What are Your Best Growth Hacking Strategies?
Gaining traction and getting your first customers can be hard!
As Indie Hackers, we are always looking for new ways to growth hack and establish out products and services.
I've listed a few of my favourite below.
What are some of your best growth hacking strategies?
Most of us are on a budget after all!
1. Pre-Launch Email List
Start getting emails ASAP. Set up a quick landing page with a simple email sign up linked to HubSpot, Mailchimp or your service of choice. Start gathering feedback and doing customer interviews as early as possible.
2. Guest Blogging
This might be a little further down the line, but I think many of us forget about the power of content creation. Even if you have a SaaS platform, creating content around your problem area and sharing how you are solving the problem really helps to frame that you are an authority in your domain of expertise.
3. Community Events / Webinars
Providing value up front by hosting events and webinars for community and potential customers is key for building trust. It creates rapport for users and gives them a sense of the real people behind the product.
4. Offer Freemiums
Once again, I think this should be reserved for when you feel you have a refined product market fit. You should be confident that by granting customers a free trial of your product or service, they will be impressed enough to want to pay you for the courtesy of staying on.
5. Lead Magnets
Creating value in the form of lead magnets is another powerful way to get leads for your business. I used this specific strategy last week to gather 120+ leads for my business. Lead Magnets still work as long as you provide great value!
6. Gamify Your Product or service
Humans are competitive by nature and we like to feel a sense of accomplishment for our time spent doing things. More and more platforms seem to be implementing gamification with points and rewards for users. Indie Hackers does this well too. We get points for contributing to other's posts and get points for content being upvoted. The network effect of this helps to bring in even more people to their ecosystem.
Google Whisk - Generate images using images as prompts, not text prompts
After 19,314 lines of code, i'm shutting down my project
Need feedback for my product.
We are live on Product Hunt
Don't be a Jerk. Use this Tip Calculator.
My #1 strategy would be not to growth hack at all.
Do you just hate the phrase "growth hack"? Or do you mean you hope to get lucky and have word-of-mouth take off?
Honestly, the ideas that @gordon provides are sound customer building techniques. I just think people hate buzzwords.
Not sure what @louisswiss' motivation is, but honestly none of this is even remotely growth hacking - it's marketing.
You don't need 'growth hacking' for your first 100 or 1,000 users.
Plus most 'hacks' are just basic marketing. Growth hacking is just a marketing phrase that sounds cool for people that think setting up Google ads towards a landing page and adding Facebook retargeting is a 'hack', for agencies to jump on the latest trend, and for 'growth hack schools' to dump basic online marketing tactics on naive young minds who think they're the next gen of marketers.
Hell, even the dude who coined the term growth hacker said that the term lost all meaning. Growth hacks were what set AirBNB, Uber and Paypal on the map because they thought of new crazy ideas to grow and used tech + marketing to get there. Nowadays every kid with a smartphone following/unfollowing people on Instagram is suddenly a growth hacker.
Give most self-advertised 'growth hackers' a challenge like the one AirBNB used on Craigslist or Paypal used on Craigslist, and they'll have no idea what to do. 99% of so called growth hackers is just doing basic online marketing, it's all BS and fluff.
3 of the things on the list on top aren't even a growth hack in the way that is described in the image that is being used to describe growth hacking in the first place.
Maybe I'm just getting old as a marketer, but to me growth hacking is losing all its meaning. The real hacking happens when you use massive amounts of data from lots of sources, put them together, create campaigns based on that and get great results in an as much as possible automated way. And that's just not what you should be doing at your early-stage.
Instead you should be busy doing manual growth. Spend 80% of your time figuring out where your users are, how to reach them and how to convert them into paying users. There's no hack for that, there's no secret sauce. @rosiesherry is right: "Be human". Seriously. Start doing stuff manually and only then look to automate things if you have to scale. Just don't try to look for hacks/shortcuts to get a million users if you don't even have a thousand.
And stop buying into this whole growth hacking hype. At this point, it's not much different than the whole dropshipping/affiliate marketing thing that popped up a while ago online.
Valid points. I think the best growth hacking strategy is to have no growth strategy at all. Instead focus on proving great value to users. A strategy called "Product led". In simpler words just a product people would want to use and then make tools/features to make that experience better.
This is what we are trying to do with Pipfeed.com. Just making an app that helps people read more. It makes taking decision very easy.
I think focusing on providing value is absolutely paramount @Imshashank. I don't think this means that you can't provide value while using techniques to grow your business though.
Pipfeed.com looks great. I hope it is all going well for you!
Thanks, Pipfeed is going really well.
I think we both are saying the same thing. It's just that "growth hacking" is being misused these days a lot for all sorts of tricks/hacks.
Glad to hear it @Imshashank. Ye it reminds me a bit of how Gary Vaynerchuck says 'marketers ruin everything'. I still think startups, we can keep the human touch without the need for 'tricks' like you say.
True words my friend.
For Pipfeed I do have a list of growth hacking ideas. They are more like tiny projects that use some features from Pipfeed to get new users to Pipfeed.
Like A.I. generated personalized newsletter.
Thanks for your input @FrankHeijdenrijk. You make some valid points and I would not regard myself as an expert "Growth Hacker" at all. You obviously have good experience in the marketing field. I completely agree that there is no hack or secret sauce.
Manual outreach and putting in the hours to grow organically early on is essential.
earlyusergrowth.com looks interesting. I look forward to getting some updates!
Ye I think "growth hacking" may have negative connotations with some people. I think any early stage startup must get creative with building out their initial community and user base. This doesn't mean it has to be done without taste or with disregard for the end customer. Quite the contrary really.
