- We would get hundreds of shares on these posts.
And we got the blog, literally organic content SEO
inbound to the point where we're doing 350,000
unique visitors a month.
(rock music)
Hey there, I'm Dan Martell, serial entrepreneur investor
and creator of SAAS Academy.
In this episode, I'm gonna share with you three crazy ideas
that work to grow my business
and be sure to stay the end
where I'm going to tell you how to get access
to this exclusive training called Silicon Valley Secrets
three growth hacks that I learned
from the top growth hackers in Silicon Valley.
Let's get into it.
So one of the things you need to know
about me is that I am a marketing nerd.
I came from the technical background software writing code.
And because of that, I'm a big fan
of deconstructing and reverse engineering things and figure
out how they grow, how they work, what are the systems
the approaches, the methodologies, the principles.
And when I moved to San Francisco, you know
even though I had lots of success in my previous company
Spheric running paid acquisition back then
this is like Google ad words.
Pay-per-click campaigns.
I wanted to understand how software companies
got distribution, ideally for free.
When you see all these like freemium tools,
I mean this was the early days of Dropbox
and other kind of consumer meets B2B SAAS products.
I just went deep.
I met the people that literally shaped my thinking
around growth hacking folks like Sean Ellis, Andrew Chen
Hiten Shah from Kissmetrics.
I mean, literally the best people
even a guy named Andy Johns
a lot of people don't know about, but you know
he was the one that really allowed me to
understand how growth is a is kind of like an investment
like you would do for financial investment.
You're trying to create compound growth.
So I went from learning a little bit of ad words.
When I moved to San Francisco to five years later, having
you know, spent millions of dollars on paid acquisition
built two venture backed companies and
been asked to speak
around the world on marketing and growth hacks.
So today I want to share
with you create three crazy stories of different
of my companies that I was involved in to how I grew them.
That a lot of people don't know the behind the scenes story.
So let's get into it.
Number one, find your pond.
So I built this company called Clarity.
You've never heard of it before.
It's Clarity.fm.
It's a, it's kind of, if LinkedIn had a, a phone feature
that's kind of what Clarity was.
It was an expert network
for people to get advice over the phone.
People paid for the advice and because it was a marketplace
we had to figure
out how to attract experts that were qualified
that were notable, that had the answers
that people might be looking for
in regards to getting advice around really
like specific topics like cryptocurrency or pricing
if you're a SAAS founder or, you know, sales compensation
kind of like really specific things.
So I know when I asked people, if they had to like come up
you for you even like ask yourself what would be ways
for you to create a network of experts?
A lot of people go well, Quora would make a lot of sense
cause there's a lot of people answering questions
on Quora and there's kind of this voting mechanism.
But if you've ever tried to automate something
against Quora and like scrape information
even if I wasn't trying to do anything malicious
it's near impossible.
A lot of these sites
like LinkedIn and Quora have like locked it down.
So we were building nine months
into this company trying to figure out
a way that wasn't manual.
Because the early days we hand to hand combat, went out
recruited those experts into our world
but I needed a way that was going to be scalable.
Right?
Cause we had the information for what the market was looking
for based on the search terms and clarity.
But we needed a way to go out and get these experts kind
of source them from these, these pools of smart people.
So we kept trying to approach it
trying to figure it out, testing different strategies.
And then one day I was like on my way to work and it hit me.
I said, huh, what about SlideShare?
So SlideShare it's actually lost quite a bit of momentum.
It used to be like the place that anybody did speaking.
I used to publish all my slides there.
A lot of my friends, if you
all the event organisers kind of put things
on SlideShare was kind of
like a social network for your presentations.
And the cool part is two things.
One, if you search a term on SlideShare
you would find all the experts on that topic.
And number two, that helped me in Clarity
try to find and sources those
experts was the last slide typically
contained their email address.
So that was a really great way for us to take somebody
looking for an expert and reach out and get them.
And we literally went from like mediocre traction
to all of a sudden just being able to source experts
on the fly.
We actually built this internal tool called Bosure.
That was like one part automation, one per part, you know
a whole team in Manila, trying to help us reach
out and curate all these incredible experts.
