19 ms·
Ask HN: What's your top growth strategy that helped grow your startup?
- fairpx 10y agoFor us, running http://fairpixels.co http://fairpixels.co (a logo design boutique), the one thing that generated the most leads and projects by far was one of our side-projects called: http://logodust.com http://logodust.com, a place where we started open sourcing unused logo designs. It quickly got featured by some major publications and it provides a steady stream of clients.
- r0fl 10y agoLots of hard work, no unnecessary spending, and reinvesting 100% of the profits for several years. Works every time.
- applecore 10y agoYou want to grow your startup? It's much easier when you Make Something People Want.
- beaconstudios 10y agotrue, but marketing is not superseded completely by product quality and product/market fit. You also need to make people aware of your product and make a strong value proposition.
- gsylvie 10y agoExactly. I often think of the famous Ralph Waldo Emerson saying, "Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door." 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".
- zanek 10y agoI know everyone may say these are outliers, but Google, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, etc all had ZERO marketing and acquired millions of users. Part of me thinks that alot of what people are saying about marketing applies to companies with a weak product or little differentiation. A monster, highly wanted product does appear to be the the exception
- beaconstudios 10y agoGoogle was the first actually-decent search engine - it allowed people to access the internet. All the others are social networks and largely rely on the network effect and being the one that becomes trendy, and thus aren't valid comparisons. If you can spot and build the next Google then you may not need marketing, but those opportunities are rare.
- chrischattin 10y agoGood old fashioned sales and word of mouth.
- ezekg 10y agoI'm learning this the hard way. I thought the hardest part was developing the product.
- devopsproject 10y ago"If you build it, they will come." should be "If you build it, they will come, after you tell them what it does"
- ci5er 10y ago> I thought the hardest part was developing the product. I'm curious: Why did you think that? There are articles, from time-to-time, that decry this notion, and yet I find that young/first-time entrepreneurs often think this. Since it's such a common notion - I've become generally increasingly curious about how it (this idea) is spread. How it gets into people's heads. Any thoughts?
- ezekg 10y agoYou also read time and time again of a developer building a project they've put little marketing effort into banking them 5k/mo while allowing them to quit their full time job. I think after putting a huge amount of time and effort into a project, you just kind of convince yourself that it's good enough to sell itself.
- ci5er 10y agoThat's a pretty good point. Still, I think it's relatively rare (statistically, out of all those who attempt it), unless they themselves are active among the community of users that adopters -- and even then stories of developers building developer tools in return for almost zero donations are not uncommon. Thanks!
- pryelluw 10y agoFocusing on providing value.
- jscheel 10y agoThis is a good read: https://www.groovehq.com/blog/focus https://www.groovehq.com/blog/focus. Remember though, every company is different. What works for one may not work for another.
- throwawaydbfif 10y agoIf your product doesn't suck and it won't sell you suck at marketing. "Growth hacking" is just a SV koolaid rebranding of marketing. 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
- nanijoe 10y agoWhat did you do to turn things around though?
- 79d697i6fdif 10y ago1) Remade website to be more professional looking, faster, more focused towards SEO, mobile friendly. I could write many pages on this :) but following online guides will get you in the ballpark 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 :)
- paskster 10y agoWe are creating an online marketplace for short term work in Germany (https://www.instaff.jobs https://www.instaff.jobs). Businesses can publish their jobs on our platform, jobbers apply with their profile and then these businesses can book the jobbers online. We take care of quality management and employment overhead (working contracting, payroll accounting, etc.). We made close to 3 Mill. EUR revenue in 2016. We acquire 90 % of our customers via SEO and about 10 % via Google Adwords. We don't do any direct sales. Our #1 growth strategy was creating well designed and highly targeted landingpages for all relevant keywords. For example if potential customers search for certain type of jobbers in certain German cities, these are some of our landingpages: https://en.instaff.jobs/fair-hostesses-agency/frankfurt https://en.instaff.jobs/fair-hostesses-agency/frankfurt https://en.instaff.jobs/fair-hostesses-agency/berlin https://en.instaff.jobs/fair-hostesses-agency/berlin https://www.instaff.jobs/promotion-agentur/stuttgart https://www.instaff.jobs/promotion-agentur/stuttgart https://www.instaff.jobs/catering-personal-agentur/hamburg https://www.instaff.jobs/catering-personal-agentur/hamburg
- louprado 10y agoSo include glamour shots of young attractive women on your landing pages when possible. Got it! :) 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.