I somewhat see "growth hacking" as doing things that don't scale as Paul Graham talks about in this article.
I think it is definitely possible to growth hack while still "Being Human" as @rosiesherry says.
"Growth hacking" and "doing things that don't scale" are literally opposites of each other. The essential core of growth hacking from the moment it was coined as a term has been to build systems that are meant to scale and require as little manual work as possible to grow.
Thanks for the reply @louisswiss. Can you explain your reason why?
Be human, it's a competitive advantage these days. 😆
Haha you are very right @rosiesherry. Thanks for the reminder!
My #1 strategy is to NEVER tell anyone about my growth hacks!
Hahaha, you must have some really amazing growth hacks!
Some are amazing, that's why they're hacks! if they weren't everyone would use them and they wouldn't really be hacks. right?
So many... obvious ones:
If the product is not awesome, it's always going to be an uphill battle.
Thanks for this great response @genemachine. I certainly like your stance on openness, honesty and sharing the best findings!
Hi there Gordon. The lead magnet thread is great! Do you have more examples that you've tried?
Thanks @witsuma. I have been building my 'pre-launch' email list over the past few weeks also. Getting feedback and iterating accordingly. I don't have quantitative metrics to go along with this, but some good qualitative insights. If I run more experiments that get more qualitative insights I'll be sure to update this post or write a new one!
Well it's a learning journey, well all make it up as we go along. Look forward to that post!
I just finished this page which has a very quick video on the "why and how-to," and shows how to spin an entire social campaign of many unique selling posts from one blog post: https://help.ritekit.com/en/article/how-to-spin-one-blog-post-or-web-page-into-many-social-posts-that-sell-with-the-ritekit-package-1fy3xmb/
I rely on this tactic to market RiteKit, as demonstrated in the quick video in the help page above, so I thought this would be worthy to share for all to employ.
See it and then, any questions, I'm happy to help. After all, I'm still indie - and I do 100% of the social media marketing, what has kept RIteKit in business for 9 years, myself.
Thanks for sharing this @osakasaul. Looks like a great tool and I like your thought process of getting the most value out of the content we create. Many of us are probably leaving 'a lot on the table' when it comes to the social reach we are missing out on because of not sharing out content effectively!
Start providing backlinks to other products.
Thanks @horizontech. This is a simple yet effective strategy that can be done almost immediately!
Look at your data to see what features are working well, and lean in to those as you modify your website's copy.
There's a reason why your post's image has "data" as one of the vital circles to a good business.
Thanks for this insight @blakerson. Yes, utilizing data once you reach scale will also be key to success! Thanks for sharing.
I believe, the growth hacks depend on the end goal.
I'd add referrals to the your list.
For me personally 'The perimissionless apprenticeship' (Jack Butcher) worked well.
I wrote about in this IH post - https://www.indiehackers.com/post/1-tweet-got-me-1300-followers-more-heres-how-i-prepared-d68fc1f9ff
Thanks very much for this suggestion @TheNakedPoet2. Love the idea of 'The permissionless apprenticeship'. I will have to try that very soon!
If I launch a SaaS, my first growth hack will be a free tool related to my niche.
Second one will be launching an affiliate program from day 1 using Rewardful or tapfiliate. Affiliate program brings more backlinks, conversions and buzz.
Thanks for the input @FalakSher. I like the idea of an affiliate program. Why do you think it is better to implement something like this early vs waiting until you have grown your customer base?
Honestly, starting by my comment, if Rewardful or Tapfiliate don't have an affiliate program, I may have mentioned another software instead of it. (Firstpromoter doesn't have an affiliate program, so it was out of my discussion.)
2nd an affiliate program costs 29$/month so why I should not leverage this channel. (Considering I have spent some $$$($) building my MVP)
3rd Backlinks matter for SEO. And it's one of the easiest ways for getting them
4th If you don't have an affiliate program, most people will not mention or if they mention, they don't praise too much. But if you have an affiliate program, it directly bribes them to do so and maybe they shamelessly promote you which can be as aggressive as pop-ups or a banners at the end of every post (remembering Freshbooks pop-ups I saw on some websites)
If standard commissions in your niche are 30% recurring, I can even make a start from 40% and increase my price likewise by adding separate paid addons or raising my SaaS price.
Thanks @FalakSher for the insight. I guess this approach depends on the product or service you are offering. For something like building a community, this may not be as relevant, especially at the start when you might want to constrain your early users and customers.
For a SaaS product that already has good product market fit then this approach would make a lot of sense!
Digital currency such as likes, upvotes and follower count brings wonders.
We can even gamify it by adding our logo on the videos downloaded from our community like TikTok
I think one that should appeal to devs is Engineering as Marketing - making a free tool related to your niche that solves a problem.
I'm only in the process of trying this out. One content/dev (make useful content more accessible) and one pure dev (a tool related to my niche).
I think it should appeal to devs because, rather than working with words (which we all seem to be afraid of), we can build small tools (hopefully week-ish long projects) that simply solve a problem.
Thanks for this @AndrewV. I like this idea. It gives a way for engineers to create a Proof of concept to see if there is apatite in the market for what they're building.
Sorry, what I'm talking about is more of a lead gen. For example, I have a video creation app, so I'm thinking of what kind of small, free tools could get people using my site with "If you liked this tool, you'll love the video creation app!"
Ah okay cool. So you would build a small free tool and use IT as the lead gen for your video creation app?
Yeah, it's mentioned in the book Traction as "Engineering as Marketing."
Awesome. Best of luck with it my man.