Growth hacking for beginners

Paul Graham, Co-founder of infamous Y-Combinator accelerator says, "Engineers should start technology companies, Media people should start media companies". When it comes to marketing, typically you would find people from ivy-league business schools as VP of Marketing, that's been the norm since millions of years. They would have handful of strategies when they would handle a new product launch which would include, buying ad spaces, planning launch events, pitching reporters, BTL (Below the line) activities etc.

However, the above concept of VP-Marketing, in-fact the entire marketing team is being disrupted by growth hackers who are engineers. So what exactly is growth hacking? - Hmm, maybe ill try to explain in my words, growth hacking (lead by growth hackers who are a hybrid of marketeers and coders) answers the traditional question of how to get product sold/initial users with A/B testing, creating different landing pages to get user user signups, adding virality to the product inherently, email campaigns to generate signups.

Aaron Ginn says, "The end goal of every growth hacker is to build a self perpetuating marketing machine that reaches millions by itself"

So how does it begin?

1. Product Market fit: I have tried working on at least a half dozen ideas and have spent considerable time trying to sell those products, only to realize that there was no need for those products. Just like me, there are millions of marketeers/Startup founders who make this mistake,

"They make products which no one wants"

If someone tells you that your products cannot be tweaked or pivoted, they are either lying or fools. Growth hackers, all over the world believe a simple premise that whole businesses and business models can be changed until they generate a tonne of revenue.

2. Test test test: When we launched our crowdfunding campaign for Diabeto (www.diabe.to/indiegogo), we launched a Thunderclap campaign (https://bit.ly/1Am00cB) which was successful however we hardly got an conversions. That put us in a spot and we concluded, not all people are the right people. Everybody wants to have their product campaign viral but will those people be the right audience? We immediately realized the issue and started getting in touch with the diabetes bloggers, who were super impressed with the product and realized the need for the same in their lives, those bloggers wrote about us and the numbers just multiplied. When we had those initial trustworthy users, the rest was a seeding process.

3. Retention:  Many of my friends who are startup founders have seen this issue with their product that most of the users funnel out after they sign up. Maybe, this would be a sign of bad product market fit again, the users signed up because of good marketing/incentivized campaigns but once they realize that the product is not good enough or worse, they just don't need the product, of course the result will be user leaving. According to Bain and Company, a 5% increase in customer retention can mean 30% increase in profitability. Moreover, I feel its common sense that it would be easy to upsell to the existing customers than the new ones. Remember, a bird in hand is worth two in bush.

As an early stage startup or if you are in late curve, you would have to experiment on growth strategies constantly and document techniques which would work for you. After all, every startup is unique and one strategy which works for one startup won't be working for another one and that's why, one needs to deep dive and yea, head first to test the waters!