- paskster 10y agoWe are mainly targeting short term jobs for exhibition, events and promotion right now. 80 % of the time, customers book young females for these jobs. So your are right, that we show "young attractive women" on a lot of landing pages, but this is more a result of our business model. The comparison to GoDaddy is not fair, since it has no relation to their business model, that they show young females. 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 https://www.instaff.jobs/koeche-mieten/frankfurt edit: same content but better english
- gwbas1c 10y agohttps://www.syncplicity.com/ https://www.syncplicity.com/ took off when it targeted a niche that Dropbox didn't: business users. 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.
- hamhamed 10y agoPartnerships with other startups for us. Find where your customers are chilling at, and create a partnership or promotion to target them
- scraft 10y agoI'm not sure whether you'd count me: I went from 0 to 10 people in about 5 years (hardly massive growth), there was no secret, just a process of being conservative, slowly growing each year, attempting to full utilize all resources we have, and trying to bring in contracts which will support us both now and in the future.
- sedzia 10y agoSending out coupons, kidding. For a niche API platform like ours (https://voucherify.io https://voucherify.io) getting SEO right seems to be the best "growth hack". Other than that, top-notch customer service does wonders.
- ezekg 10y agoI really like your site. I have an API-based service for software licensing. How important has language bindings/SDKs been for developer on-boarding? Just curious, as I don't have bindings ready and have detected a little bit of friction because of it. I also don't have an admin dashboard yet. Joys of releasing a beta early. :)
- cdiamand 10y agoI've been promoting Opps Daily (a daily software opportunity newsletter) by sharing our growth stats weekly. You can check it out here http://www.oppsdaily.com/blog 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!
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- minhajuddin 10y agoI am lucky to be in a position to have a free version of the app (https://getsimpleform.com/ https://getsimpleform.com/) before building a better paid version https://liveformhq.com/ https://liveformhq.com/ . Most of my conversions come from the link on the free version of the site.
- mazlix 10y agoI just want to thank you for making getsimpleform. I've used it in multiple projects and recommended it frequently!
- minhajuddin 10y agoHappy to hear that. Do you have any feedback on how it can be improved? I am currently planning on spending some time to make simpleform better.
- rdlecler1 10y agoDistribution is a hard problem for many startups. It's not enough to make something that people want if they never know about it. We started publishing an annual Agtech investing report at the beginning of 2015. This put us on the map and in the media.
- rsweeney21 10y agoOur strategy was to not try and find a shortcut or hack to grow our sales. We just ground it out by cold calling/cold emailing, paid ads, etc. 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.
- brilliantcode 10y agoholy shit this is by far the most valuable comment I came across of all time on HN
- tucaz 10y agoAlso what all small companies should do before raising money to "accelerate growth". Lots of them just burn through other people's money without knowing what to do.
- exolymph 10y agoAllow me to make your day: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=patio11 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=patio11
- devopsproject 10y agoNo, cold calls are something my father did. I am a Growth Hacking Ninja Rockstar.
- asdfasdfa11112 10y agoMy best tip is to not try one thing to grow your startup. Try everything. 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)
- franciscassel 10y agoI disagree with the "try everything" part. Startups are resource constrained, and can't afford the time or money to try everything. (In marketing, the world of "everything" is pretty substantial, and few of the channels can be properly tested cheaply: paid and organic search, paid and organic social (which includes many different platforms), email, old-school (e.g., print, radio, and TV) media buys, ...the list goes on.) A smart and experienced marketer will know the tools and techniques for deconstructing what channels are the most successful for direct competitors. They'll also be able to figure out the niche channels where the target audience "hangs out" that competitors haven't yet discovered. tl;dr: Don't try everything. Hire a marketer who will help you skip the guessing game and target the already-proven channels in your market.
