6 month pilot green lit by Walmart (thru LinkedIn cold contact), this was stopped due to a conflict. Currently, set up a pilot with an independent pharmacy and about half dozen local providers, the pharmacy owner started a network over ~1,000 Indian owned independent pharmacies...so again the natural word of mouth approach.

These are just some examples, and I know they may not fit into the true definition of startup. Still I think it is important to keep an open mind about the specific industry of the startup/business and not apply a one size fits all approach.

I find that people also refer me the first week they sign up. Which is something that is a bit of a hack. I heard this advice a couple years ago and I thought it was crazy but it totally works and is awesome. Someone finally made the decision to buy my service and it's at that point that they are most excited about it and love to refer people.

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.

Consider this a testament to how exceedingly useful your free service is. I was actually able to run my whole gambit of tests with the free service, probably using 100+ addresses, and used one of the alias domains to avoid blocking, though it took a few tries before I found one.

Now a paying customer :)

The other half of the story was that Syncplicity basically replaced network file shares for small Mom and Pop companies that didn't want to hire a consultant every time the network file server. Its premium support was much easier and cheaper to work with than bringing in a consultant.

So, I would summarize as: Target a niche that your competitor isn't targeting, and at the same time, find a product to replace that your customers will be happy to see go.

You can check it out here http://www.oppsdaily.com/blog.

I share the stats on hacker news, indiehackers, reddit, and the solo founder slack chat.

Its been effective so far!

We're experimenting with Instagram stories on our latest project: JQBX (https://www.instagram.com/jqbx.fmhttps://www.jqbx.fm). Having good content lets you get more eyeballs on your stories which, so far for us at least, haven't driven people to unfollow since the feed content is of a high quality.

And I think Ralph Waldo Emerson obviously never built any mousetraps and has no idea what he's talking about.

Nonetheless, the saying does seem to apply well if you replace "Mousetrap" with "Donut" and "World" with "Portland".