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A Magazine for Growth Seeking Entrepreneurs

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How to create new business growth opportunities? Marc Sniukas

Author, Art of Opportunity 1

ScaleUp ISSUE 1 GROWTH . BUSINESS

PRODUCTIVITY .

INSPIRATION

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CONTENTS 19 How to create business growth opportunity? Marc Sniukas Author, Art of Opportunity

A minimum viable product is not a product, it is a process

■ PRODUCT MANAGEMENT

How to find your brand identity and stand out meaningfully from the crowd ■ MARKETING

Hacking growth and scaling business ■ BUSINESS GROWTH

Ten startup influencers to follow in 2016 ■ PEOPLE

Why social listening is essential for all startups ■ MARKETING

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CONTENTS ISSUE 1 12

Ten growth apps for busy entrepreneurs ■ TOOLS

Time management technique to eliminate procrastination ■ PRODUCTIVITY

Free software perks worth $300 ■ DEALS

Learn about startup challenges, competition, growth hacking with Jeff Goldenberg - Author, “The Growth Hacker’s Guide to the Galaxy” ■ GROWTH HACKING

Ask GrowthMonk ■ GROWTH QUERIES 3

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How to make sure your business is scalable, sellable, and sustainable. ■ BUSINESS GROWTH

05 Quick Bytes

06 Events Calendar

A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR “The only way that we can live, is if we grow. The only way that we can grow is if we change. The only way that we can change is if we learn. The only way we can learn is if we are exposed. And the only way that we can become exposed is if we throw ourselves out into the open. Do it. Throw yourself.” - C. JoyBell C. All successful people throughout the human history have been growth seeker, whether for self, family or for the growth of mankind. Without growth, life is meaningless. ScaleUp magazine vision is to help entrepreneurs and professionals find growth in their chosen endeavor. Every article and resource are selected to help you find business growth, improve your productivity and inspire you for the challenges in life. Each monthly issue will cover growth strategies of successful people from business, academia to sports. You will get ready to use tips and techniques which will help you find 10X growth in shortest possible time. ScaleUp is not only a magazine with quality content but it is a part of a growth-oriented ecosystem that we are trying to build with GrowthMonk.

member of GrowthMonk Tribe where you will get a chance to network with entrepreneurs from around the world. We hope that you will find knowledge and opportunities through this association with like-minded and growth seeking professionals. This first ScaleUp magazine issue has tons of advice on scaling and growing your business. You will learn about growth hacking from John Elder and Jeff Goldenberg, branding from Gregory Diehl and business scalability from Shahara Wright. The cover story interview of Marc Sniukas will tell you how to find growth when your business has matured and how to build a culture of innovation as your team expands. Apart from these, there is a lot of advice on product management, personal productivity as well as $300 worth of perks for your business growth. We hope that you will like the content as much as we like it while designing and conceptualizing the issue. We are glad to have you as part of GrowthMonk Tribe and are always there to help you find growth in your life. The Editor Pete Williams

As a reader of ScaleUp magazine, you are a valued

MEET OUR TEAM Editor-In-Chief Pete Williams Contributors John Elder Marc Sniukas Gregory V. Diehl Yevgeniy (Jim) Brikman Jeff Goldenberg Geoffrey Colon Shahara Wright Design Anna Heather Image Credits: Flaticon.com, Unsplash.com, FreePik.com

Scale Up Magazine: www.scaleupmag.com/magazine Letters to The Editor: editor@scaleupmag.com Advertising: advertising@scaleupmag.com Partnerships: partnerships@scaleupmag.com General Inquiries: info@scaleupmag.com

Copyright © 2016 ScaleUp Magazine. The content of the magazine are fully protected by copyright and nothing may be reprinted without permission. The publisher, editor and ScaleUp Magazine accept no responsibility in respect to any products, good or services that may be advertised or referred to in this issue or for any errors, omissions, or mistakes in any such advertisements or references. The mention of any specific companies or products in articles or advertisements does not imply that they are endorsed or recommended by this magazine or its publisher in preference to others of a similar nature which are not mentioned or advertised. Published articles do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of ScaleUp Magazine. 4

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QUICK BYTES Mobile phone internet user penetration to reach 62% by 2018. 6 out of 10 mobile users will be using internet on their phones.

$200 billion estimated B2C m-commerce sales in the Unied States by 2018.

$3 billion: Amount paid by Walmart to acquire Jet.com.

Randstad buys Monster for .

cash

$429 million in

Start With Why?

Learn how great leaders inspire action from Simon Sinek, author of “Start with why” and “Leaders eat last”

QUOTE

“It’s better to make a few people really happy than to make a lot of people semi-happy.” Paul Graham Y Combinator

Did you know? > AirBnB founders sold home packed cereals named after presidential candidates McCain & Obama to support themselves while they built AirBnB.

POKEMON GO MANIA • It became the top grossing app in the US within 13 hours of launch. • Nintendo’s market value went up by $9 billion within 5 days of Pokemon Go launch • The Pokemon Go app is bigger than Tinder on Android • 7 out of 10 users that download the game return to it the next day. Average games usually have a 3 out of 10 retention rate. • Users spend on average 45 minutes a day playing Pokemon Go

> Rovio’s ‘Overnight’ success with Angry Birds came after 51 failed attempts. The company spent six years toiling to find the winning formula, producing 51 unsuccessful games before hitting the jackpot.

Jack Dorsey, CEO Square & Founder of Twitter works 8 hours each at Square and Twitter. His simple productivity hack is to theme his work days as follows: Monday: Management and running the company Tuesday: Product Wednesday: Marketing and communications, growth Thursday: Developers and partnerships Friday: Company culture and recruiting 5

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CALENDAR Content Marketing World September 6-9, Cleveland, OH

BIF Summit 2016 September 14-15, Providence, RI

Content Marketing World is the one event where you can learn and network with the best and the brightest in the content marketing industry.

More than 30 storytellers and 400 innovators and two unforgettable days of storytelling will jumpstart your heart and mind, and push your thinking to the edge.

www.contentmarketingworld.com

www.businessinnovationfactory.com/summit

Techcrunch Disrupt September 12-14, San Francisco, CA

Industry September 15-16, Cleveland, OH

TechCrunch Disrupt is the world’s leading authority in debuting revolutionary startups, introducing game-changing technologies, and discussing what’s top of mind for the tech industry’s key innovators.

Event for people who build, launch and scale world-class products.

www.techcrunch.com/event-info/disrupt-sf-2016

www.indsum.com

Velocity Conference September 19-22, New York City, NY Practical web performance, web ops, and DevOps training for building fast, scalable, and resilient websites. www.conferences.oreilly.com/velocity

WebExpo 2016 September 23-24, Prague, Czech Republic 2 days all about the web: 70 speakers, 2000 people from the industry and meetings IRL. www.webexpo.net/prague2016

MozCon September 12-14, Seattle, WA Three days of forward-thinking, actionable sessions in SEO, social media, community building, content marketing, brand development, CRO, the mobile landscape, analytics, and more. www.moz.com/mozcon 6

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Submit upcoming startup events, conferences, webinars etc. by sending an email to editor@scaleupmag.com

A Minimum Viable Product Is Not a Product, It is a Process

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I Product Management

“You know that old saw about a plane flying from California to Hawaii being off course 99% of the time - but constantly correcting? The same is true of successful startups - except they may start out heading toward Alaska.” Evan Williams

t’s the same story again and have to be a product at all. And it’s not again. First, a team comes up something you build only once, and with an idea. then consider the job done.

Next, they build a minimum viable product (MVP) as a proof of concept, spending a lot of time arguing about which features to include or exclude from the MVP. Finally, if the MVP works well, they plan on building the full, mature, stable product.

So what’s wrong with this picture? Why does it all go wrong for so many startups? The problem is that these teams do not understand the point of an MVP. An MVP is not just a product with half of the features chopped out, or a way to get the product out the door a little earlier. In fact, the MVP doesn’t

An MVP is a process that you repeat over and over again: Identify your riskiest assumption, find the smallest possible experiment to test that assumption, and use the results of the experiment to course correct. When you build a product, you make many assumptions. You assume you know what users are looking for, how the design should work, what marketing strategy to use, what architecture will work most efficiently, which monetization strategy will make it sustainable, and which laws and regulations you have to comply with. No matter how good you are, some of your assumptions will be wrong. The problem is, you don’t know which ones.