- thebestagency 10y agoWe've used a mixture of cold emailing and social media to generate growth in the past. The trick with social media is figuring out how to make your content both engaging and relevant to your product. We're experimenting with Instagram stories on our latest project: JQBX (https://www.instagram.com/jqbx.fm https://www.instagram.com/jqbx.fm https://www.jqbx.fm https://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.
- convalleysili 10y agoI use synthetic facebook, twitter and other accounts and assign them to bots that mimic humans. The bots then communicate with users and recommend things and conversation they agree to while also redirecting to my site. I've acquired millions of MAUs this way. I used to do this with MySpace and Friendster. Before that IRC.
- throwaway29183 10y agoWe've used a mixture of cold emailing and social media to generate growth in the past. The trick with social media is figuring out how to make your content both engaging and relevant to your product. We're experimenting with Instagram stories on our latest project: JQBX (https://www.instagram.com/jqbx.fm https://www.instagram.com/jqbx.fm https://www.jqbx.fm https://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.
- n1tro 10y agothe mix of luck (lots of it) and timing
- normster 10y agohttps://www.mailinator.com https://www.mailinator.com 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.
- ssharp 10y agoI have been a long time user of Mailinator but recently needed to run a gambit of email tests wanted to avoid typical Mailinator blocks and also would have preferred the emails to persist longer. I started Googling options, considered just registering quickly for a domain and email service, etc. but then I realized I could pay for Mailinator to get exactly what I was looking for. 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 :)
- sparkzilla 10y agoI like your product. Very handy.
- 1290cc 10y agoLove your product. I use it to sign up for everything from mortgage applications to forums to absolutely anything that I never want to be bothered with again. My account is johnconnor@mailinator.com
- will_brown 10y agoVblood.com - a vampire themed energy drink. I submitted a contact form on HotTopic.com (a Fortune 500 retailer) about my product, I received request for cost/samples, sales grew to 35,000 units/order. 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.
- tunesmith 10y agoCan you explain the Partnering for Community Care effort a bit more? That bullet point was general enough that I don't quite get what you were doing / trying to do.
- will_brown 10y agoSee: PartneringForCommunityCare.com for the pilot program the price point was $20/month (individuals) and $15/month (business with 5+ employees enrolled). The copay is $10 to see a P.A./R.N.P. or $25 to see the M.D. Concierge/Direct Primary Care is a model of healthcare where the doctor cuts out the middleman (insurance companies), more and more primary care and pediatricians are considering these business models for their practice. Benefits generally include less staff, no billing/coding, no appeals to insurers, and generally less patients/more time with patients. The practice we worked with believes it could easily grow and sustain 2,000 patients per location and we could replicate the business fairly easily by converting existing practices (more complicated due to legal and ethical concerns of existing patients using insurance) or scaling providers in-house, say like UBER with/without brick & mortar locations.
- kamphey 10y agoREFERRALS: 90% of my new clients come from current customers. Not only do I provide a good service that is rather hard to find but also only really applicable to certain people. (It's good to know your customers), I also send out little reminders every few months that I'm open to referrals and gladly give a referral fee or a month free of my service. 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.
- nixy 10y agoFor B2B: be local. Have presence where your customers are. B2B relations are so much easier if you are local, so you'll be rewarded if you are able to open up offices close to strategic customers or in potentially big markets.
- kristineberth 10y agoOr travel and meet face-to-face. Works just as well.
