Episode 6

We've covered so many aspects of building organic growth in our chat that it's almost impossible to summarize in two or three bullet points. But if I had to choose the most important takeaways for me, it'd be:

• Understand what your audience wants from a product like yours. Don't work off assumptions. Test those, then test again, until you've narrowed down the value proposition.
• Master one or two growth channels and put all your focus on them.

My today’s guest has a huge advantage over traditional founders. He’s not only a marketer by trade, but he also runs a large marketing agency. So, you’d think he’d have no problems growing his two startups.

And surely enough, when it comes to executing marketing strategies, Jack and his team probably didn’t encounter that many challenges or didn’t have to endure any learning curve.

But that doesn’t mean they didn’t face any challenges.

One of those was not understanding initially what makes the product tick for customers.

“We'vekind of created a bunch of different features and tools and then brought itback to the main core value proposition. Um, so that was a, that's a big learning as to, you know, we once tried to do, you know, pop ups, content upgrades, all these other things to try and increase, uh, uh, to try and reduce churn. But at the end of the day when people were looking for us as a solution, they really just wanted the giveaways, contests, waiting lists, that sort ofthing. So bringing it back, focusing on those core features and aspects did actually help the brand.”

Because Jack runs two startups now, they’ve immediately applied those learnings to theother product.

“We launched it as a v.1, I would say probably a year ortwo ago. Got a bunch of users on that, we listed it on Appsumo and that sort ofthing. So got a bunch of traction, got a bunch of beta testers, learned from that experience what people actually wanted, what people didn't, and then that's what fueled version two.”

And even havinga team of marketers behind them, Jack and his co-founder went through different marketing channels before finding out what works for their products.

“We tried everything under the sun. We tried content,organic socials, we tried referral programs, affiliate programs. We tried growth hacking tactics and cold outreach and all this other stuff.”

In the end, they realized that to succeed with growing their products, they needed to apply a narrower focus.

“At the end of the day, you really only need one or two channels to focus on, get good at them, and you should have plenty of leads to suffice for a very long time or plenty of sales to suffice. We ended up testing a bunch of stuff and then falling back on SEO and content creation. So our blog and creating content and ranking that in Google, that is one of the top drivers.”

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