Five years ago, the playbook for launching a new company involved a tried-and-true list of to-dos. Once you built an awesome product with a catchy name, you’d try to get a feature article on TechCrunch, a front-page hit on Hacker News, hunted on ProductHunt and an AMA on Quora.
While all of these today remain impressive milestones, it’s never been harder to corral eyeballs and hit a breakout adoption trajectory.
In this new decade, it is possible to first out-market your competitor, and then raise lots of money, hire the best team and build, rather than the other way around (building first, then marketing).
Outbound marketing tools and company newsletters are useful, but they’re also a slow burn and offer low conversion in the new creator economy. So where does this leave us?
With audiences spread out over so many platforms, reaching cult status requires some level of hacking. Brand-building is no longer a one-hit game, but an exercise in repetition: It may take four or five times for a user to see your startup’s name or logo to recognize, remember or Google it.
Below are some growth tactics that I hope will help jump-start the effort to building an engaged user base.
Laying the groundwork for user-generated content
Before users are evangelists, they are observers. Consider creating a bot to alert you of any product mentions on Twitter, or surface subject-matter discussions on Reddit (“Best tools to manage AWS costs?” or “Which marketplace do you resell your old electronics on?”), which you can then respond to with thoughtful commentary.
Join relevant communities on Discord, infiltrate Slack groups of relevant conferences (including past iterations of a conference — chances are those groups are still alive with activity), follow forums on StackOverflow and engage in the discussions on all these channels.
The more often you post, the better your posts convert. The more your handle appears on newsfeeds, the more likely it will be included on widely quoted “listicles.”
Most “user-generated content” in the early innings should be generated by you, from both personal accounts and company accounts.
Build in public …
Building in public is scary given the speed at which ideas can be copied, but competition will always exist, since new ideas are not born in vacuums. Companies like Railway and Replit post to Twitter every time they post a new changelog. Stir brands its feature releases as “drops,” similar to streetwear drops.
Building in public can also lend opportunities for virality, which requires drama, comedy or both. Hey.com’s launch was buoyed by Basecamp’s public fight against Apple over existing App Store take rates.
Mmhmm, the virtual camera app that adds TV-presenter flair to video meetings, launched with a viral video that hit over 1.5 million views. The company continues to release entertaining YouTube demos to showcase new use cases.
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… or build in private
Like an artist teasing an upcoming album, some companies are able to drum up substantial anticipation ahead of exiting stealth mode. When two ex-Apple execs founded Humane, they crafted beautiful social media pages full of sophisticated photography without revealing a single hint of what they set out to build.
Their website simply states that the team is building “technology that feels familiar, natural and human,” which is both extremely vague and intriguing, and has prompted rumors of everything from a new smartphone to a body camera.
The hype could also be amplified by a fundraising announcement, as The Browser Company did with their Series A.
Given that the company is taking Google Chrome head-on, there is a shroud of secrecy around what the product actually looks like. The caliber and breadth of the angel investors listed would inspire any reader to click … and try to figure out what would attract such a roster of supporters.
Champion side projects
Sometimes, building a free, useful, product-adjacent page that is both helpful and has viral potential can help drive clicks to your company’s main website. The website could be a real-time infographic, resource hub or low-lift web app, and subtly link to your homepage in a bottom corner.
My favorite recent example of this is TurboVax, a popular Twitter bot and free website that alerted New Yorkers of available COVID-19 vaccines by scraping vaccine websites.
TurboVax was built by an Airbnb engineer, Huge Ma, who spent $50 and two weekends to get it live. At its peak, the website had over 1 million page views a day and drove visits to Welcome to Chinatown. Ultimately, the side project helped raise over $200,000 for Asian-American-founded small businesses.
If you are building a travel app startup, consider building a landing page to track COVID-19 vaccination paperwork policies across different destination countries, or cleaning regimens from different airlines.
If you are building an HR software startup, consider building a landing page to track which companies are enforcing which remote-work policies.
Such side projects could be also hosted on GitHub and have an easy way to ingest crowdsourced data in order to surface the most updated information.
Capture earbuds and eyeballs
Before taking out an ad in a major publication or on Facebook, consider advertising on channels with fewer followers but more targeted content. Perhaps there is a cult podcast that is either educational about your vertical or features guests who are well known in your sphere of influence.
Similarly, there are many newsletters that are focused on a specific niche, such as enterprise tools, future of work, consumer and marketplaces or DTC brands, which could advertise your product, your launch or simply include a link to your waitlist signup. Having an informed podcast and newsletter strategy can lead to highly cost-effective conversion and elevate your brand.
Podcast hosts and newsletter authors are often influential creators in their domain. Thus, subscribers trust them to curate ads that are relevant and meaningful and are more likely to listen to the ad rather than skip over it.
Pull unexpected physical stunts
Highway billboards, airport signage and subway ads are the lazy and expensive answers to physical advertising. Ask yourself : What are the underutilized spaces that would receive traffic from your target demographic? How might physical ads create delightful experiences or drive up desire?
Glossier recently paid struggling small movie theaters around the country to run ads for their marquees. The effort not only benefited local businesses, but was also in line with their larger movie-centric campaign for their “high drama” mascara.
In the early days of Hims, the company advertised their hair-loss, erectile dysfunction and adult acne products inside men’s bathroom stalls in sports stadiums , turning a space traditionally devoid of any ads to the perfect arena for men’s health storytelling.
