Startup-marketing: hoe u uw klantenwervingskanalen kunt vinden

Vier jaar geleden was LawnStarter net bij Techstars terechtgekomen. We hadden het gelukt om een ​​klein klantbestand bij elkaar te schrapen - veel om ons product te valideren - maar zou nog niet uitvogelen hoe we onze klantenverwervende zouden schalen.

In de loop van de zomer verspilden we have in the time of a few to the right of the following of the following. We hebben veel meningen, de meesten niet nuttig. Een waarvan we dachten dat die bijzonder verhelderend was, was van een zeer gerespecteerde belegger in de trant van:

Je zou een doel voor de volgende maand moeten hebben om tien snelheid één nieuw kanaalidee per dag te testen en testen - vijf zou beter zijn.

Dat was een van de slechtste adviezen die ik heb gekregen als het gaat om marketing. Toch heb ik dat veel bedrijven de slechtste en de slechtste hebben gekregen, maar omdat ze hun toevlucht hebben genomen tot spullen aan de muur en het zien van de stokken.

Sindsdien heb ik veel geleerd over startups en marketing. Voor mij en andere start-up groei-beoefenaars is het eigenlijk vrij eenvoudig om een ​​bedrijf te kijken en een redelijk goed idee te hebben van de ideale groeikanalen die bedrijven zullen gebruiken om te groeien. My target with this message is about to the making of their marketing channels and more time to the bouwen of coole dingen.

Ik heb dit in twee delen gebroken. Ten eerste zijn er een aantal fundamentele concepten die ik bijzonder nuttig heb gevonden bij het nadenken over klantenverwerving. Het tweede deel bevat een verzameling retorische vragen over uw bedrijf die u hopelijk zullen helpen om u naar een groeikanaal te leiden dat voor u werkt.

Fundamentele klantacquisitieconcepten voor startups

Fundamenteel concept # 0: u kunt een drol niet polijsten 1

Het enige dat volgt, is ervan uitgaan dat je een product hebt waar mensen van houden en voor zullen betalen. Het is moeilijk om te proberen een slecht product op de markt te brengen.

Zoals Sam Altman zegt, het maakt niet uit hoe creatief je groeihacks zijn, bij sommige mensen moet je product goed genoeg zijn voor vrienden om het anderen te vertellen.

Ik denk eigenlijk dat dit niet 100% waar is. Ik kan wijzen op een paar bedrijven die weinig tot geen economische waarde toevoegen en ongelukkige klanten hebben die behoorlijk groot zijn geworden door een voldoende groot distributiekanaal te vinden. Maar het beste is om niet te veronderstellen dat je de uitzondering op de regel bent.

Het enige dat in dit stuk volgt, gaat ervan uit dat u de pasvorm van de productmarkt hebt gevonden. Er zijn veel mensen die meer gekwalificeerd zijn dan ik, die je kunnen helpen erachter te komen.

Fundamenteel concept # 1: er zijn een eindig aantal groeikanalen, nog minder die schaal

Het is superleuk om een ​​stel slimme mensen een ruimte met een whiteboard binnen te halen en te brainstormen over creatieve manieren om te groeien.

Het is ook niet effectief.

Enkele jaren geleden, toen ik tijd doorbracht met andere oprichters, weet ik nog dat ik dat keer op keer opmerkte, dat van bedrijven die van niets naar iets gingen, het was zelden via een creatief of uit de doos komen. Op een gegeven moment vertelde een mentor en een veteraan in de opstartmarketing me dit letterlijk: er zijn echt niet zoveel marketingkanalen die er zijn.

