AKA shares the key secrets for startup's growth after working with over 100 companies of all sorts.

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You can grow in different ways and I think when a company first comes to us and goes, you know, we have 50 users, we have to get to a million or whatever, I like to ask 3 questions.

Asher, King, Abraham, Sun, also known as AKA, the founder of Got Users, have gone through different growth experiments in agencies and companies working with, including top YC companies.

Would you have any advice specifically for founders in the 0 to 1 phase?

So I'm just starting a company, it's year 1, I have 50 users, but I need 5,000 to scale feedback loops to scale everything.

So what's interesting is companies in the same industry can grow different ways and even the same company grows different ways at different times.

So for example I've worked with a number of code boot camps and 1 grew through content and SEO and another grew through press but then cracked Facebook and Instagram ads and then cracked a referral strategy.

So you can grow in different ways and I think when a company first comes to us and goes you know we have 50 users, we have to get to a million or whatever, I like to ask 3 questions.

The who, so who has been using you, who are your happiest users so far?

The how, so how have they found you and also how have they heard of other products that are similar to yours or kind of in the same ballpark?

And then the why, which is, if they didn't use you, what would the alternative be?

And how would they find that alternative?

And the answers to those questions can dictate a lot of what your strategy turns into.

And when I say strategy, I mean the levers that you can pull and what you test next to figure out how to get users.

So yeah, I can dig into all that if you want, just as 1 example, right?

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There's a company we're working with now that is, they're like a financial software company.

And there happens to be 1 very big, well-known company in the space that's slow and clunky and people already use, but they're not very happy with.

So that answer to the why question, what is the alternative, is very clear for most of the people that they're going after.

And it turns out that just running a Google ad, targeting that competitor and saying exactly why we're better in that ad, and then having a very customized flow specific to that competitor has worked really well for that client.

There are cases where the alternatives don't lend themselves to Google Ads as well, but they might lend themselves to a cold outreach strategy.

So there have been a few cases now where our clients have used a tool like BuiltWith to figure out who is using an older technology or worse alternative.

And then we reach out through cold email saying, hey, I saw you're using, for example, this WordPress plugin.

So we worked with this WordPress plugin that was competing with even worse WordPress plugins.

Not that anyone loves WordPress plugins, but so they were able to reach out and say, hey, I noticed you're using this WordPress plugin.

We've done all the work to get you set up.

You basically just have to click the link.

And that made us, I think that made them 250K, 500K in revenue in less than a few months, if I remember right.

And this was at Bellcurve, but that sort of playbook of, oh, your alternative is this piece of tech, let's figure out everyone who's using that tech and then reach out through cold outreach.

So yeah, I think the answers to those questions are really core and fundamental.

And then the way in which you tactically execute it, the way that you write copy, the way that you warm your email domain, the way that you break down the data to figure out who's actually opening your email and who's actually going to your site and the Landing page copy and all of that nitty-gritty also matters But it all comes from the who the how and the why at the end of the day

That's such a great framework to think about How do we even get started like the day 1?

I mean, it's funny, people come to us and say, how do we know that you're going to get us users?

And any growth marketer who says they know how you're going to get users is selling you BS.

But what you can guarantee is learnings and learnings of what doesn't work.

And with a lot of our clients it's just trying to figure out what doesn't work as quickly as possible to get to what does.

Like just using the Google ads example again, they might try to run ads to 500 different keywords that people search and only 1 of those is profitable, but as soon as you find that 1, that's what you can spend more money on and scale up.

And so you're really trying to rule out things that don't work at a micro and macro level as fast as you can.

And so that at the end of the day is learning, right?

That's the growth mindset is we are trying to learn extremely quickly and we're trying to figure out the fastest ways to learn around that.

That's amazing and you've got a couple of years of experience doing just this with top-notch companies in where it all happens in the Bay Area.

So, you know, I'll be very happy to work with you guys when the time is right and I have something to launch to the world.

But just So many questions, but you know, 1 thing you touched on is the speed of iteration and how maybe folks can increase their speed of understanding what's working and what's not.

I can paint you a picture of what speed of iteration doesn't look like.

And I see this in particular with private equity firms that wanna optimize every last piece of juice out of the ads they're running.

I see it more often with founders from sales backgrounds where they always want to test messaging, but they end up testing the messaging on the same channel.

So there was a company we worked with, was running LinkedIn ads that were wildly unprofitable, like super expensive.

And the founder thought, oh no, if we just like change the messaging a little bit and we really crack the messaging, we'll get it right and we should test new messaging.

But what they were doing was they were testing slightly different messaging on the same channel over and over and it took them, I want to say a year, a year and a half to finally realize that paid LinkedIn ads didn't work.

I think they might have tested Facebook and Instagram too.

