How can startups with very little money start to get users? What are some of the growth hacks you’ve used or seen used (nice or not so nice). For example, I noticed in the thread about Jekalo that they bought email lists. Any other strategies?
1 Like
It’s about creating engagement channels to connect to potential users. You will need to create tonnes of content as part of your growth activities. The concept is Growth Hacking. I’ve been overtly simplistic here. Startups need to learn what it involves.
Bulk Sms!!! Buy Numbers!!!
One of the days, I had gone like 48 hrs straight without much sleep. Stopped over at Ghana High, Onikan, to soup up, a pretty young lawyer walked in for her fix too as I was about chewing on my last piece. (it’s a court district around there, plenty of lawyers stop over to meat their toms)
She settled close to my table, it was kinda lonely at the joint that hour.
I changed seat, and began engaging her on this new service needing early testers blah blah. Proposition ended something like; “I’d like your mobile number to test it out right now”. That was when she walked out, I think she even left her takeaway.
I almost shouted after her that; “…i can see your wedding ring, and wasnt even, faintly, trying to hit on you”.
If I had waited for her to return or had tried to get her takeout to her, I’d have been charged with harassment.That would have surely gotten me charged for double harassment.
At any rate, I’d live in her stories as the guy with the most unbelievable pickup line ever. #mylife
Moral of the story; there are ways to attempt things that don’t scale, my story isn’t one of them.
Anyways, wouldn’t stop me from pulling a flash mob to get people’s attention for my business tomorrow.
Life of a startup founder!
1 Like
Funny tale. Flash mob or freak mob?
Yup. Corrected!
May be some day I will share on this. Today is not that day. We have bootstrapped for over a year now. Acquired customers with very minimal advertising budget. It’s tough, but doable. It makes you super creative and find answers where none existed in the first place. Sometimes, growth is right there staring at us, but because we are looking at growth hacks funded startups are executing, we miss the cheap hacks.
5 Likes
Please when you decide to share, kindly mention me
Create a referral system, the best way to grow is through your existing customers. If your current customers are satisfied with your service, a good number of them will be willing to spread the word.
1 Like
I don’t think everyone need hundred or probably thousands of naira or dollars to create a good marketing strategy.
It is totally dependent on the market that you are operating from. Referrals for example seems to work magic from the fashion business; just deliver on a great product, with nice customer support and good pricing.
I personally think that it’s not about the money, it never has been about the money.
I think growth hacking (and all performance marketing really) is about testing as many different channels as possible with the hopes that one or more will get some traction (bring in loads of leads for cheap). Dave McClure talks about pirate metrics (AARRR). Optimizing acquisition, activation, retention, referrral, revenue. In practice, as loads of people have already mentioned, this really does depend on your market, model and product. Startup marketing is often scrappy, doing things that can come across as spammy and one of the major challenges for startup marketers these days is getting in front of the right propsects with the right messages in a non-intrusive way. So for example instead of buying emails and cellphone numbers you may use apps like followerwonk to search Twitter bios for your keywords, to ID prospects who you can follow and add to lists. @mentioning and direct messaging on Twitter may also seem a little spammy but they could work too. For acquisition we do a lot of directory scraping with apps like Kimono and import.io for propsect URLs, running those URLs through URLProfiler to find all associated emails and social profiles, and then building custom audiences for ads that we put up on Facebook, Twitter, and the Google Display Network (for the display network we use Adroll’s CRM audience - email upload feature). I spend loads of time trauling growthhackers.com for growth strategies and tools. You’ll prob find all the advice you need there. Hope this helps!
8 Likes
Thanks for this
Search Engine Optimisation
cater to an under served market, look for the guys people are ignoring and use that as ur test ground. Chances are there are opportunities for partnerships or merchandising lingering there.