Andrew Chen, die de groei al een decennium bestrijkt, vat het redelijk fatsoenlijk samen in dit stuk . Hij beweert dat er maar 5 manieren zijn om de groei echt groot te maken:

Betaalde overname . Als uw gebruikers u geld geven, kunt u gebruikers rechtstreeks via advertenties kopen. Meestal proberen bedrijven een 3: 1 CLV: CAC-ratio te handhaven om hun marges redelijk te houden na andere kosten. (eBay, Match, Fab, etc.) 1

Viraliteit . Als uw gebruikers van uw product houden, dan kunt u belangrijke "mond tot mond" viraliteit krijgen, aangedreven door een hoge Net Promotor Score. Als u uw product kunt laten verspreiden als gevolg van gebruikers die betrokken zijn bij het product, kunt u de virale lussen verder optimaliseren met behulp van A / B-tests om nog meer viraliteit te genereren. Mensen meten vaak 'virale factor' om te zien hoe effectief bestaande gebruikers nieuwe gebruikers aantrekken en natuurlijk wilt u dat uw virale factor 1,0 overschrijdt. (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter)

SEO . Als uw product een heleboel unieke inhoud maakt, in de vorm van vragen en antwoorden, artikelen, recensies in lange vorm, enzovoort, kunt u miljoenen unieke pagina's krijgen die op hun beurt honderden miljoenen nieuwe gebruikers kunnen aantrekken die op zoek zijn naar inhoud via zoekmachines. (Yelp, Rap Genius, Stack Overflow, etc.)

Verkoop . Voor startups die zijn getarget op SMB's of de onderneming, krijgt u een groot verkoopkantoor in het veld om zowel inkomend als uitgaand te verwerken. Dit geldt met name voor bedrijven die zich richten op lokale MKB-bedrijven, waarbij televerkoop de enige optie is. Natuurlijk, om dit te laten werken, moet u een veelvoud aan inkomsten genereren van wat u ze betaalt.

Anders . Er is een vreemde samenwerking, zoals Yahoo / Google, die kan helpen bij het maken of breken van een startup, maar deze zijn zeldzaam en situationeel. Maar soms gebeurt het!

Sommigen beweren misschien dat deze postulatie de dingen te simplificeert en dat de categorie 'Overig' een ontsnapping is. Maar ik ben hard geneigd om uitzonderingen te vinden. Je kunt daar misschien organisch sociaal leven toevoegen, maar in het huidige tijdperk is dat sowieso behoorlijk droog.

Merk op dat er binnen elke categorie veel afwisseling is; hier is een groot verschil tussen Google Adwords en tv-advertenties in de betaalde categorie, bijvoorbeeld. Maar de belangrijke afhaal is dat er een eindig aantal manieren is waarop je je bedrijf kunt laten groeien.

Fundamenteel concept # 2: uw kanaal wordt bepaald door de waarde van uw klantlevensduur en de aard van uw product

Op een gegeven moment moet je gegevens hebben of op zijn minst een goed beargumenteerde hypothese over wat de lifetime value van een klant is.

Je zou je huidige LTV moeten hebben, je waarschijnlijke toekomstige LTV en de belachelijke LTV die je in je pitch-deck stopt, dat je investeerders kunt vertellen met een straight face.

Dit zou op zichzelf een aantal acquisitiekanalen moeten elimineren. Helemaal aan het einde kun je alleen veroorloven wat je maakt. En idealiter verdien je 3 keer wat je uitgeeft aan een klant en betaal je het binnen 6 maanden terug. Dit is geen vaste regel, maar als je ergens in dit bereik bent, doe je het redelijk goed.

Als je een abonnementsproduct verkoopt voor $ 29 / maand, kun je waarschijnlijk geen verkopers betalen om via cold calling te drummen. Als u inkomsten genereert via advertenties (sociaal netwerk of mediasite), hebt u vrijwel gratis gebruikersacquisitie nodig.

We bespreken iets meer over hoe de aard van uw product later uw klantacquisitiekanaal bepaalt.

Fundamenteel concept # 3 - Nagelen van een schaalbaar kanaal kost tijd, focus en / of geld

'Oh, we hebben [X-kanaal] geprobeerd, het werkte niet' - zeggen veel mensen. Nee, je eerste poging werkte niet.

