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Growth Tactics
@GrowthTactics 5 years, 9 months ago 1579 views

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We found 6 startups that are growing way faster than everyone else.

We figured out their unconventional growth tactics.

This thread walks you through how to repeat them for yourself.

1/6 Experiment with timing.

Here's a clever example:

@brooklinen "leaked" a time-bounded discount and had one of their *best* revenue days of the year.

Great startups experiment not only with copy/creative, but also framing.

2/6 Get people to FEEL the problem your startup solves.

Here’s how Muzzle (notification hiding tool) uses their site to visualize the problem:

• Shows cringey notifications
• Makes them super vulgar
• Points out how Muzzle puts an end to this during Zoom calls

3/6 Poach potential customers from competitors:

• Create landing pages that compare you against them
• Address customers' biggest objections
• Show your product in action

Then, when people search for you versus your competitors, you'll show up on the Google results page.

4/6 Improve your attribution.

It's often unclear what drives a purchase.

So try this:

• Add a post-purchase survey asking customers how they found you
• Remove friction—limit choices. Make it super easy to quickly select the right one

Attribution helps you double down.

5/6 Get more people to open and read your emails.

How? Don’t hide behind a company name:

• Set yourself as the sender name.
• Make your email icon your headshot.

Most importantly: Write using your real, friendly voice.

6/6 Create better landing pages:

• Handle the most obvious objection upfront
• Use negative space to direct people’s eyes to your header

Key: Don't give people too much to read. Be clear then get out of their way.

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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)

Growth Tactics
@GrowthTactics

THREAD: How to improve your startup's conversion rate through A/B testing.

We've consolidated learnings from running 1000s of A/B tests for companies like Segment, Microsoft, and Tovala.

A/B testing = the science of testing changes to see if they improve conversion.

This thread covers:

1. Deciding what to A/B test
2. Prioritizing valuable tests
3. Tracking and recording your results

Testing makes or breaks growth.

We've worked with companies that were failing to convert their traffic.

But after three months of landing page A/B testing, they got traction.

The key: They continuously made their messaging more clear and their offer more compelling

Every day of the year, a test should be running—or you're letting traffic go to waste.

A/B testing isn't about striving for perfection with each variant. It's about iteration.

The A/B testing process

1. Decide on and prioritize high-leverage changes
2. Show some % of your visitors the change
3. Run it until you reach a statistically significant sample size
4. Implement changes that improve conversion
5. Log design/results to inform future tests

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Growth Tactics
@GrowthTactics

THREAD: How to make ads that get clicks.

(For Facebook and Instagram)

You'll learn:

• How to write ads for your audience
• Frameworks for messaging
• How to design ads

Copy & creative.

Copy = Text that is carefully crafted for a specific outcome.

Creative = Term for multimedia, such as images and videos.

Together, they determine the click-through rate (CTR) of your ads—a 25% difference in CTR can make or break paid acquisition.

Know your audience before creating ads.

The Ladder of Product Awareness (LPA) illustrates how aware and in-need an audience is for your product.

Focus on writing appealing copy to those higher up on the ladder, since it requires less time and energy to convert these people.

Steps to writing ad copy:

1. Identify the product's benefits and your audience's concerns.
2. Write a pitch addressing each.
3. Make the pitch compelling.
4. Make it concise.

Here's an example of an ad that checks all of the boxes.

You can use one of these copywriting frameworks to write purposeful ads:

1. Articulate the problem, solution, and benefit
2. Highlight your differentiation
3. Ask a pressing question
4. Match value props to audiences

One tweet on each 👇

Growth Tactics
@GrowthTactics

THREAD: 10 significant lies you've been told about marketing:

On email marketing, ads, and referrals.

"Send a welcome email immediately after signup"

Don't. People will reflexively discard it as spam.

Instead, delay your welcome email by 15-45 mins.

The delay removes the subscriber's mental connection between signup —> your email, bypassing the reflex to ignore.

More opens.

"Only highlight your best product reviews"

Imperfect reviews can generate MORE sales than 5-star ones.

