The 3 proven ways not to growth hack
There is high chance that am one of you and just like you. An online marketer in a growing startup given the awesome opportunity and responsibility to grow the traffic, leads, signups at 50% month over month. So we have to growth hack every time right?
Not every time! It is perhaps one of the biggest lessons I learnt over one of the most testing times at the startup I belong to.
So here are the absolute best ways you can mess up your growth by trying to hack (including a priceless tip from Jason M. Lemkin). These are mistakes am sharing with pride and with the hope that it helps avoid costly errors:
- Let me plug and play the growth hack I learnt in that blog post on ‘how they growth hacked’:
Don’t you love those amazingly written and inspiring blog posts that you read at growthhackers.com, inbound.org, medium.com and many more?
Keep in mind that the case study in that particular blog post is often backed by vigorous experimentation and enough toil that went unnoticed. In most cases, they have failed at several other experiments before the magic — which they might have not written about :).
So don’t have illusions that by focusing on those specific experiments alone, magic can happen. We all need to run our own experiments, fail, fail and succeed. Take blog posts as inspiration and a guide, not as the solution on its own.
Next step? Read this masterclass: How Product Hunt Helped Me Grow A List Of 12,989,483,288+ Valuable Subscribers And Generate 220k+ In Sales In Less Than 20 Minutes Without Having To Write A Single Line Of Code And Also Taught Me These 5+ Startup Lessons From My Mistakes About Being A Product Manager in 2016 on Meerkat by Matt Sydeworks.
2. Let’s just get that tool that helped that startup to grow hack:
I used to be awed at the language the growth hack tools use (have you seen how how hellobar/sumome grew the lead gen for their clients by 300%?). I love those tools. But know this before you set them: it is your strategy that will fail or succeed. The tool is just an easy, better way to do the things that work.
The placement of a sumome lead generation widget, or the headline to use on a hellobar — you decide. Experiment, learn, rerun…
Dont be dejected if the tool doesnt do magic. They are not supposed to. If you experiment enough, learn enough, there will always be that one iteration that will do the magic and tell you what, the tool will help you get the best out of it.
3. Stop doing the stuff that won’t scale
Are you looking for new ways to scale your growth? The marketing methods which don’t scale still matter. Those individual tweets, the detailed forum responses, individual personalized email reachouts… Those things may not be the 3x growth channels but they are like oxygen. They are vital for your online branding, thought leadership and goodwill from the community.
In the thick of ‘new’ experiments and untested hypothesis, we often forget where we came from. This was confirmed by my short twitter conversation with SaaS guru Jason M. Lemkin.
Yea, well that’s about it. These might be lessons that you already know but make sure you don’t lose the precious perspective that you have earned over time — growing from 0 to 100 customers.
Have a growth hacking (not) lesson to share? Liked what you read? Leave a comment and recommend.