How founders think an MVP will work

How an MVP actually works 8

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In a post-mortem of more than 100 startups, CB Insights found that the number one cause of startup failure (42% of the time) was “no market need.” Nearly half of these startups spent months or even years building a product before they found out that they were wrong in their most central assumption: that someone was interested in that product in the first place. The only way to find that out - the only way to test your assumptions - is to put your product in front of real users as quickly as possible. And when you do, you will often find that you have to go back to the drawing board. In fact, you’ll have to go back to the drawing board not just once, but over and over again.

call it, the point is to find out which of your assumptions are wrong by getting feedback on your product from real users as quickly as possible.

months, and try to build all Product these features. Management If you’re slightly more Whether you’re building a product, savvy, you’ll writing code, or coming up with a cut a few marketing plan, you should always be features that asking yourself two questions: aren’t essential for the first launch, so you’ll be able to launch your “MVP” • What is my riskiest assumption? in 8 months instead of 12. • What is the smallest experiment I can do to test this assumption? And in both cases, you’re most likely going to fail.

MVP-as-a-process, in action Let’s go through an example.

Why? Well, consider how many assumptions you’re making that could turn out to be disastrously wrong:

You decide to build a product that allows restaurant owners to create a • You spend months figuring out how to launch custom mobile mobile app for their restaurants in apps for your clients, only to find just a few clicks. It’ll have a simple This is not unique to product devel- drag and drop interface, a bunch of out that what a restaurant owner opment. When you’re writing a book pre-built templates, an events calenreally wants is a mobile-optior an essay, you have to produce mized website that’s easy to find dar, newsletter, check-ins, photo galmany drafts and spend lots of time on Google. leries, real-time chat, integration with editing. And when you’re writing • Or, after using all the latest review sites, social networks, and code, you frequently have to refactechnologies to build real-time Google Maps. And most importantly, tor or even rewrite the code. Every chat, you find out that restaurant it’ll offer a way to make reservations, creative human endeavor requires an place take-out orders, and use couowners can barely deal with email enormous amount of trial-and-error. pons, from which you’ll take a small and don’t want to sit at a computer all day. • Or, worst of all, you might find out that restaurant owners don’t want the hassle of dealing with technology and maintaining mobile apps and have no interest in using your product in the first place.

In a trial-and-error world, the one who can find errors the fastest wins. Some people call this philosophy “fail fast.” At TripAdvisor, we called it “Speed Wins.” Eric Ries called it Lean. Kent Beck and other programmers called it Agile. Whatever you 9

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cut as a way to monetize your product. This is going to be awesome!

Waiting months to discover these critical flaws is too long. At best, losing that much time is an enormous waste, and at worst, it’ll put your company out of business. In the words of Peter Drucker, “There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.”

You find a few friends to join you as co-founders and, if you’re a typical startup team, you’ll raise some money, lock yourselves in a room for 12

Let’s try the MVP-as-a-process approach and see if we can do better. We will build the product incrementally, at each stage asking:

What is my riskiest assumption? What is the smallest experiment I can do to test this Product Management

assumption?

At the very beginning, the riskiest assumption is probably that restaurant owners want to create mobile apps.

Therefore, the very first MVP could be a mockup of such a mobile app – maybe even one you did on the back of a restaurant napkin (how fitting!) Go around to restaurant owners in your neighborhood and ask them what problems they have with technology. Do they have a mobile app already? If not, why not? Do they want one? How tech savvy are they? Do they understand the benefits? Show them your mockup. Find out if that would be a good solution to their problems.

site launched today?

You can then buy a few hundred dollars of ads on Google, Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn to drive traffic to your landing page and see what happens.

Perhaps, when faced with the immediate prospect of spending money, you’ll find out the restaurant owners aren’t actually that interested. Well, good thing you learned this from just If potential users won’t even give you a few days of work instead of wast- their email address, then they probaing months of development. bly aren’t going to give you any money either. It’s much easier to discover Or perhaps you’ll find out they are this by tweaking some text and a few willing to pay. So you accept the images on a landing page than by payment for a few months of serrewriting thousands of lines of code vice by cash or check (so you don’t in the full product! The earlier you waste lots of time building a billing can find errors, the less time wasted You might find out there is not system), launch their sites, and ask on building the wrong thing. enough interest from restaurant own- them to email you if they need to ers to make this a viable business. update any of the website info. Yes, This, in a nutshell, is the MVP proThat’s a shame, but the good news this involves a lot of manual effort cess. Whether you’re developing a is that all it cost you was a few hours on your part. No, this won’t scale if product design, marketing plan, or of conversation instead of months the number of customers grows. But writing code, always ask: of development. On the other hand, when you’re a tiny startup, do not be you might find out that restaurant afraid to do things that don’t scale. • What is my riskiest assumption? owners are interested not in mobile Scaling is a good problem to have, • What is the smallest experiment I apps, but in easy-to-create websites. as it means you’ve built something can do to test this assumption? That’s progress! worth scaling. But you’re not done yet. Now you But in the meantime, you need to must repeat the process to build your repeat the MVP process one more next MVP. time. • What is your riskiest assumption? • What is your riskiest assumption? At this point, it’s probably that the restaurant owners would actually be willing to pay for such a website. What’s the smallest experiment to test this assumption? One idea for the next MVP may be to create static websites by hand for a few of the restaurant owners who expressed interest and see how they respond. Do they like it? Are they impressed that the website is already done? How much would they pay to have such a 10

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At this point it might be that your marketing strategy works. You can’t go around in-person to every restaurant in the world. What is the smallest experiment you can do to test this assumption? Your MVP could be a landing page that describes what your product will do, shows off the restaurant websites you built by hand earlier, and lets visitors provide their email address if they are interested in hearing more when you launch.

Yevgeniy (Jim) Brikman is the author of Hello, Startup and the founder of Atomic Squirrel, a company that specializes in helping new startups get off the ground. Previously, he spent more than a decade at LinkedIn, TripAdvisor, Cisco Systems, and Thomson Financial. He has a BS and Masters in Computer Science from Cornell University. This article was originally published on The Macro.

“Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose FAITH.”

Steve Jobs 11

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TEN GROWTH APPS FOR BUSY ENTREPRENEURS

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business of any size needs focus across multiple areas like sales, marketing, team management, communication etc. Entrepreneurs are always looking for a right set of tools which can ease out the burden from their shoulders. Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s why we have compiled a set of ten tools which will help your business grow fast, improve your productivity and optimize your time.

SendinBlue

www.sendinblue.com

It is a simple and cost-effective email and SMS marketing tool for small or large businesses. You can use it to send bulk or transactional campaigns. They also have a great marketing automation suite for automating drip campaigns. Pricing is quite competitive and customer support is awesome.

DrumUp is a great social media management and content curation tool that can help you significantly cut down the time you invest in platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. You can schedule the content posting on social channels on the basis of keywords selected. You can also add multiple social accounts and post everywhere simultaneously with ease. We recommend it for your social media marketing. www.drumup.io

Ninja Outreach

This tool is used for influencer marketing. You can search for bloggers and influencers in your niche and reach out to them easily. It makes prospecting for guest posts and influencer outreach extremely simple. Essentially it is like having a CRM, outreach marketing tool and blogger search engine all in one single place. www.ninjaoutreach.com

If you are looking for project management tool then Trello is your go-to solution. It makes collaboration easy and fun. You can organize all your projects through Trello boards and cards. Trello can be integrated with many apps like Harvest, Zapier, Ganttify etc. It is free for the majority of your requirements. At ScaleUp magazine, we use it to organize content for various issues. www.trello.com

Canva

DrumUp.io

Trello

Canva makes design simple for everyone. It gives you everything you need to easily turn ideas into stunning designs. You can create designs for web or print. It can be used for designing banners, presentations, Facebook covers, flyers, posters, invitations etc. Canva is free to use and access its library of images, fonts, and templates. www.canva.com

Slack

Slack is an online, social messaging app for groups. You can use it to have a group or private discussions, share materials and links with one another. It makes communication between your team easier and better. Slack is like instant messaging, forums and email all rolled into one single application. You can also connect it with other apps like Github, JIRA etc. for instant notifications and tasks management. Slack is free to use with no limit on a number of users. However free plan has restrictions on size of message history and number of apps integration. www.slack.com Tools 13

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SumoMe

If you are looking to grow your email list then SumoMe is a perfect app for your business. It provides various features like Pop-ups, Welcome Mats, Smart Bars etc. for effective email subscriptions. With Sumome, you can drive traffic, engage visitors and increase email subscribers. You can customize your templates, track and analyze your list building efforts easily. SumoMe basic is free to use and premium plans start at $20 per month. www.sumome.com

Zapier

www.zapier.com

Zapier helps non-technical people connect apps and services they use and carry out automated functions. For example, every time you get an email in Gmail, you can get the copy of attachment in your Dropbox using Zapier. You don’t have to write a single line of code for any such apps integration. There are hundred’s of apps which you can integrate and make your life easy at low cost.