And for me, that is the crazy ideas is where is your pond?
Where are your pond of either customers or partners?
Where are they hanging out?
What is not obvious to other people
that you might be able to discover?
And that to me is the creative aspect of growth hacking.
So ask yourself, where do my customers spend time
and how do I go fishing in those ponds
in a way that is aligned with their best interest.
So that it's value added and not just leeching.
Number two, who's got my list.
You know, I built
my first company ever is called Maritime Vacation.
And you know, the long story short is my dad had a cottage
and he was getting calls all the time.
So I would sit there
and watch my dad, you know, answer the same questions.
Like, does it have, you know, does it accept pets?
How close is it to beach?
Is it available?
And I remember, you know, I'm 17
18 years old was 17 at the time when he first approached me
and I just asked, hey if you had a web page
that listed all the information
would that be valuable?
And he's like, yeah, that'd be amazing.
You know, this is early days of the internet.
And, and I said, okay, what you pay for that?
So the fun part is I got my dad
I think he said a couple hundred dollars a year.
I got him to give me $500.
Cause I said, I got to build this.
I'm not going to charge you to write the code
but I knew I needed enough money to be able to
buy the servers.
Right, so like I needed the code
that I was going to write to run on a server.
And this is early way
before Amazon web services and other tools like that.
And so I started writing code
and I built this whole application, essentially.
It was like a very simplified version
of Air, Bed and Breakfast.
So I can not only create a listing for my dad
but also create a place
for other people to list their cottages.
That was the big idea.
That's why I called it Maritime Vacation, Maritime.
The Maritimes is where I'm from in Eastern Canada.
And it was MaritimeVacation.ca you know
like Canada and like, you know, really kind of a small idea
but it was the first thing I ever built.
So anyways, it's great to build it
but now how do you get the customers?
So what I remember, like struggling
like how do I find the other, my, you know
other people like my dad that had cottages
and one night I was hanging out with my buddy, Dave
Dave was a bit of a stoner.
Okay, really liked the guy meant well,
but wasn't too motivated in life.
And I was kind of struggling with this question, like
how do I get people to know about my website?
And Dave kinda says in his like, stoner ish
kind of like, he's like, yo dude
there's this tourism guide.
And I'm like a tourism guide.
He's like, yeah, dude
there's this guy that they put out tourism
new Brunswick and puts out, has got all the cottages
and all the bed and breakfast is listed in the guide.
And I was like, what?
So got my hand on a copy of the tourism guide, opened it up.
Literally. It's like what to do in new Brunswick.
And then it's just a whole directory of cottages and
bed and breakfasts is so I had the information, but it was
in a magazine, had to get it into some way of automating it.
So I hired my little brother Mo I put him
in front of my computer for like three bucks an hour.
And I built a Microsoft access database.
And I said, Mo, enter in all this information.
So he did that.
Then I created a mail merge on word
and built this like form letter that essentially said, hey
we're Maritime Vacation,
if you'd like a listing for your cottage
fill out this form include three photos.
It's $30 for the listing.
But if you want to have your photos back
at an extra $5 so that I can ship the photos back to you.
So I printed off hundreds of these form letters
folded them up, put them in the mail and ship them out.
I mean, this is like super ghetto.
Like there was no fanciness, this isn't like advertising
but I sent out the mail and I remember a few days later
and then a few days it was essentially like 10 days later
my dad came back and he had a handful
of envelopes and he just looked at me.
He said, what did you do?
And I was like, what did that come from me?
And he's like, yeah.
And we start opening up.
Not only did people order the webpages
for their better breakfast or their cottages
but there was also money in the envelope.
Like nobody today's world would send cash in an envelope
through the postal mail and people did back then.
So I, that was the beginning of kind of like
how do I think about growth?
It's not about building something.
Anybody can build it.
That's not the riskiest part about your business model
the riskiest part about your business models.
Can you get in front of your perfect fit customer?
That's what I call it and present an offer this compelling
and valuable enough for them to want to take action
and make it easy for them to take action.
But the question you gotta ask yourself is who's
got my list.
Number three, viral content.
This is probably my favourite crazy idea because
when we were building my company, Flowtown.
