BC STARTUP
Saved by @ThomassRichards

People who want to switch on growth for their startups or marketing professionals ask me what to read to get their thinking up. Here's a thread of some books and blogs I read

 When you read these, it's important to focus on the principles and not the exact strategy. Copying and pasting what someone else has done is not a guarantee that it'll work
Books:

1. Nir Eyal - Hooked: How to build habit-forming products.

Nir writes about the psychology of human behaviour with digital and physical products and shares real-life examples of how you can engage, nudge and encourage your customers to keep using your product
2. Ryan Holiday - Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising

Ryan writes how boring simple advertising is and what growth hackers need to do/take advantage of to be truly unique and to switch things up
3. Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares - Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers.

Gabriel and Justin focus on channels you can lever to acquire and retain customers. This book is a guide if you have no clue how to approach customer acquisition. It's an inexhaustive list tbh
4. Seth Godin - Permission Marketing

The OG Seth Godin writes about how to market to potential customers by taking permission. People now know when they're being sold stuff and your marketing tactics are probably boring and not working
5. Seth Godin -All Marketers Are Liars

Seth writes again about how marketers can craft stories that appeal to different groups of people. Stories are important and people often tell themselves stories before they buy products or in this case, sign up for your startup
You should actually just read everything Seth Godin has written. Books and blog here

https://t.co/AcyDXS4W1d
The Growth Handbook from Intercom. Intercom brings together leaders from the world's largest companies sharing advice on how to grow your business. An absolute great read

https://t.co/bKVPiMF6IN
Now, to a list of Blogs. There's not a lot of Africa-focused stuff as you might have seen in this list. Again, focus on principles and adapt them to your situations, not copy and paste.
1. My Blog. I write strategy, answer questions, go in-depth on channels. There's easily 20 blog posts here. I hope to do at least 12 this year starting today :)

https://t.co/8FVsQoKRCf
2. Hiten Shah. Hiten is the founder of Crazy Egg, Kissmetrics and Quicksprout. He writes a lot about the SaaS business so if you're building a subscription service, you should read Hiten

https://t.co/KSVxd40uRE
3. Andrew Chen. Andrew is ex-VP of Growth at Uber. Andrew writes about network effects, building teams and a lot about cycles of growth

https://t.co/8QdX2TpT82
Andrew's most-awesome article for me is this. Even though I don't like this hacker term :)

https://t.co/Zu75T80pBG
OKDork by Noah Kagan. Noah is Chief Sumo at Sumo Group, led growth at Mint and worked at Facebook and Intel.

Noah writes a lot of actionable advice for growing waitlists, building brands, outreach and partnerships, etc.

https://t.co/G1KZEF3pDQ
My favourite social media scheduling tool, Buffer, has an amazing resource. They've got books, blog posts, video tutorials and a ton of stuff if you need to get better at social media and digital marketing. An absolutely insightful read every time

https://t.co/fh0oJMBkCK
VC Firm First Round has Review. The best thing about Review is that it's written together with people actually doing marketing stuff every day of their lives. Here's the PR & marketing category

https://t.co/UGPUAPLB2e
Elizabeth Yin, GP at Hustle Fund and ex-500Startups partner writes building startups, marketing funnels all of that good stuff for people who want to build technology companies

https://t.co/q5CbmDYgPw
Growth Hackers' Growth Studies.

Community for growth people put together these growth studies from companies like Stripe, Tinder and AirBnB. Again, the principles matter the most.

https://t.co/itX2ene5N8
A random interesting article about Chamath, who used simple growth tactics to explode Facebook's userbase and achieve higher retention. Anyone building anything social should actually just copy and paste this :)

https://t.co/v17DxE6Oa2
I like reading NFX because they're always posting secrets lmao

https://t.co/lyz0ywD39E
Almost forgot Brian Balfour who was ex-VP of Growth at Hubspot. Imagine building stuff for marketing people and capturing them best.

https://t.co/SCeVi85orW
Connie Chan, Silicon Valley's China whisperer writes about e-commerce and social in China and SE Asia. I think that's the future of technology anyways so read Connie if you want to predict the future of Instagram

https://t.co/dCMs5cUb6U
Yemi Johnson, former hotelsng COO. Yemi never write since 2019 but we forgive him. Read anything anybody from marketing at hotelsng writes sha. That's an industry rule-of-thumb. I don't make these rules.

https://t.co/RRZq0cmV0f
Nneka Ngene writes teardowns of some of your favourite Nigerian startups here. She's done Paystack, Kuda, Piggyvest and a ton of stuff on marketing channels. I can't seem to find her handle

https://t.co/vXsoe3ltvP
@ebose__ writes stuff on SaaS, Conversion Rate Optimisation and SEO

https://t.co/IwHcAlkb7K
You should absolutely subscribe to @oluremi_x's newsletter. If you've heard of Naturalgirlwigs, she did that

https://t.co/z6C0YjmSNs
There's a growth community for Africans on Telegram. You can message @pheekayo our supreme leader for the link
After reading all these things sha, the best way to learn is by doing the work and making mistakes. Goodluck everyone :)

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In 2020, a total of 397 African tech startups raised a record $701million in funding, with bulk (89%) of these funds going to startups in Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa & Egypt.