You can sell your digital products, services, or even physical products using Gumroad. Selling on Gumroad is as easy as creating an account and filling your product details like pricing and description. You can be up and running in less than 10 minutes. Gumroad is free to use but they charge 5% commission + 25 cents per transaction. Premium plans start at $10 per month. www.gumroad.com

Gumroad

BuzzSumo

You can use BuzzSumo to find content which is most shared on social media channels as well as influencers related to particular topics. BuzzSumo can help you find good blog post ideas based on the popular content shared. Popular content can also be shared with your followers which will help you in your social media marketing. You can get insights on the content shared by your competitors and use the data to improve your content strategy. www.buzzsumo.com

Suggest your productivity tools by sending an email to editor@ scaleupmag.com. We will cover them in upcoming issues with your Twitter handle.

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SCALING UP EXCELLENCE

by Robert I. Sutton & Huggy Rao

caling Up Excellence shows what it takes to build and uncover pockets of exemplary performance, spread those splendid deeds, and as an organization grows bigger and older, rather than slipping toward mediocrity or worse recharge it with better ways of doing the work at hand. Bestselling author Robert Sutton and his Stanford colleague Huggy Rao devoted seven years to studying how the best leaders and teams spread constructive beliefs, behaviors, and practices from those who have them to those who need them. They show what it takes to spread a mindset, not just a footprint, as a program or organization expands. Their insights are based on diverse case studies, hundreds of interviews with scaling veterans, and rigorous academic studies on organizations including Facebook, Google, Pixar, Joie de Vivre hotels, Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, Johns Hopkins Hospital, the Girl Scouts, Rocketship Charter Schools, Salesforce.com, IKEA, IDEO, U.S. Marines combat teams, JetBlue Airlines, General Electric, NASCAR pit crews at Hendricks Motorsports, and recent start-ups such as Pulse News and Bridge International Academies. Rao and Sutton dissect the most crucial points that decision makers face, especially how to navigate the Buddhism” versus “Catholicism” continuum, whether to encourage approaches tailored to local needs or to replicate the same practices and customs as an organization or program expands. They reveal how the best leaders and teams develop, spread, and instill the right mindsets in their people, rather than ruining or watering down the very things that have fueled success in the past. They unpack principles that help to cascade excellence throughout an organization including link “hot causes to cool solutions” and build organizations where people feel as “I own the place and the place owns me,” and show how to eliminate destructive beliefs and behaviors to clear the way for excellence to spread.

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www.scalingupexcellence.com

Recommended Book

“Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.”

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How to create new business growth opportunities? Marc Sniukas

Author, Art of Opportunity 19

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Businesses of all sizes face growth challenges at some point in time. They all have to answer the same basic question: How do you establish new growth strategies and business opportunities from within your organization? To find out the answer we spoke to Marc Sniukas.

arc is a global expert on strategic innovation and corporate entrepreneurship, and co-founder of Business Model Gallery which is the world’s largest business model database at businessmodelgallery.com.

He studied business administration and economics at the Vienna University of Business and Economics, Training and Development at the Salzburg University Business School, and holds a Doctor of Business Administration (DBA) from Alliance Manchester Business School where he research how established companies design and implement new innovative business models. Workwise, he has been self-employed since his teenage years. As a teenager, he worked as a stagehand, and later stage manager for a live sound music company, organized live events with friends, before founding a training company after his studies in Vienna. After a couple of years, he sold that company to move into consulting, which he has been doing ever since. As a consultant, he works with leadership teams and their organizations to find opportunities for innovation and new growth, design strategies and business models to seize these opportunities and finally support the transformation of organizations to make the strategic renewal happen. He works with Fortune 500s, usually within specific divisions, and entrepreneurial companies owned and led by their founders or families. Usually larger companies. According to Marc growth can mean many things in business. Typically businesses think about growth in terms of market share, revenues, the number of employees, etc. so size basically expressed in different ways. Other approaches to think about growth, could be growth in terms of becoming more sophisticated, similar to “growing up”, growing as individuals and as teams. In his new book, “The Art of Opportunity” he talks about growth primarily in terms of finding and seizing opportunities for new businesses and ventures. According to Marc, most businesses face multiple growth challenges. Selling more of the same is becoming increasingly different. And just being cheaper or being different, the key mantras of traditional strategic positioning, is no longer enough. You have to create value for customers, your company, and for your ecosystem of partners and stakeholders, who are important for your business. To do so, you need to think about strategy in a different way. And usually, it’s established mindsets, approaches, and standardized Cover Story processes and methodologies that keep companies from doing so.

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Growth challenges vary with the scale of business as well. A startup’s growth challenge will be different from that of a mature business.

even if they did not make profits yet. So he suggested startups start small, try to make a profit quickly, which is an indicator that their strategy works, and then scale.

“Startups should start small, try to make a profit quickly, which is an indicator that their strategy works, and then scale”

When we quizzed him about secrets to creating a culture of growth in any company, he quickly suggested “Business Design Thinking” mindset concept from his book Art of Opportunity.

He explains that for established companies the challenge is mostly to try to find new growth outside of the core business. Growing the core, meaning basically selling more of the same, is becoming increasingly different. So where do you look for new growth opportunities and how do you seize them, taking into account the strengths and resources of the company is the main challenge. His experience and research have shown, that the traditional way of thinking about strategy and the strategy making processes that go along with it are not very suited to address these challenges.

“Business Design Thinking” is a mindset that values: Keep a human-centered focus, when developing your strategy, that means understanding your (non) customers, but also internally regarding your employees,

Visual thinking, draw and illustrate everything you do, you’ll be much faster on the same page and enhance understanding, again externally with your clients, and internally with employees, but also with management,

Collaboratively cocreate, again externally Startups don’t face these challengby at least engaging with es, as they start from scratch on a customer to enhance your clean plate. Yet, they often lack the understanding of their needs, their sophistication in approach which experience, barriers to consumption established companies can have, and and hurdles to satisfaction, and usually they lack the resources and internally, by creating teams from experience, which can be a disadvanacross your functions and promoting tage, but also an advantage. Some collaboration across the functions in people are more creative on a tight your organization, budget and under time pressure.

Iterate: don’t rely on the However he adds that though traditional “analyze – plan startups lack funds and resources, – implement” process, in they can grow and scale fast. If they fact, try to get rid of this have a sound opportunity and have language. We’ve know for some time proven that their strategy works well, now that the process of strategy it shouldn’t be an issue to get funds, making is not linear, yet we still try to though. Many businesses got funds, explain it by referring to the classics

of “analysis, followed by planning, followed by execution of the plan”, instead become comfortable with an iterative approach of trying something, learning from your experience, and using what you’ve learned to further design your new strategy, and finally Maintain a holistic perspective, which means think about your customer in a holistic way, think about your ecosystem, and think about all the functions in your company.

He further suggested 2 strategies for finding new opportunities. • First, talk to your customers and observe them in real life. A lot of companies do not understand why customers do business with them or why they actually don’t. Talking to customers and non-customer is the best way to gain insights. You might wonder, how to identify non-customers. Every entrepreneur has some people and/or companies in mind they’d like to have as customers…start there. • Second, try the product for yourself. But not as an employee, who often gets benefits, for example, if you’re working for an airline, and everybody along the customer journey knows you do. Be a regular, anonymous customer.

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Cover Story

How to optimize revenue model?

outlined in the book on innovation.