Fintech unicorn Pipe received significant social media applause for their feature on the Nasdaq Times Square billboard. It’s unclear if they paid for the ad; however, excitement certainly resonated among investors, potential recruits and customers alike.
The cost to run an ad on the Nasdaq Times Square billboard is surprisingly low — with 15-second ad spots on sale for as little as $30. A startup can likely achieve more impressions from a tweet of a still photo of the ad than from tourists viewing the 15-second ad itself, given how elite a Nasdaq billboard feature is regarded to be. The resulting benefit in brand cachet and recognition can pay for the cost of the ad many times over.
Two decades ago, half.com was a marketplace startup that connected buyers and sellers of used books, movies and music at a fixed price. In order to gain brand notoriety, the founders pitched the mayor of Halfway, Oregon, to change the town’s name to “Half.com” for one year in exchange for $100,000, 20 new computers and the opportunity to boost tourism. NBC broadcasted the news live, allowing Americans to watch the first dot-com city come to life. Six months later, eBay acquired the company for $350 million.
Turn users into evangelists
Creating an evangelist community that loves to share what they’ve created, accomplished or learned using your product is the ultimate flywheel.
Figma is one startup whose evangelists frequently share their love for the product and what they’ve been able to create. The company has also hired evangelists in-house as designer advocates.
Like in sports, everyone loves to choose a side and defend their team. This Brex-versus-Ramp tweet went viral earlier this year, giving their respective evangelists (including well-known tech CEOs) an opportunity to cull favor for their recommended product.
Early evangelists are often the first on the waitlist. Superhuman prominently crushed their waitlist strategy, with over 180,000 people waiting for their personal one-on-one onboarding. Superhuman lets you know exactly where you are in line and allows you to jump up in line by referring friends to join the waitlist. Many happy users have reported wait times of two to four years.
Swag prizes always draw crowds — whether founders are giving away AirPods for tags or branded merchandise for beta users. Fast.com’s founder has offered branded hoodies to both beta testers and anyone who replies frequently enough to his tweets.
No startup swag is truly rare (you can always manufacture more in unlimited quantities) but it can certainly be marketed as coveted.
Offer bragging rights
To further escalate evangelism, offer bragging rights, be it inimitable leaderboard positions or exclusive invites.
Strava’s Year in Sport recap, published each December, gives users a chance to proudly share their stats on social media — be it total hours biked or miles run.
Clubhouse’s “joined by” feature was a bragging point for early users and celebrities to show that they were nominated to join before everyone else. Clubhouse’s “nominated by” feature incited a mad race among users to nominate their most popular friends to get credit as the nominator, and in turn reap the social benefits.
Lastly, being invited to test a product early is a new form of social currency. Leveraging FOMO around early-access invites can be a magnitude more effective than PR — or even lead to PR.
Subcultures and memes
Internet culture has sparked many evangelists to create self-organized channels for community content, which could be spurred on by company channels. Three of my favorites are:
- Best of Nextdoor, which shares funny screenshots of neighborhood happenings.
- Glossier Boyfriends, which pays homage to the boyfriends who take photos of their girlfriends at Glossier stores.
- Depop Drama, which reposts outrageous exchanges between Depop members, accompanied by witty commentary.
Shopify’s Twitter account has branded itself as the “SaaSy entrepreneurship company” and has become known for both hilarious and ruthless tweets about competitors.
Take advantage of events
Major events that key communities are tuning in to, or attending in person, are fertile moments for guerrilla marketing.
Airbnb’s oft-cited founding story includes the co-founders selling Obama O’s and Cap’n McCains cereal as a last-ditch resort to keep the company afloat. When Airbnb went public earlier this year, fintech startup Public created a batch of “IPOats” as a homage to the famous founding story and sent the cereal to TV reporters covering the momentous Airbnb IPO.
At the newly notorious Miami Tech Week, smart mattress company Eight Sleep took advantage of the convergence of celebrities, tech investors, savvy consumers and journalists to launch a floating billboard clearly visible to anyone on a boat or attending a boat party. The next day, revenue increased 56%.
Zoom stood out among its peers in launching a thoughtful bus advertising strategy. Given the expense of bus advertising, Zoom concentrated its effort during the time of Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference — an event that attracted over 100,000 attendees, mostly enterprise software buyers. Given that buses would circle around downtown hotels and shuttle large crowds of conference-goers to the event, Zoom surely made a lasting impression.
Metrics for success
How do you measure the results of “growth hacking” or determine whether you were successful in grabbing the attention of key user demographics? Potential key metrics could include:
- Passive recognition: Unique additional page visits, waitlist growth, number of new GitHub stars.
- Active recognition: Number of tags or mentions on social media, Google search frequency, number of new help desk inquiries.
- Attrition percentages at each stage of the user onboarding funnel.
- Rate of referral growth (total referral count, or average number of referrals per user).
- User resurrection rate.
Every growth campaign should be measured by the appropriate metric — and postmortem analysis should take into account seasonality, behavior changes caused by pressure from competing products, and any other demographic changes such as new users from new geographies, socioeconomic classes, devices or platforms. I’ve also found that it is more effective to deploy tactics in sequence, rather than in parallel, both to retain team focus and isolate the true drivers of results.
“Growth hacking” is both an art and a science, and the companies that do it best build not just a brand, but a movement. Attention is scarce — until it snowballs.