Hot growth hacking tips with Nate Barnwell: Sean had helped a number of internet companies achieve incredible growth, and a few of them even had an IPO. Needless to say, Sean became the guy that the valley went to when they needed to grow their user base, and he would take equity and payment in exchange for his services. He essentially became a one man growth shop, setting up systems, processes, and mindsets, that could be maintained after he left. Eventually, he would hand over the keys to his growth machine to someone else, and he would ride off into the sunset. This is where the problems started.
Created in 2013 by Stewart Butterfield, Slack is a messaging and collaboration tool for enterprises. It allows company teams to chat and share in real-time. Today, Slack has over 12 million daily active users with more than 100 thousand paid customers. When designing Slack, however, Butterfield had no intention of being a big hit. Slack was created for covering the communication needs of Butterfield’s team during the design process of Glitch, a games app that can now be considered a fail. From this fail, however, came great success as the team saw how valuable Slack was to them. The market needed such a product where internal team members could communicate easily and exchange project materials quickly, and Butterfield already had one. Since Slack was created for users in the first place with no intention of profit and turned out to be a great product, further development continued accordingly. Slack team always took customer feedback as guidance, replying to every email they received and examining every ticket carefully. This initiation pushed Slack to be a great example of product-led growthWhat is product-led growth? Product Led Growth (PLG) is a business development strategy that leverages product usage to drive customer acquisitions, conversions, and market expansion. It places product on the focus of businesses.
Nate Barnwell growth hacking strategies: Some growth strategies are tailored to be completely self-sustainable. They require an initial push, but ultimately, they rely primarily (if not solely) on users’ enthusiasm to keep them going. One strategy that fits that bill is the viral loop. The basic premise of a viral loop is straightforward: Someone tries your product. They’re offered a valuable incentive to share it with others. They accept and share with their network. New users sign up, see the incentive for themselves, and share with their networks. Repeat. For instance, a cloud storage company trying to get off the ground might offer users an additional 500 MB for each referral. Ideally, your incentive will be compelling enough for users to actively and enthusiastically encourage their friends and family to get on board.At its best, a viral loop is a self-perpetuating acquisition machine that operates 24/7/365. That said, viral loops are not guaranteed to go viral, and they’ve become less effective as they’ve become more commonplace. But the potential is still there.
Startups, for example, often struggle to determine which marketer they should hire first. A growth marketer is a good bet — especially if they already have strong brand guidelines in place. (Setting tone and voice, messaging, and value propositions is not typically something a growth marketer will do.) “They are especially impactful at early-stage companies where there isn’t enough conviction to invest heavily into one given channel, due to lack of validation,” Sookraj told Nate Barnwell. “[Growth marketers] are especially impactful at early-stage companies.” But startups aren’t the only ones who see value in growth marketers. Enterprises should consider adding growth marketers as well, says Sookraj.
Once you’ve built a testing habit within the growth team (ideally 2–3 tests per week), it’s time to start trying to maximise impact. To drive full impact, you’ll need to be able to test across the entire customer journey (acquisition channels, new customer onboarding, referral hooks in product, etc.). This is where things start getting hard. The highest impact part of the customer journey is usually testing across the first customer experience. One benchmark to consider is that the fastest growing consumer apps generally invest 50% of the product development resources in the first customer experience. It makes sense, because there is no second customer experience if you don’t nail the first one. Find additional details at Nathan Barnwell.
Once you’ve determined what you’re growing and why you’re growing, the next step is to determine how much you’ll be growing. These goals should be based on your endgame aspirations of where you ideally want your organization to be, but they should also be achievable and realistic – which is why setting a goal based on industry research is so valuable. Lastly, take the steps to quantify your goals in terms of metrics and timeline. Aiming to “grow sales by 30% quarter-over-quarter for the next three years” is much clearer than “increasing sales.” Next, outline how you’ll achieve your growth goals with a detailed growth strategy. Again – we suggest writing out a detailed growth strategy plan to gain the understanding and buy-in of your team.