gaining early traction by doing things that don't scale (hustling)
DESCRIPTION
My talk from Sean Ellis' Growth Hacking Conference in London, October 2014. It starts with a story of how I hustled my way into affording a drum set at age 14 by painting curbs in my neighborhood. It then covers a lot of the tactics that we have done at Creative Market to grow rapidly, as well as mentions of other company's successful non-scalable growth strategy.TRANSCRIPT
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MUST HAVE DRUMS
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$7/hr
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$75/hr
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HUSTLED UP SOME DRUMS!
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There are 3 Stages of Growth3 stages of startup growth
Source: http://www.startup-marketing.com/the-startup-pyramid/
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There are 3 Stages of Growth
1) Product Market Fit
3 stages of startup growth
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Photo by @willsh
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There are 3 Stages of Growth
1) Product Market Fit
3) Scalable growth stage
3 stages of startup growth
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There are 3 Stages of Growth
2) The Hustle Stage 1) Product Market Fit
3) Scalable growth stage
3 stages of startup growth
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“Startups take off because the founders make them take off. A good metaphor would be the cranks that car engines had before they got
electric starters. Once the engine was going, it would keep going, but there was a separate and
laborious process to get it going.” — Paul Graham
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There are 3 Stages of Growth
your way to scalable growth
HUSTLE
20 non-scalable ways to
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There are 3 Stages of Growth
1) Manually invite your first customers. Start in a niche.
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There are 3 Stages of Growth
2) Invite friends and family(and other connections)
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There are 3 Stages of Growth
3) Join the conversations at target niche communities and forums.
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There are 3 Stages of Growth
4) Ask your competitor’s customers to try your new service & give feedback.
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There are 3 Stages of Growth
5) Go directly to your users. Ask them to sign up in person.
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There are 3 Stages of Growth
6) Speak directly with users to understand how your product can better meet their needs.
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There are 3 Stages of Growth
7) Community engagement. Reply to every comment.
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There are 3 Stages of Growth
8) Aim for 100% customer satisfaction. Everyone leaves happy!
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There are 3 Stages of Growth
9) Go above and beyond to delight customers.
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There are 3 Stages of Growth
10) Give away free stuff for signing up.
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There are 3 Stages of Growth
11) Allow users to give their friends free stuff.
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There are 3 Stages of Growth
12) Give away new free stuff weekly (retention)
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There are 3 Stages of Growth
13) Content is king. Distribution is queen. Always be writing and sharing.
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There are 3 Stages of Growth
14) Write guest posts on other people’s blogs.
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There are 3 Stages of Growth
15) Forge Partnerships.
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There are 3 Stages of Growth
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There are 3 Stages of Growth
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There are 3 Stages of Growth
16) Trade co-promotions
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There are 3 Stages of Growth
17) Throw Parties
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There are 3 Stages of Growth
18) Run a roadblock campaign across a network of sites in your industry.
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There are 3 Stages of Growth
19) Seed content on your site yourself to get it going.
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There are 3 Stages of Growth
20) Private Beta. Sorry, invite only.
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There are 3 Stages of Growth
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There are 3 Stages of Growth
Study the tactics of your competitors. Become inspired,
but don’t copy. Be more clever!
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HAPPY
GROWING!