With StartFast’s fifth week already rushing by, the 2015 cohort is solidly in Phase II: Traction and Growth. While the teams are still meeting with mentors occasionally, the majority of meetings are now led by a very special mentor: StartFast Managing Director Chuck Stormon.Here are his strategies for growth hacking; or, how to get your first significant amount of customers – fast!
The most important about GrowthHacking is knowing who your customers are. There are five basic types of customers, characterized mainly by the order they sign up in, but also by their motivation for signing up. They are: Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority, and the Laggards.
Innovators are the semi-crazy adventurous types who like to try out unfinished products, solely for the thrill of being on the razor’s edge of technology. If your business was a volcano filled with sharks, they would cut through the admission line and dive in, just to tell you how hot the lava is. They don’t care that the metaphorical volcano hasn’t been debugged, but actively seek the newest inventions, offering feedback and encouragement.Even more important are a special subset called innovator-promoters. Promoters can be found at any part of the technology adoption curve, but innovator-promoters are especially important, as they will be willing test your product and tell their friends about it. To find this group, consider running campaigns offering exclusive access or free swag, and be generous with your love and attention. They will give you feedback, support, encouragement, ideas, and suggestions. If they were a plant, they would be the sunlight of encouragement, the soil of stability, and the water of creativity.After innovators, the next group to embrace new technology are the early adopters. Like innovators, they love being the first to try new products, but they want to see some clear benefit or value. When the general admission line to the launchpad opens up, they will be the first to fly to the moon, but only once they’re sure the spaceship is safe and that moon rocks pay good dividends. This group will be first major wave to adopt your newly polished service.
After the early adopters arrive the early majority, who will try things out only if the perceived benefit is much greater than what they currently use. This flood of people is where the first large stream of revenue comes from, so let us not disparage the early majority. Nor shall we look down on the late majority, who only latch onto your product after carefully scanning reviews for several quarters. Essentially, the late majority waits until all the cool kids are on board. Together, the early and late majority comprise the largest influx of customers, and they are the final reward for all your sleepless, coffee-fueled nights.There is one last group to mention: The laggards. This group will adopt your product in about 20 years, when they finally realize that steam-powered technology is not sufficient to power their Windows 95 computer. They are the ones who called you on a rotary phone to ask why ‘the google’ is down, or why they are unable to burn a 45 record onto a floppy disc. Let us all take a moment of silence in respect for the laggards.
Now that we’ve discussed the five phases of technology adoption, we should probably consider tactics for finding that most important group: the innovator-promoters. The buzz word here is ‘campaign,’ which refers to any attempt to get a response from a customer by moving them down the so-called ‘campaign funnel.’ The campaign funnel consists of six steps: awareness, acquisition, activation, retention, revenue, and referral.
You can run campaigns for any stage of the campaign funnel. How do you run one? Excellent question! Here is an equally excellent answer:The first step is find out where your target demographic hangs out on the internet. Using a website like Alexa, compile a list of websites your customers visit, and with what frequency. Once you have this list, advertise your campaign to them. Good campaigns might offer freebies or exclusive access to an early version of your product, or even create a sense of urgency with a limited time offer. If you’ve ever seen an infomercial you're aware of what these campaigns look like in real life.At the early stages in your startup, you should focus on traction. You might not have a viral product (yet), but investors want to know that you are going places. As more and more innovators examine your product, you can build, measure, learn, and iterate until you create the next viral loop.StartFast companies move quickly! Watch our weekly wrap-up video below, and make sure you follow us on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to keep up with their growth.
