Recommended growth hacking tips by Nate Barnwell

Premium growth hacking advices from Nathan Barnwell: Despite the importance of product, it would be foolish to restrict your activities to only the product. The same internet that redefined product has also redefined distribution, and not all distribution is within the product. Those with a strong understanding of how people flow online will be able to use that knowledge for the sake of their startup’s growth. What does the “hacker” in growth hacker mean? The word hacker has a few different definitions and connotations that inform the meaning of growth hacker. Hacker is sometimes used to refer to someone who is clever, original, or inventive. They will use whatever is at their disposal to create a solution that might have been overlooked by others. A “life hacker” would be an example of this use of the term. This same attitude is found in growth hacker because they are forced to be ingenious if they are going to achieve growth. Paths to growth are not usually obvious and it takes extreme creativity to find them.

Created in 2013 by Stewart Butterfield, Slack is a messaging and collaboration tool for enterprises. It allows company teams to chat and share in real-time. Today, Slack has over 12 million daily active users with more than 100 thousand paid customers. When designing Slack, however, Butterfield had no intention of being a big hit. Slack was created for covering the communication needs of Butterfield’s team during the design process of Glitch, a games app that can now be considered a fail. From this fail, however, came great success as the team saw how valuable Slack was to them. The market needed such a product where internal team members could communicate easily and exchange project materials quickly, and Butterfield already had one. Since Slack was created for users in the first place with no intention of profit and turned out to be a great product, further development continued accordingly. Slack team always took customer feedback as guidance, replying to every email they received and examining every ticket carefully. This initiation pushed Slack to be a great example of product-led growthWhat is product-led growth? Product Led Growth (PLG) is a business development strategy that leverages product usage to drive customer acquisitions, conversions, and market expansion. It places product on the focus of businesses.

Nathan Barnwell growth hacking strategies: Word-of-mouth is organic and effective. Recommendations from friends and family are some of the most powerful incentives for consumers to purchase or try a product or service. The secret of word-of-mouth’s effectiveness lies in a deeply rooted psychological bias all people have — we subconsciously believe the majority knows better. Social proof is central to most successful sales copywriting and broader content marketing efforts. That’s why businesses draw so much attention to their online reputations. They know in today’s customer-driven world — one where communication methods change and information is available to all — a single negative blog post or tweet can compromise an entire marketing effort. Pete Blackshaw, the father of digital word-of-mouth growth, says, “satisfied customers tell three friends; angry customers tell 3,000.” The key with word-of-mouth is to focus on positive user experience. You need to grow a base of satisfied customers and sustain the wave of loyal feedback that comes with it. With this method, you have to focus on delivering a spectacular user experience, and users will spread the word for you.

A good growth marketer thinks big and tests small. They can envision anything — even Craigslist! — as a marketing channel, but they also run constant cheap, iterative tests to make sure their ideas can work. When DTC growth guru and investor Nik Sharma worked at Hint Water, for example, every major marketing push started with small, cheap tests — a growth marketing staple. If a small test got splashy results, the company invested more in the strategy. This helped Hint Water avoid expensive missteps, and innovate effectively; the company helped pioneer influencer marketing as we know it today. “Now everybody does it,” Sharma told Nathan Barnwell. “But three years ago, nobody else was doing it and people thought it was kind of sketchy.” That’s the power of growth marketing — it’s an approach that allows you to confidently invest in a new channel. You just test first.

Getting permission to run this high impact testing often requires setting up an offsite meeting with the growth team, functional leaders and the CEO. Once you’ve been given permission to test, it’s important to set up specific improvement objectives and track progress against them. This will help your team generate relevant ideas and keep everyone informed about progress. As you run higher impact testing, you should start to see some big wins. These big wins will be critical for driving broader team participation. Keeping a full team in sync around growth is not an easy task. Building the habit in the first place is even harder. But the effort is well worth it. No individual growth hacker or even a growth team can outperform a company where everyone is mobilised to accelerate growth. Find more information on Nathan Barnwell.

Don’t hit the ground running without planning out and documenting the steps for your growth strategy. We recommend downloading this free Growth Strategy Template and working off the included section prompts to outline your intended process for growth in your organization. It’s great that you want to grow your business, but what exactly do you want to grow? Your business growth plan should hone in on specific areas of growth. Common focuses of strategic growth initiatives might include: Growth in employee headcount, Expansion of current office, retail, and/or warehouse space, Addition of new locations or branches of your business, Expansion into new regions, locations, cities, or countries, Addition of new products and/or services, Expanding purchase locations (i.e. selling in new stores or launching an online store), Growth in revenue and/or profit, Growth of customer base and/or customer acquisition rate.