hey template here and welcome to another
episode now what we're going to be
talking about today is how to grow your
next business into a million users now I
wanted to remind you guys that I am an
ex-googler
lead and I have built a number of
successful apps that have been able to
get to millions of users we can take a
look at the dashboard here you can see
here that this was one of my apps with
3.6 million users had another app pure
iPhone app 25 thousand users another one
with 15,000 users 40,000 users let's see
and this was another app with 500,000
users and I have grown all of these as
well as having worked for larger
companies in which there were apps with
many many more millions of users so I
would like to think that I know a thing
or two about how to grow a business from
zero to millions of users and I'm here
to give you my top 5 tips on how you too
can do that as well this video by the
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lead 15% off now one thing that really
changed my perspective was one time I
was building this dating website and I
started researching this and I realized
that dating websites are actually
extremely easy to build and they faced a
certain class of problem known as the
chicken and the egg problem in which the
success of a dating website depends
purely on how many people you can get on
there that's it it's a marketing problem
it's not a technical problem at all so
that made me realize that there are
certain classes of businesses that sound
great at a million users but that don't
really sound good at 10 users or 100
users right and so the first thing you
need to understand is that you need to
come up with a path that gets your
business from 0 users to 10 users to 100
users a thousand users and a million and
so if you think about like a dating
website it's really not much fun with
only 10 users or a hundred users or a
thousand users but once you can get like
10 million users on there it starts to
sound pretty fun and this is something
that anybody can do but it just costs
huge amounts of investments in marketing
and advertising to get that going and
the challenge the trick is how do you
grow it to that size and this is really
not a trivial thing so you have to have
a good marketing plan in place for your
product so that's the first thing is to
understand that marketing is a very
interesting problem and for some
businesses it is actually the core
problem for the business itself I
remember one time I had collaborated
with a team member to build this
framework you know when we were building
that I said well we got to make this
really cool landing page and sell it to
the developers and tried to get a lot of
people using this stuff and then that
other developer just didn't seem to care
and all he did was he put up like a
readme file like just a plain readme
text file and then he just launched it
and said oh an email
marketing campaign and guess how many
people actually adopted this product it
was like 1 or 2 almost nobody was
interested in using this framework and
essentially that just tanked the whole
project so even though this was simply a
piece of code oftentimes the impact of a
developer especially if you're working
and say infra is how many people are
actually using your code how many people
are adopting that piece of technology
that you wrote so in more places that
you may imagine and actually in all
aspects of life from say your dating
life to your personal branding to pieces
of code that you write to how you
negotiate and to the businesses that you
grow marketing has a huge impact on
anything that you do marketing is very
important and so you just have to make
that a priority I know we all just want
to start building the product and that's
the most interesting and fun part about
it but marketing is something that
cannot be ignored you have to take it
seriously
whenever I start on a new project
actually it is usually spurred by a new
marketing opportunity so if there's a
new app platform that opens up say
Facebook apps open up or iPhone apps
open up that is a brand new marketing
opportunity it's not so much the
technology the technology may be
interesting and cool too but it is that
distribution part that actually
motivates me to jump in and start
building something
I won't take on the project if I don't
have a clear idea about how I'm going to
get the first hundred users when I
started the panel apps which is my
time-lapse photography software
I had already pre identified a small
community of photographers who are very
interested in time-lapse tricks getting
sliders and motion and all of that stuff
so I knew right away that if I were to
build a piece of software I could
advertise straight to that community of
people and they would be interested so
you want to look for niches small sub
communities like subreddits Facebook
groups in which you'll be able to talk
and people will listen if you try to
talk to everybody you speak to nobody
now the second tip I have for you is to
write the current trends in distribution
and there's always a trend going on
somewhere these days is quite
interesting I would say that the trend
is in influencer marketing you can go
find youtubers Instagram influencers
people much like myself and you go as
them to promote your product so the key
difference here is that I would say we
are in an air
of influencers in the past technology
had largely been driven by platforms you
had platforms like Twitter Facebook
Google+ and essentially it would be
grassroots campaigns in which you would
brought has a post that post would be
shared by many friends and then that
post would eventually go viral it may go
Varro around hashtags on Twitter so in
the old days it was scattered friends
who would share news and then you would
say things like oh well you got to go to
Facebook or Twitter and you would talk
about these large platforms today the
difference is that we have gelled into
communities centered around influencers
and there's not so much the platform but
it is the influencer who you should be
talking to that is the person you
