Growth hacking guide : Take your startup from 0 to 1

Growth Hacking: Take
your startup from 0 to 1
SHIVANKIT ARORA MARKETINGMASALA.COM

What is growth hacking?
 The term itself is not a new concept
 Growth hacking is a smart marketing hack which will exclusively work for your startup and
take it from 0 users to a decent level of traction
 You can use different tools/ways of marketing in a cost effective way to hack your startup’s
growth

Growth Hacking Funnel (AARRR)
These stages work for almost all startups
Awareness/Acquisition : Getting maximum potential users to see your product with least monetary
spend on marketing
Activation : Getting users to sign up for your product/service after they have become aware about you
Retention : Making users to continue their engagement with your product or service
Referral : Users talking to other potential users and telling them about your product/service
Revenue : Building a pipeline for constant revenue generation and scaling the business

How popular startups/companies growth hacked their
way?
Drop Box : Started a referral program giving free storage to all users who referred their friends
to use Drop Box
PayPal : Started giving 10$ to everyone who signed up for the service.
AirBnB : Bed and breakfast company which started posting their accommodations on craigslist
and started getting huge traction.
QuickSprout.com : Established marketer Neil Patel writes here and shares his knowledge about
digital marketing. He builds his credibility and brands himself through his blog. One of his posts
got him 17 leads

Tools of the trade (detailed)
Search engine optimization
Search engine marketing
Inbound Marketing
Content marketing
Social media optimization and marketing
Email marketing
Offline marketing and word of mouth
Private advertising

Enough of gyaan. Show me the real deal.
How to hack growth?
Before starting on this, I want you to break the following beliefs if you have them
A start-up is a complete chaos and we can make any change at any point of time based on our
“gut” feeling
If you include management in a start-up, it will get boring
Now I have my product. Let’s do SEO, SMM, Email, Offline, advertising and go crazy with all
sorts of marketing. Doesn’t matter if it is relevant to me or not
Growth Hacking is magic and I will win in the first go

Step 1- Understand who is your customer and which
marketing channel is most relevant to reach them
After you figure out who is your customer are and where they are, you need to figure out the most RELEVANT
channels to reach them.
How to do it?
1. Write a customer persona
2. Find out where they hangout most
The next thing that needs to be implemented is allocating the right marketing channel to different stages of
the growth hacking funnel
Awareness : Is social media more important than SEO at the start?
Activation : How to optimize landing pages to get more signup? Will A/B testing work?
Retention: How about email-marketing to stay in touch with your audience?
Referral : Will launching a contest invite more people to use product or service?
Revenue : How to amplify ROI and build new cost-effective solutions?

Some companies who used step 1 to find
their audience and marketing channels
Bewakoof.com
Realized that their major audience is
college people and fresher's in jobs who
want to wear jokes and fun stuff on their
clothes.
Used humor content and sarcasm posts
to address people through Facebook
mainly.
Established themselves as a fun company
that people want to interact with and
wear their clothes

How do I find the ideal customer?
Rabbler App
Rabbler is an app that lets you create polls
,vote and interact with them .
In other words, the company is trying to build the
Quora of polls
Every marketing technique include social media,
Online advertising FAILED.
We then understood that our target audience
was youth and ran a campus ambassador
program.

Narrowing down targets for our agency
Angel List
A portal where startups, founders,
investors and job aspirants create
profiles and look for opportunities.
We shortlisted US/Silicon Valley
startups and emailed their founders
what was wrong with marketing of
their startup

Step 2 : Define a process for all marketing
efforts
There are 100’s of ways to market your startup. Once you have discovered what is relevant to
your business, you need to define a process with actionable steps
These steps when carried out consistently will create a lasting effect
Don’t complicate it. At least not in the beginning. Use simple excel sheets for a start
If you guys are a team, use a free tool called trello.com to manage project work

My process chart-Social Media Marketing

My process chart- E-commerce marketing

How to find the right marketing process
for your startup?
 Analyze the results you have till now
 Make a hypothesis
 Run a small experiment to validate it
 If it works, make it a process.
 If it doesn’t, try something else. Make this loop as fast as possible

CookGourmet- Online recipe and
ingredients delivery
Analysis till now :
Facebook ads gave poor performance
People did not understand what the site did
People were looking for credibility
Hypothesis
Differentiate ad sets in Delhi, Gurgaon, Noida
Test 3 captions on each ad
Test mobile, desktop and third party apps
-Results
Housewives are most interested
Instructions in the caption work best
Mobile app ads work best

B2B client in London- Social Media

Step 3 : Startups need to learn everyday. Keep
analyzing and optimizing your marketing
There will always be something new to add. Never stop growing
Every weekend (or Monday) sit down and evaluate the performance of your marketing
Figure out what is working and what is not and move smartly
 Prioritize your efforts and give more time to marketing channels that are giving a good return
for you
Maintain a tracker that records all KPI’s weekly and keep deriving insights from it

Tracker for social media marketing

Step 4 : Choosing the best analytics tools for your growth
marketing (free and paid)
Marketing Channel Tool Free or Paid
SEO performance Moz.com and SEMRush Paid
Site Analytics /In page analytics Google Analytics Free
Detailed site analytics CrazyEgg/Quick Sprout Paid after free trial
Social media Facebook insights,
Analytics.twitter.com, Google plus
Ripples, Iconosquare
Free
Social media TrueSocialMetrics.com Paid
Email Marketing MailChimp and Aweber Freemium (Paid after a limit)

Key Takeaways
1. See your marketing in the AARRR funnel (Awareness-Activation-Retention-Referral-Revenue)
and decide which channels are most relevant for you
2. Create a process chart which has actionable steps that can be carried out everyday
3. Every week, evaluate your marketing performance and see what is working and what is not.
4. Use the best analytics tools that you can afford
5. Keep trying till you get it right
“Don’t be afraid of failure, you only have to be right once” – Drew Houston, Founder DropBox

Resources to learn and study from
Books
 Lean Startup- Bible for startup owners
 Zero to One by Peter Theil
Blogs and sites (More important than books. Keep you updated)
 GrowthHackers.com
 Inbound.org
 Startup-marketing.com
 QuickSprout.com
 Blog.KissMetrics.com
 SocialMediaExaminer.com

Got a question? Let’s talk
Give us a visit at MarketingMasala.com
Shivankit Arora- shivankit@marketingmasala.com

Growth hacking guide : Take your startup from 0 to 1

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