- Do not bother trying to hire a growth hacker.
Growth hacking is dead.
There, I said it.
So what does that mean,
and why am I doing a video on growth hacking,
and why is growth hacking dying actually a good thing?
And if that's all true
and suppose you believe that and I'll show you why,
how do you actually get unfair advantages in the market
to rise above the competition
and to accelerate the growth of your SaaS business?
On this episode, I'm gonna walk you through
why growth hacking is dead
and then I'm going to show you three growth strategies
that you can use today, that are not scrappy,
that are not scrapey, that are not sketchy,
that are not growth hack strategies,
but true growth strategies that you can use today
to rise above the competition
and grow your SaaS business faster.
Intro!
(upbeat music)
What's up everybody, welcome to Unstoppable.
I'm TK and on this channel,
I help SaaS founders like you grow your SaaS businesses
faster with an unstoppable strategy.
If you are new to this channel,
be sure to hit the subscribe button
and that bell icon, that way you'll get notified
every single time I drop an episode with the TK energy.
Now, if you're already part of this community,
if you're part of my SaaS coaching programs,
welcome back, you're my people,
really excited to see you over here.
All right, so growth hacking.
10 to 15 years ago,
I started in SaaS about 15 years ago.
So I've seen the rise and fall of different platforms,
but over the last 15 years,
a bunch of new platforms emerged where you could go get
attention of your B2B client, your B2B customer,
your B2B user, and even consumers.
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, Amazon,
even Google search for that matter matured.
All these platforms emerged.
And as these platforms emerged,
with any new platform that emerges,
there were ways to hack them, because they were so young,
they were just trying to grow themselves.
And so there were different ways you could hack
those platforms.
All of these platforms emerged
and what growth hackers were doing
was finding ways to hack these platforms,
to get data out of them,
to scrape them and to actually push through more engagement
in hacky ways so that they could rise above
and get attention.
Now here's the thing.
10 years ago, 15 years ago,
when these platforms were new,
there were ways to hack into them.
But over time, these platforms have matured.
Facebook is pretty much a pay to play platform nowadays.
There's very little organic reach that you can get.
Meaning if you just do a normal post,
beyond the five high school friends,
it's not gonna reach your target customers.
It's really hard to do that.
Facebook pages, you can post there,
but unless you pay Facebook to promote that post,
not that many of your fans are actually going see it.
So what that means is,
as these platforms have actually matured,
there's less ways to exploit them.
There's less ways to actually hack them.
This is why I think growth hacking is dying.
And because all that sketchy stuff,
even LinkedIn is smartening up to the fact that,
hey, let's not let people spam people over direct messages
through automation.
Let's cut back on that.
And this is why it's super tough
to hack into these platforms forms these days.
So here's the big question.
If growth hacking is no longer available
because these platforms are maturing,
how do you get an unfair advantage to grow?
What are the next generation of growth hacks?
What platforms can you leverage and take advantage of now
to get an unfair advantage?
And that's really as startups,
like that's really what we're looking to do, right?
We're really looking to find unfair advantages in channels,
in messaging, in segments,
where we can set ourselves apart for very low budgets
and really stand out and grow really fast, right?
And then when we've proved that,
then we can put in more money and actually fund that
so we can accelerate our growth.
But the question is,
what are those next set of growth hacks
or growth strategies if you will,
if growth hacking is dying with these maturing platforms?
So I have three principles for you
that I'm gonna dig into.
If you're excited to go into principle, number one,
the first growth strategy that you can use in this world,
where all the platforms are maturing
and you still need an unfair advantage,
go and smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm.
And let's dive right into it.
Principle number one, is community and mailing lists,
where you actually focus on giving these people value.
This is one of the smartest ways
and the smartest growth hacks that are out there.
Now you'll notice in order to build communities
and mailing lists, it's a bunch of old technology.
No one owns these pieces of technology
and that's why they're still exploitable.
That's why they're still hackable.
And at the end of the day,
you're not really hacking a platform
in an unfair or sketchy way,
which is what a lot of the growth hacks rely on.
What you're really doing is going out there
and telling people like,
"Look, your feeds are messy".
"It's filled with ads".
"Your friends are from high school".
"You don't care about them anymore".
What you do care about are peers.
What you do care about are people
that share the same values.
What you do care about is a safe environment
where you can talk about what you really care about.
And this is why there's an incredible rise of communities
on the internet.
Whether you set up a small Facebook group,
whether you use a platform that's off of Facebook,
use a custom platform to create groups.
For my coaching programs,
I have a custom community platform that we use
for all the founders and CEOs in different stages.
So they can connect with each other
and compare notes on the plays that we're running.
Communities are super powerful and a great way
to enter the conversation with your ideal customers
and get them to trust you, provide value, earn that trust,
and then eventually sell them something like your software.
