Growth Hacking Your Way To 10,000 Paying Customers

My co-founder and I recently set a big hairy audacious goal. We decided to grow our new startup CoSchedule to 10,000 paying customers. To do this, we needed to focus on growth–more visitors, more signups, and certainly more paid conversions. We needed to do a little hacking.

The idea that if you build it they will come works only in the movies.

For any new startup that has just launched, the hardest work is still ahead. From the very beginning, you need growth and to do that, you have to find customers. It’s not going to be easy, but it will be worth it once you reach product-market fit and have some paying customers to prove it.

Sean Ellis’ Startup Pyramid

What Is Growth Hacking?

The phrase Growth Hacker was coined by author Sean Ellis in 2010 as “a person whose true north is growth. Everything they do is scrutinized by its potential impact on scalable growth.”

When I first heard the term ‘Growth Hacking’ I was hooked. I didn’t know what it meant, but it implied that you had some ability to control or hack your growth and how quickly it would happen. Hacking is all about disrupting an existing system and startups need to disrupt the current market.

Growth hacking is a marketing technique developed by technology startups which uses creativity, analytical thinking, and social metrics to sell products and gain exposure. - Wikipedia Click To Tweet

An early example of growth hacking could be Hotmail’s line at the end of an email, ‘PS I Love You’, which linked directly to signup page for a Hotmail account. Dropbox is another more recent example. They let users share a link with friends so they can get more free storage space. In fact, anytime you use your Twitter or Facebook account to signup for a new service and they ask you to tweet or share their link, that’s a simple example of growth hacking.

How to Growth Hack

There isn’t any one thing you can do to be a Growth Hacker. It’s a combination of a lot of things and, even more, it’s the willingness to try something as an experiment. Even if it doesn’t work, you will still learn something.

Each startup will need to use a different set of techniques or hacks to grow. The best advice I can give is that you start digging through the resources available online and start putting together your own plan.

Lately I have been scouring the web for anything related to Growth Hacking. Here is a list of the things I have found useful.

Don’t Waste Time

The most precious resource a startup has is time.

It is the founder’s time, it is the team’s time, and it is even the time it takes to for competitors to react. Growth Hacking can help you shorten the time it takes to disrupt the market by doing things that don’t scale now. Later on, once you have paying customers and momentum built up, you figure out how to automate those tasks.

Scale like no one else, so later you can scale like no one else. - @justin_walsh
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I am a big fan of Dave Ramsey. Dave says, “Live like no one else, so later you can live like no one else”. I went ahead and hacked Dave’s phrase, and made it my own personal startup mantra.