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so instead of trying to go after every tactic every nook and cranny to kind of Leverage um focus on three channels I'm actually going to be talking about something a little different I'm going to be talking about how to get your company start up from zero an idea to about a million dollars in AR this is probably Clayton saying hi this is probably the hardest thing uh for a company and most companies fail at this once you make it past there your likelihood of success drastically increases and before I jump in and start talking about with all these tips and tactics and what you can do let's say let's get a show of hands how many people um are founders here okay cool and of those people how many of you guys are in this stage of under a million ARR or under a million annual revenue okay cool well still pay attention for those of you are not because the same principles still apply whether you are at a zero or a million what have you how many people are marketers here or growth guys growth hackers okay cool you're going to like a lot of this stuff cuz you can clients you can go back to your your own companies and execute on a lot of this stuff hopefully I see some of this stuff in action uh this weekend and if you do take action on this uh definitely tweet at me or tweet with the uh the growth marketing conference hashtag and I'll definitely uh continue that conversation we really interested on seeing what people Implement so before I jump in uh my name is sujan Patel I run a growth marketing agency called Web profits I also have a handful of SAS businesses under the company called ramp Ventures so you may have heard of them mailshake uh narrow Q qu you.co um I have to always spell it out because people always forget one or two 's uh that's my fault for um making it hardest spell but anyways we have a handful of SAS companies for uh startups I mean uh marketing and sales professionals essentially we created them for ourselves to make our jobs a little easier found out a lot of our friends wanted them and kind of scaled from there before I jump into all these tactics and things that you can execute I want to discuss a few rules that I live by a few rules that if you practice is going to make your job a lot easier and a lot less confusing first and foremost let's simplify things most companies such as drop off Airbnb these large companies whove made it to the billions of dollars they don't have dozens of channels of growth they have a handful so instead of trying to go after every tactic every nook and cranny to kind of Leverage um focus on three channels if you focus on three one it's a lot more manageable achievable you can be great at them and take it one step further and actually focus on one channel at a time get good get it working make it make make it feel easy and once it does feels easy you can then focus on the next one and the next one and the next one you might be able to do more than three but at the end of the day if you simplify this to your three biggest channels one you're going to be working on things that can scale uh because some of these channels some of these channels just don't scale that big some of them other ones do so it's all up to you at the end of the day but the next thing here is um focusing on your funnel and its weaknesses so everybody has a funnel whether you are uh you know hot new startup mobile app uh it doesn't matter what you do even if you're an old school Business Services what have you everybody has a funnel starts with awareness somewhere along the way somebody purchases if you're good enough uh and hopefully you treat your customers well and they're loyal and you have some great communication some support maybe a great blog that people love and you have Advocates such as buffer or such as buffer does but generally speaking there are two big weaknesses I see in every single business first one is awareness simply don't have enough traffic people don't know who you are this is a big problem because if you don't have this nothing else you do matters you could have the best conversion rate in the world but if not enough people come to your website it's irrelevant and frankly when you do get more people to come to your website whatever you've done to optimize will be irrelevant as well the other thing is conversion people do get traffic maybe you're getting unqualified traffic but you're not you're failing to convert people so what I recommend here is really pay attention to these numbers these two areas and keep an eye on them because these are the areas where you're going to find the biggest weaknesses and also the biggest opportunities I like to use the bullseye framework from the the book traction and these guys did a great job of really simplifying my three channels um kind of approach the way this Bullseye framework is organized is essentially that the center ring is really focusing on those three channels the middle ring is focusing on ancillary channels and the outer ring is focusing is all around ancillary channels things that are moonshots you still don't want to forget about those they could be huge but at the end of the day you don't want to bank your main effort on moonshots that doesn't that your success rate is drastically going to decrease the next thing is and this is my last R I promise before I jump into the tactics is focusing on making your customers love you and a great user experience and and everything around your brand your product and exposure and experience with your brand instead of focusing on PR because if you do this it will be much much more beneficial it'll help you grow much much faster than a tech crunch article or whatever the next web article or what have you because even though a next web article maybe you get you a a big jolt of traffic what happens when it fades away one week later you're not going to continue to get that same jolt so you may need it but my Approach is screw PR and focus on getting your customers to absolutely love you and when you do this you can move mountains so the agenda for today is talking about first and foremost pre-launch marketing second how to nail your launch very very important here you get this thing right the card can kind of fall into place and lastly once you got a few hundred customers maybe a dozen customers to a few hundred depending on your price point you have some momentum you're ready for scalable marketing or I like to call it Big Boy marketing so I'm not just talking out of my ass here I actually do this for myself and have have leveraged this exact approach I'm going to share with