advertise with there used to be
something called bloggers and you would
go to these bloggers who ran their own
little independent websites and you ask
them to write about your stuff but
bloggers have kind of faded out these
days to be replaced by the influencers
that's who you need to go to that's the
trend these days and so overall I would
recommend you check out YouTube Twitter
Instagram maybe read it find out who the
influencers are in your specific niche
and go ask them to promote your stuff
maybe pay them a little money or
something like that get that all set up
for you not the third tip I have for you
about how you can grow your business is
to be genuine being genuine is trending
these days I would say you know in the
old days used to be all corporate speak
people hid behind this bill and
customers seem to appreciate that they
thought it sounded professional but
these days there's been sort of a
backlash against corporatism so this is
about building a natural relationship
with your customers your audience your
viewers how are you guys doing over
there say hi to your mom for me I want
to show you lose something that kind of
surprised me when I first saw this but
there's something called the style and
tone guide for large companies and we
take a look at what Google has here they
say that even for them officially they
want you to aim for a conversational
tone rather than a formal one be human
let your personality show be memorable
you can even be a little funny now in
then they say aim for a voice in tone as
conversational friendly and respectful a
voice that's casual and that
and approachable and you can see that
this is actually reflected in other
documentation as well if you check out
MailChimp at mail chip we've walked in
our customers shoes using offbeat humor
and the conversational voice we play
with language to bring joy to work we
don't take ourselves too seriously
we are plain spoken we are genuine so if
the way you are communicating with your
customer is very formal and you think
that's professional it's actually not
you're actually damaging your brand and
you are distancing yourself from your
customer and you're just being very
corporate faceless non-genuine entity
and you lose that chance to develop a
more human personal relationship with
your customer which your competitors
probably are doing so that's the current
trend these days if you're trying to act
out corporate and professional then just
stop that right now now my fourth tip
for you is the optimize your conversion
funnel so maybe you set up this
beautiful landing web page you want to
make sure that as people are entering
your website you aren't losing them and
this is something that you have to
really be mindful of about I want to
show you some interesting landing pages
here actually if you take a look at the
landing page for Amazon it's quite
interesting actually that when you get
towards the purchase flow you'll find
that nothing on the page becomes
clickable anymore except the continue
button in which you can continue to buy
stuff the Amazon logo that banner you
can't click on it they just remove that
so you don't keep going backwards
even this learn more button if you ever
tap on that it just opens a brand new
window in the pop-up but it doesn't
actually redirect me from this site once
I get into this portion it just follows
me straight into the portion where I
have to place an order you want to
minimize the number of clicks that your
user has to make if you check out my
website here I don't even have a cart I
just asked for your credit card number
and then there's a Buy Now button right
there which completes the whole
purchasing process for you it's one
click by essentially accessibility is
something that I think a lot of people
underestimate and what you want to make
sure that your site is easy and simple
to access for anybody and you want to be
thinking about people like your mom for
instance with someone like that be able
to navigate your app your business your
website and really understand it and go
through the whole flow for example if I
were to build a website many
so I would just use a standard button
I'm not going to try to customize it and
make it look all cool and shiny and
round it because then it doesn't really
look like a button anymore right and
people may not know that that's
clickable and that whole entry should be
fun simple clean and understandable now
the fifth point here is you want to
consider what people like to call the
viral loop right which is the flow in
which when the user gets into your app
or your business or whatever it is how
are they going to spread that through
word-of-mouth and you want to make it as
easy as possible for people to share
your stuff so don't underestimate
building out this referral process in
which you can give people some goodies
and bonuses in exchange for them sharing
your service with their friends their
family you know I have spent tens of
thousands of dollars on advertising a
lot of that stuff doesn't really work
like I'm not sure if I've ever gotten
any payoff that felt really tangible to
me for advertising whereas if a product
is really good then it will be able to
grow on its own and that is really how
you get massive amounts of growth right
if your goal is to get like say five
hundred thousand users you're not going
to get to that amount by paying for
every single user it's just going to
cost way too much so you have to make
sure that there's a way for your
business to grow in sort of a viral way
exponential way without you having to
pay for each single person so for a lot
of the apps and games I make I always
take into consideration the time to
build some sort of referral process in
which people can have a special link if
they were to share that they would get
some in-app goodies some virtual items
virtual goods something that would just
incentivize people to help grow that
product let me know what your top tips
are on growing a business if you like
the video give the like and subscribe
and I will see you next time bye