Talking about his new venture Business Model Gallery, Marc gets Marc recommends thinking about very excited and full of energy. He said that the business model 1. Revenue streams, i.e., where the gallery is meant to be an inspiration. money comes from, “We researched and documented 2. Pricing mechanisms, how to well over 100 business models set the prices, and from various industries, B2B, B2C, 3. Payment mechanisms, that is online, bricks-and-mortar, etc. and when and how to receive payI’m convinced that everybody will ment, and you actually getting find some inspiration for their new the money. business, no matter whether it comes from an established company or a How to price product start-up.”

for sustained growth?

“I’d like to refer to the Blue Ocean Strategy framework, and the idea of ‘pricing for the masses’, which, to me holds 2 key thoughts: First, you need to price as such that the price is affordable to the mass of buyers, don’t forget you also need the capacity to deliver and meet the demand a particular price might generate, and second, when pricing, don’t just take into account the price of your direct competitors, but also alternative solutions, which satisfy the same or a similar need than yours.” When a company becomes big, innovation slows down or even it stops altogether. In such cases, Marc said that any company can continue to innovate. The trick might be to free the resources to do so. Often, once the business gets going, everybody is just busy with doing what needs to be done and nobody is taking the time to think about the next step. He also suggests following the principles 22

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Cover Story

Q. Your new book “Art of Opportunities” talks about finding new growth strategy. Can you share some insights about your book? Sure, so we start on the premises, which come from my academic research, that established companies which are successful at finding and seizing new growth think about strategy in a different, more entrepreneurial way you might say. So in the book, we outline 1. How and where to find opportunities for new growth, mainly by looking at non-customers, their needs, the customer experience, barriers to consumption and hurdles to satisfaction, 2. How to seize these opportunities by designing your offering, business model and revenue model, and 3. How to successfully launch your new business and scale it up in a relatively safe way. Q. In your book, you talk about discovering an opportunity, acting fast on it by having a rudimentary strategy and keep on iterating till you find success. How different it is from lean startup strategies? The underlying ideas, and philosophy we might say, is not that different from lean startup. We show how this can work in established companies, and outside of Internet businesses and online products or services. Q. Can you share specific examples of companies struggling with growth and what they did to capture growth? One of my favorite examples is the German media company Pro7, which developed a completely new business making TV advertising available to start-ups and SMEs. After 5 years, this new business has become the major growth driver of the group.

Q. How can one drive personal growth? Can the concepts from book valid for personal or career growth as well? Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d like to think so, yes. I hope the ideas and cases in the book, inspire people to try this approach, an approach that is pioneered by many companies around the world to try them out. You will grow personally by learning something new, and, in case you develop the next growth business for your company, it will certainly help your career. I have seen project managers, leading such initiatives to become managing directors of the companies that were born out of their business ideas and the opportunities they discovered. Many have been promoted to introduce the new strategies to the whole group, while others have been headhunted by other companies to do the same thing there. Q. How do you intend to use the concepts in your book to grow your own venture (businessmodelgallery.com) ? Good question :) well, for one, we listen to our customers, did surveys, and after about 2 years in beta mode, we enhance the packages with a lot of features, and a new customer experience, catering above all to start-ups, corporate and professional customers. Have a look. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m sure youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll find it interesting!

Cover Story

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“Never give up. Today is hard, tomorrow will be worse, but the day after tomorrow will be sunshine.”

Jack Ma, founder/CEO of Alibaba 24

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Why Brand Identity Matters in Business

How to Find Yours and Stand Out Meaningfully from the Crowd Marketing

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any first-time entrepreneurs quickly find out that merely having value is irrelevant. Being good at something means nothing without the communication that will get others to accept that value into their lives. And as every good educator knows, just listing facts about something is not a good way to get it to stick in someone’s mind. To really get through to a specific audience in a meaningful way, you must present information in a way that corresponds to how your listeners take in information. This is why narrative is paramount to your success. Narratives are how we structure information with character and changing emotions. Narratives allow us to see how something relates to ourselves and whatever matters most to us. They paint a picture in our minds to feel attached to and recall more easily later on. If you can learn to talk about your brand identity and everything you produce in the right way, regardless of what you are selling, your audience will listen, and they will become emotionally engaged. No matter the product, the service, the industry, or the target demographic, everything in brand identity comes down to the meaning of the message. And where does that message come from? It is an expression of the core values of the people behind a business and the reason they choose to do what they do. Those values are ultimately what differentiate one person from another, and the identities of business even within the same industry niche.

The goal in branding is to rise above an identity a mere company composed of people producing goods. It is to become synonymous with the deeper meaning which drives the sale and use of your products. It is the virtue which causes your team to care about the things you do, and the aspirations your buyers also aspire toward. What is it that you want your audience, and the general public, to think and feel when they look at your logo? Superman’s shield inspires hope and heroism. What intangible value do you bring into the world?

example. It’s an entire identity and USP Marketing built around one very simple idea, which has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of their pizza. But these tactics fail to work for 99% of small business owners. A much more personal approach is needed, one which demonstrates the personality of the brand and the dynamics of the customer relationship.

Every passionate entrepreneur can have their brand become an embodiment of what they are trying to stand for - both internally with their employees and partners, or externally with their customers. It’s about more than just making revenue. It about being known for the higher ambitions that are most important to you, and the principles you will never back down from. That larger narrative is what builds trust from others, because they know what principles drive your actions. They know what you will always strive toward, even in less-than-ideal conditions. It is the basis of your integrity.

The more unique your product, and the greater meaning behind the values you want associated with your brand, the more you are going to have to educate prospects. They won’t immediately know why they should choose yours over another they are already more familiar with. Additionally, the more expensive your product, the truer this becomes. Any new idea has to be introduced with care to an existing mental paradigm, or it risks being rejected because it is just too new.

“The greater the meaning behind your business, the harder it becomes to communicate it to the world.” There used to be a simpler time for a growing business where marketing was just centered around simple, singular feature, such as being faster, stronger, cheaper than your competitors. Domino’s “30-minute delivery or it’s free” guarantee is the classic

“There is no faster way to garner the lasting respect of employees, partners, and consumers than to become the embodiment of an ideal.” 26

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History is full of great scientists, philosophers, artists, and inventors too

far ahead of their own time. They were underappreciated, ignored, or even scorned, while they were alive because the paradigms of their generation were not wide enough to include the enormous value they brought. They failed to educate and incentivize their audience to listen and retain. Generations later, we finally caught up to where they had already been. Humans just aren’t wired to accept things that are too new,

unless the resistance to change can be lowered with stra- spective. You are blinded by tegic communication. optimism and familiarity. If you don’t know what specific emotions customers should be Marketing associating with your brand, “The keys to arriving you won’t be able to direct that at your own compelling experience. If you can’t explain how your product accomplishbrand identity are es a specific result in a way a questioning and 10-year-old could understand, you haven’t learned to introspection.” communicate well enough. Sometimes, just being asked a highly targeted question and forcing yourself to sit with it until a meaningful answer can arise is all that is required to have a major identity breakthrough. People often just don’t know what direction to look in, or they stop looking as soon as easy answers present themselves. They must find the strength to go deeper than that. They have to be willing to be uncomfortable and sit with that dissonance until they finally uncover the deeper motivation behind their work. The right questions are the ones which make business owners think differently about something they believed that they already understood. If you don’t know the answers to questions like what might prevent a prospect from getting the full intended value your services, you haven’t really looked at them from an outsider’s per-

Key Takeaways: • Who you are (your brand personality) • What you offer (the function of your products and services) • Why a specific type of person should care (the main benefits they have on a unique target demographic). Those can all be combined into a really attractive company narrative. Soon, you won’t just be another purveyor of goods on the market. You will be solving a specific problem, in a specific way, for a specific type of person, and as a specific person. And you will never have to fight for meaning in your industry ever again.

Gregory V. Diehl understood the importance of universal ideals at a very young age. Raised in California before embarking on a path of global exploration, Diehl focused his belief in personal empowerment through a career path in education at age 18. His quest for learning led him to deep self-discovery through entrepreneurship, inquiry, and analysis. Diehl has lived and worked in over 35 countries so far, offering straightforward solutions to seekers of honest advice and compassionate support in the development of their identities. Diehl’s first book, Brand Identity Breakthrough, quickly shot to #1 bestseller in Public Relations on Amazon, and is available in Kindle, print, and audiobook formats.