you for two different companies one is my own mailshake we got to about 7,500 customers using this exact approach and again our three channels here are content marketing influencer marketing and Community what I mean by Community is once somebody becomes a customer we do a lot of work to engage with them to keep them a part of our brand we have a private Facebook group and whatnot and another company called when iwork.com where we grew to 15,000 customers about 10 million ARR using the same things slightly different channels you can see customer advocacy is a huge part of our growth what I mean by that is Word of Mouth our customers are driving the business and it's partly due to the product and other part of due to you know how we interact with them we do a lot of uh engagement with them on social media offline send them books more content what have you so let's jump into it first and foremost start with the landing page I don't care if your product's already out you're going to release a new feature create a landing page for that feature if you have an idea you don't even have a full-fledged idea create a landing page it becomes real when you create that landing page it also that's when the that's when day one starts that's when you can start getting feedback you can put a big bad bold mission statement but what I want you to really do is collect email addresses and this is important because as you grow this email list they can help you when you launch and do other things and frankly if you are failing to collect email addresses and people don't resonate with your idea this is a time you can change either your messaging or maybe your idea doesn't have legs so you can save yourself a lot of time and hard work the next and building your email list is still a big part of this is building an audience what I like to do and what I recommend heavily is to actually start with an ebook or a lead magnet some sort of big explosive thing that you can then do lots of different marketing around before I launched mailshake and a handful of my other SAS products back in 2015 in the summer 6 months prod I wrote a book and published it on on growth hacking called The 100 days of growth I used that to actually build my audience build my list and I knew I was going to be building a tool for marketers and so I found a good angle at the time growth hacking was a lot less saturated um and it there was enough traction if I looked on Google Trends and things like that there were people searching for it and the volume was going up so I figured why not do that and kind of adjust the approach that way I can build a big audience you can do the same thing when you create a value piece of content you can actually do a lot more outbound and kind of cold emails which I'll get into in a second but um along the way you can use um the ebook to kind of start blogging and create kind of themes around that so um again on your landing page create a blog also guest post on industry Publications the larger the better but start your way up from the bottom why I like other blogs and guest plugging in in of building your own blog and focusing on that is because you're going where an audience is if it's your blog you actually have to start from scratch right yeah you get 10 people 100 people thousand people great but if you go and blog on another person's site figure out your industry find the top blogs but when you do that you're going to a place where there's a big audience already and you can leverage and bring it back to your site if you have that landing page and ebook people will purchase people download you get email addresses you start building that audience one hack I like to use is actually leverage influencers and the best way to Leverage influencers is to interview them one it helps you build a relationship and two it they have a brand they have a following people know who they are they're reputable they are kind of unofficially um endorsing You by putting your brand your company closer to their brand but they also you can also attract an audience as well another thing I recommend doing is smart cold emails similar to cold emails you're reaching out to people but instead of just reaching out try to make that email warm what I like to do is well identify the customer who am I going after and whatnot let's just say you figure that out get their attention getting their attention on social media following them adding them on LinkedIn even viewing their LinkedIn profile if you're in the B2B space can actually increase your success rate your response rate your open rates drastically that one thing alone can make or break your cold email campaign because if somebody sees your name in your inbox and they've seen it on a social media profile and it's within the 24hour period 48 hour period they may remember and it may not be cold I like to use things like Hunter or find any email addresses to find these email addresses to begin with I start usually with cold email when I when I have a new product and idea because I can control it I can do a thousand emails send in my ebook and something like that to get early feedback early kind of traction and I can turn it off if it's bad if I have a lot of feedback and people are saying hey I don't like it I don't think I'll buy from you or you know they're just saying I see this idea everywhere or whatnot I can adjust it I can turn off my marketing and go back to the drawing board and one last thing here is to use something like retarget links or rebrandly where you can actually add retargeting pixel to a link so if you're sending a cold email and you're sending an external article or an article that's not written by you or even if it's your own you can at least retarget them on social media or on Facebook with other other places speaking of social media instead of doing your AB testing on your own site because early stage companies again they have that awareness issue do your AB testing on Facebook you can use the clickthrough rate to determine the success and let's just say you have a handful of ideas different messaging you want to try out well take those handful and turn it into true proven ones the best clickthrough rate and then you can ab test any website because if you're getting a few thousand visitors a month you probably don't have enough traffic to get statistical significance for a few months and let's face it who wants to do ab tests at an early stage company for three months just to figure out what the right messaging is when you can do it on Facebook in 24 hours and for a few bucks because you're really just measuring click-through rate