It's fun to read about growth hacks. After all, all the successful companies you know of used them right?
If only you could replicate those, your startup would be just as successful.
Right?
Wrong.
Growth hacks will leave you disheartened, wondering whether you're wasting your life, money, chances.
Here's the truth: Most people don’t grow astronomically over night – It’s usually the accumulation of small gains over time that makes an impact.
If you take a systematic approach to growth, you don’t need to get hung up on rapid growth figures.
Growth is about systems rather than hacks – A lot of people end up with poor results because they focus on tactics that worked for people they know.
Creating a framework for growth is more important and when you create a realistic, living framework, you're way less likely to get disheartened and give up.
I've used this simple framework for managing growth for a long time. It works well when I'm realistic with myself:
When you're starting out, these goals don't need to be overly detailed. Try to avoid being overly specific.
You'll need to be more exact later. But at first, you don't know what you've got. Don't constrain yourself with numbers on your first growth experiments/projects.
The best strategy is to just do something
Let's imagine I was building a new SaaS product (which almost everyone on IH is).
Here's an example of what I'd have for a new project:
Goal
Get site visitors to take a trial
Metrics
Projects
Actions
Don't overdo it.
P.S. I share the best B2B SaaS growth resources I find on the internet with original commentary over at Positive Hüman
Growth hacks are often trying to optimize working funnels by percentages: get 20% more people to get to the next step of the funnel, find new marketing channels, get featured somewhere to have a big day and increase SEO juice, find a way to increase sharing so that your viral coefficient grows. But when your company is really small, changing the number of users by an absolute number will absolutely dwarf percentage growth.
Sure. That’s an optimisation to be run within the context of a broader system for growth.
Hey Marc, thanks for sharing such wonderful thoughts here!
Just some follow-up questions, I agree what you suggested above, and among the actions, I always found "Optimize my site for search" the hardest part.
This should belong to SEO, and I tried to improve SEO for my site, but it doesn't work that much IMO.
Any advice?
Sure thing, Daisy.
SEO and content together is probably one of the best channel pairings you can have for indie businesses (generally speaking). There is almost definitely search volume for the thing you’re looking to sell.
Consider what problems your potential customers have, figure out how they might be searching for solutions (you can use a tool like Ahrefs to do that), write keyword focused content that aligns to their problem and proposes your solution where relevant.
I was actually recently on Growth Machine’s podcast talking about this exact topic. You can listen here
Great, will surely check it out!
Huge thanks!
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