The Engines of Growth in Pills

In the last few years I red a lot about growth, marketing and acquisition strategies. It’s getting hard to find something really interesting, so when I find it I reshare it. Or even better, from now on, I will make a summary of it.

This is the original talk by Devin Hunt, Partner at Foundercentric, talking about the Engines of Growth.

Word of mouth and viral videos are not Viral Strategies

They can attract a lot of people but after a while, if you don’t sustain them, their virality fade away. Let’s imagine that you create a succesful video that attracts 1 million viewers. Sure it’s a success, but it will not continue to attract millions of viewers for long. Just in few cases it will happen, but it’s incredibly hard.

Sticky growth is what usually a startup should focus early on

It consist in increasing the retention of your activated users as much as possible. He mentions the Evernote example. When you start to use this kind of products, you have a stronger and stronger reason to keep using them. First it’s because they’re good products. Second it’s because while using them you build a barrier to exit (more notes saved, higher the barrier).

He also suggest that it’s the “simplest” one to achieve. I don’t personally agree that is necessary the simplest, but it’s for sure the most important thing in the early days of your product. Increasing retentions means making a good product.

I would always focus on this kind of growth, no matter what stage you’re into, to make sure that you get the product right. Then you can consider others to grow faster.

Content marketing

A way to attract leads is to blog about interesting things. And we already knew that. But the interesing point is that he defines the “interesting things” pretty well. You should’t necessary talk about the closest part of the market you’re in, but the general market you’re in. If you are an analytics tools (like Kissmetrics), it’s not necessary to talk about analytics techniques and analytics researches.

It is enough to talk about tech trends. Blog about everything that could appeal to a person who is part of that market.

Happy growth.

This article originally appeared on http://blog.fanchimp.com/the-engines-of-growth-in-pills/