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TAKE THE SURVEY

“ You have to be constantly reinventing yourself and investing in the future.” Reid Hoffman Founder, LinkedIn 28

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Recommended Book

“Most startups don’t fail because they can’t build a product. Most startups fail because they can’t get traction.”

mart entrepreneurs know that the key to success is not the originality of your offering, the brilliance of your team, or how much money you raise. It’s how consistently you can grow and acquire new customers (or, for a free service, users). That’s called traction, and it makes everything else easier—fund-raising, hiring, press, partnerships, acquisitions. Talk is cheap, but traction is hard evidence that you’re on the right path. Traction will teach you the nineteen channels you can use to build a customer base, and how to pick the right ones for your business. It draws on inter-views with more than forty successful founders, including Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Alexis Ohanian (reddit), Paul English (Kayak), and Dharmesh Shah (HubSpot). You’ll learn, for example, how to: • Find and use offline ads and other channels your competitors probably aren’t using • Get targeted media coverage that will help you reach more customers • Boost the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns by automating staggered sets of prompts and updates • Improve your search engine rankings and advertising through online tools and research

Traction by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares www.tractionbook.com

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Weinberg and Mares know that there’s no onesize-fits-all solution; every startup faces unique challenges and will benefit from a blend of these nineteen traction channels. They offer a threestep framework (called Bullseye) to figure out which ones will work best for your business. But no matter how you apply them, the lessons and examples in Traction will help you create and sustain the growth your business desperately needs.

HOW TO HACK GROWTH & SCALE YOUR BUSINESS

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Business Growth

“To make Millions of Dollars, you have to affect Millions of lives...”

omeone once told me that and it’s stuck with me my entire career. Startup business plans, no matter how complicated, All boil down to that one sentence. You can’t succeed at scale unless you have some plan that allows you to touch the lives of millions of people. The problem is, very few new businesses start out with access to millions of customers. Heck, getting that very first customer is one of the hardest things you’ll ever do!

Back then we called it Guerilla Marketing, and we didn’t have any of the fancy analytics tools that we have now, but the idea was basically the same.

Growth Hacking focuses on two main areas: 1. Traffic 2. Conversion But on a budget!

Business Growth

to get the word out about their email service. They’d let the customers do it for them. By the time they sold the company a year later, almost 12 million people were using their service. 12 million might not sound like a huge number of people, but remember; only 70 million people were using the Internet back then. So basically 25% of all Internet users used Hotmail that year. That’s incredible!

How did they do it?

The guys decided to put six little So how do you get there? words at the bottom of every sinThe most famous story of Growth gle email that every single user sent How do you scale a business Hacking is the story of Hotmail. You through the system. What were the from zero to millions – may not remember Hotmail, but it words? especially if you have little to was the original webmail program; no money to spend on way before Google came around and “Get Your Free Email traditional marketing released Gmail.

methods.

Hotmail started off slow back in 1996 (the same year I started my Ad Luckily the Internet gives us more tools today than ever before to reach Network Website). The Internet was vast audiences for little to no money. young, and using webmail was a novSocial Media, Joint Ventures, Viral elty. Microsoft bought the company Marketing, and good old fashioned about a year later for a reported $400 Guerilla Marketing give everyone, million dollars. $400 million bucks even one or two person startups the for a year’s work seems like a runaway success, but it almost wasn’t. In ability to scale quickly. These days we roll all those techniques into one fact, the first month of its existence, Hotmail only managed to convince big marketing strategy and call it about 20,000 people to sign up. Growth Hacking. Growth Hacking is the latest greatest new thing in marketing, but when you get right down to it; Growth Hacking has been around forever, we just didn’t call it that. I used it back in the late nineties when I built (and then sold to a publicly traded company at the height of the dot com boom) one of the Internet’s earliest advertising networks. 31

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At Hotmail”

Ground shaking? Earth shattering? World changing? Nope. Just a short and simple line of clickable text that everyone saw. Those words turned every email that went through their system into an advertisement for the company. So the more email that people used, the more free advertising that Hotmail got, causing more people to use the service, causing more people to see the ads, causing $400 million dollars to fall into the pockets of the founders just one year later.

Even back then 20,000 wasn’t a lot of people. Granted there were only about 70 million people using the Internet at the time, but Hotmail’s fate That’s growth hacking. seemed sketchy at best. They hadn’t raised very much money and didn’t It’s all about finding some way to have a lot to spend on advertising. get the word out about your product at no cost to you. It’s about creatLuckily, the founders thought like ing systems that foster exponential growth hackers instead of traditional growth organically. marketers and came up with a plan

When I built my banner adBusiness vertising netGrowth work, I tried to build those ideas into it. My network was set up sort of like a ponzi scheme. If you owned a website and signed up for my ad network I’d give you a small snippet of code that you would place on your website. That code would generate a banner ad on your site, and keep track of whether or not someone clicked on the ad.

about your customers and clients. Get in their heads.

Get this wrong and all your Growth Hacking can be for nothing.

• What are their habits? Imagine your Growth Hacking has • Where do they hang out? succeeded and traffic is pouring into • What things are they looking for? your website. That’s when the wheels usually come off for new startups. Hopefully you already know these Most aren’t equipped to handle the things; if you don’t then you’ve got a sudden flood of traffic to their site. whole other set of problems! I’m not talking emotionally here, I’m talking technologically. As you think about your customers, their habits, their wants and needs; It doesn’t take a very large spike in Growth Hacking ideas will come to traffic to crash a web server if the you. You’ll probably have more ideas server isn’t set up to handle that sort than you can implement at one time. of thing (and most aren’t). You see, Test each of them carefully one at a when startups are first getting startEvery time two people clicked on time. ed, they usually go with the cheapest an ad on your website, you’d earn a web hosting solution that they can credit that allowed one of YOUR These days there are tons of tools find. ads to be shown on someone else’s that allow us to test our marketing website. Traffic to your site generated in a bunch of different ways. You Many don’t have dedicated tech advertising on other people’s sites, don’t have to spend an arm and a teams, maybe one of the co-founders which generated traffic to your site, leg for these tools (though some of of the company has a tech backwhich generated advertising on other them can be expensive). It can be as ground, maybe they don’t. But even people’s sites and so on. simple as setting up some A/B split with a tech background, that’s no testing and using Google Analytics to guarantee that their area of tech exIn the first three months, with zero observe the results. pertise is server configuration. dollars spent on advertising, it generated over a millions ads across the Split testing is the art and science of Building out infrastructure that can network. That’s organic Growth splitting up your in-coming traffic handle large spikes in traffic is a very Hacking. into tranches and then showing one specific skill, and it’s hard to find. We tranche of visitors one web page; all remember what happened when It’s all about building systems that and showing another web page to Obamacare rolled out here in Amerfoster this sort of behavior. You have the other tranche. Then, you just wait ica. The flood of traffic completely to build your products and services for the data to come in and tell you knocked the website down almost with that in mind from day one. It’s which page converted better. immediately and kept it down for not something you can really slap on weeks. And that was a site that costs later. That’s why the lines between These days we can split test to an millions of dollars to build. product creation and marketing really amazing level, so much so that you blur together these days. can sometimes be hit with informa- They just didn’t build in the ability to tion overload. Take it slowly. Only scale automatically. test one thing at a time. See what What’s the silver bullet of These days building a website that Growth Hacking for your works and what doesn’t and move forward. can scale automatically isn’t that difbusiness? ficult. Load balancers and pay as you There’s one aspect of Growth go billing from places like Amazon I have no idea. There is no one Hacking that hardly anybody AWS make building a scalable websize fits all solution when it comes talks about and that’s back end site much easier than it used to be. to Growth Hacking and scaling a website server technology. MayBut it still takes knowledge that your business. All businesses are different, be talking about load balancing average startup founder probably so all Growth Hacking ideas will be web servers isn’t very sexy, but doesn’t have. different. it’s an incredibly important part of any success you’ll have. Once the traffic starts pouring in, it’s You need to sit down and really think 32

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too late to fix a poorly designed server. As a startup founder, you need to build these scalable features into your infrastructure from day one, both from a strategic marketing standpoint and a technological standpoint.