- edoceo 10y agoThere is a book called Traction that outlines more than a dozen plans and emphasis on trying more than one to see what works for your case. What works for StartupA isn't what works for StartupB. Try and test
- karmajunkie 10y agoThe best thing we've done in the last year was start marketing, period. Previously, we made all our sales through essentially an enterprise model—get one national customer and pick up all their local affiliates. The sales cycle was long, and most growth happened word of mouth, but it wasn't fast. We had zero marketing presence aside from going to the relevant trade shows. 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.)
- throwaway-6006 10y agoWould someone please suspend this account already. He is not a "YC tech manager" as his profile implies (assuming he hasn't changed it just now). Based on comment history, he appears to be a troll that has hijacked a dormant account with high karma. 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...
- grzm 10y agoIf you have a concern along these lines, I recommend you contact the mods via the Contact link in the footer.
- logicallee 10y agoHi - the above is very obvious satire: I am showcasing how insane European VC's are. You can see another take from me on this same theme by reading this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12198883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12198883 You can read that and then read my reply (scroll down to about the third comment), part of which I'll quote "you've given a lot of hard data but fail to draw the obvious correct conclusions, that the reason you haven't raised financing is because you're not located in Silicon Valley and don't have an office there." Regarding the comment you just responded to: I purposefully made my comment extremely over the top (and insane), as satire. But I hoped the parent poster would reply by saying "if this is satire you are correct - this is exactly the reception we got. The last valuation we were offered is 1 million - and they wanted two thirds of the company." (Which would both be insulting, and kill the company.) Anyway I am within my edit window but don't feel a need to edit my obviously satirical (by no means troll) comment. Email me at the address I have listed (which likely on archive.org or elsewhere you can see has not changed in a long time), and I will confirm for you. I cannot emphasize enough that it is extremely obviously satirical - it makes fun of closed-minded European VC's. It was meant to evoke a sense of injustice. As clear and obvious satire - you can tell it's satire due to the facts it chooses to draw attention to, which are stellar. The "punchline", the second paragraph, is a total non sequitur. Given how - genuinely, really - amazing everything mentioned is, why would any VC want to rudely shut themselves out? Oh right - because they're a European VC, which was my satirical point. Finally, even if for some reason you didn't get right away that it's satire, there is no other explanation because the parent poster didn't ask for anything, and even if they had this would not be the place to post a reply. In case I have to spell it out, I'm obviously not a European VC and the post I replied to obviously did not try to contact me. I'd appreciate it if you made your comment less accusing.
- yesimahuman 10y agoFind a passionate community, make something awesome for them, get their contact info (email, twitter, etc.), stay engaged w them, improve and engage consistently. Have used this process for a number of products and it works very well in the beginning stages.
- williamle8300 10y agoSome people are product visionaries... while I agree with your approach for market-driven products, what would your advice be for people who start with a product instead of a userbase?
- yesimahuman 10y agoThink about it as starting with a product in a market. If you can't identify a market, then you should stop and do something else. A market doesn't have to be big and vague, it can be small. For example, people who develop apps with Angular JS (to use an example from my company). You can then expand from there assuming you have a vision that allows for that and the market isn't only as big as the small one you started with.
- mherrmann 10y agoI'm launching a file manager for programmers [1]. What helped immensely was to get it featured on BetaList [2]. This brought about 1000 new users. I'd definitely do that again. [1]: https://fman.io https://fman.io [2]: https://www.betalist.com https://www.betalist.com
- 7cupsoftea 10y agoSEO and I highly recommend Ryan Bednar at www.rankscience.com. They are in YC right now and doing a pretty amazing job.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- profpandit 10y agoThis is a very sincere and honest question, one that few start-up founders, if they look deep inside their hearts, would have a top of the hat answers for. Yet, it beleagers start-up critics such as TechCrunch and people interested in start-ups in general. While there are no cookie cutter answers
- callmeed 10y agoYou're obviously going to get a variety of answers because it really depends on your product and market. Saas vs hardware, consumer vs smb vs enterprise, mobile vs web, etc. 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 http://tractionbook.com
- ccvannorman 10y agoTraction is an easy read and an excellent jumping off point into the "growth strategy" space.