But we were trying to push them for like a year, saying, hey, okay, let's test new messaging, but let's also test the different channels.

So we're testing more big variables at once, and we're taking a very different swing.

Let's have you give talks to the communities of your target customer.

Let's try a direct mail campaign, let's try a billboard.

Like, there are all these other things that you can do that When you test wildly different channels and combinations of copy and channel, your speed of iteration goes way up because you're just getting wildly different results.

And that's really the goal is you just want a big distribution of the results you get so you can narrow down on the ones that are performing best.

So that's sort of like part 1, right, is like don't over optimize, and especially around messaging.

Messaging is where people get really stuck on this It is important to have the fundamentals down and it is worth spending like a week or 2 on that But once you have the fundamentals down you probably don't need to tweak the messaging much And if you're gonna test it don't test it on the same channel like test it on a different channel The other piece is the teams that iterate fastest, like I'm thinking through the clients that move fastest right now, they are really good at 80-20ing what's actually important to the point where, and we don't always love this at Got Users, but some of them will go through the material that we have or the playbooks we have on a specific channel and they might miss 1 or 2 things because they're just trying to get it up in 2 days, but then they show up to the calls that we do and they go, hey, is this good enough or are there things that I missed that you wanna tweak?

And we tweak them live on the call and they launch experiments in 2 or 3 days and they're good enough.

They meet the standard of quality that we know is enough to get users, but it's because they've really tried to whittle down what isn't important to save themselves time and launch things super quickly.

So I'd say 80-20ing stuff, really, really important.

Get 80% of the gains with 20% of the work.

Yeah, 1 other thing that our really fast-moving clients do is when they feel like they don't have enough bandwidth to run new experiments, instead of thinking that they have to hire or bring on an agency, they first think about who on our team already has bandwidth and how can we plug them in to run a growth experiment and play to their strengths.

So we have clients that are pulling in salespeople to work on growth and they're emphasizing cold outreach and BD because that's what salespeople tend to do better.

Or they're pulling in a biz ops person who is able to run, let's say, Google ads, because it ends up being a more technical channel for them.

Or a content writer to do some organic social media posts when they were maybe doing blog posts before, that kind of thing.

So the teams that move really fast find bandwidth in the places that aren't growing to focus on growth.

And so naturally they're creating work for themselves by being able to plug in on the growth front and they stitch it together.

So you're saying trying variety of channels and not over obsessing on the details that matter but matter less, which really connects to the second point of 80-20, of really focusing on the

in order to move faster, which I guess you also mean like the 80 could be the things that would take 20% of the time.

Like you get to try many more times and then curving out resources of whatever you have, which is like so, so startup mentality.

I think you make an interesting point of getting really clear on what the 80% is, because if you run a bad experiment, you can't trust the results from it.

So you might write off, I don't know, press in PR as a channel because you didn't do it right.

And so knowing exactly what that 80% looks like is really important, and our fastest moving clients are very good at making sure with us that they are covering enough of the fundamentals there.

So what is, that's actually super useful for anyone who's listening probably.

Like what is a bad experiment that makes you get to a wrong conclusion like writing off a channel?

There's a, this is a Chrome extension that I worked with years ago.

They were kind of like Apollo.io or any of these tools that let you find someone's email, Hunter, Apollo, Clearbit Connect, all that stuff.

They were pouring a lot of resources to fixing their landing page and the copy in their onboarding flow, but it was very clear from walking through the onboarding flow and looking at the funnel data they had that everyone was dropping off when you had to install the Chrome extension because the ratings on their Chrome extension were too low and it seemed like a scam.

And the app asked for a bunch, or sorry, and the Chrome extension asked for a lot of your data.

And so people would come to the Chrome extension page, see that it was 2 and a half stars, go, I'm not sharing all my data with you, this looks shady as hell, and they wouldn't download the Chrome extension.

They thought, oh, if we pour more traffic in at the top of the funnel, or if we improve the onboarding flow after they install the extension, we will grow.

And it was very clear that the reviews were playing the huge role, and they weren't just focused on getting their review count up.

And they spent 3 or 4 months on what I would say are the wrong things, and they ended up not growing and folding the products, because they weren't able to get actual users and actual customers at the end of the day because they were all not trusting of the tool.

So I think being really short-sighted about that or focusing on levers that you feel you can pull and maybe not doing the really hard thing, that will slow you down.

So the difference between doing what's easy than doing what's necessary.

Yeah, ideally some of the work we do with clients is we try to figure out what is easy and necessary and where is the low hanging fruit that we can pick.

And that's always the best when it's like, oh yeah, there's this Facebook group I've already been a part of for 5 years, and I can just post in that in their shameless Wednesdays post when people hawk their products and get a bunch of users.