Business Growth

These days, it’s never been easier to scale a business on a budget, but it needs to be your main focus from day one. Focus on the strategy, tailored to your specific customer base; and focus on the technology to make sure your servers can handle the load, and you can’t go wrong. And remember; to make Millions of Dollars, you have to affect Millions of lives. John Elder is one of the original pioneers of Internet Marketing. He created one of the earliest Internet advertising networks back in 1997 and sold it to a publicly traded company at the height of the first dot com boom and then went on to create the best-selling Submission-Spider search engine submission software that’s been used by over 3 million individuals and small businesses in over 45 countries. John recently founded Codemy.com an online interactive school that teaches people to code using a unique blend of video courses and hands-on help. His latest book, “The Smart Startup” is available at Amazon.com

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TEN STARTUP INFLUENCERS TO FOLLOW IN 2016

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People

“ You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” – Jim Rohn

People

The environment we live in and the company we keep has a major influence on our personal and career growth. While you cannot change everything suddenly, you can gradually work towards improving your environment and choose friends who will help you succeed. The easiest thing is to learn from the experience of successful people and do what they are doing. That way you will get same or similar results. People in the list below are the leaders in their respective fields and champions of personal and business growth. Follow them closely and see what they are doing, talking about, and sharing. When you do this on a regular basis, you will soon start attracting success, inspiration, and motivation in your life.

Ryan Holiday ryanholiday.net @ryanholiday

Dharmesh Shah is Co-founder and CTO of HubSpot. In addition to co-authoring “Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media and Blogs”, Dharmesh founded and writes for OnStartups.

Guy Kawasaki guykawasaki.com @guykawasaki

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Ryan Holiday is an American author, marketer, and entrepreneur. He is a media strategist and prominent writer on strategy and business. He is the author of 3 best selling books and an expert of business growth.

Dharmesh Shah onstartups.com @dharmesh

Guy Kawasaki is an American marketing specialist, author, and Silicon Valley venture capitalist. He was one of the Apple employees originally responsible for marketing their Mac computer line in 1984.

Noah Kagan is an American Internet entrepreneur and the founder of AppSumo and SumoMe. He is a growth hacker and write about marketing and growth on his blog www.okdork.com

Sean Ellis

Qualaroo.com @seanellis

Mikael Cho is the founder of Crew and creator of Unsplash, a site that provides free, unlicensed, high-quality images.

Noah Kagan okdork.com @noahkagan

Sean Ellis is an entrepreneur, angel investor, and startup advisor. He is the founder and CEO of GrowthHackers and was previously founder and CEO of Qualaroo. He originally coined the term Growth Hacker.

Mikael Cho Crew.co @mikaelcho

Andrew Chen andrewchen.co @andrewchen

Andrew Chen works at Uber on their Growth team. He writes about mobile, metrics, and growth. He is an advisor/investor for tech startups including AngelList, Barkbox, Dropbox, Grovo, Kiva, Product Hunt, Tinder, Wanelo, and Gusto.

People

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Dan Martell is the founder of startups like Clarity and Flowtown. He has invested in 33 startups and an advisor to companies like Hootsuite. He talks about growth through his website danmartell.com

Rand Fishkin moz.com @randfish

Neil Patel is the co-founder of Crazy Egg, Hello Bar and KISSmetrics. He helps companies like Amazon, NBC, GM, HP and Viacom grow their revenue. He regularly writes about business growth on his blog.

Dan Martell danmartell.com @danmartell

Rand is the founder and former CEO of Moz, board member at presentation software startup Haiku Deck, co-author of a pair of books on SEO, and co-founder of Inbound.org.

10 Neil Patel neilpatel.com @neilpatel

People

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Once you stop learning, you start dying.â&#x20AC;? Albert Einstein 10X YOUR PERSONAL AND BUSINESS GROWTH WITH ScaleUp MAGAZINE SUBSCRIBE NOW

“The key to growth is the introduction of higher dimensions of consciousness into our awareness” Lao Tzu 38

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Ask GrowthMonk

Ask GrowthMonk is our free virtual mentorship program where you can ask your business and personal growth queries. Our expert panel members will answer your questions and provide valuable insights. You can learn from their vast experience across multiple business domains. The best answers will be featured in next issues of ScaleUp magazine. Submit your questions by clicking the button below and your GrowthMonk will answer them soon.

ASK GROWTHMONK YOUR QUESTION

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LEARN ABOUT

Growth Hacking

STARTUP

CHALLENGES,

COMPETITION,

GROWTH HACKING with Jeff Goldenberg

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In this magazine issue, we interviewed Jeff on startup growth, challenges, competition and growth hacking. He is a growth guru who understand growth hacking from inside out.

eff Goldenberg is a startup entrepreneur with 15 years of experience. He started his career in the dot-com bubble and since then has launched 6 consumer facing businesses and learned a lot about the proper way to launch a business. Currently, he is the Head of Growth at Borrowell, Canada’s leading online marketplace lenders. Similar to Lending Club in the US, their loan platform connects lenders and borrowers and uses technology to make the borrowing process much faster, more fair and transparent and friendlier than the traditional banks. Borrowell just celebrated its 1 year anniversary. In that year they have had almost 50,000 Canadians apply, representing almost $700M in loan applications.

hacker, so they can achieve rapid growth in their own businesses. Talking about the challenges that companies face when growing a business, he shares that there are many, many challenges that startups face when trying to grow, and the odds are incredibly stacked against them. For a company to grow in today’s age of competition, they need early product-market fit, access to growth capital, a great team and a culture of experimentation that will allow them to systematically uncover growth channels.

Product-Market Fit – the biggest mistake companies make over and over is to try to grow too soon. Startups begin with the product-market fit, which is the state Jeff also works with a ton of other in which the company has proof that startups in Toronto. He is an Entre- their value proposition is wanted/ preneur-in-Residence at MaRS Disneeded by their customers. This covery District, as well as a startup sounds obvious and simple but it’s mentor at Techstars/Startup Next not. To achieve product-market fit and 500 Startups. Through this men- the company must identify a valtoring, he gets to work with dozens ue proposition that customers are of high rising startups, and he tries willing to pay for. Then they need to help them avoid the mistakes and to figure out how to communicate pitfalls that many startups face. that value proposition clearly and quickly, so they can attract customers He recently co-authored a book through advertising. Next, they need called The Growth Hacker’s Guide to identify specific market segments to the Galaxy, which is a marketor ‘buyer personas’ of specific ing recipe book for non-technical groups of customers that benefit marketers. The goal of the book is the most from the value proposition to empower non-technical marketers and are willing to spend good money and help them think like a growth to get it. Finally, the company must 41

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Growth Hacking

be able to show empirical proof of customer demand, to know for sure that they’ve achieved this state. Only then can the company contemplate growth. If you try to grow before achieving product-market fit, you will waste your scarce marketing dollars. Access to Capital – access to investment dollars to grow your business is difficult as the startup barriers to entry decrease. Initially, with only a good idea and some nice slides in hand, the entrepreneur needs to raise some “seed” investment to give them capital to get off the ground. This capital will often come from “friends and family” and other people who know the entrepreneur enough to believe in their abilities. Once the business has been established, the company needs additional capital to fully build out their product and to begin experimenting with different customer acquisition channels. If the company is lucky enough to find a channel that acquires customers cost-efficiently, the company is then in a position to raise serious investment through a Series A round, where the company will bring on funds to rapidly expand their marketing channels and growth very quickly. This process is extremely difficult and time-consuming, and founders need to be sure to keep a hand on the steering wheel the whole time. Set a single milestone for each stage, and only work on the initiatives that get you closer to that one single current milestone.

A Great Team – for most startups, a good team won’t do and a great team is needed. This is very difficult for early stage companies that can’t afford to pay competitive salaries to their employees. Founders can attempt to find a co-founder that has complementary skills, and can make up for the deficiencies of the original founder. Advisors can be brought on board to provide advice and further fill the gaps in the team’s skills. Early employees can be attracted by a good idea, a good early team and some positive traction, and can be paid in cash and stock options to motivate the early hires. Putting together a killer startup team is part art and part science and is critical to building a hyper-growth startup

The culture of experimentation – startups don’t know where their customers are going to come from, and the startups that assume they know are often met with an unexpected surprise. Startups need to be approached with an open mind and a curiosity to experiment and need to constantly poke the box and see what happens. The only way to do that is to try a lot of things, be systematic about how you test, measure and learn and need to be willing to fail, because many of the things you try will fail.