The tech startups that stood out in 2020 by funding received were:
°Egypt's Vezeeta - $40,000,000
°Nigeria's Flutterwave - $35,000,000
°South Africa's Skynamo - $30,000,000
°Kenya's Twiga Foods - $29,400,000
°Kenya's Komaza - $28,000,000


The top investors in African tech startups in 2020.


Kenya 🇰🇪

59 Kenyan startups raised a record total of $191,381,000 in funding in 2020.

Twenty two (37%) of Kenya’s funded startups raised a $1 million or more.
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22 startup principles to scale your company in 2022:

1) The obstacle is the way

Every hard problem you solve is a moat that others will shrink from.

Most people don’t have the stamina for hard work.

Challenges completed are insurance policies against competition.

2) Sell your story, not your product

Your company isn’t a product, it’s a story.

Great stories attract great employees and great customers.

Sell your story.

3) Focus on leverage

Points of leverage are areas where inputs can disproportionally affect outputs:

- A better conversion funnel impacts all sales
- A better sales process impacts all revenue
- A better onboarding process reduces churn

4) Focus on customers, not competitors

Success comes down to whether people will pay you to solve their problems.

Competitive intelligence is useful to understand where other attempts to solve a problem fall short.

But the customer’s actions speak loudest.
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Simon H\xf8iberg
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@SimonHoiberg
Why should you start your own business instead of becoming an employee?

Well, being a business owner isn't for everyone.
But it may be exactly the change you need!

Let me give you some great reasons to quit your job and become self-employed.

🧵👇


1️⃣ You become free and independent

You get the ability to steer the direction of your life in any way you want, instead of working for the whims of others.

You also get to manage your own time and schedule.
Who wants to ask for permission to spend time with your loved ones?

2️⃣ You get to follow your passion

In your own business, you get to do what excites you.
Not only does a passion make your job fulfilling, but it also unlocks hidden powers in you!

Why do you work?

❌ Because my boss wants this done by tomorrow.
✅ Because I love what I do!

3️⃣ You can make a lot of money

Of course, wealth isn't everything.
But let's be real, it's important!

By freelancing, you can triple your income.
I take home more than $300K/y on consulting alone.
So can you 🔥

Combine that with selling products!
Only the sky is the limit.

4️⃣ You pay way less in taxes

Earned income (salary) is the type of income that is taxed the highest.
By being an employee, you're a 50/50 partner with the government.

By incorporating your business, you can lower taxes by reinvesting in assets such as stocks or property.
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Growth Tactics
Growth Tactics
@GrowthTactics
THREAD: How to grow your startup through referrals, and word of mouth.

(Actionable tactics from working with 400+ startups)

Here's the truth: Your startup most likely won't make a video and go viral like Dollar Shave Club.

So instead of trying to "go viral," focus on acquiring customers through fans who already love your product.

There are 3 ways to grow through your current customers:

1. Product-led growth: Your product is built for sharing.

2. Word of mouth: Users proactively recommend your product to friends.

3. Referrals: You create an incentivized reward program.

Let's dive into each 👇

Product-led growth.

It's powerful: You don't have to artificially incentivize users to refer—you simply empower them & get out of their way.

E.g. To pay someone with PayPal, the payment recipient needs to first join PayPal—they're incentivized to sign up to receive their cash.

Product-led growth is possible when ppl use your app to:

• Transact or collaborate w/ others (PayPal, Dropbox, Zoom, Slack). These products are only effective when others use them with you.

• Create content intended to be shared w/ others (Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Cameo)
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Julian Shapiro
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@Julian
My day job is growing startups.

I've worked with a few hundred by now.

Here's how to grow your podcast, newsletter, blog, YouTube, and Twitter.

Hope this helps! A thread:

Growth marketing, a timeline:

2015: "We need to go viral."

2017: "Well, we raised $25m of VC. Let's dump it on Facebook ads."

2021: "Wow. We should have been focusing on content and building a great product."

How to grow a podcast:

• Be YouTube-first; do video
• Split eps into 8min YouTube clips with SEO’d titles
• Get guests that are searched for on YouTube
• Consider not publishing bad eps
• Exchange eps with other shows
• Niche is fine, but be widely accessible

How to grow a YouTube channel:

• Describe the video's value in the first five seconds
• Ask a question you don't resolve until the last five seconds
• With YT algo, 1 amazing video > 10 good videos
• Quick cuts don't give people time to ask if they're bored

—Mr. Beast

Some tips for growing newsletters:

• Plug it at the end of a tweet thread.
• Swap plugs with other newsletters.
• Send a sample issue upon signup to excite people for future issues.
• Consider twice-monthly over weekly. My poll revealed people are fatigued with newsletters.
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