ROAD FROM $0 TO $10M: 10 GROWTH TIPS
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10 start-up growth tips for scalable growth
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ROAD FROM $0 TO $10M: 10 GROWTH TIPS
- 1. ROAD FROM $0 TO $10M 10 GROWTH TIPS Can Ozdoruk, medium.com/@top5things
- 2. 30-Sec About Me: Software Hacker turned into Growth Hacker turned into Advisor Can Ozdoruk, medium.com/@top5things
- 3. 1. Sell First. Build Later Always Say YES Get Feedback & Pivot Can Ozdoruk, medium.com/@top5things
- 4. 2. Focus on TAM & ICP Validate Product-Market Fit Use Beach-head Strategy Seg 1 Seg 2 Seg 3 Seg 4 Seg 5 Seg 6 Can Ozdoruk, medium.com/@top5things
- 5. 3. Educate Prospects Run Inbound Engine ASAP Capture->Nurture->Qualify Consider: Call/Demo Interest: Pipeline Closed Won Outbound Inbound Can Ozdoruk, medium.com/@top5things
- 6. 4. Hack Structurally Growth is Not Luck Find Flagship Campaign Ideate Prioritiz e Experimen t Analyze Scale Can Ozdoruk, medium.com/@top5things
- 7. 5. Be The Guerilla Think Outside The Box Be Bold. Break Rules Can Ozdoruk, medium.com/@top5things
- 8. 6. Use Metrics. Everywhere Find Unique Metrics Align CAC w/ ARPU LTV High Low Low HighCAC Premium Service Discard Economies of Scale Upsell $ Can Ozdoruk, medium.com/@top5things
- 9. 7. Create Flawless UX First Impressions Matter Every Visitor ~ Customer 50msec Time for 1st impression -International Journal of Human-Computer Std. 88% Users do not return after a badCan Ozdoruk, medium.com/@top5things
- 10. 8. Don’t Undersell Apply Value-based Pricing No Pr. Elasticity for Niche Cost Price Perceived Value Incentive to Sell Incentive to Buy $ Can Ozdoruk, medium.com/@top5things
- 11. 9. Find Your Partners Use Shortcut If Possible Joint GTM Consider: Call/Demo Interest: Pipeline Closed Won Outbound Inbound Partner Referral Can Ozdoruk, medium.com/@top5things
- 12. Can Ozdoruk, medium.com/@top5things Delight 10. Obsess with CS Cost:Retention < Acquisition 50-50 Rule Consider: Call/Demo Interest: Pipeline Closed Won Outbound Inbound Outbound Referral
- 13. One Last Tip…
- 14. Hire Right, Fire Fast Hire 1% Don’t Stuck with B Players ~$100M Total cost of a bad hire -Tony Hsieh, CEO, Zappos Can Ozdoruk, medium.com/@top5things
- 15. Suggested Readings: 1. Geoffrey Moore, Crossing The Chasm 2. Eric Ries, The Lean Startup 3. Peter Drucker, Managing Oneself 4. Jonah Berger, Contagious 5. Marc Benioff, Behind The Cloud email/tweet for any Questions: can.ozdoruk@gmail.com | @canozdoruk medium.com/@top5things
Editor's Notes
- 1. In sales mtgs what’s one word that work all the time? YES. Always say YES. You don’t need to specify a timeline 2. Most people think they have the world changing idea before doing enough research. These are not the best strategies as things change a lot FAST. If you don’t validate your idea, you might be building a Wrong Product. 3. Get feedback. From your network, from your employees, from investors but most importantly from your customers and prospects. 4. If they want something slightly different than what you offer, there’s a big chance there might be so many other needs from others. Make that switch and sell. Famous examples: Twitter: Major transformation in business model: started as Odeo, a network where you can find podcasts into a platform that we all use and like. Starbucks: Was initially selling whole beans in 1971. They moved into adjacent brewed coffee to-go in 1981
- I talk to many CEOs every week. They’re all smart. If I pick one thing that people miss the most is the focus 2. In startups, our instinct might be to chase every possible deal: “We sell to the financial sector, but why not try Government?”, “Our best product-market fit is in Fortune500, but that mid-enterprise could benefit our product.” Do these sound familiar? 3. I’m not trying to discourage you from expanding into other segments. You should, as long as there is a fit in that particular segment. If not, you should let go of the desire to go after anything other than your TAM & Ideal Customer Profile, aka, the persona, industry, company size, geo, and every other characteristic that makes your product a differentiated offer. As G. Moore identified in his books Crossing the Chasm you can think about the market as a bowling alley and identify the first pin as your first entry.
- 1. Once you have the TAM, and you have the list of people, you start calling them, which should be a great first step. But as soon as you first begin your outbound activities, you should also start inbound aka education of people. According to HBR, it takes 7-12 touches for cold leads to become warm 2. Create marketing programs: build thought leadership pieces: blogs, ebook, white papers. Build reference documents like case studies or analyst reports. 3. Then leverage SEM/SEO and get leads and nurture them.
