Digital Skills Global
12 Growth Hacking Techniques Every Startup Should Use

12 Growth Hacking Techniques Every Startup Should Use

Good growth hacking is a data enhanced mindset. Get into the zone, be strategic, opportunistic, and you will succeed rapidly or otherwise be able to quickly recognise what is not working and adapt accordingly.

1. Use free stuff until you need to pay for it, Wordpress, Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, SurveyMonkey all have free versions that will take you a long way before you need to pay for the advanced services (if you’re smart about it you may never even need the paid for versions).

2. Good enough, is good enough to get it out there. Get it 80% working, and get it out there. Make people love it, and then respond quickly when they point out any bugs or glitches and then quickly fix them. Your users can be your testers if you use them wisely and responsively.

3. Networking still works, leverage other people’s help, wisdom and insights. Be confident, believe in your product, and always be ready to tell your story.

4. Use the data to understand what is happening, there are analytics for almost everything you do now. This is where geeks are useful and come into their own. The geeks will get the job done.

5. Use humour and be topical. Have all your branding lined up, and when you see your Super Bowl opportunity go for it.

6. Know your opposition and use free third party tools to measure, monitor and evaluate where their traffic is coming and going to. Alexa.com, SimilarWeb, TwitterAudit, and QuickSprout are all great ways to assess your rivals reach, impact and engagement.

7. Twitter is your friend. You can tweet anyone, they may not reply, but lots of people will. Many of these will even help you, if you ask nicely and for appropriate things.

8. People still buy from people. Until we have robots selling to robots it makes sense to be pleasant, charming and helpful to others. It’s not necessary or even strategic to be a jerk when dealing with other people. Growth hackers don’t have to share their tips with you if you’ve just been rude and demanding with them, would you?

9. Don’t blindly copy other people’s success. Beware of hindsight bias. Just because someone has become successful it doesn’t mean they are the best person to take advice from about what is right for your own company. Looking back they may have just been lucky, rather than as amazing, as they now see themselves to be. Growth hacking is about being able to use and quickly discard tools that might be of use.

10. Check out Sean Ellis, and the Growth Hacking forum. Learn from the guys who invented the term.

11. Learn from the experts.

Patrick Vlaskovits. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel, there are some good / great resources out there already. See this link by the author of ‘The Lean Entrepreneur’, for a great slideshare presentation on Growth Hacking, with lots of great resources.

12. Learn from the experts.

Neil Patel. Neil Patel has built numerous successful companies. He avidly blogs on experiments he has tried out to increase growth, carefully detailing what has worked, and what has not.

Bonus tip.

For marketing and growing your business, the books, thoughts, and ideas of Seth Godin, Gary Vaynerchuk and Guy Kawasaki are well worth following too.