When a review weighs cons versus pros yet concludes the product was worth purchasing anyway, people see it's authentic & REAL.

So don't bury slightly negative reviews.

"You have to send a newsletter every week"

Most newsletters shouldn't be sent weekly.

High cadences force newsletter writers to rush and publish lower quality information.

Instead, consider only sending when you truly have value to add.

"Your startup needs a great referral program"

The referral programs that grew Airbnb & Dropbox don't work for most companies.

Instead, find your *social loop*:

E.g. An eCom pet store should get dog owners to post photos of their dogs on IG w/ you tagged.

Growth Tactics
@GrowthTactics

Twitter is, by far, the fastest way to build a high-quality audience.

Why?

It's quicker to write insightful tweets than it is to produce 10min YouTube videos or 1400-word blog posts.

Here's a thread of actionable tactics from studying the fastest-growing Twitter accounts.

2/ Fast-growing accounts have two things in common:

1. They spend 30+ minutes per day sourcing and refining 1-3 daily tweets. They don't wing what they say, and they typically sit on each idea for a few days.

2. Key: They write tweets that get *retweeted.*

3/ Retweets bring followers.

We polled people to ask why they retweet. They said:

1. "Retweeting is my bookmarking system for ideas."

2. "I retweet when someone's put elegant words to my thoughts."

3. "I want my followers to know I relate to this statement."

4/ So, to get more RTs:

1. Tweet referenceable content that people will refer back to later.

2. Challenge the status quo with elegance and wit.

3. Pick a debate and argue your side with a novel take.

The most RTed tweets? *Threads with advice like this.*

5/ How to write a tweet:

• Open with a hook: Make it counterintuitive or counter-narrative.
• Concise body: Satisfy the craving your hook created.
• End with a punchy zinger: Summarize implications of your finding and what it means for the reader.

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Pat Walls
@thepatwalls

Last month, 250k people visited https://t.co/nkcmLxbhzC, mostly from Google search.

Here are some things I've learned about SEO:

1. Second-and-third-order consequences

SEO is a "mind game" of second-and-third-order consequences. The work you do today will not yield results immediately.

Write an article, publish it, and then get no results. This makes you think you "did it wrong". Most people quit here.

Just go in with the expectation that you won't see results for six months after publish.

Instead of getting discouraged, just write more and publish more. By the time you published your 20th article, you might start finally seeing the results of your first.

2. SEO industry is mostly BS

Try to avoid SEO experts and industry nonsense, they are mostly distractions.

*Examples of distractions*: Google algorithm updates, schema markup, page speed, meta tags.

Do you think you’re smarter than Google’s algorithm? Maybe today, definitely not tomorrow.

Write and publish compelling content that answers the searcher’s query. That’s it!

@Moz:

Harjeet
@Harjeet

1/ Today I prepared for talking about common mistakes startups make (founding -> growth stages) by writing it in tweet form. I ramble too much when public speaking and hoped it would make the core ideas clearer in my mind and more concise. Think it worked. Here are the tweets

2/ Earliest mistake is picking the wrong co-founders. You have to be value-aligned (don’t have conflicting personal goals) and respect each other. With both of these, any other differences are irrelevant - can be worked out. Without them everything else you do is irrelevant.

3/ If you launch, next mistake is chasing top-line vanity metrics (sign ups) instead of growing the number of users who *really* love you. @paultoo advice - better to have 10 users who depend on you than 100 who a lukewarm. This requires patience and killing your ego.

4/ If you raise a seed round, it’s tempting to ignore retention. With money, there are always ways to grow top-line (buy ads, launch a new location). Strong fundraisers can do this for multiple rounds (though investors are more savvy to this now). Eventually, the bottom falls out

5/ Once you’re growing without churn, you find you have a diverse set of customers and can’t make them all happy -it’s easy to fail trying. Commit to a long term strategy for going public and build for the users who get you there, even if you lose the others. You have to focus.

