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Video Transcript:
Paul: Today is Growth Hack’s Day, and let’s talk about one example where one company got 2000 users in 20 days.
Hi, it’s Paul Clifford here from Disruptware, and today’s Growth Hack comes from a guy called Ryan Hoover. Now what Ryan did? He came up with an idea where he wanted to create a community that recommends and votes on new startups that come into the tech community. But of course, before committing to weeks and nights of coding a new app to do that, he wanted to make sure that first of all the thing would work. So following the lean startup sort of principles, he created his MVP or his Minimum Viable Product and he did it using a tool called Linkydink.
And Linkydink is a tool that using email you can just vote on links. And by taking this concept and refining it, he then took it to an audience to get validation. So how did he do that? Now to get good validation, you need to ensure that you are speaking to the right customers. You can’t just throw something out there because you need to know that the people who are saying, ‘Yes, it’s a really cool idea,’ actually have authority to say, ‘Yes, it’s really cool idea.’
So you need to reach out to influencers in the market. And using principles from a chap called Paul Graham, and Paul Graham's from Y Combinator. And one thing that he talks about is when you startup, do things that don’t scale, don’t expect just to put an app up there and expect it to explode. Get your first customers onboard, directly yourself, engage these people directly yourself. So in another words use your friends and family, use your network, make phone calls, emails, reach out to people and get those initial users onboard, because they become your evangelists.
So what Ryan did is went to some of the big influencers in the market and he made sure he was speaking to the right people. And some of these were VC type influencers. Some were people who were really good in the blogging community, but they all had influence. So they could provide strong feedback to him that his idea was sound. And then by getting them onboard and working with them, he could refine the design, refine his MVP, and before you knew it, he had like between 20 and 100 customers straightaway before the product was really built.
And then, of course, he went then to a friend of his and they started building some technology very, very quickly. I think they built the whole thing in about 20 days, and the thing really started to takeoff. So it’s a really good product, it’s called Product Hunt, you can find at producthunt.co.
The only thing I would say that I would do if I was doing that is I would buy all the domains for that brand, because when I went to look at Product Hunt, I found producthunt.com was not available, producthunt.io was not available, but producthunt.co was. If you are investing that much time, energy, I would buy all the domains that you can for your brand, so you are protecting that. So you won’t lose customers who go and seek you out.
So I hope you found that useful, this is Paul Clifford from Disruptware.
Recommended Resources:
1. Product Hunt - click here
2. Y Combinator - click here
3. Linkydink - click here