Share your growth hacking techniques

Gianluca: Welcome to Indie Hackers!

As a starting point -- there is one thing Indie Hackers should focus on and never forget: Give value to your users. If your product or service provides value to users (cheaper, better, faster, you name it), then you will usually not have problems with growth.

This is something to remember. A lot of people (and myself included) come with subpar products and try to "growth hack" them but then wonder why it does not work. Ask your users and build with them to really understand what value they get. I would even do this BEFORE building any product or service (by putting a minimum viable offer or product online).

Now, once that part is done: Putting that product / service in front of users (you can call it Marketing, or Growth Hacking but in essence it is the same, even though Growth Hack is probably more tech oriented and "fast" way of acquiring users).

My thoughts on that: There are many ways to do so but do not deceive your users, and always think about retention of users you will get (not only acquisition). Make sure to acquire users in an ethical way, and users that will come back. Example (not saying it is necessarily bad): if you try to "growth" hack some contests with FB ads to spend a lot of money and then see users disappearing, this is not good.

Here are a list of tactics for online businesses:

1. Email marketing (You build an email list hoping some subscribers will pay your service at one point)
2. Content marketing (You make interesting content to try to get users)
3. Direct sales (You contact directly customers)
4. Paid acquisition (Facebook ads, Google ads)
5. Affiliate sales (You ask third parties to promote your service and give them things in exchange)
6. Referrals (You ask your customers to refer to their friends and give them and you give things in exchange)

There are many more!

One thing I do is make sure to build clear calls to action on pages that are NOT restricted from anyone accessing them freely.

But also make sure they flow naturally with the content, not just some sidebar opt-in box type of thing.

Like this: https://chadthiele.com/artwork/tsukiji-fish-market-craftsman/

The red “download in 4K” link takes the visitor to my join page. Almost every page on my site does that.

Lay the foundation first, then dive into finding traffic to flow through your tunnels. And finally, enjoy the process. Experiment.

Good luck!

Hi, Giancula. People will be more willing to share if you will share something first. This is your very first post; maybe it is better to share something first, let the community get to know you and then ask for highly valuable favour?

Find the community in your niche and be a part of it. It will help you be up-to-date with what's going on in the industry and helping other genuinely will bring in sales for sure.

We started a points system where people can earn points by referring others, and they use the points for games and raffles that win them actual crypto (ie. Bitcoin guessing game at time X). So far that's going pretty well for us. YMMV though!