“If this all sounds hard, it should be. Starting a hyper-growth startup is really difficult, and in my 15 years on the front lines, I’m beginning to see patterns that exist amongst the most amazing startups. It’s lead me to believe that there is a ‘proper’ way to start a startup.” 42

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Jeff is an ardent supporter of technology and its role in business growth. His company Borrowell uses technology to make it easier for customers to get a personal loan. It also leverages technology to market efficiently and communicate directly with our customers. This one-to-one relationship allows them to better understand what their customers expect from them.

to achieve this unit economics. If you’re Growth creating a Hacking new market, offering a new product type or disrupting an existing market, sometimes having a competitor is a benefit. It is very expensive to educate an entire market, and having a competitor Technology is leveling the playing pushing a similar message could be a field for startups. It is enabling com- net positive. panies to compete for a fraction of the entry price of the past. “I’ve seen many examples where the first to market spends a ton of “Someone in the banking world told money building the market, and then me it costs them $5 million just to the second to market comes in and get to the technology table, and their positions themselves as cheaper, fastcompetition could be a startup with er, better etc.”, cautions Jeff. an Amazon Web Service account! “A quick word about The barriers to entry have never been lower.”, says Jeff. competitors: competitors are The same goes for marketing and growth hacking. Every day, SaaS companies are launching with the goal of making it easier and easier for marketers to leverage technology. The flip side is that your competition is almost infinite because the cost of competing is so low. That said, technology plays a huge role in growth, from advanced customer segmentation to marketing automation to real-time personalization to programmatic ad buying to social networking and on and on. Jeff advises to keep an eye on your competition but keep your focus at home. It’s really important to follow your competition, understand how they’re positioning themselves compared to your startup and speak to customers to understand how they perceive the differences But overall, the goal of a startup is to acquire customers for less than the revenue they can generate from the customer (ie - make a profit), and most startups aren’t able

a startup ghost story. Firsttime founders think they are what kill 99% of startups. But 99% of startups die from suicide, not murder. Worry instead about all of your internal problems. If you fail, it will very likely be because you failed to make a great product and/or failed to make a great company”

Sam Altman, the President of YCombinator

What he would do with unlimited resources? He would generate awareness and direct response simultaneously, and he would invest massively in amazing content creation. To illustrate this, he gave following example about two companies A and B. Company A raises a seed round, and must spend every dollar incredibly wisely to prove to future investors that they can acquire customers efficiently. They launch many small tests, look for outlier data, analyze the results and iterate accordingly. Their goal is to spend each dollar smarter than the previous dollar, and constantly learn and iterate. Only when they discover a great channel do they invest major resources, when the risk is the lowest Company B raises a ton of investment capital and has the luxury of spending more aggressively upfront. They buy lots of mass media ads, in addition to direct response ads, and endeavor to build a brand that will resonate in the long term. They have big marketing launches with big marketing budgets and attract many customers. Their goal is to maximize awareness and brand exposure, hoping the revenue will follow. Company A benefits from rapid learning, and as such is able to minimize the risk of their marketing spend by deploying massive capital only once they’ve established a successful channel. They sacrifice in awareness because it takes longer for lots of people to become aware of their brand. On the other hand, Company B benefits from mass awareness, but sacrifices on learnings by committing capital upfront, when it’s the riskiest. Both strategies can work and both strategies can fail. A hybrid strategy that launches in phases might be optimal, as you can learn without sacrificing awareness. 43

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Jeff ’s has recently co-authored a book “The Growth Hacker’s Guide to the Galaxy”.

including how to apply their success to your Growth businesses. So Hacking He shares an interesting story behind we got to inthe book idea. terview amazing companies “The book was originally an awelike Shopify, some, long form blog post called The Hubspot, Frank & Oak and Zenefits Ultimate Growth Hacking Sourceto name a few. They are my personal book. People really liked it, and it favorite part of the book and the went viral thanks to the influence part I’m proud of. of some awesome industry leaders. We got over 50,000 views and over Then we decided to Kickstart the 400,000 of our Slide Share! book, so we launched a crowdfunding campaign. We did this mainly as So we knew we were onto somean awareness initiative, but also to thing, and that readers wanted more. harness the momentum of the blog So we decided to expand on the blog going viral. Our publisher Insurpost, curate 100 growth hacking gent Publishing was very helpful in “recipes” and write something highly creating an awesome Kickstarter tactical and actionable for the mod- campaign, and we were able to fund ern marketer. the project” Next, we decided to also include 9 case studies, where we would interview the Founders and CMOs of some of the fastest growing companies and tell their growth stories,

The goal of the book is to empower non-technical digital marketers and inspire them to try new things and learn new skills.

“What keeps me going is GOALS” Muhammad Ali

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Productivity

Time management technique to eliminate

PROCRASTINATION

echnology has made our life better and comfortable but it also has reduced our attention span. Throughout the day, we get distracted by mobile phones, social media notifications, emails and what not. As a result work productivity has taken a major hit. We are not able to achieve our goals on time which result in dissatisfaction and further procrastination.

In this magazine issue, we will cover a simple yet effective time management technique for dealing with procrastination and distraction. This technique which is known as Pomodoro technique was developed by Francesco Cirillo in 1980s. As a college student, Francesco was struggling to find a focus for his studies. He used a tomato-shaped timer to focus on his work and hence the name of the technique is Pomodoro which is Italian for tomato. This technique is used by professionals around the world to help them focus and get back to work, leaving distractions behind. The technique uses a timer to break down work into intervals, traditionally 25 minutes in length, separated by short breaks. These intervals are named Pomodoros, the plural in English of the Italian 45

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word Pomodoro. The method is based on the idea that frequent breaks can improve mental agility. The methodology is simple. When faced with any large task, break it into short timed intervals which are further spaced out by short breaks. With time, the technique will improve your attention span and concentration. Pomodoro technique does not require anything special other than a timer. You can either use a physical timer or download free Pomodoro apps on your mobile phone. You can get started by following 6 steps.

Decide on the task to be done.

Set the pomodoro timer to 25 minutes.

Work on the task until the timer rings. If a distraction pops into your head, write it down, but immediately get back on task.

After the timer rings, put a checkmark on a piece of paper.

If you have fewer than four checkmarks, take a short break (3â&#x20AC;&#x201C;5 minutes), then go to step 1.

Else (i.e. after four pomodoros) take a longer break (15â&#x20AC;&#x201C;30 minutes), reset your checkmark count to zero, then go to step 1. These 6 steps are all you need to make yourself super productive and win over distractions. When the clock is ticking and you have only 25 minutes to get the task done, you become more focused. Chances of a task getting completed become higher.

Smaller breaks after every 25 minutes will help you clear your mind and re-energize you for next work cycle. You need to keep all distractions away as much as possible to have successful Pomodoro cycle. To know more about the technique visit the official website www.pomodorotechnique.com

Share your time management and productivity secrets with the ScaleUp magazine readers. We will publish them with your name in next issues. Reach out to us at editor@ growthmonk.com

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“To WIN big, you sometimes have to take big RISKS.” - Bill Gates

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WHY SOCIAL LISTENING IS ESSENTIAL FOR ALL STARTUPS Geoffrey Colon, Author of Disruptive Marketing

hile many growth hackers or managers of growth marketing will talk about the quantity of customers they add to their product, the way to battle churn is to implement what is called the Always Be Listening or ABL approach to growth marketing. How does this technique work and how can you use it for your startup? Well, if we separate the need to add customers to our service and report on the amount of 48

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people we have using our solution for qualitative data like customers who spend a majority of time using your solution instead, we usually can get that by pulling them into our solution knowing what they are seeking and offering that to them as an immediate result. So how does a growth marketer get this quality audience? One way obviously is offering a product that offers solutions other products do not offer. But we know that building a product alone in our age of distraction, lack of attention and abundant solutions isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t enough.