There's a client who was like, oh, I can just post to my alumni mailing list for my college and get a bunch of sign-offs.

And they like 20x'd in a week, something like that.

So that's not always the most scalable, but it's often a very good lever to pull.

And so we try to find the combo of scalable enough in your wheelhouse and low-hanging fruit, that kind of stuff.

Speaking of interesting experiments, so was there any experiment that you were very surprised by the results of?

It was just off the left field kind of thing, never happened before, just weird.

Yeah, I mean, the 1 that has inspired why we run Got Users the way we run it was when I was at the agency, we were working with a code boot camp.

We thought it highlighted the value props way better.

They went, hey, this is objectively a better website.

And we ran an A-B test against the current site.

And for how clever and amazing our new design sounded, it performed way worse.

And the old janky, dense site that was, I think, slightly more informative, won out.

And that's not the only time that that's happened.

There were many other times where we would run A-B tests that didn't actually beat the current janky site that the founder themselves had built or I think that even that same client, the founder threw up a crappy landing page that they thought might work later and that did perform better than the older page.

Here we are, this like expert agency coming in thinking that we know how to make landing pages and then we fall flat on our face and we're like, what's going on here?

And so the learning here, and it wasn't just in these cases, like I would tie this to moments we have on calls where Founders would go, I don't know if that works for my customer, or they might have some crazy great idea that we could not possibly have come up with without knowing more about their customer and product.

That made the light bulb go off and made us realize, hey, we know the tools of marketing really well.

But At the end of the day, you have to know your customer really well, and especially with the startups we were working with, the person who knew the customer best was the founder.

And so what came out of that at the time was the first version of Demand Curve, and that turned into what I'm doing now at Got Users, where people, or founders and early hires, run their own experiments themselves because they can bake in their knowledge of the user and then we layer on what we know from the marketing side around how to run a particular channel, what good copy looks like, how to 80-20 experiments, all of that stuff.

And that's how companies end up actually growing really well.

And so that has always been a huge learning for me is that you cannot possibly understand a customer better than someone who's already at a company, who's talking with them all the time.

I mean, we definitely ran some A-B tests that worked better.

But it happened enough and with a large enough magnitude that it made us double-take.

Yeah, this is so much similar to product, where just really knowing the ins and outs of your user is so many times the highest leverage.

I mean, what's interesting is it opens up new acquisition channels that you didn't know existed either when you get to really know your user, right?

So I think it's very common, and it's hard for me to say what these channels are ahead of time, but it's common to say, hey, like, all right, let's test paid ads, let's test cold outreach, let's do content and SEO, you know, let's like pull all the traditional acquisition channel levers.

And it's like, well, the way that you may grow might be from putting on a costume and going to academic conferences, because the type of people who attend academic conferences tend to throw them themselves.

And so you have this nice recursive loop.

And like, who the heck could have figured that out, right?

Or there's another client we had where it turned out that receptionists at the offices they were targeting were really important, and they started throwing events for receptionists, and that was the way that they grew.

You just never – and there's Another 1 that was like lobbying mayors of small cities and then turning that into local news events so they would get local press which they could then use to persuade other mayors to like pass a law in their town.

Like there's just weird unexpected things that come out of really knowing your user well.

And so a lot of like the work that we do now is just around interviewing users from a marketing perspective to figure out what those weird ways you're going to grow are that we could not possibly predict.

And I think that's, for me, that's where a lot of the magic of growth is.

And I think that's where a lot of people get growth wrong is they think growth is, hey, let's just test these channels.

Let's grow the kind of the traditional way or through the channels I know.

And it's like, well, maybe that will work.

That works sometimes for some companies, but you might stumble into some completely unexpected way of growing that's gonna be the way you grow long-term by getting to know your users better.

And so it kind of boils down to like talk with users and especially with the marketing twist to it.

Yeah, it's just I guess like it all in a way boils down to like audience, channel, product fit, right?

And for some I guess types of audience, some products might meet them best at those places like conferences or small city town hall, whatever.

Yeah, there was someone I was talking with, the way that they grew was they would go to conferences, but because everyone already has a booth at a conference, it's hard to stand out.

And so what they would do is pre-select the group of people they knew they wanted to meet who was going to the conference.

They would email the organizer beforehand and say, hey, who is in, it was a specific healthcare niche, who's in this niche that we should talk with?

Then they would email those people beforehand, throw a dinner just for those people before the conference, and pretty much ignore everyone else at the conference.

And that was very successful for them to grow.

And I've heard of other companies putting flyers on hotel room doors at the conference.

They don't have to actually pay for a sponsorship slot, that kind of stuff.

So there's a lot to play with even within conferences, and I think conferences is kind of a broad term for it.

So you never know exactly how it'll show up as a tactic.

