Today we are going to talk about startup growth.
If you don't know me, my name is Caya.
I'm one of the founders and the CEO at Slidebean- a venture-funded, profitable, multi-million
dollar startup.
One of my proudest achievements is having led our marketing and growth teams since the
company was funded back in 2014.
As a CEO, you have to get involved in everything, inevitably.
But it's been the marketing and growth departments that have become one of my favorite tasks
as part of running this company.
If you've seen some of our previous videos, you've seen me talk about traction.
Now you understand why I value traction so much.
It's not only about getting the metrics you need to raise your round of funding;
in the end, funding is just a means to an end: having a bigger, more profitable business.
It's growing your customer base and retaining those customers and turning them into evangelists
that REALLY counts as a successful company.
This is how to grow a business.
Alright, so in this video, we are going to be covering-
Growth at the early stages Unit economics
Basic growth tactics and finally The Growth Marketing or Growth Hacking mindset
Other topics that we will cover in Part II of this video are
Building a marketing team The basics of SEM (Google Ads) and Social
Media Marketing Detailed conversion tracking
And finally, Content Marketing and SEO.
Now why these topics?
Because they relate specifically to our own experience- and we consider ourselves experts
in most of these.
Our company, Slidebean helps other companies present ideas- either through our automatic, AI design platform
or by getting our content and design teams involved in writing and structuring of
presentations for those customers.
So, even though most of our customers are other business (B2B)- we don't do a lot of
'traditional' sales.
Our customers come to us through marketing, not via outbound reach.
It's a B2C (Business to Consumer) kind of customer acquisition.
So if the type of business you have requires a long sales cycle or a bunch of sales people, then this video will only
cover the 'demand generation' part of your process.
Sorry.
Ok, enough intro- let's get started.
Growth at the early stages If you are just starting your business, figuring
out your growth is, well, tough.
There's little money to spend, the product is still early or unfinished- and convincing
people to join or to pay is harder.
So here are some basics before you even think about growth:
GROWTH = PRODUCT At this stage, your growth is not only related
to your marketing, outreach, or sales efforts but to the product itself.
If you are just starting up, then your product will probably be far from perfect.
You have to understand that the stuff you learn as you try to position the product should
impact the product itself and the roadmap.
So DO NOT DO NOT hire an agency (for now) Company growth is something that you need
to figure out yourselves at this stage.
The person who is looking at the website conversion rate should be in the same room as the person
who designed the landing pages, and the person who is picking out which features to develop
next.
This means that one of your founders or one of your very first few hires should be the
marketing/growth persona.
Like I said, I was that guy for a large portion of our company history, while my co-founders
focused on the product.
And yeah, we were in the same room, about 24/7.
Next point on the basics of marketing. Growth costs are not an expense.
I own a marketing agency back in Costa Rica, and a large portion of our customers come
to us thinking of marketing as an expense.
They have a budget they are willing to 'spend' in marketing.
Marketing is NOT an expense; it's an investment.
If you measure your efforts correctly, you should be able to determine how spending $1,000
in a campaign will yield $3,000 in sales.
If you know these numbers are correct, then spending (meaning investing) $10,000 instead
of $1,000 is a no-brainer because you know for a fact that it will translate to $30,000.
We'll revisit this in our Unit economics section.
Finally, be prepared to spend money Back in 2013, when we started Slidebean, we
were able to acquire our first 5,000 using mostly (free) social media advertising.
Quality, shareable content went a long way, and it was enough to build an audience that
eventually converted to our product.
Forget about that.
As a company, you have to pay to play in social media these days.
It's an extremely competitive space, every single brand is trying to compete for attention,
and Facebook is greedy.
The actual organic reach of a page these days is less than 1%, which means that if you have
100,000 followers, less than 1,000 of them, on average, will see anything that you publish.
While you might be able to have early wins in 'newer' platforms like TikTok, or 'niche'
audiences like Reddit, soon enough you'll find yourself on the mainstream platforms,
competing for attention and being forced to pay for those impressions.
More importantly, marketing is a trial and error game.
Some of your experiments will fail, and the faster you can run more tests, the faster
you can figure out your growth plan.
