Going nonlinear, going big, going to be funded

To describe something as "nonlinear" is to describe it by what it is not.

What is so attractive about Flipkart, Practo, FreshDesk, Ola, BookMyShow, Oyo the new age companies? The answer is their Nonlinear Business Growth. This phenomenon of nonlinearity occurs when entrepreneurs exploit, explore & jump to hyper growth with without having follow a strict path. Hacking growth is a systematic model to embrace impending changes and creating opportunities quickly by continuous experimental iterations to distil and scale up promising nonlinear business ideas.

Investors are programmed to find & fund nonlinear ideas

Linear business models like IT services companies are easy to understand & correlate wherein the revenues growth is directly linked to headcount growth. For nonlinear business growth models it is difficult to define a business theory as their outcomes are disproportional, arbitrary & unpredictable. In nonlinear business, traction is everything, achieved by inorganic methods or growth hacking. Inorganic growth arises from mergers or takeovers rather than an increase in the company's own business activity while growth hacking is a process of rapid experimentation across marketing channels and product development to identify the most effective, efficient ways to grow a business. 

Either it works or it does not, methods do not matter, results do

The word "growth hack" has become synonymous with witchcraft magic while it's all about experimental iterations to distill the scale up ideas. Every startup differs from one other. It's great to learn about nonlinear growth mentioned online but 90% of copy paste methods fails because these old hacks which worked for others do not last forever. Let's first try to decode the process of how to build a nonlinear business model with experimentation.

1. Identify if the problem you are solving with your product solution is need to have or nice to have. Need to have solutions are like pain killer business which quickly scales & get most of the investor attention while nice to have solution are like vitamin business which means that they are optional hence will have lot of lag time and efforts to scale.
2. Re-imagine all the traditional assumptions, existing processes, marketing plans by asking the right questions for growth hack by solving complexities. Create laundry list of target experiments from this exercise
3. Next is to identify a KPI metric, set a goal to decide success or failure of your growth hack experiment but don't count until there is something valuable to count.
4. Finally target slice of customer segment to validate the experiment for creating non linear growth.

Fill in below hypothesis statement before getting into any of the experimental iterations using above process.

We believe that [doing this / creating this experience / exploiting this channel] [for this customer segment] will achieve [this outcome]. We will know we are successful when we see [this signal from the market]

Jumping the curve is not for faint hearts, sane personalities; only people with irrational perseverance can create nonlinear business. Most successful founders KPI is when they are able ship their product to customers on high velocity. Nonlinear business creation with help of balance sheet happens when with capital investments achieves economies of scale to create disproportionate outputs. There very similar multiple way the large established companies try to achieve nonlinear growth. Let me list down few startup ideas which helped create viral customer adoption for their nonlinear growth.

First viral hack in 1996-97 which I had experienced was with Hotmail, at the bottom of every email sent by Hotmail PS I love you, Get your free e-mail at Hotmail, they acquired millions of users. Another very similar hack was "Sent from my iPhone" helped Apple promote & sell again millions of devices at no extra marketing cost. Airbnb adopted guerrilla tactics by pushing their inventory on Craiglist to get traffic and it was successful till Craiglist engineers discovered & plugged the hole.

Over deliver to delight the customers, helps get customer attention & retention. Gmail when launched in 2004 with big bang jump of 1GB mail storage which was revolutionary pain killer solution. Users could now store emails forever. The existing mail boxes of 2MB to 10MB types by Yahoo or Hotmail looked dwarfed, it just blew the competition away. HubSpot has been described as unique because it strives to provide its customers with its valuable content free. It has helped them establish their thought leadership & credibility making it the best perceived marketing solution for SME companies. Starbucks card is a breakthrough loyalty reward program which helps gives it user both pride & free offers. They created a community experience with specially designed personalized gold card that gives feel of elite group, satisfying the emotional quotient which led to the creation of loyal customers following. Paypal disrupted with friction-less way to checkout online, once the user signs up they started giving an incentive of $20 initially to activate users. Microsoft found a workaround to sell software through partners & they forgo their linear obsession of selling it themselves. They showed us the power of partnerships & distribution. They created army of unpaid salesman with computer OEMs with their Microsoft Partner Program to generate monopoly in the desktop computers market. Word of mouth marketing with double sided referrals which made Uber & Dropbox generate nonlinear customer growth at lowest cost.

Linear paths are well defined text book solutions that follow an order. The businesses that disrupted the decade old ways of doing things and turned it upside down have experienced nonlinear growths. For investor it's perpetual activity to find that one in a million team whose ambitions to grow the idea nonlinear way & dominate market segments. Nonlinear idea's becomes successful after massive scale like social networks, messaging, e-commerce, gaming etc. have seen huge amount on venture capital investments. Venture capital is not a prerequisite for hyper growth as many statistics have shown that 90% of companies bootstrap their way to success. It's so rightly said that "you can’t scale what you don’t start" so take a courageous decision to follow big dreams.

Go big or Go home

@mehtasanjay - Share your feedback & comments on Twitter.