Vanwege de aard van marktefficiëntie is het vrij vaak dat de groeikanalen moeilijk te penetreren zijn en dat het vaak tijd en / of geld kost om het werk echt goed te maken.

Bijvoorbeeld:

• Betaalde acquisitie: met Adwords moet u mogelijk bieden op een miljoen zoekwoorden om de paar honderd die daadwerkelijk converteren te vinden. Op Facebook hebben we $ 75.000 verbrand totdat we een combinatie van targeting op advertentiemateriaal en doelgroepen hebben gevonden (veel bedrijven hebben meer gebrand om die winnende combinatie te vinden).
• Viraliteit: Voordat gebruikers door gebruikers worden uitgenodigd, hebt u een eerste gebruikersbestand nodig. En ze moeten een reden hebben om gebruikers uit te nodigen. Het kan ook verschillende iteraties duren om de juiste hoek te vinden.
• SEO: Hoewel er mogelijk geen marginale kosten per klik zijn die u krijgt bij het zoeken, moet u inhoud maken en een goed presterende website hebben - dat kost geld. Bovendien moet u links naar de website opbouwen, meestal per PR of inhoudspromotie, wat opnieuw tijd en geld kost. Zoekmachines geven zelf geen resultaten - als u alles goed doet, verwacht u dat SEO 12 tot 18 maanden in beslag neemt. Dat is meer dan de start- en landingsbaan van een gemiddelde startup.
• Verkoop: in een bedrijfsomgeving kan het 9 maanden duren om een ​​deal te sluiten - veel startups kunnen het zich niet veroorloven om het salaris van die verkoper te verlengen.

Most of the time, your first attempt out of the gate will be suboptimal. You should not simply write off a channel because of this. Rather, you should determine if you’re within ‘striking range’ of making that channel work. Then, you can start iterating until the channel starts paying dividends.

Fundamental Concept #4 – Start scrappy

If you’re in the majority of startups that aren’t at the point where a large scalable channel is working for you, don’t fret.

There are a variety of growth channels that are untapped out there that are faster and easier to crack. They won’t bring you to an IPO (or even a Series B most likely), but they can help you get the traction needed to validation on your product, earn a bit of revenue, and potentially raise more financing.

Airbnb spammed Craigslist early on. Growthhackers did some autofollowing/autoliking on Twitter. At LawnStarter, we optimized our way to the top of Yelp and did daily Groupon deals to get our early user base.

Questions to Help You Find Your Customer Acquisition Channels

As I previously mentioned, within each of the four scalable channels that currently exist for startups, there are a whole lot of variants. Additionally, ‘starting scrappy’ opens the door for a wide variety of tactics.

To determine which channels are most likely to pay dividends, it’s best to think about your customer and how they might go about buying your product.

What follows is a series of questions, along the lines of your customer and their buying journey, to ask yourself to help you discover your customer acquisition channels. I’ve learned these through hundreds of coffee meetings, hours of reading, and through my own experience at LawnStarter. Since transactional consumer and SMB is my world, my insights are probably skewed as such.

It’s not an exhaustive list of questions and the questions are not mutually exclusive. It’s also not a ‘follow this and you will succeed’ framework. And full disclaimer: the suggested tactics may not actually work for you. But I hope they are useful.

Are you selling to large enterprise companies?

If you’re selling a B2B product with a large value, you will probably end up scaling via an enterprise sales force. Even companies that grew virally early on like Slack and Dropbox, or through grassroots evangelism like Sendgrid and Twilio, added a sales force at some point. Don’t be one of the dummies that thinks they’re taking a stand by selling to the enterprise and ‘won’t need a bunch of sales guys’.

Starting Scrappy

Nearly every founder I know selling to the enterprise, started off by selling the product on their own.

Typically they work their network to get the warmest leads possible, and treat the sales process as a learning experience. Just landing a few clients by oneself can pay the bills, and also lead to enough traction to justify hiring a sales rep to scale it.

