I can’t believe it’s already been 3 months that I’ve posted my last article “The Day I Went to the Web Summit”.
So many things happened since November that I can barely remember all of them. Note to myself: keep on using Evernote to write down everything.
February 2016… In less than 2 months I’ll celebrate the 1-year mark of my startup. While it feels like yesterday when I was handing over my badge at the Google’s reception, it also feels like it’s been an eternity. Such a journey, you quite feel lost in time. We got featured on Product Hunt, got press coverage, helped people secure a job or refer someone…
After almost a year, still bootstrapping like never, Refer Me Please is still alive and growing!
In this post, I’ll focus on 2 main things that take the most of my time: Growth and Growth hacking.
As we’re not generating revenue yet, growth is for us the number of registered users. How do you calculate growth? Quite easy! As explained by Kevin Hale, Managing Partner of Y Combinator, Growth=Conversion — Churn. In other words, to grow, your growth rate needs to exceed the churn rate. Easy peasy.
The growth of a startup usually has 3 phases:
1| Initial period of slow or no growth while the startup tries to figure out what it’s doing
2| As the startup figures out how to make something lots of people want and how to reach those people, there’s a period of rapid growth
3| Eventually a successful startup will grow into a big company. Growth will slowly slow, partly due to internal limits and partly because the company is starting to bump against the limits of the markets it serves
(src: Paul Graham about growth)
When you combine these 3 phases, you get an S-curve. And the most important one is the second one, the one that defines if a startup will be big or not.
Since I’ve launched Refer Me Please, I’m trying to stick to a 20% monthly growth rate. For some of you, it may seem low. But think about it: let’s say you have 10.000 users in January. You’ll have to hit 12.000 in February. And so on.
And because we are bootstrapping (no external input and growing without almost spending money on advertising whatsoever), we have to think out of the box and find ways to spread the word out there and get some traffic. And this goes with sweat AND long hours.
For quite a while, we’ve been posting on Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups, websites, trying to find journalists, running some javascript code to automate tasks…etc. While it’s working pretty well and still help us growing at the pace we want, we need to bring the growth rate to the next level.
This is why I’m currently working on 2 other projects, that will not only develop my skills but will also allow me to expand my reach and nurture a user’s database.
I won’t tell right now what are these 2 projects but I should talk about it the next article.
The only thing I can say is 24 hours is not long enough! Oh and never say I don’t have time. If you want to do it, you’ll find it. It just takes a bit of a hustle and motivation, nothing more :-)
To always stay on track (and I strongly recommend you to do it if you’re interested in Marketing), I just passed the Inbound Marketing Certification. It’s free and really helpful.
For those of you interested in growth hacking, free tools or just interested in what I use when working on Refer Me Please, find below some useful links that I use quite a lot and really helps:
Growth Hacking
http://growth.supply/free/all/
https://growth-hacking.zeef.com/david.arnoux
http://growthtools.stfi.re/?ref=startuplister&sf=pddejj
http://startupresources.io/index.html
Design
http://makerbook.net/
http://hackingui.com/best-design-resources/?ref=producthunt
https://colorlib.com/wp/free-flat-social-media-icons-sets/
https://designschool.canva.com/blog/headline-font/
Website Related
https://www.producthunt.com/@evanwolf/collections/safe-landing
https://www.producthunt.com/@jfilcik/collections/programming-with-no-code
Oh and because I used to be like that, today we’re Friday, meaning Monday is around the corner and for some of you, it’s not the best day of the week. Watch this video in case you want to see Monday in a completely different perspective.
Looking forward to Monday!