Yeah, just being, I guess, being creative, sort of the guerrilla marketing kind of way.

It's just always more impressive when it's creative and out of the box.

I think what's interesting for me is seeing where that can scale a bit too.

So there was a company I spoke with a few years ago.

They were like a women's clothing company.

And the founder was really good at giving talks.

And it turned out that a lot of their users, early users, had found them through the founder giving a talk, like a female empowerment conference.

And so they ended up creating a whole team structured around getting their founder to speak at as many women empowerment conferences as possible so that she could get in front of a bunch of people.

And they got to well over a million dollars in revenue that way just by getting the founder to speak at a bunch of conferences and optimizing for that.

So it's interesting to see how guerrilla marketing, or I don't know if that's considered guerrilla, but how that can turn into a more scalable strategy.

And yeah, it doesn't sound like a very expensive kind of marketing.

Sounds like the ROI is pretty high over there.

I mean, if you're selling a trinket that costs 3 bucks, you better get in front of a lot of people at that conference, right?

But yeah, it's surprising what's cost effective.

Billboards always surprise me at how cheap they are and how few people use them.

You can run a good billboard for like $3,000 to $5,000 in a decent area.

Well, I guess I don't know if billboards are trending and are going to be like, I don't know if this is the way to go in 2023, but maybe many folks just like me are missing something.

Yeah, I think zigging when others zag and finding the arbitrage where people aren't spending marketing money is really powerful.

And there are definitely companies that have grown through billboards.

I think Twilio grew through billboards a bunch.

And these are like fairly modern tech companies that use billboards to grow.

And it's just latent ad space that's actually not crazy expensive that you throw up an experiment on and see what happens.

So there's some nuance around how you do attribution for that, right, and how you make sure that the experiment actually works.

I mean, companies grow so many different ways, they really do.

Wow, that's like, I guess this is news for many people.

I think that sometimes founders, technical or business-oriented, usually don't necessarily come from a marketing background and so when it's time at some point in year 1 when it's time to start doing growth marketing or more traditional marketing It's just sort of like, okay, what's in the playbook?

Like how do you create and scale a marketing team?

And it's like, okay, there's paid, there's direct, email, you know, and everybody just go this route and it could be crowded.

And just to build on that, it's really dangerous to think that there is a playbook when you make a hire, especially if you're hiring someone from a company that is in your industry that's maybe already grown a bit and you're hiring someone who's been there for the playbook that that company used, because there is a very strong bias to try to use that same playbook at your company to grow your company.

And like I said, companies grow different ways over time and in the same industry.

And so what you really need when you're thinking about the playbook for growth or for marketing is being ready to pivot and change what you're doing really quickly and adapt to getting punched in the face because it is very rare that that first playbook you think will work actually does work.

It does occasionally, but I see a lot of companies firing these folks who come in who think they know exactly how your company will grow and it just doesn't go the way they expect.

And so they need to be really, I hate the word adaptable, it's kind of a corporate buzzword, but you do need to change what you're doing if the thing that you're doing now doesn't work, right?

What do you see as the, in bullet points, the top characteristics of really good growth mindsets, folks getting into growth or experienced that are just making it to the 10%.

And maybe how, like when people interview, they can try to gauge for that?

So the 2 factors that I've seen is I've reflected on what makes a really good growth hire.

The 2 characteristics are 1, being able to 80-20 things really well and constantly going, what's the 20% work version of this?

The second is they make sure they understand exactly what you're saying as a user, as another team member, but they ask clarifying questions.

And they really try to understand exactly what you're saying before they try to brainstorm off of what you're giving them.

And when they, the really good ones do that really well.

And if you want more details on, you know, what sorts of questions people ask in growth interviews or what we recommend, there's a guide to hiring on the Got Users site, if you go to the docs section, and if you just go through that and scroll down to the bottom, you'll see a bunch of interview questions that we ask candidates ourselves when we recruit.

So there's a lot of tactics in there, if folks wanna look, but at a very high level, it's understand what they're saying completely before you respond to it, and 80-20 really well.

Amazing, honestly, this sounds like, you know, we'll make it to the top 3 of any employee on any level.

People have told me that's true, yeah, in other roles too, so I totally agree, yeah.

What's the best way to reach out to you if people want to learn more, just have some questions to follow up?

Or yeah, just go to gotusers.com, poke around.

We've got a bunch on the site you can learn from.

I'm on LinkedIn too, if you wanna follow me on LinkedIn.

People think I'm weird, but that is my social media channel for sure of choice.

I'm on Twitter and no 1 follows me on Twitter.

So definitely an unabashed LinkedIn stan.

Maybe I'm just zigging when people are zagging or whatever, but I freaking love LinkedIn, man.

Yeah, with AKA, you know, still trying to figure out who I am.

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