Scaling Up

Typically scaling an enterprise organization involves turning the first few deals into a process that can be handed off to other humans. Since one’s own network will tap out, a form of lead generation needs to take place. This might be outbound via brute force, using outbound dialing with SDRs or cold emails. Or, marketing might generate leads via inbound methods such as trade shows, paid acquisition, or content marketing. Content marketing can also be a big channel for certain products (see self reflective audience).

As alluded to before, there are some products that grow virally, but the vast majority of enterprise companies use a sales force at some point.

Are you selling to small to medium sized businesses (SMBs)?

It’s quite difficult to sell to and market to small businesses.

As Peter Thiel says:

The product needs a personal sales effort, but at that price point, you simply don’t have the resources to send an actual person to talk to every prospective customer. This is1 why so many small and medium- sized businesses don’t use tools that bigger firms take for granted. It’s not that small business proprietors are unusually backward or that good tools don’t exist: distribution is the hidden bottleneck.

There’s really only one proven way to sell to the SMB: cold calling.

If you’re selling to small businesses, you’re pretty much destined to building a boiler room style organization of cold callers that make 120 dials a day in hopes of selling one package every day or two per rep.

Starting Scrappy:

You’re going to have to be smiling and dialing at some point, may as well start now. Founders and early employees should make the calls themselves, refining it into a script that can then be passed off to someone else who can then read it verbatim.

If you’re targeting a specific vertical, there might be communities you can participate or publications you can get a story in (see the section of self selective audiences). Many of them are pay to play. My experience tells me that any benefits from these will tap out very quickly.

Scaling Up:

The good news about creating a product for SMBs is that you can scale it until you run out of businesses to call or the overhead of managing the sales floor catches up to you. Every rep is accretive.

Once you’ve figured out the script, you can hire a couple confident entry level folks to use it to drum up new business. Once you’re confident the script and process is ROI positive, you can hire more.

Eventually you’ll be hiring groups of young, ambitious folks, putting them through the training process, and having them use the script 120 times per day. You’ll have to plan for 50% churn of an incoming class – that’s just life in this business. Expect to get slammed on Glassdoor by the 50% who quit.

As you grow, marketing can support by generating some inbound leads, but it will pale in comparison to what your reps generate. Effort is typically put into making the sales floor marginally more effective.

Are customers searching for the solution? Do they know what the1y want to buy?

Bellhops is a company that provides affordable, local moving services through a tech platform. There are a finite number of people who move each year, and they know what they want: a moving service.

Intercom defines this as category based buying. Customers know what category of product they want and they look for it, most of the time online.

This means you’re probably going to scale via search, most likely a combination of both paid search and SEO.

Starting Scrappy:

We previously established that SEO takes months and maybe years. In the meantime consider drafting off the companies that already dominate the search results. Search Google for whatever terms reflect the buyer intent, and see which sites tend to own the search results.

See the example below for ‘austin tx photographers’:

As you can see, there are four aggregator type sites that show up for every search result, each of which you can either buy a placement or earn an organic spot on. It’s much easier and faster to get a front page spot on Yelp than it is on Google – simply ask your customers to review you.

Let’s look at a B2B example. Here’s the result for the term ‘web scraping tool’. You have a few articles and a review site. You may be able to pitch your way into the article (or buy your way if it’s an affiliate site), or earn your way to the top of Capterra.

As far as paid search goes, you can start doing it right out of the gate, assuming you set your bids low enough so that the CAC makes sense. Depending on what else you have going on, you may or may not want to start optimization, which is a whole series of posts in and of itself.

Scaling Up

On the SEO front, you need to give yourself 18 months in order to see results. You will need on-page content that search engines find valuable, and a PR or content promotion strategy that earns you links to your site. It’s ideal if your product itself generates the content so that this can scale infinitely – think Yelp, Tripadvisor or Stack Overflow.