Flowtown was a social marketing application
for small business owners.
So essentially if you think of like email marketing
I saw in 2009
the future of like early days of Twitter and Facebook
where there will be essentially a tooling
a set of applications that would help small
businesses market on social media.
So Flowtown was that product.
And one of the core hooks
that we did was we took an email address
and we gave you all of the social networks that
that email address your customer or your lead was on.
So that made it really easy
for you to build campaigns, to reach out to them.
So that was cool built.
This first MVP got early customers got things
so like ramen profitable, but
for us to get real growth, we needed more eyeballs.
The product sold itself if people heard about it
but we needed a really cost-effective way
to get people aware of it.
So one of the things that I saw going
on back then was a site called Mint.com
and Mint had one of the most beautiful blogs out there
and they were consumers.
So they were trying to create just content
that would help consumers understand their personal finance.
And then obviously if you want to do that
in an automated way, Mint is the tool for you to do that.
And one of the things that Mint did
that I thought was, was cool.
I just didn't understand how to do it for us.
Was it created these really cool infographics?
So like pie charts
and workflows and all these different things to
explain what they were selling.
And one of the ways we thought of
and I didn't know if it would work was okay, well
I don't have anything cool that I can, you know
immigrant we're a business, a business marketing tool
but what if we found other datasets?
What if we found interesting information
that other people had created and we visualised it.
So we found other marketing companies that had
SMB marketing data.
We found other people that had written these like detailed
like how to do stuff, but then we asked to partner
with them and we co-created these infographics.
So, so think like, you know, these really long
they were big before.
And cause that was another thing that Mint.com did
really well is this infographics.
And we just started publishing these
and we started promoting them
and we got really good at like sites like Digg
and Reddit and a bunch of different distribution channels.
But the infographics were so valuable
in their own that people would just share them.
We would get hundreds of shares on these posts.
And we got the blog, literally organic content SEO
inbound to the point where we're doing 350,000
unique visitors a month all
through this crazy idea of saying
let's go find some data that we think would be interesting
to our potential customers.
Co-create it, co-produced it,
so when we went to somebody who had a dataset
and we said, hey, we want to visualise it.
Here's an example.
They're like, that's amazing.
It's like, well, we'll create it.
You publish it on your blog.
We'll publish it on ours maybe a week later.
So we added some value.
So we got the credit or the ability to get the data.
Then we published it on ours.
We linked it up.
We asked them other people to link it up.
And we partnered with this company
down in LA called C5 Column Five.
And I got to tell you those crazy early days
of building content of these infographics, it
it blew up to the point where the
the infographics were featured in marketing books.
People asked us
for the rights that we created these like marketing assets
if they could republish them in their books.
And it was a real honour
and it was cool to see some of them go like crazy viral
where they get thousands of shares.
And again, it's just these crazy ideas of like looking
around you and trying to see what are other people doing
and can not work in my industry.
But that's how we use viral content to really
get distribution for my company Flowtown.
So quick recap,
three crazy ideas that helped me grow my business.
One, find your pond.
Number two, who's got your list.
And third, can you create some viral content?
So those are some fun stories of my entrepreneurial journey
and some crazy ideas that I've had to help grow my business.
But I want to also share with you a resource.
I mentioned at the beginning
which is Silicon Valley Secrets
like how to growth, hack your business.
Based on some of the strategies that I learned
from the top in the world
people that worked at Facebook, Quora, Twitter, et cetera.
These are folks like Andy Johns.
If you don't know who he is, he is, I think he's now
he's still involved in a wealth front
but Andy was the, he worked with Chamath, who was the head
of growth at Facebook.
I met Andy at an event.
He shared some incredibly powerful principles for how
he approached testing different growth ideas
and click the link below to get access
to that exclusive training just for my community.
It's called the Silicon Valley Secrets for growing your SAAS
or your software company.
Be sure to click the link, to get access to that.
And if you like this video, please, please
please leave me a comment.
Let me know what you liked the most.
What resonated with the most, be sure to subscribe
to my channel and smash that like button and as per usual
I want to challenge you to live a bigger life
and a bigger business.
And I'll see you next Monday.
(soft music)