Secret Sauce Conference, Part 3
At Google Campus London, 23/09
#getyoursauce
@secretsauseconf
To finish off our Secret Sauce Series, here is the final presentation given by the organizer of the event Vincent Dignan, which perfectly reflects the theme of the conference — growth hacking, providing the audience with both essential techniques to apply, and also tools to use to hack your business to success.
@VincentDignan — on “Content Marketing 101” & “How to attract humans”
Think of growth hacking in terms of Chuck Palahniuk’s “Fight Club” rules:
“you do not talk about growth hacking”
And I should probably stop writing here.
Because otherwise it ruins the magic. I am talking about this awesome, deliberate disguise of website analytics, content marketing, A/B testing and Search Engine Optimization– all wrapped up nicely in an “I don’t know, I guess people just love it!” sentence.
You know how when you are watching a good movie, no actor looks directly at the camera (well, because it is just stupid) but also because the audience stops being absorbed fully into the perfect world of cinema and starts remembering that it is just a regular person who memorized the lines beforehand.
Techniques that Vince is describing in the presentation are very much like a well-written movie script that regular people do not need to know. He starts with the emphasis of being your true self, and not that business-y “smart ass” guy everyone hates. Go out and do it the old-fashioned way. Attract people by being a genuine human, not only the letters on the email. Speak to your potential readers/customers before going viral — what people are looking for? Will your product be relevant?
Next thing I personally found absolutely genius — up to the point of being slightly creepy, but still incredibly useful. Use websites like charlieapp.com or discover.ly to insert a person’s email into the search box and get an impressive amounts of useful information about a person’s background. This trick is as old as the Planet Earth, however the simplest example of how well it actually works is me being extremely surprised when someone I knew told me to congratulate my parents on their 20th anniversary without me mentioning anything about it. Such tricks allow to you to “win a person’s favor” and make a good first impression.
“Be the mixture of a mad man and a math man”
Do not sweat on small things. Pour more of your resources into those that work — there are a zillion ways to acquire actual users, try things out and focus on the ones that are suitable for your business. Do not completely avoid emails — spam the f*ck out of everyone & use sidekick.com — it allows you to see who opens your email, when, where and how many times and then use the rebump.cc from Gmail, which is basically the tool that keeps sending your email forever until you are either banned or answered. :)
He continues: “Growth hacking is all about clever thinking and technical know-how”.
If you are a writer (or, it seems to me even if you are not): when writing an introduction to your article, make sure it is interesting enough to keep a reader on your page — start with the story. Moreover, keep you sentences short and sharp as well.
To help you keep your paragraphs neat and clear use the Hemingway App, which highlights parts of the text that are too complex — no more than 25 words in a sentence. Use websites to find writers for you (Gumtree, Problogger) or pay famous bloggers to post your content therefore exposing it to the wider audience.
Don’t forget to promote your article on any social media outputs that you are using, and/or try sending it to the websites that are constantly looking for an original content (e.g. Huffington Post).
Talking about social media — Buffer.com is the Holy Bible or, as he puts it the “Siri of social media” that allows you to pre-plan your posts on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Google+ and schedule the times you want them to be published, making everyone believe you do not sleep at all working 25/7 on your social media.
To conclude, Vince frequently uses an example of Airbnb when explaining what growth hacking actually is. It is using all available means in a clever way adapting them to suit your purpose, to pursue your inital goal. Airbnb did that by integration which Craigslist which had thousands of users. Thinking outside the box have initially became another, larger box and what you have to do is basically step out of it completely and do something rather different. Think about the phrase “when water flows, it follows the route of less resistance” (which is what most people do in regards to everything in life, not only business).
Resist, explore, create.
Don’t forget to read the first Secret Sauce Conference article on Matthew Clifford’s talk about “How to prepare to be a founder”
& the second part on the “Idea Generation and Validation” by Anthony Catt.