On the paid search front, you can probably squeeze out 5-10x whatever the results you get from your first stab at the campaign. You’ll likely need a fairly healthy test budget early on to discover what keywords convert and which don’t, and eventually you’ll want to build or implement systems that allow you to test ad copy. Someone on your team will need to be an expert at paid search eventually, and you may even do it programmatically at scale.

Are you targeting a passionate or self-reflective audience?

If you’re reading this, you’re probably either a growth marketer, a startup founder or my mom :).

I’m not selling you anything, but if I were selling something to growth marketers or startup founders, this would be a great place to talk about it.

If the product you sell is directly (or even tangentially) related to something your target customer lives and breathes, it makes a whole lot of sense to start producing content they will find interesting and want to come back for.

Intercom is an example of how this plays out for product managers and marketers. You think they’re publishing books and producing a podcast out of the goodness of their hearts? Of course not. Moz is a great example in the SEO world.

Producing high quality content builds trust and awareness, and lets people become familiar with your brand.

Here’s an oversimplified but illustrative narrative of how this works:

1. Prospect is Googling a problem, stumbles across a post you wrote
2. Prospect reads the post, finds it valuable, maybe reads another one, closes the browser
3. 3 weeks later, prospect has another problem, googles it, and finds your website.
4. Prospect thinks to himself ‘this company produces good stuff’, I’ll opt in to get emails / follow on social
5. 5 emails later customer wonders what this company does, clicks to a landing page
6. Over the course of several months prospect gets article after article, gets retargeted, sees friends share content in newsfeed
7. Prospect needs a solution, remembers the brand, and comes back and makes a purchase because he trusts that brand as the authority on that product

This is much more prominent in B2B. Mint.com is one instance in the consumer world – they created a following in the personal finance niche, according to the case studies.

Starting Scrappy:

Early on, you won’t have an audience, and your content won’t automatically rank on the first page of Google. And the current state of social platforms makes virality very difficult – you may have a hit post here and there, but don’t bank on it.

So, when you create content on your own site, you’ll have to manually promote it to start building awareness and your audience.

A good place to start is communities that this sort of content gets shared in. This could be reddits, Hacker news, Slack groups, Facebook groups, Quora, or even forums. You can try brute forcing it by spamming, but eventually you’ll get called out or banned. It’s better to be an active participant in the community, and occasionally share a piece you authored that adds value. You’ll get noticed as the authority on your topic eventually.

You can also leverage other parties’ audiences and domain authority’s by producing content for other websites. You may not be able to rank highly for a search term, but a website in your industry might be able to. You can also leverage a platform like Medium to get eyeballs on your content.

Scaling Up:

As Tom Gunguz points out, content marketing compounds. It takes months and sometimes years to get to this point, but at some point it really pays off.

I’d break it into three categories:

1 – Getting an initial set of eyeballs

2 – Building an owned audience

3 – Nurturing and converting the audience

Typically SEO is critical to building that initial audience, but social sharing can help as well. You may find an open social platform that works well with your content, such as Youtube (even then you’re doing SEO, just your search engine is Youtube).

Building your audience involves some sort of opt-in, primarily via an email list and secondarily social platforms. Over time, you’ll probably add content forms, and promote them to your now owned audience. Intercom is the epitome of this, having a popular blog, a podcast, and even books.

As your content machine is revving to acquire and engage an audience, some of that audience will spill over and convert. That’s where marketing automation and lead scoring can be used to help identify which members of your audience might be interested in buying, and which should be left unbothered.

Do customers have a problem, but not know the solution?

Self Lender is a company that helps individuals build credit.

Even though 1 in 4 Americans don’t have a credit score, there are not that many solutions out there. And what would you even search for to find a product you don’t know exists?

However, with a credit score being important, and 25% of Americans having one, you can bet there are a large number of people looking for a solution. Therefore, Self Lender invests in a great deal of content elaborating on these problems, while also offering a paid solution.