Therefore, we must conduct a pulse or “audit” of what is happening around us. The best way to do this is to implement a social listening strategy that answers questions with you as the customer solution and thus makes your product the definitive attraction. So how do you do this?

it helps understand the pulse of a market Marketing or potential market. To simply make Keep a spreadsheet of all the terms, a product in phrases, competitors and others you the 21st Century with blinders on One way if you have budget is to gain from this monthly exercise. You and then note you didn’t know there utilize a number of social listening don’t have to rush into making a would be no demand is no longer tools like Sysomos, Cision, Sprinklr piece of content right away, in fact an excuse knowing what people or Radian6. But what if you are like give yourself three to four months are talking about, searching for and to see how requesting from the entrepreneurial the marketworld. place evolves, how these conversations Geoffrey Colon is the author increase or de- of the just released book crease. During Disruptive Marketing. He is also a this time your communications designer and growth hacker at Microsoft where he works product may on growing customers for products pivot too knowing what associated with the search engine Bing. He is a regular contributor to the marketplace is seeking ScaleUp Magazine with articles that and if you are can help you scale growth for your business while also reaching your most startups and are bootstrapping providing something that ultimateobjectives using new thinking and for a solution? This is where good ly will be in demand due to lack of tools. old search engines and platforms like supply. Twitter and even Instagram can help. When you ultimately put together the First, think about your customer and content that explains your solution what they would be searching for and becomes the “go to” based online. What terminology and words on the natural behavior of what would they use? What phrases? From people would be searching for, you here reverse engineer and input those outgain any competition who may words onto these platform search have phrased their solution from a bars. What content comes up? Is it non-customer-centric angle while possible to create better content than you phrased finding your solution in the top results? What would that in- the language of customers. corporate? Can you produce a video that you embed on your website with Also when it comes time to make the the main question one would ask and video, there are tons of video prothe video offering the solution? Goo- duction solutions you can use. Look gle and Bing have noted how much into iMovie for iOS, Videomaker, video acts as a main signal in SEO Vidblaster, Adobe or Magix. All are these days and thus it’s a good idea cheap solutions and with a few video to think beyond simply the written tutorials on YouTube you can teach word with your content. yourself. Before you know it, this video can live on YouTube, FaceWhat you are trying to do is lure book, Twitter, Instagram, Vimeo and people to your content who act as a variety of other platforms. your initial adopters or advocates. Social listening is essential because 49

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This almost always starts with a piece of content that explains how you solve a customer problem. This always starts by finding out who is asking and answering the questions that your business helps solve.

IF YOU LIKE WHAT YOU READ FOLLOW US

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Business Growth

HOW TO MAKE SURE YOUR BUSINESS IS

SCALABLE, SELLABLE, AND SUSTAINABLE Shahara Wright n my book From Entrepreneur to CEO, I discuss the issue of Founder Dependence. It is a concept often discussed and mused about in corporate circles. It is not widely discussed in the small business world. On the one hand, you have funded startups, whose investors remove the Founder as soon as possible. This is based on the belief that the person who had the vision cannot possibly be trusted to bring it to life. On the other hand, you have the bootstrapped entrepreneur who grew the business from the ground up and believes that no one knows better than he/she.

These are two extremes and in the middle lies a reality. At what point can the business survive without you? Do you want the business to survive without you? If so, you must make it sustainable, scalable and saleable. 51

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Business Growth

Is it sustainable? A business owner must learn how to allow others to make decisions and give up certain responsibilities to focus on other aspects of a growing business. This statement tends to be a big stumbling block for founders. No one is perfect and they certainly do not know your business like you do. They have to learn, and you have to give them time to learn. It means that the “control freak” inside has to learn to be less controlling. Those who refuse to relinquish control demonstrate that they suffer from a lack of vision.

hire a person to work on it full time, utilize a service to help you.

If you want to enjoy that vacation or have a day off, then you have to begin planning for it. The first thing you must do is write down what you Owners who cannot let go will do. I know, you do everything - so eventually drive their business what is everything and how do you into the ground: management will do it? Unless you are Coca-Cola with become dysfunctional at some point. a secret formula that no one can ever A founder that cannot let go will not know, your job can be defined and let workers thrive or leaders be born. written down. They will eventually push out the talent and only retain those who do I would start with the most importnot care about the overall survival of ant job and then move toward the the business. jobs that are menial and tasks that

to include evaluation criteria and compensation. The more detailed the job description, the easier it will be for you to find the right person for the job.

you wished someone else would do. Then categorize those jobs and make job descriptions. If you plan to hire employees to take over some of your responsibilities, they need to know what they are. Some people are visual learners, some are auditory: you need to have various methods of communicating the job.

Next, you should consider having employee handbooks and training. Once you hire an employee, do not assume that the two hours you spent training them while on the job is enough. You cannot expect someone to understand the nuances of your business if you do not take the time to train and educate them on the business as well as their job. The more time you spend up front working with an employee, the less time you will have to spend fixing their mistakes. A company handbook will also give you legitimacy and act as a communication tool between the business and the employee. Basic questions can be answered and you can make a clear standard upon which employees will be evaluated.

A job description explains the duties and responsibilities of the jobs required, outlining the requirements for a potential employee such as skills, training, and education. Notice that it does not have to be the same skills, training and education that you If you do not want to spend as the business owner possess, but your time learning and trying to that which you desire your potential comprehend social media, hire a employee to have. Ask yourself, contractor. Bring in someone that who would the employee report to; knows what they are doing and let how would this position function them train your staff on what to do (what does the job actually entail) and how to do it. If you need help and what attributes are needed by with payroll and you cannot afford to the employee? You may also want

Customers will also help in weaning a company from founder dependence. Introduce new employees to customers and let them know that “Pat” will be helping them from now on with that matter. Sometimes it is hard for customers to get used to dealing with someone new. The proper introduction instills confidence, assurance and, sometimes, extra patience. Customer reviews or surveys should be used during this time to help determine what is and what is not working well for the customer experience.

Understanding your limitations is key. For most small business owners, giving up complete control is a nonstarter. However, the skills needed to get the business started may not be the skills needed to continue the business or grow the business. Be willing to bring more knowledgeable and skilled contractors to help move the business forward. While hiring professionals in this manner may be more costly, it saves time overall because of the training and experience of the professional in a given area.

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Business Growth

Is it scalable? Can you replicate this business and make it grow? Can you open up another location or create additional revenue streams doing the same thing in various places? If you are the one that has to do it, the answer is no. You need to have systems in place to grow your business. If the systems only exist in your head, that is a problem.

together multiple systems that do not work is just as bad as having no systems at all. Focus on your core strengths. If you are the idea person in your business, then create the ideas and let other people put them in place. If you are the money person, then control that and let others focus on various aspects of the business. I am not suggesting that you become totally hands off—I am saying that you need to think long term versus right now.

Is it saleable? Only about thirty percent of family businesses survive the second generation and only about three percent of start-up entrepreneurs intend to purchase an existing business. These are not good odds.

tive to buyers is the same thing that makes your business profitable. Having things in place so that your business can be handed to the next generation, is important. Can your business be handed down to a family member? Would they even want it? To reiterate, you have to plan for a future transfer/handoff of your business. Is it sustainable? Is it scalable? If not, it is not saleable. Do you have intellectual property that someone wants such as trademarks and copyrights or customer lists? Do you have a diverse customer base? Do you have employees that know and understand the business? Do not be the challenge in your business — be the visionary.

What aspects of your business are repetitive? You should make an effort to automate them as much as possible so that you can focus on growth-related activities. If you can make certain aspects of your business “plug and play”, it will help you to step back from the day to day operations and focus on the business as a whole. This goes back to the planning concept that we discussed earlier: you have to be willing to take the time to make this happen. If you do not have the time because you are so busy running the business, then your business is never going to grow. You need to focus on solutions that will help you scale. Not every option is right for you; the only way you are going to find the right solution is to take the time to focus. Putting 53

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If you want your business to be passed down to your great grandchildren, you have a lot of work to do. If you want to sell your business at some point, you have even more work to do. You may not be thinking about selling your business right now, but you need to. What makes your business attrac-

Shahara Wright is a CEO, business law attorney, professor, community leader, speaker and author. She has been the owner and Lead Attorney of The Wright Firm, PLLC for 15 years. Shahara provides small and mid-sized companies with legal and business strategies including entity formation, mergers and acquisitions, investor packages and contracts.

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