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Growth hacks not working? You're doing it wrong

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.

A simple framework for managing growth at a SaaS

I've used this simple framework for managing growth for a long time. It works well when I'm realistic with myself:

  • Goals – what are the outcomes you need/want?
  • Metrics – how will you know if you're achieving?
  • Projects – what experiments/projects will you run to make progress?
  • Actions – what actions are involved in each project?

What does that look like in practice?

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

Shia LaBeef

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

  • First get 1 user. Then get 10. Then get 100.
  • Try to convert 3% of traffic from a key landing page.

Projects

  • Create a landing page with a signup form
  • Write an initial blog post
  • Create a problem based sales page

Actions

  • Share landing page in xyz community
  • Send my blog post to 10 people I know with this problem
  • Optimise my site for search
  • Set up conversion goals in Google Analytics

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

  1. 3

    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.

    1. 1

      Sure. That’s an optimisation to be run within the context of a broader system for growth.

  2. 1

    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?

    1. 3

      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

      1. 1

        Great, will surely check it out!
        Huge thanks!

  3. 1

    "Hi, my name is RJY and I approve of this message."

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