When your car is making a noise or behaving oddly, again you only know that you have the problem not necessarily the solution. That’s why Yourmechanic maintains a Q&A section, with both an answer to the problem question and a call to action.

If your customer is searching for a solution, you’re probably going to want to invest in content marketing.

There’s certainly overlap between this and the previous section, but there is a key difference. In the case of having a self reflective audience, you want to capture their attention and build a brand with your content, so it’s important to avoid trying to convert directly. In this case, your audience is less reflective and more just a random assortment of folks looking for a solution. (I just want my car fixed, I don’t care about being in a community of Acura Owners). Thus, you’re going for more direct conversions.

Starting Scrappy:

Early on, the content that you produce won’t rank at the top of Google due to lack of links. However, there are a ton of Q&A oriented sites that probably already rank for this query. Do the Google search and see if there’s a forum or Q&A site you can provide a highly valuable answer too, while also dropping a hint at your solution.

No places to do this? Create your own landing page for the query. You can create a video on Youtube, a longform article on Medium, or manufacture a question on Quora that you answer yourself.

You’re essentially hijacking another site’s domain authority. First, make sure that you put a ton of text in the answer (especially on Youtube) so that Google thinks it’s the most relevant answer on that site. Then, make sure you comment or post all over that site to ensure that your piece is crawlable and receives link equity – this is known as page rank funneling.

Scaling Up

To scale this sort of content marketing that answers a question then provides a solution (your product), start by coming up a list of all possible problem-related search queries, and throw them into Google’s keyword planner. This will give you which ones actually have search volume. Then follow this guide to keyword research visualization to prioritize which ones you should write for.

You won’t know which pieces will do well, so produce a high volume of articles while maintaining quality. You’ll also need some sort of content promotion and link building strategy.

After awhile, say 12 months, you’ll start to get traffic to your resources. Some will convert to purchase exceptionally well – these are the pieces you want to work on SEO to. Additionally, you may have some high traffic posts with low conversion – you may be able to increase these. To learn more, read this guide to content optimization.

You might find a sort of template that really works. For example, Zapier found success by targeting search terms of [X software] and [Y Software] integration, and subsequently created pages for every possible combo of softwares people might want to integrate.

Is your product low-friction with mass appeal? Is it an ‘add-on’ to peoples’ lives?

Remembering your passwords isn’t necessarily a huge problem, but it is an inconvenience that almost everyone has to deal with.

Dashlane solves this with low friction, paid solution that individuals can easily add on to their lives. It’s something that I didn’t know I needed, but would be happy to try cause remembering passwords is a pain.

Blue Apron is another example. Most people eat 3 times a day, and many people cook several times per week. Pounding in the message of an ‘easy way to prepare really good dinner’ into someone’s head via newsfeed ads until they finally take Blue Apron up on the intro offer.

In both of these cases, it’s fairly easy to sign up. Dashlane offers a free tier, and Blue Apron’s first meal is cheap. However, the products are both very good, so they have high long term purchase rates.

If something has mass appeal, low friction to try, and is not replacing a habbit – it’s simply a matter of getting large quantities of eyeballs in a low cost manner. If you can hone your audience, even better.

Starting Scrappy:

These sorts of products can get a great early boost on Product Hunt – plan this launch carefully since you only get one shot. Product Hunt forbids voting rings so make sure to only earn your spot. Just kidding, ask literally everyone you know to upvote it – everyone else does.

Press can also be a driver of this sort of product. Fund raising and product launches are easy topics to pitch to press, but outside of that you’ll have to get creative. Stories about the founders can be interesting. LawnStarter doesn’t fall into this category, but we were overwhelmed with traffic when the Guardian featured our crazy sleep schedule experiments. Dashlane took advantage of the trend of password breaches, earning their way into publications like the NY Times.

