Growth Hacking: How to Acquire 100K Users

what's up everybody Dan Martell here serial offspring investor and creator of SAS Caddy me in this video I'm gonna share you how to throw a laptop here man just take it anyways I'm gonna share with you how to growth hack your start up to your first hundred thousand users and be sure to say the end where I talk to you about how to get access to my high-tempo testing training taught to me by the man the legend Sean Ellis specifically around the North Star metric so I'll share that with you at the end so if you're new here I built a company called clarity and it was a marketplace for entrepreneurs to get advice over the phone by other entrepreneurs and when I built it I thought man this is this is the the ultimate tool for micro celebrities and Twitter you know personalities and you know bloggers to monetize their advice and I literally was like this is gonna be incredible because it's gonna allow people that have knowledge to give access to the people that want it and create an economic system to reward that I even had a charity component built into it and then I launched and there were crickets I literally brought 300 people together in a theater gave them access to it I had you know Dragons Den Shark Tank experts entrepreneurs like Mike from fresh books and you know Ryan at HootSuite all these incredible people available for this room and a bunch of people did not do any calls and what I realized and I'm gonna walk you through the different strategies to growth hack because that company eventually grew to hundreds of thousands of users doing calls over the phone but for the first nine months it was nothing nothing traction traction and then eventually growth curve up into the right would eventually exited the business so the big lesson there was to nail a niche what I've discovered I'm gonna walk you through how to do that is you need to find somebody that for us for clarity was an entrepreneur that invests in themselves if that's not true if they're you can be an entrepreneur a lot of people I just want to let you know there's probably out of 100 entrepreneur 90% of them are not growth minded they don't read business books they're just accidental business people entrepreneurs it was the 10% of the people that actually went to conferences bought books hired a coach that ended up being our best customers once we understood that everything else from a marketing point of view change I'm gonna tell you how to take that and implement it in this video one nail a problem niche now a lot of people tell you like oh you need to you know the riches are in the niches here's the way I think about it is you can focus on a small group of people because you don't want to cast the wide net right so the whole idea is you can try to be everything everybody it's too wide and then you have like if it's the the holes in the net are too big the fish swim through it or you can kind of focus on less of the overall ocean and close the squares on your net so that you can actually start catching the right fish okay so that's the concept but here's the reality is the problem niche they need to know so one they need to know they have a problem so too many people are building technologies for people that don't know they have a problem - they need to be actively looking to solve the problem if they're not it's gonna be really hard because then you gotta convince they have a problem and then hopefully they start looking for a solution and number three that have the means to invest either time or money to make the economic engine work for you so that's number one I can teach you all the marketing hacks and growth hacks that that you'd ever want to learn but if those things aren't true you have a problem niche that wants your solution everything else is gonna fall flat number two map the universe there are so many great examples of this of companies that said ok once I understood who our core customer was how do I find a way to discover them in a programmatic way alright so for me one of my favorite examples is one of my investment portfolio Steve a payroll hero you know they were working on trying to deploy a payment or payroll solution out in Asia and they were having a hard time finding early adopters so what I always ask is you know what's true what are the characteristics about that customer that early adopter and long story short after evaluating a bunch of different options you realize that for them their best customers the customers that we're using and loving the product today we're all using Google Apps for domains now this might seem obvious cuz everybody watching this uses you know Google Apps or Gmail for their corporate email but there's still a lot of people in the world that don't they use you know Lotus Notes if you remember that one they use you know Outlook etc but once we realize that then we could programmatically take all of the potential customers that they had run them through a filter check what's called the DNS the domain name service of the email record and find out if they were using Google Apps for domain as their email client or their tool and filter out all of the let's say a hundred thousand potential customers down to the twenty five thousand that would be incredibly perfect for them so I think of this all the time both in you know what's true about the customer how can I programmatically discover there's so many great companies out there like full contact for social media or social contact data built with four techno graphic data I mean there's so many different ways for you to figure out from a URL or an email or a database the specifics that's true about your best customers and then filter out and ask yourself now that I've got that how do I get in front of them number three value in advance now here's what I've always loved and what's true for me is I love using education based marketing I think it is the most powerful way this video is an example for me to add value in the market teach my customers something extremely powerful that'll get them a result and if they want to you know find a way to do that faster or quicker or easier they can kind of move forward down that path of that discovery and that's true for all the software companies that I work with for the most part we want to figure out a education based strategy that's gonna allow your best customers to discover you because they're searching for a problem that they they're certain for a solution they have a problem on the other thing is so you have two ways you have content you have product the product is splintering off typically as a splinter strategy some feature of your core solution that maybe people are paying for and making it as a free widget either as a Chrome extension etc I mean so in a great examples video so Michael let one of my best buds he actually took one of their video