Hockey sticking growth 101

One of our web experiments is on a 10x growth path in under 12 months of launch. The screenshot you see above is what people call a hockey stick growth.

I prepared the framework and my wife led the strategy and execution of this experiment as a part time activity. It was supported by one full time employee.

This post is going to be a quick list of hits and misses along the way and possibly serve as guidance for some.

1.) Have a huge target addressable market (TAM) to create real impact.

Unless you have a large enough TAM, chances are you won't be able to create a real impact. We operate a few web assets which have a niche audience and the addressable market is small and scattered. We have not achieved hockey sticks in any of them.

2.) Give them what they want - atleast at first.

Fulfilling demand in a supply scarce market is easier than creating demand for an unknown product/service. We surveyed the market to understand what they really wanted. We realised that almost no-one was providing it online. We built it and then let them come to us.

3.) Just Ship - Don't wait for perfection. Improve as you go.

As you can see, the graph from November to March is the season for us. Last time when we launched in December, we had already missed out on some of it. We had to rush, launch and capitalise. We did not wait for a great design, superior tech stack, great UI. Heck I don't like our UI even as I write this. We settled for what was the best available option and just implemented it and launched. We're improvising as we go.

4.) SEO is a thing of the past.?

Google executives have said it several times over. Don't buy links, don't create them yourself. Give your audience what they deserve and things will fall in place. We did just that. We did not build links. We did not have a proper on-page optimisation for until 2 quarters. We just promoted it on our social media and word of mouth took care of the rest. An interesting thing to notice is that if you get direct traffic and social traffic, google understands relevance and ranks you better and starts sending traffic to you which is 4x to 5x your direct traffic.

5.) Data is the Monarch.

If content is king and community is queen, then data is the monarch. Analyse frequently and get into the details of it. For us, we really found out what our audience loved and scaled it up for all locations in India. We've not even captured 1% market share yet and this year we want to do 20x :)

We missed a lot of opportunities along the way. We were very slow and we did not expand the team. If we had done paid marketing, I'm sure the growth numbers would have been a lot more amplified.

Also our employee quit as she got an offer that paid 2.5x more than what we were paying her. She's moved there making a position vacant. If someone is up for the challenge, you know where to find me.

Hope this post was helpful :)

Cheers !