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Justin Kan
@justinkan

With @ycombinator #demoday kicking off, @atrium gathered advice from past YC founders.

.@jaltma from @latticeHQ says “Don’t confuse investor interest with product-market fit. You’re about to be on the receiving end of a lot of hype and FOMO - use it to your advantage by taking the money and then keep your burn and ego low.”

.@typesfast from @flexport says “I like to remind myself that even Bruce Springsteen still gets nervous before his concerts. Remember that, and then try to focus on what investors want: First, not to be bored. Second, to get rich(er).”

.@collinmathilde from @frontapp says “Leverage your data to tell a story about what the business has achieved and where it is going. Metrics are necessary, but they are too often shared without a narrative arc.”

.@drusenko from @weebly says “Make it relevant. Investors can live in their own world, so try to find an angle that they can relate to.”

Damon Chen
@damengchen

I shipped all these apps in 2020. Most of them generated $0.

🎬 https://t.co/JAhXqsuu6h $0
🌍 https://t.co/BrNUAhfiIT $0
💡 https://t.co/ZWcLfOH4aI $0
🐞 https://t.co/aghOxYEcPI $1.99
👍 https://t.co/2JhJLe27pW $3,025 in 10 days.

But that's ok, just keep shipping! My stories👇

🎬 https://t.co/wuiBp1XsYD is the first thing I created. It's a community for indie makers. The different thing is we post updates in videos. I created it for fun as I think the world doesn't need one more text-based forum, so I make a video one. No monetization plan so far.

🌍 https://t.co/fiwjgCWho5 is a social app. The idea is from Linktree, an app to share your social links. I thought it would be cool to add more visuals to it, and meanwhile we can explore others around. I also have no monetization plan for it. Make it for fun too.

💡 https://t.co/fZfL45uvVX is a platform to connect influencers with their fans. People says it's like @superpeer. But the only difference is it's all sync. Influencers don't need to commit their time to fixed slot. Fans pay to ask questions, influencers can answer at anytime.

Continuing Influenswer... I think the product has its potential. But for now maybe I didn't find the right niche to serve. Will re-evaluate it in future.

Garry()
@garrytan

Subtle real advantage nobody talks about: if founders can access deeper pools of capital early/quickly, they can get bigger faster without spawning lots of competitors.

If your startup is real, pitching Sand Hill is sometimes like giving away copies of your treasure map

This advice is seldom given because most of the time and for most founders, you are still better off talking about your idea as much as possible to better understand where the dead ends are in the idea maze. Can’t do that in isolation.

Asking investors what is hot is usually less useful than asking what has worked, and what didn’t work and why? That’s how you can skip ahead and avoid death.

“All I want to know is where I’m going to die so I’ll never go there.” —Munger

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Hello, my name is Gal,
I am an Israeli citizen, and I want to convey this urgent message to the world: Contrary to what you are told, Israel has not "returned to normal" in any way >>

2/ Moreover, despite the desire to create a setting as if there was a full and normal routine here - the Israeli Ministry of Health JUST RECOMMENDED TODAY TO EXTENT THE DECLARATION OF A “STATE OF EMERGENCY” in Israel >>

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UNTOLD STORY OF QUEEN BHAVASHANKARI OF BENGAL - A 🧵u must read

Know the role of Naga Sadhus

PART-1

One of the most underrated empires to ever grace India is the kingdom of Bhurshut from central Bengal.

1/

A medieval powerhouse this kingdom stood firm against the Pathan invasion from Orissa twice, and with each time devastating the enemy forces.

Along with this, we also have to note that this was the time when the empire was under the reign of a widowed queen named Bhavashankari.

She wasn’t even born in a royal family and yet she achieved what most of the kings couldn’t do

This begs the question, why does no one remember this great kingdom?

3/

Bhurshut empire thrived from 15th century till late 18th century as an independent kingdom while acting as tributary state with full autonomy.

4/

What’s even more puzzling is that no one knows about the great queen Bhavanshakari who thrashed the Pathans single handedly without the aid of their allies.

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