Some Ideas on Startup Growth for The Strategic Founder.
1. It is hard to get users. It is best to start with that assumption and work from there. You’d be less surprised by how hard it is to get users later, and more poised to work harder and be more patient.
2. Ask: Who is my customer? What problems do they have? Will they buy a solution? Will they buy it from us? Then follow what is next.
3. Start with your small and fanatical customer base – that you had in mind when you were starting out.
They are usually the people who need your solution the most and are usually more tolerant of the imperfections inherent in new products and services.
4. You should necessarily start out with a small number of customers. This allows you the opportunity to please a few people extremely well — so you can win them over. That is far better than pleasing many people mildly — and still lose them. You can scale so you can please many people — later!
5. Do things that don’t scale. If you would have to serve customers one by one in the early stage, so be it. This can even enhance your understanding of the customer base and give you the opportunity to make better products. You can always find ways to scale later, but for now, your focus should be about serving your small but fanatical customers extremely well.
6. Engage users, get feedback from them, and iterate forward. The only essence of launching fast is to engage users so you can get feedback. Until you engage users to listen to what they have to tell you – as they always do – you are building nothing and growth is impossible.
No company ever ends up with the exact product or idea they start out with. So, keep iterating forward to something better.. And don’t hesitate to do for your users what they want you to do for them, and not what you yourself want to do for them.
Their feedback (plus your deep understanding of the part of your product which customers might never be able to comment on because they might not really know what they want!) should guide you into knowing what they want. There are a lot of ways to get feedback: User reviews. Surveys. Market research. Whatever works!
7. Keep iterating until you get to product-market fit (PMF). The simplest explanation for product-market fit is that it is when your product is in sync with the market; when your product is satisfying a strong market need really well.
8. Expand once you capture that fanatical customer base — and you have reached a product-market fit.
9. Do many little things. Since there is no such thing as one magical “hack” you can apply to create a great product, and even if there is, you won’t know it until later, you should be trying out many different things to see what works. Because everything in business, as in life, follows the Power Law Distribution or the 80/20 Rule, you can expect that out of the many things you will do, some – albeit very few – will turn out to matter in a disproportionate sense. The challenge though, is that, you rarely know which thing will matter most (especially in the startup world where almost everything is uncertain), until you have done it. So keep iterating and keep trying out different things to refine and perfect your product.
10. Change your idea or product. “You’ll generally do best to follow that constraint wherever it leads rather than being influenced by some initial vision, just as a scientist is better off following the truth wherever it leads rather than being influenced by what he wishes were the case. When Richard Feynman said that the imagination of nature was greater than the imagination of man, he meant that if you just keep following the truth, you’ll discover cooler things than you could ever have made up,” observed Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator. Always change your idea as may be required of you by your customers or by the market.
11. Engage in aggressive marketing. Whatever it takes, you must get people – especially the right audience, that is, your users – to know about what you do. And you must do that with ferocity and aggressiveness. (More on that in Marketing Section.)
12. Design default marketing into your product. Your product should be so great that users will easily find it worthy of telling their friends about it. It is also essential that you design viral marketing into your product so that as users encounter it, their friends are more likely to do so as well. That is viral marketing. For instance, most social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are such that users can rarely use them without their friends using them, too. This is growth hacking. Take advantage of it by designing as much virality as possible into your products.
13. Utilize PR for cheap marketing. It can be the cheapest form of marketing – and it works, if rightly applied. So long as you are building what matters, hacking the system through cheap PR can help you get a lot of attention — and traction! Use cheap PR.
14. Have a team full of energy, intelligence, and integrity. (More on this in Team Building Section)
(More ideas about startup growth in Sales and Marketing Section.)