It's not free.
Few companies can get away with free organic reach.
So yeah, get your wallet ready.
In summary, if you are an early-stage company,
Learn to do this yourself- either you or one of your co-founders should absolutely own
your communication.
Be prepared to experiment a lot, and set aside some money to do it.
Once you find a channel that works, double down on it.
All right, so let's move on to
Unit Economics When talking about marketing, your unit economics
are the metrics that determine if your campaigns are profitable or not.
Some basic concepts here: CAC: Cost of Acquisition- the cost of bringing
in a customer.
If you are calculating the CAC of a specific campaign, then you should do Campaign Cost
(divided by) Number of Customers.
If you are calculating your average, broad CAC, you can also include the cost of your
growth team or the platforms and tools that your team used.
Cost per Sign Up or cost per Download- for many businesses with trial periods or freemium
business models, a sign-up or app download is different from a (paid) customer, so you
should keep track of both.
Finally, the Lifetime Value: the average revenue that you expect to make from a single customer.
On a SaaS company, this is calculated using your retention estimation or churn.
On an eCommerce shop, this is calculated using the average order size, the average margin
that you make from that order, and the % of customers that make repeat purchases.
The most basic rule of marketing is that your LTV should be higher than your CAC. That's pretty obvious.
Depending on the industry, you might aim for a 2x or 3x on your CAC to LTV ratio.
Is this too dense?
Here's a funny video from our team for you to take a break.
Let's carry on, growth tactics
My favorite book on growth is called Traction- I will link it in the description.
The premise is simple; there are only 19 channels for any company to acquire customers.
That's it.
If you know what those channels are, you can pick and create campaigns around them.
Those channels are, Viral Marketing: your ability to grow from
customers referring you to other customers.
Public Relations: the art of getting your name in blogs, newspapers, TV or press publications.
Unconventional PR: publicity stunts.
Search Engine Marketing: ads on search engines like Google, Bing or even Youtube.
Social & Display Ads: Instagram/Facebook/Twitter type of ads- based on a user's interests.
Offline Ads: TV spots, radio commercials, billboards, infomercials, newspaper and magazine ads.
Search Engine Optimization: the very complex art of Google ranking your website.
We'll cover some of this on part II of this video.
Content Marketing: if you are watching this video, you've witnessed and have fallen
victim of our content marketing campaigns.
Email Marketing: not a lot to explain here.
Engineering as Marketing: using apps and tech products for growth.
Like the bank that makes a loan calculator to get customers and leads.
Targeting Blogs: which you could even translate to 'influencer marketing'.
Getting people with niche audiences to talk about you.
Business Development, pretty obvious there.
Sales, pretty obvious again.
Affiliate Programs: offering rewards in exchange for your customers referring other customers.
Existing Platforms: leveraging your presence and relevance in existing platforms, such
as figuring out how to be promoted on the App Store, or on the Chrome Store.
Trade Shows: not a fan of those but they are an option.
Offline Events- Meetups and such.
Speaking Engagements
Community Building
And, that's it. Nineteen channels of growth.
Are there any other channels of growth not covered there?
I don't think so. I think they've covered most of them.
The book elaborates on each one of them and gives you some ideas on successful campaigns
from different companies.
This brings us to our last topic for today,
Growth Hacking I don't know if the internet has a definition
for what 'Growth Hacking' is.
My definition is: mastering the art and science of,
Coming up with campaigns for these 19 channels.
Measuring unit economics of those campaigns diligently.
Using that data to make quick decisions to pull the plug or double down on campaigns.
Optimizing copy, design, campaign concepts, and landing pages to maximize conversion.
And finally, working with the product team to turn marketing metrics and results
into product changes.
The growth hacker is a bit of a mythical being, but by no means impossible to find.
And yeah, you should either become one or capture one early on.
The mindset is simple, test, test, rinse and repeat.
Repeat on the campaigns that worked, of course.
Next week we are going to be looking into more specific examples of growth hacks you
can do as you grow your business.
Hit that subscribe button to stay tuned.
Also, if you want to take our platform for a spin, you can use this code to get 3 free
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See you next week!