- 1. Growth Hacking does not come magically. There’s a basic framework for it. You have to brainstorm and come up with an idea; then you have to make sure that idea is executed. You have to test and see the results. Repeat the process again. Do multiple experiments. For one month use budget on luncheons another month on exec dinners and see the output. Rinse and Repeat. 2. Like the unique value prop that differentiates you, you should be able to identify a unique campaign that will have a higher ROI than others 3. Example with Retail Analytics Report where I was able to come up with investment bank style 15-page report that tracks 5Kinventory items on top 5 retailers. I then printed and shipped them to my prospects. Got customers and we had an interview at Bloomberg.
- 1. Think Outside the box. 2. Hotmail was not the first email provider. But they’re the first one that did something to experiment with growth. At the end of each email they default added signature: “ps. I love you, get your free email at Hotmail.com at the signature” Their user count skyrocketed in just a couple of months. 3. Salesforce when they were a very early stage startup, they have a big competition called Siebel. They were targeting Siebel users. Instead of on-premise SFDC was serving via cloud. They went to Siebel annual user conference, hired paid protesters and showed signs and yelled attendees how SFDC is better and cheaper then Siebel. They invited them to a neighboring bar and pitched a detailed demo. These events slowly let people switch users from Siebel to SFDC. 4. PX example: Very limited sign-ups for a Happy Hour reception after a major conf. I printed flyers. And I distributed them across the hallways, above the water stations, lunch tables. In the end, 65 people came to the event and only one from LP. 5.Break Rules. Apologize later.
- 1. For everything you do, use Metrics. Metrics will guide you and avoid emotional mistakes. It can be Pipeline/ARR for Sales or MQL/Opportunity Creation for Marketing, and NPS for CS. And there would be some company-wide metrics, in B2C it can be MAU, in B2B Quick Ratio. 2. Segment every prospect: Here 2x x2 modified version of BCG matrix. X-axis covers the cost of acquiring customers and the y-axis the total revenue you earn from the customer Cash Cow = The best with low cost and high returns. You have to make sure they don’t leave you. So the main strategy would be creating top-notch customer service. Treat them as Golden Tier. Zombie = High cost, low return. You should discard soon. Star = High cost, high return customer. They are mostly large and growing companies so there might be future revenue streams. However, their costs are high. So use economies of scales to reduced CAC. For instance if the majority of the cost coming from your reps, you might want to outsource it or if the majority of costs are coming from specific materials, you might negotiate a better deal with your vendors. Dog = Low cost but low return. It has to be relevant for you to sell to them. You might increase your prices or upsell additional products/services.
- 1. If somebody comes to your website, they’re looking for an answer. In your site, you should be able to supply a solution to their pain points. You should answer their questions. Personalization is the key. You don’t need to do RTP at this stage about at least you should show solutions for specific personas and industries. 2. Everybody has a limited attention span. So you have to do all these in a short amount of time. Treat every visitors as your sr customer. UX matters everywhere. If you have a form to capture a lead, it has to ask only a couple of question. There’s a rule of 15 seconds. If it takes more than 15 secs, they’ll not fill your form. 3. Same applies to your product. If your product is SW-based, it should be intuitive and engaging free of bugs.
- 1. Revenue is the number of buyers times your avg price. The second one is not optimized as the first. 2. What happens in most cases is you have your cost and your average price that gives you the incentive to sell and getting you some nice margins. 3. But, there is the perception part, that how customers see your products. If you are able to tell a great story about your benefits to them, your perceived value will increase. This is how Apple, Ferrari, Nike use it to hike up margins. 4. The good thing is there’s no price elasticity if you’re a differentiated product.
- 1.Other than sales and marketing fed funnel; there’s another part of the funnel called partnership. If you are able to identify a partner and go to market with them, they can also send their customers to you. I’m not talking about a 3rd party reseller or VAR. It’s a company bigger than you and willing to feed you with leads. How can you find such partner? You have to give them something in return. 2. In my current company, we partner with a larger company who is in the CDN market. Their biggest competition is a $12B public company. Their competition launched a security product and stole customers from them. When we talked to them about going to market with them, it helped us, because they’re larger than us so they send some customers to us but also it helped them, when competing with the giant company. 3. Each case is different as it depends on the market, competition level and your competitiveness. 4. However, you can identify a partner for yourself. Bigger the better. So they can do the heavy lifting. You can do joint activities together: webinars, guest blog post, newsletters. Even go to TS together.
- 1. We talked about how to best capture lead and turn them into a customer. But your work does not finish there. First of all: Cost of getting a net new customer is much higher than retaining existing customers. Hence you don’t have the luxury to lose the customers 2. To reduce churn, make sure to feel the pulse of your users and act accordingly. Reward good/engaged users with incentives, help not-engaged users. At the wee want them our number one promoters of your products. 3. As a CEO, you should spend half of your time pre-sales(S&M&P and another half post sales with CS)
- 1. Hiring is skill, and I highly suggest you learn how to hire if you haven’t trained yet. Hire for Skills and Motivation as you can teach them your product/industry later. 2. Try to get the most talented people in the market. Say you have a team of 10 people and you‘re competing with a much larger competitor. You need all ten people w/ 100% performance or more than 100%. If 2 of them perform with 50%, you lose 10% of your productivity. But more than that, these detrimental employees can affect culture and new upcoming hires. So fix the problem asap. 3. When Google was interviewing candidates, for a long time candidates were interviewed by 2 Larry & Sergey. Up until recently, they stopped reviewing candidates. 4.There’s a significant cost for the bad hire. According to Tony Hsieh of Zappos, it’s $100M.