#thefirst1000 Part 4: Finding Your Growth Engine

The cool thing about scaling your product? It’s much easier than the initial building process and there are a bunch of different ways to do it. Rather than creating my own list of different ways to scale your product, I’ll share one of the articles I found most helpful for your reference (Read the Article). Through this article, I’ll get into details about how we made one avenue work for us in hopes that some parts of our journey might be replicable for what you want to build.

With the many avenues that you can use to get your product in front of enough people to acquire 1,000 users comes flexibility and the opportunity for different types of businesses to grow. On the flip side it allows entrepreneurs who have excelled in only one avenue to proclaim themselves as an expert at growth overall — and that isn’t always the case.

What’s interesting about the world of startups is that it’s a field with terrible success rates, yet, so many experts give hard and fast rules about what will and will not gain traction.

We’re cognizant of that fact because we experimented with a number of different avenues and many failed. We even tried different ways to reach our users online but what ultimately took off was creating great app store pages and remaining unsatisfied with its’ performance.

Literature suggests that you should experiment with different growth engines, and turn up the fire on the one that works the best. This can often require a great deal of tracking, using unique links, and even deploying one strategy at a time to see what works the best. In the end, this type of experimentation is the least expensive as you are able to identify what is working and channel resources accordingly.

Leading up to our launch in the App Store, we took a queue from Netflix and tried to reach our users online organically through Reddit. Our result, however, ended up being quite different. Where Netflix had resources to slowly invest in building relationships and over time leading up to its launch, we had to hop straight into the pitch. After being kicked out and suspended for spamming Reddit groups, we decided that it was time to move on to a different strategy to accelerate our growth.

The trial & error phase can be grueling, but what I took away from those early failures is that learning from what others have done can be valuable but comparing your business to those that started out with incomparably more resources, can cause you to lose steam. For some, it’s motivating, for me, I stopped trying to replicate growth strategies and thought independently about how I could make FreeSpot better today than it was yesterday. Ultimately, this led to was a series of small but incremental changes. Once we were in both app stores, here’s how we made our page take off:

So you’re probably thinking, “Awesome, that’s great and all, but it doesn’t actually help me think about the strategy behind the marketing I want to do.”

Below are some of the questions I get most frequently about marketing a business. Admittedly, I don’t have all of the answers but I’ll explain my thought process in the hope that will help guide your decision-making process. The goal is to think methodically about your growth as opposed to deploying multiple to frantic and uncontrolled attempts at hitting your traction goals. Even an ineffective strategy is better than no strategy because it allows you to identify that it isn’t working and pivot to try something different.

When Should You Start Paying for Ads?

The short answer is you never truly know. Some people swear by starting out with paid ads and feel that it represents true product testing by putting it in front of a mass of strangers with little context or guidance. Others fear a scenario where venture capitalists will see a tech company turning all of its money over to another tech company in order to grow.

Here’s how I’ve been thinking about it:

Attaining more than 2,000 users without paying for ads is a vanity metric.

And, it’s a vanity metric we’re proud to have accomplished. That being said, there’s no shame in having paid for traction because guess what; we’re going to have to pay for ads eventually.

Most tech startups focus on really really fast growth. On average at FreeSpot, we’ve been growing by about 400 users a month. That’s a great start and it shows that we’re on to something. But, at the same time with our product, the more users we have, the better our users’ experience becomes. My goal is to do what’s best for the community that we’re building.

I’ve learned through this process that you need to focus on building your business, not your pitch deck. That’s not to say a pitch deck doesn’t matter, it definitely does, but what I mean is

Build something that works. When it works, everyone shuts up.

I’m building the same business and saying the same things that I was 8 months ago, but now that we have traction, people trust my insights, feel I have a good understanding of what our users want and know how to keep them coming. The reality is that you need that trust from your stakeholders because it gives you freedom. You don’t want to have a short leash because it limits your ability to test new ways to grow your audience.

What’s Your Secret Sauce?

Testing and incremental improvement! Knocking it out of the park usually takes more than a couple of swings or dumb luck when you’re trying to market your product organically. Making incremental improvements can go a long way. In our first two months in the app stores, we only acquired 400 users. For many people that’s great, but I kept looking at the low conversion rate on our page and thought about how I could get even more.

As an example, before I changed the app store screenshots, most people told me they liked the old ones better. In fact, everyone did. Honestly, I liked the old ones better, too, and still do. But the change wasn’t about what I or anyone else liked. The new version was made to convert more downloads. That change happened right around the 500 user mark. Here’s a chart of our growth to see how it performed:

The biggest challenge we’re working through now is converting more downloads into signed on users. Traffic has slowed a ton as COVID-19 sweeps through the US and we want to make the most of the interested people who are still searching for free stuff and finding our platform. For those who are interested, I’m happy to share how our recent changes end up performing.

That’s a good amount of traction, when are you going to raise?

That’s a good question. The reality of hitting 1,000 users is that most people don’t care. Many founders have to go far beyond 1,000 users before they secure their first round of venture funding. From what I’ve heard, the fundraising process gets a lot easier when you can get everyone to care about you’re working on.

This means when you’re starting out and developing your growth strategy, think beyond your first 1,000 in a very systematic way so that once you’ve identified your growth engine, it continues to produce results over time. You want to understand how and why that engine works for you because you may need to continue your hockey stick growth past 1,000 people before anyone starts paying attention.

Understanding and accepting that took some time, but it came with a number of different takeaways. By far the biggest of all was getting used to hearing the word NO, and figuring out what to do as a Founder when it happens…

Next Article: Getting Used to the Word NO

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.