There are a ton of ways to get attention. Getting to the top of popular reddits or Hacker News can also be fruitful, since people will think ‘oh this is useful, I might try it out’, even if they came to the site for an article about how you do machine learning or something like that. Getting influencers to share your product can also pay dividends. Quora might have popular questions you can get away with answering.

Linktexting.com – a widget that sends download links for mobile apps – is an example of an add on in B2B. Search Quora for ‘Linktexting’ and you can see how much buzz they managed to generate, so much that one user posted this:

Scaling Up

Companies with these sorts of low friction life add ons tend to scale up via paid ads on Facebook, display, mobile or other platforms. The ads are focused on direct conversion – you don’t need to ‘educate’ or ‘nuture’ someone’s interest in a password manager; you simply need to connect with enough people at the right moment.

Most of your energy is focused on testing new creatives, honing your audience, or optimizing conversion funnels.

Additionally, there is a chance that paid virality or referral programs can work, but your mileage may vary. You have to think to yourself ‘is there a reason someone would go out of their way to share this with a friend? Does sharing create or burn social capital?’

Gifting someone a free meal is a value add, so it probably creates or keeps social capital neutral. That’s why Blue Apron’s referral program worked. Gifting someone a password manager, eh, maybe not so much.

Is your product social in any way?

Social networks aren’t the only social products.

Uber is social in the sense that you often ride with people. Living Social is social in not only the name, but in the sense that it started out with discount events and experiences – things you do with friends. Venmo and Paypal are social in the sense that you’re paying someone else. Dropbox is social in that you are sharing something with someone else.

Everybody wants to try and brute force a referral program (most don’t work), but if your product is inherently social, a referral program is a good thing to evaluate.

It’s no coincidence that referral programs have driven growth the growth of all the companies mentioned.

Starting Scrappy:

Don’t simply throw up a ‘Give $20 get $20’ screen and expect it to work. Rather try and understand the existing social behavior relevant to your product.

Then, come up with a hypothesis on how to use incentives to either increase the frequency or accelerate the existing behavior.

For paid referral programs, I’d recommend using your LTV calculations to come up with the absolute most you’d be able to pay for a new customer. Then, apply a discount since referral programs 1) typically will cannabalize some acquisition you would have had anyway and 2) can lead to much worse performing cohorts due to gamers.

Now, arrange an incentive program so that you will break even on your referral program. For example, if your theoretical LTV (after accounting for cannabization and gamers) is $40, try a give $20 get $20. Then test it.

You will likely lose money or just break even on these cohorts. However, it will give you a fast read on whether there’s any life to your referral program at all. If there’s no life, kill it and move on. If there’s substantial activity, you can dial back the incentive to be more reasonable on CAC. From there, it becomes a mere optimization problem.

Scaling Up

If you’ve identified that a paid referral program can be large, scaling opportunity, you’ll want to scale it til kingdom come.

Start by creating your funnel, which probably looks something like this.

Active user

Views invite screen

Share action

Invites / action

Signup / invite

Note that for each customer you acquire, you will acquire another. Use your intuition, analytics and customer feedback to decide which of these to work on. One likely opportunity is increasing the number of users who view the invite screen

Also, you can learn where a customer is on their lifecycle when they share. Can you speed that up? Can you incentivize those who have shared to reshare?

You’ll probably want to built a testing framework in house so that you can run test on a variety of dimensions.

Are you building a social network or community of some sort?

Your community will not (and probably should not) generate revenue until you have millions of repeat visitors.

If this is the case, you really need scalable, free (or nearly free) customer acquisition. That typically means virality.

Starting Scrappy:

Every social network has had some sort of hack to get off the ground. Here are a few I’ve heard about.

Reddit faked a lot of usage early on before people joined.

Facebook put up pictures of college students (without consent) to rate ‘hot or not’, focusing on college campuses early on.

Pinterest founders allegedly got value from putting their website up at Best Buy (not sure how much I buy this).

The founding team at Nextdoor went to neighborhoods and manually built their initial network.

