The value of an accelerator program like JFDI Accelerate comes from its mentors. Their advice counts because they’ve been on the front line themselves. As an entrepreneur and and investor, Vinnie Lauria has seen startups both struggle and succeed to hack the challenge of growth, writes David Ongchoco
Golden Gate Ventures Founding Partner and serial entrepreneur Vinnie Lauria dropped by last week to give a workshop on growth hacking for the startups on the current JFDI Accelerate program. In a session fuelled by experience, Vinnie shared eight key insights on how to grow your user base from 10 to 10,000.
1. Start building your community now
The first thing Vinnie highlighted was to start building a community of your target audience as soon as possible. It is important to start talking about the topic and offering value to your potential users. Give your audience information that they want, and talk about it publicly by sharing it through Facebook, Reddit, Quora, Tech In Asia or whatever platforms you can use to build a following.
2. Set yourself as an expert in the space
A great way to start building a community is to set yourself as an expert in the space. Vinnie shared, “Build yourself out as a thought leader so people will respect you and know more about you.” You can do this by hanging out in places like Quora and answering questions of people and creating useful content. Overtime, you will eventually gain a following and it will be easier for you when you officially launch your product.
3. Hang out in places where your users hang out
To build off the second tip, Vinnie shared how he would spend time in forums when he was working on his previous company, Lefora, which focused on forum creation and management. He would spend time just offering advice and trying to help out forum admins who had problems. He would eventually start sharing Lefora as an option that these admins could use to solve problems they faced.
4. Cross post and partner with companies with similar user base
Vinnie highlighted examples of companies that used cross-promotion partnerships to help boost their user growth. An example he gave was TradeGecko, which used the ability of Shopify to create plugins to create an additional channel to acquire more users. He encouraged everyone to take advantage of these other channels, create plugins and cross post blog posts with companies who have a similar target audience but a larger user base.
Learn more about why TradeGecko joined the JFDI Accelerate Program here.
5. Focus on retention
Vinnie emphasized the importance of retention and finding a way to keep users engaged depending on your objectives. Growth will only be seen if you’re able to build upon users you’re able to retain. When starting out, Vinnie even went as far as saying that you want to push new features and work on your product based on whether or not it will help with retention or acquiring new users.
He shared a 3 step rule: 1. Get users. 2. Spend time on retention. 3. Once you’ve established a retention system, start spending time acquiring new users again.
6. Personalize your newsletters and keep them simplified
Vinnie shared the strategy they used at Lefora of breaking down their users to three different tiers: awesome, middle and bad. They would then personalize their newsletters, making sure that their newsletters really provided value to their different tiers of users. He told everyone to ask the question, “what can I offer them in this newsletter that they’ll want to click through because it is going to helping them?”
7. Highlight content and make things interesting
Don’t spam your users with useless content. Highlight interesting content that will incentivize your users to click through. One example Vinnie shared was referencing blog posts you wrote that got a lot of attention and saying, ‘here’s something interesting that came out of an article we wrote, click here to learn more’.
8. Use Ads wisely
Advertisements can be very powerful but you should know which one is the right one to use for your business. Vinnie explained when to use Facebook ads and when to use Google ads. For Google ads, only buy ads in the search results page and be really specific with your target key-words. On the other hand, Facebook ads are for more specific niche products that you want to market to a broad audience. Buying ‘Facebook Likes’ is also a cheap way to gain new users if targeted properly. If you’re a mobile app, Vinnie shared how it is a must to buy Facebook mobile ads that lead directly to the app download page.
Speaking of the JFDI Accelerate Program, our 2015B Applications are now open. Our mentors, founders and investors form the perfect ecosystem for your startup to succeed in Asia. More than 60% of our Accelerate startups receive seed funding.
David Ongchoco is a content marketing intern for JFDI Asia. He currently studies at the University of Pennsylvania and runs an international nonprofit called YouthHack, which has a goal of helping students learn more about startups, technology and entrepreneurship. He also contributes for top publications like the Huffington Post, Technical.ly Philly and the Philippine Daily Inquirer.