Growthhackingextended 130424223221-phpapp02

21 Ways to get More Users

Actionable Growth Hacking Tactics

@yongfookVirtual Assistanthttp://beatrixapp.com

http://beatrixapp.com



















Disclaimer!Based on first hand experience growing a

user-base of 500,000 (1.5 years) at previous companyand doing customer acquisition consulting

Focus is on users with an explicit ARPU!e.g. SaaS, E-commerce, Gaming...

Zero-revenue services may not be applicable

YMMV, don’t tase me bro etc.

Actionable Growth Hacking Tactics by @yongfook

Jon YongfookDirector of Online, Glamour Sales

#2 Luxury Flash-Sales Site in Japan

US$XX million per year sales

Joined at 0, left at ~500,000 members

Lived in Japan for 10 years before moving to Singapore

Founded recipe portal opensourcefood.com - acquired 2009

Bootstrapping 2 startups in Singapore - SaaS / E-commerce

Selected blog posts:http://yongfook.com/negotiation.htmlhttp://yongfook.com/enterprise.htmlhttp://yongfook.com/your-craft.html


Fuck starbucks.

Bootstrappers drink their coffee from plastic bags

http://yongfook.com/negotiation.html

http://yongfook.com/negotiation.html

http://yongfook.com/enterprise.html

http://yongfook.com/enterprise.html

http://yongfook.com/your-craft.html

http://yongfook.com/your-craft.html

This is a not a Growth Curve


This is a Growth Curve

Periods of strategic, sustainable growth

Rapid, unsustainable* tactical growth

*perhaps a temporary paid partnership, exploiting some growth vector that shuts itself off after a while, or a landing page optimization that inexplicably and suddenly stops working magic


The 3 Commandments Of Growth Hacking

Knoweth What Thy Customer Wants

Knoweth Where Thy Customer Resideth

Knoweth The Language Of Thy Customer


Think About & TEST:What’s the language potential customers use to articulate their problem?

How can I save time?How can I produce better results?

How can I look great in front of my peers?How can I never have to do this myself again?

How can I earn more money?


How Can WeAutomate This?

...and always asketh...


cheapTrivia: The artist Michelangelo was famously cheap and lived in poor conditions, despite being very wealthy

scalableTrivia: Mount Fuji in Japan is actually a volcano and has been dormant since 1708

expensiveTrivia: Archimedes discovered buoyancy, was one of the best mathematicians of his time and also built giant, mechanical war machines

Organic Search• AUTOMATE: For every model in your

database, think about how it can be turned into automatic public-facing content.

• Remember to put an obvious CTA!

• AUTOMATE: Make sure sitemap.xml is being generated programmatically and is submitted properly to google / bing etc.

Editorial

Automatic / Template

There’s a page like this for every country on DirectRooms

Ex

1


Organic Search• AUTOMATE: Use RICH SNIPPETS.

Seriously. Not everyone is yet, you have the advantage right now.

1

(which one would YOU click)


• Create shareable content

• Top 10 Lists

• Useful stuff

• PICTURES! (e.g. Boston.com)

• Think about content that is useful to your customers.

• Don’t talk about yourself too much.

• AUTOMATE: you can’t automate content creation but can you automate idea generation? Use google trends / social searching to hack yourself a weekly list of topics to cover.

Mr PorterExcellent, authoritative and shareable blog content.

Their business is e-commerce.

Ex

Blog Blog Blog2


• Tech blogs are always looking out for good new content. Don’t be afraid to reach out if there’s market overlap.

• Be proactive - write first, then offer it to a blog. If they decline, offer another blog. And so on - worst case? Put it on your own blog.

• SEO value + direct leads

• AUTOMATE: same as blogging, cannot automate this but can automate idea generation.

Guest Post Elsewhere3


• Get your content out there - don’t expect people to come to it!

• Find relevant Subreddits and self promote!

• Same goes for Quora, forums, comment feeds of related blog posts on other blogs - flirt with that line between being spammy and being useful.

• Master the art of Hacker News!

• AUTOMATE: get everyone on the team to sign up for buffer and buffer the hell out your content each time you post.

Share Your Content4


• AUTOMATE: use tools for this. obviously. Google Content Experiments (lame) or Visual Website Optimizer (quite awesome).

