Skyrocket Your Startup's Growth: Proven Strategies to Boost Success

Welcome back, everyone!

It’s Matt here. As usual.

Today, I’ll be covering a few techniques that can lead to potentially explosive growth for your startup.

However, they’re not just restricted to startups and can help boost revenue and increase the customer base when it comes to well-established businesses.

Startups have a lot of potentials.

The benefits of not being fully well-established are that you have room to try new things, explore various strategies, see what sticks, and double down on that.

When it comes to established businesses, however,? they’re a bit more restricted when it comes to trying out new things.

But don’t worry, there are always useful things that you can take from what startups and new ventures are doing and implement in one way or another in your already-established business.

Anyway, let’s get to it.

The first tool in your arsenal is your pre-launch email list.

This is your secret weapon. This is where you start building relationships with your potential customers even before you launch your product.?

Out of all the things that you can do, this is one of the best ways to warm up and nurture your audience as well as gradually introduce them to what you’re coming out with.

If you’re a business, you might benefit from this when you decide to launch a new product or service. This could not just help you pre-validate.

Instead, it could boost traffic to your existing set of products and increase your brand exposure, regardless of how they respond to your new potential product.

"Why should I bother with an email list when I haven't even launched my product yet?" - you might ask.?

Simple.

By the time you launch, you'll already have a group of people who are interested in what you're offering, and you'll have their email addresses to market your product to.?

Dropbox is a prime example of the power of a pre-launch email list.

By starting to build an email list before they even launched, Dropbox was able to tap into a pool of interested and engaged users from the get-go.

When the product finally launched, these early adopters were quick to sign up and spread the word, leading to an impressive user base of 100,000 within just a year.

Another thing to include in your strategy is launching your product on Product Hunt.

It’s a great way to get in front of a large, engaged, and active audience of makers, founders, and early adopters.

Now, you might be thinking “Matt! My product isn’t ready for launch yet. How do I get my product out there without it actually being out there?”?

Well, that’s nothing to worry about.

You can also launch your MVP (Minimum Viable Product) on Product Hunt to get early feedback and then follow up with your actual product when it’s ready to be released to the public.

A plus point here is that you get to leverage the community to get feedback on what you’re doing, rather than get a response only after your official launch.

If this isn’t enough, or you’d rather go even further, then leveraging the power of referral marketing can be something you might want to look into.

Big brands today, like Evernote and T-Mobile, had great results from increasing their customer base via referrals.

The basic idea of referral marketing is about getting your existing customers to refer their friends and family to your product.

The best part of it is that it’s relatively easy and cost-effective when compared with aggressive marketing campaigns.

However, to ensure that it’s successful, consider giving your customers an incentive for every successful referral.

That could be a discount, a credit balance they can use or an extended trial period of access to your premium features.

A real-life example of a company that leveraged referral marketing is Airbnb.

Airbnb incentivized its users to refer their friends by offering both the referrer and the referred friend discounts on their next stays.

In some cases, Airbnb’s referral program increased bookings by over 25% and boosted referrals as well.

It was also instrumental in helping them in achieving rapid growth, as it allowed them to reach new audiences and increase brand awareness without spending a lot of money on advertising.

Now, if you’re audience is currently not as large as you’d like it to be or is too small to yield significant results from referral marketing, there’s a way you can tap into existing and engaged audiences that are potentially extremely relevant and may be interested in what you have to offer.

How? By partnering with brands that have products that may complement what you have to offer.

Making sure that their audience fits the ideal customer profile you have developed will go a long way in ensuring the partnership is fruitful for both you and the other brand.

Oxwash and Vanish are great examples when it comes to partnering.?

In 2021, Vanish, a stain removal company partnered up with Oxwash, a sustainable laundry startup.

They came together to highlight the issue of clothing waste which resulted in Oxwash using Vanish’s new sustainable formula in its washing facilities.

The formula, Vanish 0%, was eco-friendly as well as contributing to increasing the lifespan of clothes, preventing them from prematurely ending up in a landfill.

At the end of the day, the key to successful growth hacking is to explore various ways you can engage with and get in front of more relevant people that will be interested in what you have to offer.

This includes using data from traffic to your website as well as studying industry trends and case studies of similar products in your niche, using insights to model your own unique approach.

If you still find shortcutting your growth too much of a hassle, you don’t need to worry.

As always, I’m here to help.

Feel free to reach out if you’ve got questions or need help with coming up with a strategy that suits you.

Keep building,