So building out a community,
building out even a mailing list,
where you're emailing them once a week with value
or twice a week with value, is super, super powerful.
And is probably one of the greatest growth hacks
that exist today.
If you're not doing this, if you're not building a community
with your ideal customers,
regardless of whether they are customers already,
or they are prospects,
if you're not building out your mailing list,
you need to double down on that.
It's not about just saying,
"Hey, just subscribe to our mailing list."
It's about writing to them
and providing value about the space,
about the things they care about, sharing stories.
And that's what builds that trust.
And this is one of the best ways
to actually get more attention, because guess what happens.
When you have a community that provides a lot of value,
when you have a mailing list that provides a lot of value,
then people forward the emails.
People tell others about the community, and all of a sudden
more people wanna join that community.
All of a sudden this happened probably like a month ago,
month and a half.
We started getting referrals from our existing
go-to-market coaching program members to others.
We have founders like,
"Hey, like so-and-so told me that I should join.
"So here I am."
And I'm like, "Oh, that's cool."
Like they hadn't even seen the YouTube channel yet,
or maybe they saw a video or two,
but they were wanting to join because they heard
what a great community we had
and what a great program we had.
So this is the power of communities,
and this is the power of mailing lists.
They're inherently viral.
It gets word of mouth growing.
It gets trust going,
and you can actually focus on providing value
and then you can sell later.
So that's principle number one.
Principle, number two,
of getting unfair advantages in the market.
And I'm a big fan of this,
if you've been following me for awhile,
is to publish your manifesto.
Publishing a manifesto is one of the best ways
that you can actually get heard.
You see it's a noisy world out there
and everyone's out there putting a tweet here
and a thing there, and it's all over the place.
It's very rare that someone sits down
and puts together the thought process on exactly,
here is my point of view on X, and here's what I believe,
and here's what you should check out.
And very few people are actually thinking about,
well, how do we actually put our thought process out there?
The big transformation we're doing,
our big unique point of view in a consumable way.
Sometimes they're spread across blog posts
or maybe a mailing list posts,
but no one's putting out a manifesto.
And so if you actually take the time
to craft your manifesto,
to put it together in a meaningful consumable format,
and you actually start to promote that
with everything else that you're doing, all of a sudden,
you're no longer trying to just bam, bam, bam,
drive high volume.
What you're really doing is actually driving
a differentiated conversation.
You're getting out there and saying,
"Hey, here's my unique point of view.
"And here's why you should care."
Now, if you wanna build your manifesto,
this is something that we teach
inside of our SaaS go-to-market program.
But if you're wondering what it looks like
and how it comes together,
be sure to check out this video,
where I go deeper into the core principles
that drive a manifesto,
why it makes it work and how it works.
You don't have to go there right now.
I'll link to it below because I have
principle number three for you.
But before I go to principle number three,
lemme just pause here for a second.
Are you starting to see what's going on here?
The big thing to understand
is all of these distribution platforms
that exist on the internet are maturing.
And as they're maturing,
they're locking themselves down and they're actually harder
and harder to hack into.
And ultimately they all become incredibly paid to play.
You have to pay them to actually get attention
because there's only so many stories
and so many posts that LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter,
can actually fit into the five seconds, 30 seconds,
a minute, two minutes that a user will spend
in an hour scrolling through.
So there's more attention and more content.
And so in order to break through,
you actually need to find unfair advantages elsewhere,
'cause these platforms don't like to be exploited anymore
because they've matured.
And so what that means is that you're gonna have to start
going off these platforms,
and creating your own ways of distribution.
And that's why these things are so popular and so powerful.
Even growth hackers today, I love growth hackers,
and I don't mean to knock them in this video,
but growth hacking, the traditional growth hacking is dying
because these platforms are getting better and better.
And so what they're doing
is they're going off these platforms and trying to create,
and teaching people to create their own properties.
And this is why things like building your own community,
your own mailing list, and publishing your own manifesto,
and distributing that, even through this community,
is so powerful.
Are you starting to see the power in this?
If you starting to see the power in this,
can I just get a yes comments below.
Also smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm
if you have not done so already.
The YouTube algorithm really likes it
when you smash that like button.
So please smash that like button.
Also, if you're in the stage of building out
your SaaS business and scaling your SaaS business
and you're starting to wonder,
well, how do we drive growth?
How do we build out our go-to-market strategy
and go-to-market machine and take advantage
of some of these unique ideas?
This is exactly why I created
my SaaS go-to-market coaching program.
You can learn more about at tkkader.com/gtm.
I'll also link to it below.
Let's go to principle number three.
Principle number three is,
you have to think about referral marketing.
Little by little, I've been getting more and more excited
about referral marketing because at the end of the day,
we are going through all these different channels,
all these different channels
to try to actually build our authority, build our trust,
figure out how to talk to people, get their attention.
