BOOSTRAPPING

All news is good news

One of the biggest challenges entrepreneurs face is building awareness for a new product. Marketing has become very expensive, and unless you have raised venture capital, you will need to think outside the ad box. In this guide we will look at how to efficiently build awareness outside of traditional paid marketing channels via growth hacking and designing growth within your product.

Perhaps only friends, family and the users who provided feedback during your product discovery are all who know you exist. You now need to spark the fire to your rocket’s engine by attracting users/customers to use and ultimately pay for your product. We need to somehow get on everyone’s radar. At this point, all news is going to be good news. The more people we can get to know we exist and create buzz, the better. The value of referral and word of mouth can not take place unless you get your product out there and build the initial awareness.

Tap into Existing Communities

If we are to reach users without paying for ads, we must then find out where our target users hang out and reach out to them directly. Affinity groups or communities are where your target audience typically can be reached. Online examples include Facebook Groups, Discord Servers, Reddit Forums, Instagram, Twitter etc. In person examples may be local Meetup groups or relevant events. Online groups are heavily underutilized as a way to build initial awareness for your startup. Most online groups will have a policy on spamming any self-promotional posts, thus it is important to tread delicately when posting about your product. The key is to be authentic and share that you are looking for their help and feedback. These groups are also an excellent way to get signups for the product discovery research as discussed in the previous guide. Make sure to keep record of which groups you have posted in and when you last posted in, so that you do not over spam your welcome. Otherwise, you may find yourself getting blocked or reported, and not be able to leverage a valuable channel to reach your target audience.

Case in Point

Tapping into existing communities has been the number one awareness channel for the past two companies I co-created. For HackHands, we tapped into GitHub, the de-facto hub for software developers. For Pastimes, we tapped into Facebook Groups. Doing such yielded hundreds of thousands of users discovering our brand. Here is how we did it.

For HackHands, we needed to build awareness to expert software developers that we were building a new platform for them to get paid to help other programmers. So we wrote a script that crawled the profiles of programmers who highly rated repositories on Github.

We made a commit to their README file and added a message to the commit inviting them to check out our website and sign up to be a mentor. While this plan did catch the attention of the developer community, it was a bit too spammy and loud. We found that there were too many people complaining about our spammy method compared to the amount of signups we were receiving.

We went back to the drawing board and ultimately began crawling and scraping the public email addresses listed on profiles and stored them into a tool that could automate a mail merge template to invite programmers to our platform. This approach worked much better. It yielded hundreds of thousands of developer signups.

For Pastimes, we needed to build awareness to outdoor enthusiasts. What better way to let others in existing Facebook Groups know about a new app to streamline meeting like-minded friends and planning activities.

We began joining hundreds of groups for the different outdoor activities and locations we were focused building awareness for. Each group had tens of thousands of users. We posted a message in each of these groups indicating a new way to connect and make friends which also included a link to our website.

Our google analytics started showing more and more users coming to our website from these posts. So we continued to post. We added a picture to the posts and noticed that Facebook prioritized posts with a picture. This made even more users in Groups discover the post and click over to our website and download the app.

However, many of these users were in many other Facebook Groups and were getting tired of seeing my posts about Pastimes. Users would post comments on my posts about it being overly posted and annoying. There were lots of users first discovering these posts and replying in the comments to defend the post and app. The Facebook algorithm was prioritizing my posts with all this engagement from the community. At one point, there were over 1K sign-ups a day from the awareness these posts were generating. While some users were frustrated with our marketing strategy, we had generated over 300K user visits to our website leading to almost 50K user downloads.

In both of these examples for HackHands and Pastimes, we were able to tap into existing communities and leverage a free marketing channel. There was a learning curve to balance the signal to noise in both cases. While you will certainly make some people upset, you will never be able to make everyone happy when it comes to hustling a growth strategy. In the beginning, you simply need to make a splash and get the word out. Once you find a growth strategy that works, you can then refine the messaging and tactics to improve signal to noise.

Ambassador Community

As you start out, there will be early adopters who are passionate about your mission. These users are willing to tolerate the bumps and gaps in your early stage experience, because they are bought into your mission. Ambassadors are key for evangelizing your product and can help you reach a tipping point when formally launching via any crowdfunding or product awareness platforms. Formalizing an ambassador community of marketeers to help get the word out can be strategic in building efficient awareness. However, ambassadors typically need some kind of incentive to effectively build awareness and stay engaged. While you likely can not afford to compensate ambassadors with monetary or equity incentives, you can offer them product currency (free or discounted access to your product), community admin roles, or even shiny badges. Managing an ambassador community on top of everything else can be quite the overhead, so make sure this is something your team can take on. Ideally, you want to design the governance of the community so that it can manage itself as much as possible to minimize the overhead required to gain the benefit of having ambassadors help you grow.

