- Startups equal growth and you need a lot of it.
Can you triple your revenue two years in a row,
then double it three years in a row?
That's the bar for a SAS company to get to
100 million dollars a year in revenue and get to an IPO.
Today, we're going to talk about how to get that growth.
Here's half a dozen ways to grow your startup
that I usually try to think through
to see if it could work for that startup.
Remember, every startup is totally different.
History doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme.
These lyrics might just work for you.
Let's get into it.
(upbeat music)
So say you're lucky, you have product market fit,
your team is humming, customers love it
and you have great retention.
How do you grow?
Well, this is where sales and marketing come into play.
For sales, there are two books that I recommend,
"Predictable Revenue" by Aaron Ross
and "Founding Sales" by Peter Kazanjy.
Both of these books will be linked in the description below.
Sales is incredibly important
and for those $100,000 contracts or larger,
you need enterprise sales.
For marketing, there's just so many ways to do it.
Here's a non-exhaustive list just to give you ideas.
PR is a great way to think about
how you get people in the door.
A good press article can move the needle for you.
This is how I did it in 2008 actually.
Posterous, when we were actually making new features,
we made sure that every single new feature
turned into a news article by one of the big blogs,
TechCrunch, VentureBeat, or Mashable.
Every time I made a new feature,
I made sure to get coverage.
And this is really hard in 2021.
I'm not sure if you can actually do it anymore.
It doesn't also always have to be good news either.
Do you remember Soylent, the meal replacement shake
for software engineers?
I remember meeting them at YC and funding them right
when they went from being a networking hardware startup
to their current idea,
I actually told them to change their name.
I said, "Don't you know what Soylent Green is?"
- You got to tell them, Soylent Green is people.
- But I was wrong.
They ended up building a huge recurring revenue business
with minimal marketing spend because they got
hundreds of millions of dollars of free advertising
all just by PR, blogs, videos and news articles
about the name itself.
I don't like this, but the reality is controversy sells.
It's hard to pull off,
but it was one of the strongest lessons to learn lately,
especially around this idea that every business
is now a meme.
If you have a good story that touches your users
or is meaningful or valuable to society,
or even controversial and sparks a lot of discussion,
you got to keep PR in mind in terms of how you can grow.
Beware though these things tend not to scale
and most startups cannot rely on this at all
because most reporters and even bloggers
are generally focusing on much bigger stories,
especially in 2021.
Next, content marketing.
It's a great way to get attention
and it just takes you writing informative articles
full of facts and data,
things that people actually find interesting
to get the story out there.
My favorite example of this is OkCupid.
They were able to grow their user base massively
just by using statistics about dating from their user base.
The most extreme version of this that I saw with my own eyes
while I was a partner at YCombinator
was actually a startup called YourMechanic,
which made tens of thousands of blog posts
about every possible thing that could go wrong
with your car.
All of it led back to their homepage,
which is a marketplace for car mechanics.
I'm pretty sure that they got thousands of leads per day
just because of that.
This leads actually perfectly into the next section,
which is basically SEO, Search Engine Optimization.
If the internet is one brain
and you can show up top of mind
when the brain is looking for info about something,
it translates into many, many new customers for you
basically for free, sometimes enough to build
a billion dollar startup.
The craziest example that I saw is Zapier.
Zapier was a YC company that built
a fundamental piece of what now we call
no code and low code.
It lets every possible cloud service
work with every other one.
And the approach was really simple.
Make a connector for every possible website
connecting to every other one.
So say you want to connect Gmail to Airtable,
you want to connect Trello to Slack,
the cloud is growing so quickly,
there are so many people trying to figure out
how to get these tools to work together.
And when they search for it in Google, they found Zapier.
Today, Zapier is worth more than a rumored $4 billion.
I suspect a good chunk of it is connecting
the highest intent thing in the world,
a Google search to their service,
and then just having highly ranked pages
that took many years to become top of that search engine.
This is the most dramatic form of winning
the internet I have ever seen.
Now, if you can't win the internet,
sometimes you can buy it.
Yes, I'm talking about Google ads.
You could also call this strategy
search engine marketing for short.
My wife actually worked at Google for a few years
as an ad optimizer in their operations team.
And the craziest story I remember from hearing
about her work was that some of her clients
were actually literally doing colonic kits
so colon cleansing.
But some of them started off as tiny operations,
maybe 100 to $1,000 a month.
And as they made profit,
they reinvested in it to get to as much as
a million or $10 million a month in revenue.
That sounded crazy to me.
But now I realized that's actually relatively common.
There are all of these ways that you can
reinvest your profits in SEM.
If you can buy ads and make more money from them
than you paid for them, it's a powerful engine for growth.
It is not that common, but it still does happen.
Well, we can't talk about marketing
without thinking about social media,
both ads and influencers.
They're an amazing way to get customers.
And there are too many examples here to name really,
think of almost any D to C brand
that rose up over the past few years
and you'll see that they did it on the back of
Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat or even Twitter.
Look at what Rihanna was able to do with her brand, Fenty
or what Ryan Reynolds was able to do with Aviation Gin.
Now, for more resources, I recommend that you follow
Nik Sharma on Twitter.
He's a wealth of knowledge about how to work
with influencers and leverage social media
to actually build a great brand.
Finally, we can't talk about how to grow
without thinking about partnerships
and business development.
Probably the most famous example of this was actually
Microsoft with IBM.
Somehow Bill Gates got IBM to choose MS-DOS to be licensed
as the operating system for their new personal computer,
the IBM PC.
That choice alone literally made Microsoft.
And today it remains one of the most durable cash cows
for that tech giant,
one that set them up even for a second one
in Microsoft Office and productivity software.
So that's not totally a complete list of ways
to grow your startup,
but I hope that gives you a good sense of where to start.
That's it from me for now,
but really excited that you're taking this step
to learn how to build a startup.
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My goal is to help as many founders as I can.
And I really appreciate your help here.
Be well and I'll see you next week.
(upbeat music)