• Don’t fuck around testing your design too much. Test your language / value proposition and CTA.

• Preserve Scent

• Get Their Email Address (it’s really all you actually need)

• Don’t let them LEAVE your signup page without signing up.

• Be ready to test AGAIN in another few months - optimizations don’t last forever.

GrouponDifferent graphic assets depending on entry keywordto preserve scent: this search was for “spa coupon”

Ex

Landing Page Tests5


Allow your users to share / like / recommend / EMBED your contentAUTOMATE: BUILD SHARING INTO the user journey

Built-in Sharing6

• AUTOMATE: Retrofit other large markets to work with your site in a way beneficial to users.

• AirBNB / Craigslist

• Craigslist actively prohibits this sort of thing now but I bet there’s some regional incumbent that will be slow in closing any loophole you exploit!

• Big companies can’t get away with this. Do this before you get big.

Air BNBFamously created a “Post to Craigslist” feature

despite there not being an official API, in order to gain initial traction

Ex

Distribution Automation7


• “Retweet this to Win!”

• Is this really social? not reeeally.

• AUTOMATE:

• Leverage vanity / curiosity

• Give User A some dynamic content specific to them (e.g. a horoscope) and encourage User A to tweet it.

• User B learns about your company via learning something funny about User A (their friend).

KloutSome (most?) of Klout’s growth is driven through

leveraging user vanity and curiosity:1) Vanity of users sharing their high score

2) Curiosity of user’s friends to find out their own score

Ex

Social Campaigns8


• “Fake it till you make it”

• If you’re a marketplace or UGC site, seed it with as much content as possible. Nobody will stay loyal to an empty site.

• What content can you use? Creative-commons licensed. Fair-use from other sites (think: excerpt + link back a la Pinterest). Reddit famously created fake profiles in the early days.

• Don’t be shy! Seed Supply.

• But uh, don’t keep doing it - real customers pay much better than fake customers.

Seed Supply9

http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/06/reddit-founders-made-hundreds-of-fake-profiles-so-site-looked-popular/

So the founders made a small addition to the submission page, visible only to themselves: in addition to the "URL" and "title," there was a "user" field. Ohanian and Huffman could make up a login in the "user" field, and if it wasn't already registered by an actual person, the link would be submitted under the ghost profile. "That did two things," said Huffman. "It set the tone… and it made the site feel alive."






In 2010 I made a game that at a certain point you had to invite another person in order to progress...it worked incredibly well and it didn’t piss

as many people off as I thought it would.At that middle point in the game, most users werehappy to spread the word. 10,000+ users in 2 days.

Forced Virality...10

• ENGAGEMENT / LOYALTY!

• AUTOMATE: add a drip-campaign or autoresponder to each user after signup. Encourage them to make that first interaction / upload / etc.

• AUTOMATE: add other email triggers to encourage other behaviors:

• abandoned cart - remind them!

• dormant - poke them!

• successfully used your product - get their feedback!

CRM Automation11

Jeff didn’t reeeeeeeeally send this mail himself


Recruited over 30 trend-setting (non-celebrity) bloggersand incentivised blog coverage via VIP events and coupons

AUTOMATE: Sweeten the relationship with widgets for their blogs

Influencers12


• A reliable portion of our monthly growth came from paid search

• It took me months to learn how to stop bleeding money in adsense. There’s a learning curve.

• AUTOMATE: use the Keyword Tool and use the Ad Group Ideas feature - it’s bloody useful and saves lots of time. Quickly test various keyword groups to see which convert the best = learning the language of your customers.

“Singapore Hotels”A search for “Singapore Hotels” on Google shows

many companies with deep pockets: Agoda, booking.com, expedia.com - startups trying to

compete head to head with these companies in Paid Search will simply run out of cash

Ex

Paid Search13


• Advertise to people who’ve visited your site already.

• CTR can be better, and it makes you look like a massive company.

• AUTOMATE: stick the remarketing tag across your whole site from the very beginning! Build the audience so that you can advertise to them later.

Remarketing!14


• “Refer a friend and get a $25 coupon!”

• Japanese users seemed less motivated to refer for cash

• Test the incentive, for example “Refer 5 friends and get free shipping for 3 months!”