Product Hunt

Product Hunt can be a very effective way to build awareness. It has become the de-facto platform for new product discovery and therefore is a strategic channel that many teams now prepare a strategic launch for. While you may want to post your product right away, a slew of tactics can be used to get the most out of Product Hunt. This is mostly due to the fact that Product Hunt curates the products that make it towards the top each day and then sends out an email digest to their community of hundreds of millions of users. You really only get one shot when posting on Product Hunt so here are a couple tips for making the most out of your shot.

Build a Circle of Influence for Launch

You will need to plan ahead and get your friends, family and communities to create accounts ahead of time prior to asking them to upvote your product. Product Hunt has built ways to detect accounts that are being used to game their organic trend and engagement algorithm. It is pretty easy for them to ignore any activity from accounts which have been recently created which upvote your product. So again, you will want to make sure you can get only people who already have an existing account with history and karma to upvote and engage with your product. This is where your Ambassador community can be strategic, assuming you have communicated way ahead of time and asked for them to get an account setup.

Communicate the Date

Ask everyone to be as active as possible on PH leading up to your launch so that any accounts upvoting your product do not get flagged as bot/fake accounts. A few days prior to your planned launch date on PH, send out communication to your inner circle of friends, family, communities and ambassadors. Send another reminder the night before, and then make sure to follow up with everyone the day of launch to ensure everyone has engaged/upvoted with your post.

Purpose first marketing

Purpose first marketing can be very effective for building awareness via early adopters and ambassadors. It is all about the promotional position of an altruistic aspect of your product, purpose and mission. When users and customers use or pay for your product, they feel good because they are supporting a good cause they stand for. The more explicitly a purchase supports a good purpose, the more effective this strategy can be. Thus, some tactics for purpose first marketing include donating a percentage of your profits to a good cause. In addition to attracting awareness and loyalty from users and customers, purpose first marketing can also help you to build strategic partnerships.

Partnerships

Partnering with more established brand can provide awareness and growth channels for your startup. Partnerships can be incredibly strategic. They are a front door to growth and a back door to liquidity via strategic acquisition. Good partnerships are typically mutually beneficial, so you will need to sell a value proposition for each partner in order for a more well-known brand or company to be interested in partnering with you. This can be a delicate dance, especially if the desired partner has all the leverage to craft a partnership where they benefit more. Here are some tips when building partnerships:

Product Roadmap

When it comes to exploring a potential partnership that involves product integration, be very cautious to commit to such. A partner may hijack your product roadmap. If you let a partner dictate your roadmap, your precious development resources will soon be dedicated to building the wrong features that don’t serve your core users. Additionally, every line of code you write for your product will require maintenance, testing and improvements. Thus, partner features and integrations can become a cancer with headaches for your team to maintain.

Partnership Agreements

It is important to clearly articulate expectations and goals up front with any partner. Similar to founder agreements, these should be as overt as possible. Any commitments that are discussed and agreed should be in writing. This will create a vendor lock that prevents a partner from bailing on their commitments.

Protect Your Property

Partners may consider you a threat if they are at all competitive in your space. Do not be naive. Companies may be curious to explore partnership conversations with you, only to covertly check in on your innovations and learnings. However, your Intellectual Property (IP) may ultimately become an asset that leads to an acquisition opportunity. Thus, you need to let partners know that you are working on IP they don’t have while still protecting this IP from being stolen. This is where mutual NDAs come into the picture and should be considered. Many times, you and your team are actually the assets a partner will want to ultimately acquire, but it is still important to withhold from sharing IP and secrete sauces until you are protected.

Door to Growth

Now that we have covered the aforementioned cautions, it is time to discuss the advantage of awareness gained from a partnership. You are likely interested in partnering with another brand or company because they are more established with a larger following. Therefore, they offer credibility for your brand and a strategic awareness channel. You just need this more influential partner to somehow communicate to their users or customers that they should check out your brand or product. Convincing a strategic partner to do such is not easy, especially the more competitive and less complementary you are. A partner risks their own credibility by communicating that they are partnering with a company that is new or unknown. Thus, a partnership may not take shape until there is comfort and trust in your relationship. Therefore, it may be important for your offering to discover and create some kind of benefit or value to your partner’s customers/users, which they are not able to currently provide. If you can figure out how to position and provide such, a partner will more likely be comfortable crafting a partnership and distributing your brand and product to their audience. This will ultimately become a door to growth as you craft partnerships with strategic brands to generate awareness about your existence and value proposition.

