Find a Growth Hacker for Your Startup. Once startups are ready to scale, their biggest challenge is often hiring someone capable of leading the growth charge.
A marketer with the right talents and approach can kick some serious ass once product-market fit and an efficient conversion/monetization process have been proven. But the problem is that most startups try to hire for skills and experience that are irrelevant, while failing to focus on the essential few skills. Typical job descriptions are often laden with generic but seemingly necessary requirements like an ability to establish a strategic marketing plan to achieve corporate objectives, build and manage the marketing team, manage outside vendors, etc.
Generally speaking, the job requirements/skills mentioned above are not paramount for startups in or before the early growth phase. After product-market fit and an efficient conversion process, the next critical step is finding scalable, repeatable and sustainable ways to grow the business. Zero to Product/Market Fit (Presentation) at andrewchen. The First Step To Building A Growth Machine. A machine is built to produce an ever growing engaged user base.
The machine process the tactics. The process makes the machine. Traction vs Growth. Traction The traction phrase is where more startups are.
GoalThe one and only goal should be to find product-market fit among some audience segment. Part of this is understanding how large that audience segment is to make sure you can build a compelling business. MetricPlain and simple your eye should be on retention. If your product does not retain users, there is no point in growing the top of the funnel. Growth vs Marketing vs Product. The topic of growth has been more polarizing than I would have ever expected.
The animosity largely surrounds the use of the term “growth hacking.” Growth Hacking. Growth Hacking Basics. Understanding the key variables in Viral Marketing. A short study of this web site reveals that a hugely important factor for success in startup companies is finding ways to acquire customers at a low cost.
In the Business Models section, we looked at the perfect business model: Viral customer acquisition with good monetization. However viral growth turns out to be an elusive goal, and only a very small number of companies actually achieve true viral growth. In 2005, I invested in a company called Tabblo (acquired by HP in 2007), and had the good fortune to work with an outstanding entrepreneur, Antonio Rodriguez.
Never Take Your Eyes Off This Hacker Metric. If you’re like me, you’ve had enough of the Facebook IPO story.
For tech entrepreneurs struggling to build stuff, the cacophony of recent press is just more noise. Vanity Metrics vs. Actionable Metrics – Guest Post by Eric Ries. Vanity metrics: good for feeling awesome, bad for action.
(photo source: UK Guardian) This is a guest post by serial entrepreneur Eric Ries. He was most recently co-founder and CTO of IMVU, which has more than 20 million registered users and generates $1,000,000+ in revenue per month. Eric is also a venture advisor to Kleiner Perkins. How do you get to $1,000,000 per month in sales? Here is just one business-changing example, taken from the outstanding “How IMVU Learned its way to $10M a year” on Venture Hacks… IMVU learned its way to product/market fit. Enter Eric Ries… Vanity Metrics vs. The only metrics that entrepreneurs should invest energy in collecting are those that help them make decisions. When you hear companies doing PR about the billions of messages sent using their product, or the total GDP of their economy, think vanity metrics.
Don’t Forget Your Logged Out Users. I find myself saying this quite often these days to entrepreneurs and their product teams.
It's something that I've noticed working with leading social platforms like Etsy, Twitter, Tumblr, and others. Services such as these have a large number of their users accessing the service regularly on a logged out basis. I can visit my friend Daryn's tumblog without logging into Tumblr and often do. My son can visit LeBron James' Twitter without logging in and often does. My daughter can check out vintage items on Etsy without logging in and usually does. How to Make Your Startup Go Viral The Pinterest Way. On Thanksgiving, Pinterest’s co-founder Ben Silbermann sent an email to his entire user base saying thanks.
It was fitting, as Pinterest was born two years ago on Thanksgiving day 2009. Ben had been working on a website with a few friends, and his girlfriend came up with the name while they were watching TV. Pinterest officially launched to the world 4 months later. Some startups go crazy with hype and users right after launch. And some don’t. Take a look at Pinterest’s one-year traffic on Compete from Oct 2010 to Oct 2011, which is the picture in this post, and shows Pinterest rising from 40,000 to 3.2 million monthly unique visitors.
Backing out of Compete’s numbers, we see Pinterest grew about 50% month over month from a base of zero since its inception (on average, smoothing the curve). Note these numbers are approximations and also do not count the significant traffic the service sees from mobile (Pinterest’s app currently takes the #6 social spot in the iTunes store). Growth - Brian K Balfour · Traction vs Growth.