What's up, everybody?
Dan Martell here, a serial entrepreneur, investor,
and creator of SAAS Academy.
In this video, I'm going to share you
how to throw a laptop.
Oh, here, man.
Just take it.
Anyways, I'm going to share with you
how to growth hack your startup to your first 100,000 users.
And be sure to stay till the end, where
I talk to you about how to get access to my high tempo testing
training taught to me by the man, the legend, Sean Ellis,
specifically around the North Star Metric.
So I'll share that with you at the end.
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So if you're new here, I built a company called Clarity,
and it was a marketplace for entrepreneurs
to get advice over the phone by other entrepreneurs.
And when I built it, I thought, man, this
is the ultimate tool for micro celebrities
and Twitter personalities and bloggers
to monetize their advice.
And I literally was like, this is going to be incredible
because it's going to allow people that have knowledge
to give access to the people that want it
and create an economic system to reward that.
And I even had a charity component built into it.
And then I launched, and there were crickets.
I literally brought 300 people together in a theater,
gave them access to it.
I had Dragon's Den, Shark Tank experts, entrepreneurs
like Mike from FreshBooks and Ryan at Hootsuite
and all these incredible people available for this room,
and a bunch of people did not do any calls.
And what I realized--
and I'm going to walk you through
the different strategies to growth hack
because that company eventually grew to hundreds of thousands
of users doing calls over the phone.
But for the first nine months, it
was nothing, nothing, traction, traction, and then
eventually growth curve up and to the right.
We eventually exited the business.
So the big lesson there was to nail a niche.
What I've discovered-- and I'm going to walk you through how
to do that--
is you need to find somebody that, for us, for clarity, was
an entrepreneur that invests in themselves.
If that's not true--
you can be an entrepreneur-- a lot of people,
I just want to let you know, there's probably
out of 100 entrepreneurs, 90% of them are not growth-minded.
They don't read business books.
They're just accidental business people, entrepreneurs.
It was the 10% of the people that actually
went to conferences, bought books,
hired a coach that ended up being our best customers.
And once we understood that, everything else
from a marketing point of view changed.
And I'm going to tell you how to take that and implement it
in this video.
One, nail a problem niche.
Now a lot of people tell you like, oh, the riches
are in the niches.
Here's the way I think about it is
you can focus on a small group of people
because you do want to cast a wide net, right?
So the whole idea is you can try to be everything to everybody.
It's too wide.
And then if the holes in the net are too big,
the fish swim through it.
Or you can kind of focus on less of the overall ocean
and close the squares on your net
so that you can actually start catching the right fish, OK?
So that's the concept.
But here's the reality is the problem niche.
So one, they need to know they have a problem.
So too many people are building technologies
for people that don't know they have a problem.
Two, they need to be actively looking to solve the problem.
If they're not, it's going to be really hard because then you
got to convince they have a problem,
and then hopefully they start looking for a solution.
And number three, they have the means
to invest either time or money to make the economic engine
work for you.
So that's number one.
I can teach you all the marketing hacks and growth
hacks that you'd ever want to learn.
But if those things aren't true, you
have a problem niche that wants your solution,
everything else is going to fall flat.
Number two, map the universe.
There are so many great examples of this
of companies that said, OK, once I understood who our core
customer was, how do I find a way to discover them
in a programmatic way?
All right, so for me, one of my favorite examples
is one of my investment portfolios,
Steve at PayrollHero.
They were working on trying to deploy a payment or payroll
solution out in Asia, and they were having a hard time
finding early adopters.
So what I always ask is, what's true?
What are the characteristics about that customer,
that early adopter?
And long story short, after evaluating
a bunch of different options, we realized
that, for them, their best customers, the customers
that we're using and loving the product today,
were all using Google apps for domains.
Now this might seem obvious because anybody
watching this uses Google apps or Gmail
for their corporate email.
But there's still a lot of people in the world that don't.
They use Lotus Notes, if you remember that one.
They use Outlook, et cetera.
But once we realized that, then we could programmatically
take all of the potential customers that they had,
run them through a filter, check what's called the DNS--
the Domain Name Service--
of the email record, and find out
if they were using Google apps for domain
as their email client or their tool,
and filter out all of the, let's say,
100,000 potential customers down to the 25,000 that would
be incredibly perfect for them.
So I think of this all the time, both in what's
true about the customer, how can I programmatically
discover there's so many great companies out there,
like FullContact for social media or social contact data,
BuiltWith for techno graphic data.
I mean, there's so many different ways
for you to figure out from an URL or an email or a database
the specifics that's true about your best customers
and then filter out and ask yourself,
now that I've got that, how do I get in front of them?
Number three, value in advance.
Now here's what I've always loved
and what's true for me is I love using
education-based marketing.
I think it is the most powerful way--
this video is an example--
for me to add value in the market,
teach my customers something extremely powerful that
will get them a result. And if they
want to find a way to do that faster or quicker or easier,
they can kind of move forward down that path
through that discovery.
And that's true for all the software companies
that I work with for the most part.
We want to figure out a education-based strategy that's
going to allow your best customers to discover you
because they're searching for a solution they
have a problem on.
The other thing is so you have two ways.
You have content, and you have product.
The product is splintering off typically as a splinter
strategy, some feature of your core solution
that maybe people are paying for and making it as a free widget,
either as a Chrome extension, et cetera.