• Some incentives work better at different stages of the customer journey e.g. a newly-activated user / a long-term user

• AUTOMATE: Remember to test the crap out of the HTML email design / message itself. Optimize and improve your conversion rates.

GiltAll group-buying and private e-commerce siteshave an MGM mechanic. It’s a scalable way of

acquiring pre-qualified users - costs will riselinearly with new users acquired

Ex

Member Get Member15


• It’s not a must-have but it’s certainly a nice-to-have. HN / Reddit drive a lot of traffic.

• Write great content for geeks

• or create something open source

• or ask for genuine feedback:

• Show HN: what do you think of our startup?

Get on Hacker News!16

http://pitchpigeon.com/blog/10-lessons-learned-from-a-successful-hacker-news-launch.html

Signups for a paid software productlaunched on Hacker News




• An incentivised partner sending you targeted prospects is supremely valuable

• High quality users

• Try to negotiate a revenue-share, but be prepared for other costs like a revenue guarantee or an up-front payment.

• In addition to rev-share offer them something they can’t already get easily e.g. build something for them for free, give them data.

• AUTOMATE: We put a whole store on their site that earned a rev-share, that they never had to manage and that seamlessly-integrated with the rest of their site.

We partnered with a popular fashion destination and got banner space, a dedicated page (we put an

inline-frame store on it), EDMs and more.

Ex

Partner Up17


• Bit of a gamble but can be highly effective at getting users

• Depends on the size of the blog ecosystem but in Japan: 10,000++ new users from a single post

• User quality varies

• Can result in re-blogs, conversations

• Real Example: Celebrity A (paid) wrote about us, then Celebrity B (unpaid) checked us out and wrote about us organically and enthusiastically as we were selling a brand that she loves. We ended up getting more users via Celebrity B than Celebrity A.

• Best to do it in a regulated environment where there are guidelines.

Ex

Famous bloggers such as Xiaxue are no stranger to advertorials. Pick your audience wisely however.

Endorsement18


• FACT: Loading time affects your conversion rate A LOThttp://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/

• Don’t forget to optimize one of the most basic parameters out there - site speed

• AUTOMATE: your deployment process should be combining all your assets into as few files as possible, minifying them, and serving them from a CDN (with gzip) your framework should be doing this for you already.

• There are more quick wins to be had concentrating on static asset serving speed than db/code optimization

Be Fast19


http://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/

http://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/

• The press want / need to know what you’re up to!

• There’s (about) 10 different occasions where you might want to talk to a journalist about your startup:http://pitchpigeon.com/blog/the-10-types-of-startup-press-release.html

• AUTOMATE: news wire services have some SEO benefit, but you are better off sending emails to journalists / publishers. Oh there’s an app for that!

http://pitchpigeon.com

Tell The Press20


http://pitchpigeon.com/blog/the-10-types-of-startup-press-release.html






• Figure out what the AHA! Moment is for your service / app

• Twitter: found that when users follow 30+ people, they suddenly “get it” and engagement increases

• Optimize around getting users to reach that goal - make decisions for them, or make it as seamless as possible, or keep bugging them to do stuff!

• AUTOMATE: Your app *needs* an onboarding process (tutorial / wizard etc) but don’t just blindly build one - the onboarding process should have one goal: get users to reach or as near as possible to the AHA! Moment as fast and with doing as little as possible. Data is your friend!

Find the AHA! Moment21

Twitter now tries very hard during onboarding to get people to follow others - using an algorithm to

increase relevance


Horizontal Growth

Shiny Report

Tool

Shiny Report

Toolin Japanese

Shiny Report

Toolin Chinese

Shiny Report

Toolfor Moms

Shiny Report

Toolfor Dogs

You get to do it all over again for different markets


Vertical Growth

Shiny Report

Tool

Shiny Scheduling

Tool

Shiny EmailTool

Shiny Invoicing

Tool

“Spaceballs the Flamethrower!”

Or across different verticals!


thanks!@yongfook

http://yongfook.com

http://yongfook.com

http://yongfook.com

Brought to you by Beatrix

Virtual Assistant for Social Mediahttp://beatrixapp.com









































Growthhackingextended 130424223221-phpapp02

Technology

automate idea

html http

onboarding

hacker news

people

blog

customers

content