On Growth Hacking BLOCKS’ Kickstarter campaign to $1.6 Million (and how it can be applied to any Startup Launch)
To growth hack?
It’s become a common verb used in the startup community nowadays.
One sure thing is that it implies doing unconventional marketing that drives growth.
Your Startup Launch
You’ve been working hard on your product for months, you can’t wait any longer and it makes you nervous.
It’s time to launch.
You’ve prepared your launch: you talked about what your product does and the problem it solves. Time has come to set a date and go through your launch checklist.
Yet, deep down you fear that you’ll launch in silence.
You fear that you won’t reach your goal.
Uncertainty about how this will play out gives you the creeps.
What if you could guarantee that your launch is a success?
It’s exactly what we did at BLOCKS, we knew the launch would be a success, but we didn’t know the magnitude.
$250,000 goal reached in 54 minutes
BLOCKS (The startup company behind BLOCKS Smartwatch) launched on Kickstarter October 13th, 2015 and reached their funding goal in 54 minutes, an astounding $250,000 (that’s an average of $4,630 per minute) to a total of $1.6 Million at the end of the campaign.
Those are the kind of results growth hacking bring.
I was in the trenches in BLOCKS team.
It wasn’t luck. It wasn’t magic. It wasn’t random.
There is a science behind these results and that’s what I’m going to show you.
I can hear you say: what’s the secret?
Before I answer you, let me go through how a typical launch is done.
It seems to always start with a checklist of things you need to do.
7 things you need to do to successfully launch your startup
- Have massive PR — Get featured on the biggest tech news sites
- Have massive amount of followers
- Get featured on tech sites, some of them ask you to pay
- Get featured on ProductHunt
- Have a huge email list
- Ask influencers to talk about your product
- Be number one on Google search for your keywords: SEO
Why 7?
Why not 25 or 99?
You see these headlines everywhere on the internet when you research about how to launch. And any list of tactics doesn’t cut it. How do they fit together and in what order?
The first question people ask: what’s the secret for raising that much money?Then they ask if we got featured on the biggest tech news sites: TechCrunch, The Next Web, Wired, Engadget, Gizmodo, Mashable, The Verge …
It’s also common to think that you need a certain number of followers on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Pinterest before you launch.
What hacks did you use? What tactics did you use?
My thoughts: tactics and hacks are powerful. You should definitely know them. But used randomly, they produce random results.
There are no secrets, no silver bullet.
In my opinion, no amount of getting featured on major tech sites will bring you most of your customers.
And about followers: many successful startups don’t have Facebook pages.
Your launch succeeds because you’ve done the work months before.
The answer to all your questions is growth hacking.
Growth hacking is about solving marketing problems with an engineering perspective. We experimented with various marketing ideas in order to grow very fast.
It is a process, a system, which, when executed properly guarantees the launch succeeds.
At BLOCKS, we started to work on the launch months before, as well as during the campaign.
Create a vision that draws your first people to you
Months before the launch, we built a tribe, a tribe of people who loves BLOCKS, believes in BLOCKS and what it stands for.
We knew that our tribe would buy our product.
According to the law of diffusion of innovation, the first cohort of people to join a tribe are the innovators.
The innovators are also ambassadors. They will tell other people about their tribe by spreading the word out. They are your true fans.
The innovators help bring the next cohort of people: the early adopters. That’s why we only focused on bringing in these 2 groups.
Growth hacking on a daily basis, how it works
First, you need a team.
At BLOCKS, we had a combined set of skills in engineering, marketing, design and product.
Second, you need to know about the 5 stages of the growth hacking process.
Months before our launch we started to work on the growth hacking funnel which has 5 stages:
- Acquisition : get people to visit your site
- Activation : turn your visitors into users with whom you have a relationship with
- Retention : nurture the relationship and make them part of your tribe
- Revenue : people of your tribe become your customers
- Referral : your tribe spreads the word about you and bring more people
At every stage of the growth hacking funnel there is a process for generating experiments based on marketing ideas:
Question -> Research -> Hypothesis -> Experiment -> Data -> Conclusion
We had a huge backlog of ideas and we tested each one (the experiment).
Growth hacking always start with human psychology and behaviour. No wonder Sean Ellis who coined the term created Qualaroo a tool that tells you why people do what they do on your site.
If you understand what motivates people to take action or what prevents them to do so, then you increase your chances for solving their problem.
This process is fun because it’s art and science.
Science helps you eliminate guess work, stay on track and accelerates work while art is the creativity part which proposes solutions.
4 untold side effects of growth hacking
1.Your results will depend on how good you are at prioritising. Believe me when I tell you that it almost cost me my job not to do this well. Prioritising is a sensitive issue and it’s a silent killer. You’ll have plenty of ideas at any stage of the growth hacking funnel, but not all ideas weigh the same. The weight of an idea depends on its impact, how easy it is to implement, how long it runs and what you can learn from it.There is a good ratio to have and focusing on either one of them too much will lead to missed goals.
2.Your growth team will fight over resource at some point. At BLOCKS we ran into this so many times. Our designers could only produce so many original high quality images. Prioritising based on impact will usually solve this issue, or you could add a new team member.
3.Growth hackers will take the experimentations a little too far and that’s a good thing. I can’t tell you how many times I was told this: “You’re taking this too far, it doesn’t align with our branding”. I believe innovation happens at the edge and those who surf in these waters find hidden gems.
4.Growth hacking is never ending. You have to keep on iterating so that you keep on learning and those learnings give you new ideas to experiment upon. Speed is key: the more experiments you run, the faster you learn, the more ideas you have, the more you keep experimenting. Very few growth hackers will tell that it’s actually hard to keep moral up when 90% of your experiment aren’t conclusive.
Double down on what’s working
As I just mentioned above, the reality of growth hacking is that 90% of experiments don’t go anywhere, you can’t seem to find a conclusion, rather than speculating (strong human tendency), move on and let data speak for itself.
But when an experiment works, you have to go all in on it.
Double down on what’s working because at a given time, one channel will bring most of the results. So, run the experiment till you saturate the channel. Frankly, those moments are so rare that it feels like finding unexpected gold, so keep digging, get as much as you can and as long as you can.
Let’s connect and continue the conversation
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Thank you for reading and see you soon for another one.