And a great example is Vidyard.
So Michael Litt, one of my best buds,
he actually took one of their video solutions inside
of Vidyard and front-loaded that for free as a browser
extension-- now called GoVideo--
that is arguably one of the fastest growth channels
that they have to attract top of funnel awareness
for their core Vidyard products.
So much so that Hubspot actually integrated GoVideo
into their sales CRM solution.
So that's on the product side.
On the content side-- again, value in advance,
two strategies, content or product--
on the content side, Unbounce, a company
that I invested in, that team there, Rick and the team,
they crushed it on building education-based content that
really serves their customer and their market
until they're ready to buy a solution like Unbounce.
And it is their number one channel,
and it's helped them grow exponentially.
So that, to me, is just from a growth hacking point of view,
those are two really powerful strategies.
Number four, drafting strategy.
So one of the strategies I think is powerful
is find somebody else that's further along that
has access to your core customer and figure out
a way to draft behind them.
Recently, I got into road biking because my good buddy Jarrett
said, hey, don't worry, you will not look funny in spandex.
I still don't think that that's the truth.
But anyways, we got a road bike, and I went out with them.
And what's cool is, if you've never done it,
if you tuck in behind the lead person or somebody that's
a lot stronger in front of you, they
make the whole biking process so much easier.
They cut the wind for you.
They create a draft to pull you forward so that you
can keep that same level of momentum
without exerting any-- probably half the energy
required to keep that pace.
And I just think about that in regards
to partnerships and growth in our business.
There's a strategy I teach called OPN.
And the real estate people, they call it OPM--
Other People's Money.
In the growth market strategy, it's OPN--
Other People's Network.
So if you think about it, Airbnb did this beautifully
by essentially using Craigslist's network
to get distribution, right?
Instagram did this beautifully using two networks,
the IOS network and their growth--
if you look at Instagram, when it launched,
and the growth of that market--
and Twitter.
People posting on social, specifically Twitter photos.
Before that, Twitter didn't really
have a great photo solution in the feed.
Using that drafting strategy and OPN,
try to find a network that has access to your perfect customer
and build some kind of publishing solution.
And the easiest way to do this at an enterprise level--
if you're watching this and you're like,
that won't work for me because I'm mid-market or enterprise
SAAS--
is, what's a report that you could share publicly,
something that your tool could generate for the customer
that they would feel comfortable sharing publicly?
That would be one.
So a widget.
We did this with Clarity, where we created a profile widget
for our experts on our platform, and we allowed them
to add that to their website.
So we got exposure through their personal networks.
But with the report, you can either
do it publicly, or even just sharing it amongst their team
to get other people aware of your solution
and using and collaborating around the tool
to help it make it more sticky.
I, mean, think about Slack and the communication channel
that they created and inviting other people to collaborate
around channels made the product stick,
and it created a kind of viral exposure
inside the company network.
So drafting strategy, to me, is a powerful way
to think about it for your SAAS, your product, your business,
to find somebody that's already moving forward,
that it talks to your core customer,
and draft behind them.
Number five, rinse and repeat.
Now this might be simple to say, but hard to execute.
What I've seen companies do is they have something that's
working, and they're starting to see
a little bit of traction and light around a growth strategy.
And instead of doubling down and investing in it,
they keep moving to other things.
So what I want to say is rinse and repeat
around the things that are working
to kind of build more velocity.
But at the same time, if you feel like you've tapped out,
if you're three iterations in--
so if you do a two-week dev cycle,
like a scrum or an agile process--
if you're three two-week cycles, a month and a half in,
and you haven't been able to move
the needle on that specific channel,
then go back and reintroduce another growth strategy or idea
that your team came up with to make that happen.
But rinse and repeat around all of these.
But if you've got traction, reinvest
and try to make it grow.
And if you don't, add a new one.
And having that discipline of focus and measurement
will be the unlock for you in building a growth strategy.
Gets you 100,000 users.
So quick recap.
Number one, nail the problem niche.
Make sure that they feel it, and they want a solution for it.
Two, map the universe, ideally in a programmatic way.
Number three, add value in advance through content
or splintering off a product feature.
Number four, drafting strategy behind other people's momentum
in, what I call, OPN, Other People's Networks.
And five, rinse and repeat using a high-tempo testing framework
that I'm going to share with you next.
So as I mentioned at the beginning,
I want to share with you a training I did called
high-tempo testing taught to me--
full credit goes to Sean Ellis, the creator of this.
He's also essentially the originator of the term "growth
hacking."
He was an advisor in my last company Clarity.
He's been a friend for almost a decade and one of the smartest
marketing minds out there.
And I taught it at my recent SAAS Academy intensive.
I want to give you access.
Below, if you click the link, you'll
get access to that specific training.
Specifically, you want to figure out what your North Star
Metric is, your NSM.
That alone will make all of these strategies I just shared
with you work like lock step.
So click the link below, get access to that.
If you like this video, be sure to smash the Like button,
subscribe to my channel.
And if there's anybody you think this video could serve directly
that you care about, feel free to share it with them.
As per usual, I want to challenge you to live a bigger
life and a bigger business.
And I'll see you next Monday.
So you're going to throw that computer, right?
I'm going to throw it.
Throwing the laptop.
Catch.