Growth hacking on a lottery tickets and what you can learn from it

For people living under the ocean, powerball was one of the biggest lottery tickets with prize money of 1.5 million, sorry I got that wrong it was 1.5 billion dollars. It’s 1.5 fricking billion dollars. To give you an estimate of the size there are only approximately 1700 billionaires in the world out of the 7 billion people. That is 0.00002% of the population. Who doesn’t want to be part of the top 0.00002%. Needless to say everyone bought the ticket.

Now the problem is it is next to impossible to win a lottery ticket. It has been statistically proven that buying a lottery ticket is equivalent to flushing it down the toilet. Some smart fellows calculated the odds and found that if you drive for a kilometer to buy the ticket, the chances of you getting into a car accident is more than winning the lottery. And me personally is not a big fan of the lottery tickets but heck I am a big fan of growing your business creatively

Everyone reading this has a business and or are in the plans of starting up. How can you take advantage of this hype for your business? One bakery in Toronto had the perfect example of awesomeness. They got 3000 powerball tickets and gave it away free for anyone who had a 20 dollar bill. The results, people starting queuing up in front of the bakery from 3:30 AM in the morning. People took chairs, blankets and essentials to bear the winter cold to stand in queue from early morning. Police personnel was deployed. I am pretty sure the neighboring bakeries would have run out of customers. It got violent as well towards noon. Someone threw a projectile through the bakery’s window and police deployed in the area arrested the man. The queue in front of the bakery reminded me of the queue people stood outside apple store before Iphone launch. Basically a bakery managed the make people stand in queue for about half a kilometer. The news channels covered them and they got tremendous PR through this.

So how can you as a business owner take advantage of similar growth hacks?

1. See what is trending and find ways to engage with your audience. If there is a hype take advantage of this and give something of value.
2. Don’t give away all the offers in one shot, give it away on installments. The bakery divided the 3000 tickets to three days which ensured customers and buzz to last for three days.
3. Most importantly, don’t rest on your one time effort, keep working on creative ways to grow your business and keep looking out for opportunities to grow.

If you have reached till here, there is a good chance you will like my previous post. Go ahead and read on how I became an overnight success with foxdiary.