The hardest part of building a startup
My presentation is about the hardest part of building a startup (growth), and how to achieve it with a small budget and limited resources. I also touch on the best tools to use, how to use them, and how to make sure you're getting the most out of your initial traffic.
2. • Vice President of marketing at Nutshell - www.nutshell.com
• PayDirt - dashboard.getpaydirt.com
• YesViideo- www.yesvideo.com
Raven Media Labs - www.ravenmedialabs.com
• Director at MoviePass www.moviepass.com
• Director at Peanut Labs www.peanutlabs .com
Who am i?
@bliemaster
6. What to do before launch
What I’ll be talking about today
How to successfully build a marketing plan for your startup that is scalable and repeatable.
What to do after launch
Tools to use
7. Goal for today
eave you with techniques and tools that will make it easier to grow your busin
8. per user
CAC
010-2016
0
52.5
105
157.5
210
262.5
2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016
Advertising spend per user
Cost to acquire a new user has doubled since 2010
Reasons
• competition
• old tactics
How can you find waysto
bring this down.
10. You’re gonna need some tools
LYTICS - Identify drop-off points best performing channels and under-performing pa
QUALITATIVE INSIGHTS - Figure out why things are happening
A/B TESTING - Find the best customer facing variations to optimize conversion
18. generate buzz
Landing
Pages
• Always capture email
• Referral program
Optimizely
Wordpress
• capture emails
• track your clicks
• a/b test copy
• a/b test design
• live chat with traffic
• platform to test ads
collect data
22. Adwordsfacebook
linkedintwitter
test ad channels
Keyword tooltest ads (ctr, keywords, etc)
Cheap ads
Would you…
Content
Build presence
Test traffic to landing page
Start capturing email addresses by pushing traffic
Content
Build presence
Test traffic to lp
29. launching
have a
plan
TRACK ANDMEASURE
EVERYTHING
INVITE ROLLOUT
MAILCHIMP, URL BUILDER
www.nutshell.com/?utm_source=mailchimp&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=di
scount20
TEST AND TRACK LANDING PAGES
OPTIMIZELY, CRAZYEGG, GA
TALK TO YOUR CUSTOMERS
QUALAROO, SURVEYMONKEY
TRACK USER BEHAVIOR
KISSMETRICS, MIXPANEL,
ELANCE/ODESK
REFERRAL PROGRAM
REFERRAL SAASQUATCH OR IN-HOUSE
31. Experiment
growth
levers
BE AWARE OF WHATIS
WORKING FOROTHER
COMPANIES
AFFILIATE ADVERTISING
SHAREASALE, COMMISSION JUNCTION
MOBILE DOWNLOADS
FACEBOOK, FLURRY
RETARGETING
ADROLL, FACEBOOK, ADWORDS
YOUTUBE PARTERNSHIPS
IN-HOUSE AFFILIATE PROGRAM
SOCIAL MEDIA
FACEBOOK, TWITTER, LINKEDIN, TUMBLR
CONTENT
BUZZSUMO, CONTENTLY,
REFERRAL PROGRAMS
REFERRAL SAASQUATCH
GROWTH HACKS
ON-BOARDING, INVITE, REFERRAL
32. growth hacking
It's the idea that an entrepreneur can take a clever or non-traditional approach toincreasing the
growth rate/adoption of his or her product by "hacking" something together specificallyfor growth
purposes.
37. Sean Ellis - Growthhackers.com
Growth hacking is a marketingtechnique
developed by technology startupswhich
uses creativity, analytical thinking,and social
metrics to sell products and gainexposure. It
can be seen as part of the online
marketing ecosystem, as in manycases
growth hackers are simply good atusing
techniques such as search engine
optimization, website analytics,content
marketing andA/B testing which arealready
mainstream.
Growth Hacking
Marc Andreesen– Netscape,Andreesen Horowitz
Steve Blank
Being in a good market with a productthat
can satisfy that market.” Many people
interpret product/market fit as creatinga
Minimum Viable Product thataddresses and
solves a problem or need that exists.
Product market fit
Startup Marketing Disciplines/books
Eric Ries - The Lean Startup
Ries' overall claim is that if startupsinvest
their time into iteratively buildingproducts or
services to meet the needs of early
customers, they can reduce themarket risks
and sidestep the need for largeamounts of
initial project funding and expensiveproduct
launches and failures.
The Lean Startup
CherryDeals – Peanut Labs
Market research through social media (zynga monetization)
3rd way to monetize
Built sales team
Launched and fell flat
Can work for anyone. Large businesses
MoviePass price test
29.99 annual
39.99 quarterly
49.99 monthly
Forewarn – Created survey to find out who would be interested. Thought it would be the older crowd. Gen Y isn’t so bad and self centered :)
Hipster – 20k email addresses in 2 weeks. Closed seed round because of it
YV – Collected email addresses without affecting conversion
KISSMetrics – Capture domain
Forkly – OG in the space – Created viral loop and generated more emails – moved
4 different variations
Click tracking – finding where people are clicking – How can you concentrate clicks?
Facebook – Build ad asking about “would you sign up for…” Be explicit –
Target different demos
Moat – Shows you competitors banner ads. Zoho has been around for awhile.
Mailchimp – Segment users into cohorts – test different messaging and landing pages
Test and track – show different landing page variations
Talk to customers – Qualaroo, surveymonkey
Track behavior – KISS – allows you to track the user from the first time they hit your site (cookies, unique ID after signup)
Referral – Everyone should have one