Solutions inside a video art and front-loaded that for free as a browser extension now called go video that is is arguably one of the fastest growth channels that they have to attract top a funnel awareness for their core vidyard products so much so that HubSpot actually integrated go video into their sales CRM solution so that's on the product side on the content side again value at advanced to strategy's content or product on the content side Unbounce company that invested in that team there Rickon the team they crushed it on building education based content that really serves their customer and their their market until they're ready to buy solution like Unbounce and it is their number one channel and it's helped them grow exponentially so that to me is just from a growth hacking point of view those are two really powerful strategies number for drafting strategy so one of the strategy I think is powerful is find somebody else that's further along that has access to your core customer and figure out a way to draft behind them you know recently I got into road biking because my you know good buddy Jarrett said hey don't worry you will not look funny in spandex I still don't think that that's the truth but anyways we got a road bike and I went out with them and what's cool is if you've ever done it if you tuck in behind the lead person or somebody's a lot stronger in front of you they make the whole biking process so much easier they cut the win for you they create a giraffe to pull you forward so that you can keep that same level of momentum without exerting any like probably half the energy required to keep that pace and I just think about that in regards to partnerships and growth in our business you know there's a strategy I teach called OPN other so I got it from set in the real estate people they call it OPM other people's money in the growth market strategy it's opiate other people's networks so if you think about it Airbnb did this beautifully by essentially using Craigslist network to get distribution right Instagram did this beautifully using two networks the iOS network and their growth if you look at Instagram what in launched and the growth of that market and Twitter people posting on social specifically Twitter photos before that Twitter didn't really have a great photo solution in the feed using that drafting strategy in OPM trying to find a network that has access to your perfect customer and build some kind of publishing solution and this and this easiest way to do this at an enterprise level if you're watching this and you're like I don't that won't work for me there's a mid-market or Enterprise SAS is what's a report that you could share publicly you know something that your tool could generate for the customer that they would feel comfortable sharing publicly that would be one so come a widget we did this with clarity where we created a profile widget for our experts on our platform and we allowed them to add that to their website so we got exposure through their personal networks but with the report you can either do it publicly or even just sharing it amongst their team to get other people aware of your solution and using and collaborating around the tool to help it make it more sticky I mean think about slack in the communication channel they created and inviting other people to collaborate around channels made the product sticking created a kind of viral exposure inside the company network so drafting strategy to me is a powerful way to think about it for your SAS your product your business to find somebody that's already moving forward that it talks to your core customer and draft behind them number five rinse and repeat now this might be simple to say but hard to execute what I've seen companies do is they have something that's working and they're starting to see a little bit of traction and light around a growth strategy and instead of doubling down and investing in it they keep moving to other things so what I want to say is rinse and repeat around the things that are working to kind of build more velocity but the same time if you feel like you've tapped out if you're three iterations in right so if you do a two-week dev cycle like a scrum or an agile process if you're 3 you know two-week cycles a month and a half in and you haven't been able to move the needle on that specific channel then go back and reintroduce another growth strategy idea that your team came up with to make that happen but rinse and repeat around all of these but if you've got traction and reinvest in trying to make it grow and if you don't add a new one and having that discipline of focus and measurement will be the unlock for you and building and go strategy gets you a hundred thousand users so quick recap number one nailed the problem niche make sure that they feel it and they want us lucien for it to map the universe ideally in a programmatic way number three add value in advance through content or splintering off a product feature number four drafting strategy behind other people's momentum in what I call OPN other people's networks and five rinse and repeat using a high-tempo testing framework I'm gonna share with you next so as I mentioned the beginning I want to share with you a training I did called high tempo testing taught to me full credit goes to Sean Ellis the creator of this he's also the essentially the originator of the term growth hacking he was an adviser of my last company clarity he's been a friend for almost a decade and one of the smartest marketing minds out there and I taught it at my recents ask adam ii intensive online give you access below if you click the link you'll get access to that specific training specifically you want to figure out what your northstar metric is your NSM that alone will make all of these strategies i just share with you work like lockstep so click the link below get access to that if you like this video be sure to smash the like button subscribe to my channel and if there's anybody think this video could serve directly that you care about feel free to share it with them as per usual I want to challenge you to live a bigger life and a bigger business and I'll see you next Monday I'm gonna throw it throw in the laptop catch

Channel: Dan Martell

Views: 28,023

Keywords: Growth Hacking, Acquire 100K Users, Pick a Niche, Solve One Problem, Map The Universe, Core Customer, Value In Advance, Education Based Marketing, Infotainment, Drafting Strategy, Joint Ventures, Partnerships, Viral Exposure, Rinse and Repeat, Agile Process, Dan Martell, growth hacking startups, growth hacking marketing, growth hacking techniques, growth hacking strategy, growth hacking examples, growth hacking tools, growth hacker, growth hacker marketing, growth marketing

Id: KER_ToELCM4

Length: 12min 27sec (747 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 29 2019