Growth Hackers autoliked a bunch of relevant tweets, which eventually got them a following, that spilled over into the community.

Scaling Up:

Every large social network – Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Nextdoor – has grown via virality.

Linkedin and Facebook were largely email. Instagram and Pinterest used sharing to Facebook to get growth.

Let’s be really clear here: the super successful communities and social platforms probably would have grown without these mechanisms, just not as fast and not as far. There was strong word of mouth around them, and the levers were simply gasoline on the fire. If your platform doesn’t have strong engagement and word of mouth, showing a popup modal to import contacts isn’t going to be your ticket to crazy growth.

All of these platforms then layered on SEO once virality slowed, arranging their user generated content so that search engines can index it. Since social networks typically get a lot of press, link equity isn’t an issue.

Do others see your product being used? Is there a way for this to happen?

Two weeks ago, I noticed an electric scooter sitting in the middle of the sidewalk in downtown Austin. I thought nothing of it, assuming the owner had probably just ducked into a store quickly. The next day, I saw one outside my own building. A few days later, I saw someone standing near one, fiddling with their phone before they hopped on and rode it away.

Then, I got a referral link to try Bird via SMS.

Then it all clicked, and I started seeing more and more scooters around town. My co-founder and I were running late to a coffee meeting with a couple investors so we decided to try out free rides. They then saw us ride up with the scooters, which prompted a conversation.

In this case, the product in and of itself is viral, so they added an element on top of it to make it even more viral.

“Make private behavior public" is one of Jonah Berger’s methods of increasing word of mouth. In the case of Bird scooters, the behavior is inherently public.

But what if your product is inherently private? See if there are ways to expose it. Yelp, Tripadvisor and Grubhub create artificial awards to trick businesses into putting up stickers. On-demand services like Favor, Taskrabbit and Doordash give their runners t-shirts and car stickers. Wag not only gives their walkers t-shirts, but also provides branded leashes, dog bandannas, and lockboxes.

There’s also instances of this in the digital world. Intercom puts their branding on their live chat, Sumo puts it on the popups, and Hotmail put ‘sent with hotmail’ in the email signature by default.

Starting Scrappy

For real world products, if you think your product has the potential to grow virally in this sense, you need to get to some critical mass. This typically means starting small and unscalable. In the case of Bird, they are physically putting out scooters every morning and picking them up every night (to avoid impounds), and only putting them in the densely populated areas. Yelp went door-to-door offering window stickers to their restaurants.

Since these tactics will typically build familiarity, but won’t trigger a purchase, you’ll want to figure out a mechanism to be that trigger. This might be a referral program or press.

For digital viral loops, there’s little cost to implementing this tactic. You might want to consider requiring branding for free tiers, or offering extras if your customers put a badge on their website like Mixpanel did (note: if you ‘pay’ for badges and don’t nofollow these links, you could get penalized like Thumbtack did).

Scaling Up

You won’t be able to pick up scooters or put stickers in windows forever, so you’ll have to figure out ways to automate it. Fortunately, by doing the scrappy stuff, you have a playbook. Additionally, you’ll probably be able to layer on paid acquisition to assist the virality, and also get a better measure of how effective the various parts of your strategy work.

Summing Up

Als u op zoek bent naar uw kanaal voor klantacquisitie, gooi dan niet alles en de gootsteen naar de keuken. Probeer niet te creatief te worden, en geef de dingen niet op, wil je hebt niet niet boos geschud.

Denk in plaats daarvan na over uw klanten, en plan uw strategie voor klantenverwerving dienovereenkomstig. Zoek uit hoe je gaat schalen en investeer in de lange termijn terwijl je in de tussentijd je verworvenheid in evenwicht brengt met scrappiertactieken.

Als je een oprichter bent die in de beginfase op zoek is naar je kanaal, kun je me een bericht sturen . Ik ben er eerder geweest en ik ben blij dat ik het kan betalen.