Welcome to this lesson of our Growth Hacking Academy!
If you’ve got this far, you’ll know today’s subject: growth hacking for startups.
To recap briefly what we’ve covered in earlier lessons, growth hacking is an innovative approach to marketing, built on testing various strategies until the winning one emerges. Every kind of business therefore has to find the route that suits it, remembering that the same strategies don’t work for every kind of business.
But who uses growth hacking? There’s no one specific person or company that uses it — it can be used by all kinds of organisation, from a startup to a multinational (the Coca-Cola example is well known).
Today we’ll concentrate on growth hacking for startups. We’ll work out together what a startup is — what doing a startup means — and how it relates to growth hacking.
Let’s begin.
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Growth hacking for startups
In this first part we want to explain what a startup is and what doing a startup means.
Then we’ll get into the relationship between startups and growth hacking.
Let’s begin.
What is a startup?
Before talking about growth hacking for startups, we have to be clear on what a startup is.
So let’s go step by step.
What is a startup? A startup is a new business being conceived. Creating a startup — a new venture — presupposes someone with the appetite and the finances to go out on their own, plus colleagues able to contribute (people who know how to work in that field).
A startup is a group of people trying to find a business model that turns a profit, that scales, that’s interesting and, ideally, that’s unique.
So the future entrepreneur needs strategic ability and a good knowledge of the market, and has to be able to face the problems that arrive and find solutions. That means a managerial instinct, the right idea — one that can work — an action plan, the willingness to accept change in order to evolve, the ability to analyse the market landscape, to measure the results of what you do, and to refine the work in order to produce results financially.
Creating a startup isn’t simple: the idea alone isn’t enough without people helping you, without the right skills and instincts, without good organisation and planned strategies.
A startup is a structure still being defined.
Who can start one?
You can start one on your own, although inexperience may make it better to turn to someone more expert in the field who can help you make what you have in mind real.
You could go to an accountant, bring in people who commit for a set period and help you get the venture off the ground, people who can give you an idea of the costs ahead and help you define the work and the timing more clearly.
There are also organisations known as business incubators, which provide support and knowledge and help you through the development stage.
The advice, though, is to move carefully, staying attentive and clear-headed about what you do. There’s every possibility of making mistakes born of inexperience, or of not having run all the necessary analysis in advance — mistakes that can cost a substantial amount of money, even if budget can be recovered through startup funding and incentives.
Is it clearer now what a startup means? Good. Now let’s see how growth hacking for startups works.
How did growth hacking for startups come about?
Sean Ellis (the founder of growth hacking) helped startups and companies reach the business results they’d set, with growing the company as his main objective.
Companies, early-stage ones included, sought him out precisely because he used a different approach to marketing in order to get results.
Sean used neither traditional marketing nor digital marketing alone (which is what every agency used); he had something different, a unique approach, new techniques.
Which is why the method needed a name of its own: growth hacking.
Growth hacking marketing means marketing for growth. That’s exactly what it is: using several tools, trying several strategies to achieve real business growth. Analysing the results of each strategy, and refining it, therefore matters enormously.
Growth hacking and startups: the perfect fit
Startups turn to this way of doing marketing more and more.
There’s enormous demand for growth hacking worldwide, and do you know why? Because startups desperately need rapid growth, and only a considerable rise in users and revenue gives them the chance to carry on.
Which is where the growth hacker’s work comes in: putting everything they have — knowledge, ability, experience, creativity — into the business and at its disposal, trying every route available as long as it leads to visible, measurable growth.
The growth hacker is a professional who doesn’t stop until they’ve found and followed the road to growth. For them the objective is always and only that: growing the business.
It’s a very important and interesting role — by now a fundamental and indispensable one, today and in the years ahead.
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Growth hacking for startups: why budget matters
Why do startups choose to work with a professional growth hacker?
Beyond what we’ve already said — that growth hacking is focused on growth — there’s the question of budget. Startups usually don’t have much of one, which is why they’d rather spend it on a new approach built on tests and results than on traditional marketing, which costs a great deal and very often gives no measurable results.
With growth hacking the whole effort is made efficient and you arrive sooner at an effective, profitable solution. A startup is more inclined to make small investments to test which strategy wins, and then put a larger sum behind it. What matters for a startup at the outset is putting itself in a position to acquire customers and to receive feedback from users, so it can work out how to improve the product it’s offering.
Growth hacking for startups: success stories
Growth hacking is indispensable, and it has been for many startups.
The fact that growth hacking weaves together five components — data analysis, digital marketing, product development, creativity and constant experiments — makes it a valuable and necessary service, above all for startups that need to make the most of time, resources and people while getting as many results as possible in as little time as possible.
Here are some success stories to draw on for your own growth hacking strategy.
The Spotify case
Spotify is a music streaming service born to fight piracy.
Spotify’s founders were smart in making it possible to personalise music to each individual user’s taste: through artificial intelligence the app learns what users like and suggests tracks that resemble it in some way.
Spotify counts 100 million users, and that success came not only from personalisation but from launching the app gradually.
They built considerable anticipation for its arrival — it had already shipped and spread across Europe but not yet in America — and made sharing possible through a deal with Facebook.
Spotify is held to be the best music app in the world, and that’s certainly down in part to the marketing behind it.
WhatsApp and growth hacking
The app in question is WhatsApp: an instant messaging app, on the web too, that has taken over in recent years.
What was WhatsApp’s key to success?
WhatsApp knew how to investigate what users would want to do with their smartphones. The success lay in building a product that fitted users’ needs, with plenty of features and services built around what people actually wanted.
Through word of mouth it did extremely well, and now it lives alongside us every day.
A growth hacking example: Netflix
Netflix lets you watch films on demand today, but it began as a company renting out DVDs.
What made the platform popular?
The approach was inspired: Netflix managed to reach people without spending on advertising. What it did was take a human approach, talking in online forums and in communities interested in DVDs, and planning a soft launch exactly that way.
The approach went viral and the company fulfilled 100,000 orders in the first months. No spending at all — simply a good mind that found a winning, well-suited strategy.
That’s growth hacking for startups.
If you want more success stories, we’d suggest this lesson from our Academy:
Conclusion
Growth hacking for startups: in this lesson you’ve stepped into the world of startups.
As we’ve seen, it matters for startups to lean on growth hackers who, as you’ll have gathered, will try many strategies to find the best solution for a given business.
Doing growth hacking for startups is certainly stimulating, but it won’t be simple — and above all it isn’t the same as doing traditional marketing.
Growth hackers are sometimes a little mad; they look for solutions nobody else would think of, and that’s part of what makes them valuable.
Stay tuned to your favourite Growth Hacking Academy!
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