Growth

Lecture 6: Growth

Link: How to Start a Startup

(You can find notes to the other lectures here.) 

Alex Schultz (@alexschultz)

Growth hacking is just Internet marketing.

Great product leads to customers.

Retention is the single most important thing for growth.

If you don’t have a great product there is no use spending time growing it because it won’t grow.

Startups should not have growth teams. The whole company should be the growth team.

Every company thinking about growth has a different North star. You need to define that North star.

The first time you get paid is a magic moment.

Get people to connect with the thing that gets them to stick on your site.

When operating for growth everything has to come from the top.

“Build it and they will come” is not true.

Move slow to move fast.

Building to where the world is today is an easy mistake to make.

Book: Viral Loop

Book: Ogilvy on Advertising

Think about virality in terms of payload (how many people you can hit with any given viral blast), frequency, and conversion rate.

Do anything you can to remove friction from the flow.

Do your research first for what (keywords) people are going to (search for).

Research consists of:

  • What people are going to search for that is related to your site?
  • How many people search for it?
  • How many other people rank for it?
  • How valuable is it to you?

Google Adwords keyword planner tool.

The single most important thing is to get links from high-ranking websites.

Email is dead for people under 25.

If you get caught in SPAM then it is very hard to get out.

The most effective email you can do is notifications.

What notification you should be sending is the first thing you should think about for email, sms, and push.

Think about how you can create triggerable email campaigns.

Make sure you have deliverability.

Focus on notification and trigger-based email, sms, and push notifications.

Work really, really hard.