Growth Hacking for Small Business Success

In this blog post, you will know what growth hacking is in brief. If you need us to help you to grow your business now, speak to us about high growth business coaching

When I used to call myself a growth hacker, I was frowned upon. I used to work with tech start-ups, and I am a tech entrepreneur myself. When I finished my degree in the year 1995, I along with my friends started a forum which helped fellow developers when they had issues with using the software or workflow. This forum mainly focused on JAVA and objected-oriented technologies. My friends and I developed this forum website using HTML and published online. We used our pocket money to fund the forum. We had to bootstrap our venture, so we used growth hacking techniques and tactics to market our product (forum) to get developers on board and approached local companies to advertise their products on our forum as we have but client base for them to market. This technique generated revenue for our business, and we were able to reimburse ourselves. Then we did not know that these are growth hacking techniques or tactics we did what we thought was needed; neither of us could afford big marketing budgets, nor we had investors knocking our doors.

Let me now introduce this term “Growth Hacking”, and then I will try to answer the following questions

·      What is Growth Hacking?

·      What does a growth hacker do?

·      Why should a small business owner or an entrepreneur or a solopreneurs think like a growth hacker or hire one?

Please don’t waste your time;

·      If your marketing budget is big, then don’t worry about this…

·      If you have investors or board of directors who are risk-averse, then don’t bother with this…

·      If you are risk-averse and don’t have money, then you should be looking for safe and secure job…

·      If you are scared of technology then it will be difficult…

So,

What is Growth Hacking? 

Sean Ellis coined the term “Growth Hacking” in 2010. No one knew what he was doing. The tech start-up would hire him to get more leads by educating about their products to their ideal customer base or market. To perform his service, he would take equity from the start-up and small commission when he could grow the company into a state that it is profitable. When that happens, he secures, scales and trains a team before he exits the company. When he leaves the company; the company must be autonomous. However, that did not happen even after he transferred over his knowledge.

Many Silicon Valley start-ups used growth hacking techniques in one way or other. Growth hacking measures and analyses the behaviours of the customers to ascertain product/market fit, it uses pull marketing strategy and mainly focuses on

1.    3Ps of Marketing Mix (Product, Place, Price) instead of Promotion (4th Mix) it replaces with People element.

2.    More Value for Money Invested.

3.    Create a product which people want and need so that they buy now.

Growth hacking is an unconventional but ethical way of applying marketing principles to educate people about the product and getting feedback to create a better product. Growth Hacking uses collaboration and word-of-mouth to raise the awareness of the product and disrupts the buying process of the customer. When the customer realises that the product is needed, then it is produced, priced and promoted through collaboration. Here is general explanation by wiki.

What do Growth Hackers do?

Growth hackers are individuals who analyse and measure every change within production, marketing and sales cycles. They test every single aspect of the product properties and keep asking the questions “Why?” and “What?”. If good happens then the question is “Why” and “What” else “Why” and “What”.

Growth hackers believe that failure is one step to success or one way that this did not work. Their mantra is “Fail fast and fail forward”. They think about making profits not breaking even.

Growth Hackers use Agile and Lean methodologies principles to achieve their goals. Growth Hackers follow a process similar to the following.

Attract -> Wow -> Growth -> Secure -> Optimise -> Scale -> Exit

Prime examples of Growth Hacking techniques applied successfully are Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Uber , Airbnb and more.

Why should you adopt “Growth Hacking” techniques now?

Growth hacking mainly uses technologies to automate the processes, measures and analyses the results to strategise the delivery and implementation to make profits with minimal resources.

As a small business owner, solopreneurs or even a & entrepreneur, you lack resources such as time, investment and team because it costs money. We wear different hats and are overwhelmed because we could not be in many places. As an entrepreneur who wants to leave a legacy, we must embrace growth hacking techniques to grow the business which thrives in any economy even with minimal resources. We need to build a company which has survival mechanisms inbuilt.