- profpandit 10y agoI have found that the maximum propensity to gain is to set your priorities right and then sit back and watch the river flow I don't mean that as a fishing analogy but more as a "let your ideas evolve in a organic way" So you would expect that you would achieve your top priority the soonest and lower priorities later How much you achieve is a rate issue and I don't think there are any fixed answers for that Obviously the are ways to accelerate your rate of progress through an analysis of the data and this is typically what the pundits vouch for But this a grey area. Since most start-ups are driven to grow revenues rate acceleration is very typical but that is a more a matter of business than engineering
- reflect 10y agoFor us ( http://www.startupdaybook.com http://www.startupdaybook.com ) a few things have been very effective -- but it did take a lot of trial and error to find those few things. 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.
- benjaminfox 10y agoThanks for sharing. Which subreddits helped you?
- reflect 10y ago/Startups has a "Share Your Startup" each month which is great
- pandemicsyn 10y agoCan confirm, BetaList is entirely worth it. We were just on it not too long ago. Our conversion rate from BetaList traffic was in the mid 30's. My coworker ended up writing about it on /r/Entrepreneur, and then our blog ( http://blog.twist.io/our-launch-on-beta-list-what-we-learned/ http://blog.twist.io/our-launch-on-beta-list-what-we-learned... ). Keep in mind though that Reddit's hard to predict and quality of feedback varies. If you post something to Reddit, it's worth taking your time to write something useful with hard numbers. Even then, there's a chance the random question about drop shipping submitted just ahead of you will get a ton of responses and you might get nothing but crickets.
- zinssmeister 10y agoWe are a marketplace for great projects looking for great designers (https://www.designinc.com https://www.designinc.com), something that needs to grow on two ends. What has worked really well for us is putting out high quality content marketing. Our YouTube channel has a weekly show that is shot with great sound and video quality. When we write blog posts we try to be very specific and insightful rather than pushing lots of cheaper/easier content every week. Another great channel for us is SEO. Here we also take the high quality over quantity route by building fewer but more insightful landing pages. We want people to spend more time on our content and get value from it.
- garysieling 10y agoFor https://www.findlectures.com https://www.findlectures.com, I've found writing articles for other places helpful. E.g. dev.to has a big twitter following, which leads to things getting passed around. Similarly, if you write something that does well on small subreddits, a lot of times they will make it into Cooper Press email lists later.
- petercooper 10y agoThanks for the mention! :) However, people who email us with something to include tend to do even better with making it in or even getting highly featured. We are increasingly finding things we get first and feature then end up on HN or Reddit the next day, so we want to encourage that ;-)
- garysieling 10y agoNice, thanks for the reply, it never occurred to me to do it that way :)
- petercooper 10y agoWe have not been very good at communicating how we find stories and hope to improve that :)
- idlewords 10y agoCompete with a Yahoo product
- johndavi 10y agoWe priced our product appropriately for our customer base and the value offered by our product: which is to say, an order of magnitude more costly than a typical VC-subsidized, "make it up in volume" startup approach. This certainly resulted in the opposite of growth, raw-customer-count-wise, but it's led to a legitimate, sustainable and growing business; streamlined our maintenance and support costs; and focused our product roadmap.
- foundersgrid 10y agoReaching out directly to companies who would be a great fit changed my business overnight, which formed the basis of starting my new company which helps others do the same: https://GrowthList.co https://GrowthList.co
- CarlNew 10y agoWhile I do agree on following a solid mid/long term strategy to generate sustainable growth, a Startup can often benefit immensely from hacking an unconventional marketing channel at an early point in its trajectory. If that doubles or triples your signups even for a short time, it can be immensely helpful to get investors to take you more seriously while you're grinding out the longterm strategy. It also helps to get feedback from real users while you're still in the development phase.