A Day in the Life of a Growth Hacker

Day 13 of 30 Days of Starting Up

Recently my newsletter subscriber count and product sales are stalling after the initial boost. It got me worried.

Marketing on Twitter, IndieHackers, and HackerNews helped a little, but it also brought down my productivity; hence yesterday's newsletter subject "Fighting Unproductivities." I need to brainstorm new strategies to growth-hack. I started by listing my unique advantages and disadvantages.

Disadvantage

• Low Twitter engagement

  I have 3,700 followers, accumulated over five years via passion projects – I launched each project with a link to my Twitter profile. However, I rarely tweeted; my tweet count is lower than some accounts with three months of history. I failed to create engaging tweets to keep followers interested. Now I have suddenly become actively promoting my content on Twitter, but the engagement is low.

  Idea: I should not growth-hack on Twitter. Instead, I should create original non-self-promo tweets to get back on track first.

Advantage

• I own a few popular sites

  One thing I did right over the years was passion projects. I have a few project sites with consistent visitor streams.

  Idea: maybe some of the visitors could be interested in my recent work? I can add a modal to these sites that lead visitors to my latest work.

I took a look at google analytics to see which site is the most popular. The most popular sites that I own are:

• cssicon.space
• play.typedetail.com
• typedetail.com

I started to design the modal pop-up interaction. My favorite place to get inspiration for interactive animation is Codrops. This is what I ended up with after experimenting with a few different options:

Now I need to design an eye-catching, convincing modal layout with a call to action. I want it to have a non-standard look so that people won't mistake it as an ads at first glance. I went through a series of small changes until I settle at last:

The three iterations in the last row don't look very different, do they? What I changed between 7 and 8 was the font for the apostrophe. I like the more traditional look and think it is more fitting for the rest of the letters:

Combine the modal interaction with the layout design; this is what I ended today's work with:

Tomorrow I will code this up and make it modular so that I can customize the font and color schemes to fit different sites that I own. Stay tuned for my progress reports on the coding part!

I am building my product – a brand designer app – in public and share my progress daily in my newsletter. If you enjoy the content, please consider subscribing to my newsletter!