And ultimately the one channel that is left untapped
is our existing customers.
It's when I started to get these referrals
from my existing, and from the existing founders
that are in the programs then I started realized, well,
why don't we just incentivize them more?
Why don't we tell them like, "Hey, refer more people.
"Let's make our community even stronger."
And so referral marketing
is one of these underutilized things,
because A, it seems too easy or too good to be true.
And B, no one quite knows how to do it effectively.
So referral marketing, going to your best customers
and asking them for referrals to your future customers,
to your prospective customers is one of the greatest ways
to grow.
Why?
Because number one, your best customers trust you
and your future customers trust your best customers.
They trust each other.
And so the trust is transferred a lot quicker.
On top of that, they already know at least one person,
maybe three people.
So when you ask in a programmatic way,
in a consistent way, it all starts to come together.
So if you wanna dig a little bit more referral marketing
and a few other marketing strategies,
cutting edge marketing strategies beyond these three,
be sure to check out this video
where I go a little bit deeper into referral marketing
and to other marketing strategies
that you can use to drive growth.
You don't have to go right now.
I'll link to it below with all the other resources
that are put together.
So let me recap here, and put this all together.
All of these platforms that started 10, 15 years ago, right?
Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit,
all of these platforms have now matured
and they don't like it when you hack them.
They don't like it when you do something sketchy,
they don't like it when you scrape them,
they don't like it when you are actually doing something
they don't intend you to do.
And also they don't like it
when you're getting free attention.
Little by little, every single one of these platforms
are becoming more and more pay to play.
Because of that, growth hacking,
traditional growth hacking is dying.
And in order to actually rise above and differentiate
and still find unfair advantage,
'cause that's how you really grow in the early stages,
you need to go off platform.
You need to take matters into your own hands.
So the three growth strategies,
growth hacking strategies if you will,
the new age ones, is number one,
community platforms and mailing lists.
It sounds old school, but you own it.
Number two, publish a manifesto.
I'll link to that link below.
And number three, referral marketing.
Those are my three principles,
three growth hacking strategies that will work today
in 2021 and beyond
because it doesn't depend on one platform.
That's the power of it.
But it still helps you differentiate in the market.
If you got value from this video,
be sure to smash that like button if you haven't already,
but also, before you go, you made it this far.
I've got a question for you.
How are you feeling about your go-to-market strategy
and how are you feeling about your growth?
If you are piecing together all these different pieces
on, well, how do we make all this work?
How do we actually build a go-to-market strategy?
What is a go-to-market strategy?
How do we accelerate our growth?
How do we get these right pieces in?
Maybe I need to create a manifesto.
How do I actually do that?
If you're tired of piecing it all together on your own,
this is exactly why I created
my SaaS go-to-market coaching program.
Inside of my coaching program,
I give you the step-by-step process
on exactly how to craft a go-to-market strategy
and execute on it.
And along with that, I also coach you.
We have weekly calls with other CEOs.
We have one-on-one sessions.
We have a community.
All of this is to help you grow your SaaS business faster.
So if you're in that stage
where you need to grow your SaaS business faster,
you need a scalable go-to-market strategy and machine
to execute on?
You wanna reduce execution risk?
Then I invite you to apply to join
my SaaS go-to-market coaching program.
It's a very simple process.
Just go to tkkader.com/gtm,
tkkader.com/gtm.
When you go over there,
you'll get all the details on the program.
At the bottom of it, you can apply to join.
It's a small application form.
We'll ask you a few questions
and if the questions look right,
then we'll actually get on a strategy call,
and then we'll figure out how we can help.
The reason we have it in an application form
is because we just wanna make sure, like, time is precious.
We just wanna make sure we can actually help you.
So we ask a set of questions to make sure that,
hey, you're the right stage where we can help you,
where we have demonstrative success.
And then we'll get on a call and we'll talk through exactly
how the program works ,and then we're off to the races.
So just go to tkkader.com/gtm.
Love to have you on if you are a SaaS founder
that is scaling your SaaS business.
That's all I have for you today.
I wanna thank you for watching this episode.
If you got value, we put a lot of love into these videos.
So be sure to smash that like button.
I also drop an episode like this two to three times a week,
every week on actionable strategies
to grow your SaaS business.
So be sure to hit that subscribe button
and that bell icon if you haven't already.
If you have a fellow founder,
you're part of a WhatsApp group,
you're part of a Slack group,
you're part of a community
where other founders could get value,
please share this video with them so they can learn also.
We wanna help as many SaaS founders as possible
and grow this unstoppable community of SaaS founders.
And lastly, remember everyone needs a strategy
for their life and their business.
When you are with us, yours is gonna be unstoppable.
I'm TK, and I'll see you in the next episode,
(light melodic music)