Growth Hack – Comprehensive Customer Research

As mentioned earlier as well, building a good product for a focused group of customers is a great way to get traction. A good tool to build such a product is customer research. Identify people in your target market, try to get as much information from them and incorporate the results in your product.

Tempo, an AI enhanced calendar app, was able to do this very well. It was launching at a time when the competition was extremely high. They did interviews, surveys and a whole lot of product testing before the launch. When they did launch, they were flooded by a large number of new users.

Growth Hack – Limited Initial Target Market

Having a very limited and clearly defined initial target market leads to a more focused product, which in turn results in higher adoption. Also this mostly tends to result in a community cum networking effect, which further enhances traction for the startup.

Quora started off in Silicon Valley and was targeting startups and VCs. Soon it was able to build substantial traction through this network of it’s early savvy users.

Growth Hack – Right Message at the Right Time

Sending a relevant message at the right time leads to great results. This is particularly important in push marketing techniques like email marketing, sms marketing etc. So what do I mean by the right message and the right time? The right time is about finding a reason/occasion to send a message and a right message is one which is structured around it.

OkCupid is a dating app which has used this hack time and again as part of it’s email campaign. For example, when it rains, they send the following message to their email list in that particular area – “We noticed it’s raining tonight in San Jose. Our statistics show that more people sign in when there is bad weather. It’s the perfect time to message that special someone!” (source: freshsupercool.com)

Growth Hack – Integrate

A good way a startup can get growth is by integrating the same with other businesses. The integration should result in some value addition for the users. The startup can benefit from the existing trust and visibility that these other businesses have created within their user base.

Slack has been able to integrate with major services like Dropbox, Asana and so on. This enabled it to get good user traction, especially in it’s early days. 

Growth Hack – Invent the Wheel

Inventing the wheel means creating something useful well. Try to create something which is copyable and which other startups/businesses would need and may not want to invest in. Since you already have that with you, you can share it with others and get a mention/branding in return.

Startups do not want to spend money on creating a new privacy policy if they can copy it from some website for free. Iubenda was able to create a comprehensive privacy policy with their branding embedded in it and shared it with other startups. This helped them in their SEO and in getting referral traffic from these other startups.

Growth Hack – Social Sharing by Users

Social sharing by users has a great growth effect attached to it. If you can get a user to share actions on his/her social networks and blogs, it serves as a strong referral tool and good traction can be generated by it. Users tend to share because of 2 primary reasons – self-fulfillment and to establish new relationships and a personal brand.

A famous example of a startup using this hack is Quora. A user asking or answering a question on Quora can share the same on social media, which brings traffic to the website.