Growth Hacking is Much (More) Harder in Developing Countries

And Why US Startups Should Be Grateful

I hear new stories every single day about how ‘growth hackers’ are fighting their way to increase user sign-up’s and bringing in traffic to their newly launched startups. These so called ‘growth hackers’ are trying to find ingenious ways so that they can increase their metrics, make things go viral, and become the next Facebook or Instagram. They get frustrated as the amount of money in their bank account decreases everyday, and growth becomes so damn important because without growth a startup is dysfunctional. Startup = Growth.

Most of the ‘growth hacking’ stories that we’ve read out there in social media or news are based off in the U.S. However, we rarely hear success stories of growth hacking from startups in developing countries (say in the South East Asia for example). Yes I think most ‘growth hackers’ by this time know how Dropbox increased their user base through their referral program or how Hotmail initially gained traction by appending a “P.S. I love you. Get your free email at Hotmail” in every email user sends. But where are the big growth hacking stories from the developing countries? Where’s the article that dissects how TaoBao become the biggest e-commerce marketplace (even bigger than eBay and Amazon combined in terms of sales).

As someone who is a startup founder in a developing country, I feel that a lot of things are different in terms of growth hacking in the U.S and developing countries. I am not saying that we can’t learn from these startups based in the U.S, but some that works in the U.S might not necessarily work here. You might ask why? It’s just a technique so it should be universally applied to any kind of similar product right? Well, here’s some of my findings.

The environment in the U.S (especially Silicon Valley) is a lot different in terms of culture and people to developing countries.

Most people in the U.S are more supportive and rather willing to try new products/ideas. The mass amount of people in developing countries are more reluctant to try new stuff, they are afraid of getting scammed, tricked, etc. You’ll have to be really patient with your potential customers, give them assurance, and answer what you might consider stupid questions if being asked in the U.S (for example: ‘What is a shopping cart?’). People aren’t just yet that accustomed to the digital and online world and their mindset is still in the traditional way of doing stuffs. I think this is the biggest challenge amongst all that makes it a lot more difficult.

Not a lot of local platform in developing countries that can support growth.

Most developing countries don’t have local platforms as big and influential as Quora or Reddit, where you can easily post links to your startup and (potentially) gain tractions from it. The amount of distribution channels that can be utilized is limited. The only available options are the big guys such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google, but that’s about it. Even Twitter hasn’t opened up their advertising channels outside the U.S yet (at least here in my country). There’s no local Reddit, Quora, HackerNews, Craigslist, etc. The amount of local users that are on Reddit (or any big international platform sites) are probably really-really small.

This posses a problem, for example if you’re trying to sell your SaaS solution to the local businesses, most probably your potential customers aren’t hanging around on the web yet. You’d really have to go door to door, pick up the phone and do the sales pitch. I am not saying you don’t have to do this in the U.S, but sometimes you can minimize/avoid this by sending e-mails to people. In an environment where e-mail is not common and most people are more convinced when meeting person-to-person, having to do this so many times slows down the growth rate by some amount of factor.

Lack of community and resources

In Silicon Valley you have regular meetups, events, and conference where Growth Hackers meet and share their knowledge. While I agree most of the information available can be accessed online, it’s the meeting, talking, and networking with awesome people is what you can’t replace in the online world. While the term ‘Growth Hacker’ seems to be perceived as sexy and hot, not a lot of people here know what the hell is ‘Growth Hacking’. Hence the community doesn’t even exist yet.

So for those three reasons I should say that for every single ‘Growth Hacker’ out there in the U.S, please be grateful of the vast amount of resources that you have. While you’re busy hacking ways to get email addresses of potential customers, in the other side of the world, most people are still using feature phones (heck do they even have e-mail addresses, most of them still use text messages).

People are paying text-messaging based advertising here and it’s a big industry for the local phone carrier companies, which is something that is not common at all in the U.S. Also I’d probably say that probably on average ‘Growth Hacking’ that involves money in developing country costs a lot more than in the U.S.

Do you have any tips or stories to share on how you growth hacked your startup in developing countries? If yes, please do share as I’d like to hear more about it.