This document discusses customer acquisition strategies for startups. It covers bootstrapping by getting initial rabid fans through friends and networking events. It emphasizes validating the product with a small group before large-scale marketing. Content marketing and growth hacking techniques are also discussed, like using content to spread brand awareness and leveraging existing users to find new customers. The document provides examples from companies like Instagram, Wetpaint, and AirBnB and recommends resources for learning more about customer acquisition best practices.

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Bryan@GeekHQ.co
@BryanStarbuck
Oct 15th, 2014
Customer Acquisition
for startups
by Bryan Starbuck
Owner:
Former CEO of SPARKON
Former CEO of TalentSpring
(Acquired in 2010)
Talk for:

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My talk is about 4 areas
Bootstrapping
Your first customers
Roots take
Sustained Engagement & Net-Promoter
Scaling
Customer Acquisition

3. Bryan@GeekHQ.co
@BryanStarbuck
Bootstrapping
Customer Acquisition
0 to 30 rabid fans

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Bring in friends
Paul Graham, Y-Combinator
Do things that don’t scale
The point: Validate you can get a CORE set of people to
attach and be rabid fans. Then make sure their Net-
Promoter is causing them to bring in more people.

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30 rabid fans vs. mass scale marketing
Paul Graham’s “Do things that don’t scale” is not intuitive. The
point is to get a smaller pool to VALIDATE that they attach to
your product, not scaling immediately to a very large base.
Here is an analogy to understand what he means:
Entrepreneurs often say, “My problem is marketing. I just need
to get a large scale of customers and all of my problems are
solved”. In this analogy, the entrepreneur invented a new kind
of bike, and wants racers to switch to his product.
The goal is to get 30 rabid fans that use it for many months,
and to pay for the product. This validates if there is a problem
(which the entrepreneur often fails to see).
Here the entrepreneur is forced to see that square wheels is a
blocker. He initially thinks it is a marketing problem.
This forces him to see that the square wheels block getting 30
rabid fans. After that is fixed, he gets 30 rabid fans and then is
ready to scale marketing.
Then he moves on to larger scales of marketing. And his initial
base is pulling in new customers.

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Start first with friends
Invite in friends
This isn’t mass scale marketing, it is focused on getting
30 rabid fans that stay attached using it.

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Hit networking events in Company T-Shirts
In silicon valley, early
startups often flood a
meet-up with all
employees in company
t-shirts.
They work on getting a
starter set of users. Or
learn why people aren’t
“attaching”.

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The Instagram founder started by putting Instagram as
the default webpage in apple stores. …until he was
caught by store employees and chased out

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Ads – to test conversion rates
Google AdWords & Facebook are a great way to test conversion
rates, and verify that conversion rates are in successful ranges.
Facebook is great for gender, age, zip code and job title

10. Bryan@GeekHQ.co
@BryanStarbuck
The list of
Marketing Channels

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The LIST OF CHANNELS
Dave McClure’s
famous chart:
This is a GREAT LIST
of most normal
marketing channels
IMPORTANT: Notice #1
comes first, then #2,
then #3, #4 and #5.
Assume that 1 to 3 marketing channels will be the backbone of your
marketing (if you aren’t content marketing based). The other channels can be
supportive, especially when you do the sections that have nearly zero financial or time costs.

12. Marketing Channels
That are core to your business model
Bryan@GeekHQ.co
@BryanStarbuck

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Wetpaint used BizDev deals
Their OLD BUSINESS MODEL: Get your own wiki
website
Early on, they used SEO, but didn’t get to where they
needed to be.
They pivoted to having a partner bring in the traffic and
branded content. Their pivot needed to solve customer
acquisition.
Their OLD BUSINESS MODEL: Great CMS websites for NBC, ABC, CBS that uses their
content and helps build community with that traffic.
Early on, they used SEO, but didn’t get to where they needed to be. Later, when they used
http://nbc.com/ , it solved their customer acquisition.

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For B2B Early Stage companies
Great Trick: …if your company will have phone-based sales people.
You normally sell to people matching a JOB TITLE (or other criteria).
Spend $50.00 each week on eLance for them to build a list of 10,000
people that match that criteria from LINKED-IN. They often have
engineered web crawlers to build these lists.
Then do direct sales. You can skip lead gen marketing early on.

15. Bryan@GeekHQ.co
@BryanStarbuck
Content based
marketing

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Content Marketing
Start with your positioning: Zappos is amazing customer services when buying shoes
Clarify how you tell your story. Then find many “unique angles” to build unique content.
Zappos writes articles about the amazing tours that they give people to their offices.
Content Marketing is:
• Make a great piece content.
• Make sure it is linked to your core value (but may have more in that one story)
• That great piece of content can go out many marketing channels.
• You made an amazing video. It can go out Twitter, your blog, email update to users, your facebook page, etc.

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Example with SimplyHired.com
Example: SimplyHired.com is a vertical search engine for job postings.
They launched SimplyFired.com. Simple content site. They collected people’s
best stories of getting fired. They grew quickly, because that was great content
and the story spread quickly in the news.

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Watch Rand’s Friday videos
Get started by watching Rand’s Friday videos.
http://moz.com/blog/scaling-geo-targeted-local-landing-
pages-that-really-rank-and-convert-whiteboard-
friday
These teach content marketing. And it is
content marketing you can see how it works.

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Inbound.org
If you need to acquire customers,
then visit:
inbound.org
These are the best customer acquisition
techniques. The best new ideas in the industry,
updated every day.
If you need to acquire customers, then go there
instead of Hacker News or reddit every day.

20. Bryan@GeekHQ.co
@BryanStarbuck
Growth Hacking

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What is Growth Hacking
Summary of Growth Hacking:
Customer or Action X, invites in many more
customers (or solves problem Y)

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Hotmail.com
Every signature of Hotmail
accounts early on, had:
Sent by Hotmail

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AirBnB
They had a catch-22 between RENTER and
LANDLORD.
They automated posting to
Craigslist to find the other.
Craigslist turned this OFF after… AFTER AirBnB
scaled up and broke their catch-22.
Growth hacking will often cause that channel to be shut down later. It gets harder over
time, and requires creativity.

24. The End
Bryan@TheStarbucks.com
@BryanStarbuck