What's your best growth hack for your product?
I've worked as the Head of Growth for a product company before launching my own startup. I used to spend considerable amount of time every day researching for ideas and hacks that'd help our product grow quickly.
I wish to mention two hacks that gave us the best ROI:
Launching Video Podcast: In each episode, we invited industry leaders to speak about the latest trends in the industry. These podcasts helped us establish authority, helped us gain reach (through network effect) and also got us several leads from top companies.
Building a Niche Community: This one is my favorite. We launched a forum - and answered EVERY question in the niche. It took us about 4 months to do so; but the results were massive. We went from 0 -> 6K visitors per month to our forum in the first 7 months and the grown compounded every month. This got us visitors on autopilot and the feedback from them helped us shape our roadmap and discover real pain points.
In fact, I was so impressed by the community hack that I launched my SaaS in the same niche - a modern forum / community software that helps businesses get organic growth and user retention.
I'd love to know - what hacks have you tried for your product growth and what were the results? I am sure we can lean a lot of interesting marketing techniques from each other.
Replies
This is 🔥. One of our best growth “hack” at Equally AI was turning our onboarding into a diagnostic. Instead of explaining features, we asked what users were worried about (e.g. lawsuits, audits, etc.), then aligned everything they saw to that fear and actually provided the solution and support they needed to scale. We've seen way higher retention since.
@a11yexpert That's very cool! I strongly believe you should try building a community in your niche; with zero initial members. I've a playbook that works every time. If you're curious, Im happy to discuss with you.
@thebigk We’ve been toying with the idea of a more focused accessibility community but haven’t pulled the trigger yet. Sure I’d love to learn from that playbook.
@a11yexpert - This is the area of my interest and I'll be happy to chat (no strings attached). Let me know.
This is very helpful Kaustubh we are currently working on growth for Probado and we will definitely be implementing these ideas
@baltazar_torres Great! Let me know if you need help with community building. That's my forte and I'd love to help you build an organic community.
@thebigk When it comes to Product hunt that sounds like a good idea!
@baltazar_torres - yep. Also consider building an owned community; on your own platform. This is the topic of my interest and I'll be happy to chat (no strings attached). Let me know.
Finden
This is such an insightful breakdown, especially the community angle, thank you Kaustubh! Love how you turned consistent value into compounding growth.
Quick question: was the forum hosted on Reddit or a self-hosted platform? Curious what tooling you used there.
Thanks for sharing — bookmarking this one!
@randeep_wilkhu Glad you found it useful, Randeep.
We wanted to own our community. With Reddit - you can't. We went with Discourse; but it was super painful to use. If you want to build a community; I"d love to help you. We built our platform to solve the issues community builders face; and I've personally faced in the last 20 years of building online communities.
Finden
@thebigk This is interesting, I will take a look at this platform - it's very new to me. I really appreciate the transparency!!
IXORD
How much have video podcasts helped the product or brand? I am interested to know more details. Could you please share?
@ixord A lot. I can't share the details - but the key is to get people talking about each other's business. That builds connections - and that's what you need to crack enterprise deals.
IXORD
@thebigk So you're saying that talking about each other's businesses on a podcast will create a chance for a corporate deal to happen? But what about just video podcasts that don't have corporate deals?
@ixord - We realised that corporate deals slow down because of the middlemen and the key decision makers aren't available. By getting them on podcast, we offered the leaders a chance to make new connections, talk about each other's business and find if there's anything of mutual interest.
The guests were carefully picked from businesses that could help each other. That's why it's a 'growth hack'.