Designing Growth in your product

One of the best ways to gain more referral and word of mouth is by design within the product. A viral coefficient greater than 1 is going to be what you want to strive for. This means, for every 1 person who joins or interacts with your product, it leads to at least 1 more person finding out about and engaging with your product. Here are some tips to consider for how to design such.

Shared Utility

The best way to design growth is in the actual utility of the app. For an example, the calendar booking software such as Calendly we mentioned in the previous Discovery guide provides utility to not just the initial person who signs up for an account, but for anyone who books time on one’s calendar. As they tap on the link that was shared, they will be exposed to Calendly’s value proposition and brand and are likely to also sign up, share their Calendly link, and so on.

Empty States

An empty state is when there is no content or activity to display for the user within an application or website. This is typically because it requires the user to create an event or content. Social apps that have a newsfeed or apps that require other users to be discovered are best suited to take advantage of designing viral coefficients within empty states. When there is not any users or content to display to the user, this is an excellent opportunity to show an affordance to the user letting them know they can share the app or website with their contacts/friends. Doing such will lead to more users or contents (value) for the user.

Onboarding and Data Input

Onboarding is a critical part to walking the user through the initial setup of the app. Onboarding is its own strategic aspect of product design. There are opportunities to create viral coefficients during onboarding and throughout other interfaces in your application. For an example, you can ask the user during onboarding if they would like a mentor, someone to support them in their experience or even emergency contact to be notified about their usage on the app (this may not always be applicable to your specific context/product). This way, when a user inputs data to share the contact info of another user, you will be able to reach out to this provided contact via a transactional email or communication. This is therefore designed awareness and a viral coefficient.

Watermarks

Watermarks for your logo or brand are a very popular way to build viral coefficients. Adding watermarks to your product experience emerge as an opportunity when there is utility from content which can be shared with others outside of the product. This way other users who are interacting with such are discovering your brand even if they were not the one to use your product to create the content. For an example, an app that can edit or add filters to a photo may have a watermark on the output of the photo you edit/upload and then when you post or share the photo, others are exposed to your brand and product.

Gamification

Gamification typically includes badges, rewards, and game mechanics to incentive building awareness via sharing your product with others. Doing such can be a way to design viral coefficients within your product when monetary rewards are not economically possible for your capitalization situation.

Referral Engines

Referral engines are perhaps the most common way to build viral coefficients within your product. These typical have monetary incentives, enter to win giveaways and rewards for the user to share your product. The more users share your product and get others to sign up or use your product, they more likely they are to gain some kind of monetary incentive. Sometimes these are even incentivized on both sides in a way that both the user/customer who shares and the user who signs up receives a reward. While this designed product awareness is effective, the challenge is that not all startups have the capital to afford an effective single or double referral engine.

Engineering A Growth System

The more technical your team is, the more likely you will have the capacity to design and engineer features within your app that lead to viral coefficients. Additionally, your engineers can leverage scripts and systems to scale awareness efforts that are manual or time consuming. A growth system includes any tools which aide in your ability to streamline growth. Every growth system will look different. Some will be a suite of spreadsheets connected to an email merge tool. Some will include sophisticated interfaces and scripts that integrate with APIs, automate crawling and scraping data, or efficiently automate and scale outreach efforts. When designing a growth system, it is important to measure the impact of your growth efforts and ensure they are yielding an effective signal to noise ratio. This means moving the needle without overly annoying users.

Ethics for Growth

All news is good news to a point. Getting the word out should never come at any cost. Your ethos should always be a north star when navigating the ethical dilemma of growth. Always err on the side of your shareholder’s interests. Your brand and reputation will take a long time to build, but it can be tanked extremely fast. Thus, it is important to not wear a black hat when growth hacking. This means, never inflating your growth or actually breaching users via hacking in an unethical manner. Be smart and use good judgement. If it doesn’t feel right, it likely is not the right thing to do. A startup is a marathon, not a sprint. If you building something worthwhile and design growth with sound ethics, they will come!

Checklist for Boostrapping Growth

Now that we have explored many ways to efficiently get the news out about our product and generate awareness, it is time to learn how to measure the outcome and impact you are having on our end users or customers. In the next guide we dive into the rocket science of analytics. Before moving on, here is a checklist for boostrapping growth:

1. Find existing communities to share your product in order to obtain feedback.

2. Build an ambassador community of early adopters to help you evangelize your product.

3. Use this ambassador community to form a Circle of Influence that can help you have a successful launch on Product Hunt.

4. Build partnerships with more influential brands to create a backdoor to growth via their credibility and distribution.

5. Design viral coefficients in your product so that every user or customer generates more users or customers.

6. Dedicate developments to create a growth system to script, scale and measure growth.