Get to know Nathan Barnwell and some of his growth hacking achievements

Top growth hacking advices with Nate Barnwell: Despite the importance of product, it would be foolish to restrict your activities to only the product. The same internet that redefined product has also redefined distribution, and not all distribution is within the product. Those with a strong understanding of how people flow online will be able to use that knowledge for the sake of their startup’s growth. What does the “hacker” in growth hacker mean? The word hacker has a few different definitions and connotations that inform the meaning of growth hacker. Hacker is sometimes used to refer to someone who is clever, original, or inventive. They will use whatever is at their disposal to create a solution that might have been overlooked by others. A “life hacker” would be an example of this use of the term. This same attitude is found in growth hacker because they are forced to be ingenious if they are going to achieve growth. Paths to growth are not usually obvious and it takes extreme creativity to find them.

Created in 2013 by Stewart Butterfield, Slack is a messaging and collaboration tool for enterprises. It allows company teams to chat and share in real-time. Today, Slack has over 12 million daily active users with more than 100 thousand paid customers. When designing Slack, however, Butterfield had no intention of being a big hit. Slack was created for covering the communication needs of Butterfield’s team during the design process of Glitch, a games app that can now be considered a fail. From this fail, however, came great success as the team saw how valuable Slack was to them. The market needed such a product where internal team members could communicate easily and exchange project materials quickly, and Butterfield already had one. Since Slack was created for users in the first place with no intention of profit and turned out to be a great product, further development continued accordingly. Slack team always took customer feedback as guidance, replying to every email they received and examining every ticket carefully. This initiation pushed Slack to be a great example of product-led growthWhat is product-led growth? Product Led Growth (PLG) is a business development strategy that leverages product usage to drive customer acquisitions, conversions, and market expansion. It places product on the focus of businesses.

Nate Barnwell growth hacking strategies: Instead of needing as many leads as possible at the top, a viral loop funnel requires just one satisfied user to share with others. As long as every referral results in at least 1.1 new users, the system continues growing. The milestone referral model is similar to the viral loop in that it relies on incentives to kickstart and sustain it. But milestone referrals add a more intricate, progressive element to the process. Companies that leverage viral loops generally offer a flat, consistent offer for individual referrals — businesses that use milestone referrals offer rewards for hitting specific benchmarks. In many cases, “milestones” are metrics like number of referred friends. For example, a business might include different or increasingly enticing incentives that come with one, five, and 10 referrals as opposed to a fixed incentive for each individual referral. A company will often leverage this strategy to encourage users to bring on a volume of friends and family that suits its specific business goals. The strategy also adds an engaging element to the referral process. When done right, milestone referrals are simple to share with relatively straightforward objectives and enticing, tangible products as rewards.

Startups, for example, often struggle to determine which marketer they should hire first. A growth marketer is a good bet — especially if they already have strong brand guidelines in place. (Setting tone and voice, messaging, and value propositions is not typically something a growth marketer will do.) “They are especially impactful at early-stage companies where there isn’t enough conviction to invest heavily into one given channel, due to lack of validation,” Sookraj told Nathan Barnwell. “[Growth marketers] are especially impactful at early-stage companies.” But startups aren’t the only ones who see value in growth marketers. Enterprises should consider adding growth marketers as well, says Sookraj.

It is important to instrument for growth so that you can truly understand what is happening. Another important part of instrumenting for growth is testing tools such as Google Optimize, that allow you to implement a/b tests across your website and product. Finally, you’ll need a system to bring all of this information together so that your team can learn how to improve growth. Now you’re finally ready to start accelerating growth, which is level three of the pyramid. In this stage you should focus on building a growth team that can effectively execute a growth process. The purpose of this growth process is to uncover better ways to accelerate growth in the business. Your goal here is just to build a rhythm and habit of testing. Every test you run will lead to additional learning — even if it doesn’t directly drive immediate improvement in growth. It’s important during this stage to catalogue this learning so that the team keeps getting smarter about how to accelerate growth. See more information on Nathan Barnwell.

With all of your planning, resourcing, and goal-setting complete, you’re now ready to execute your company growth plan and deliver results for the business. Throughout this time, make sure you’re holding your stakeholders accountable, keeping the line of communication open, and comparing initial results to your forecasted growth goals to see if your projected results are still achievable or if anything needs to be adjusted. Your growth plan and the tactics you leverage will ultimately be specific to your business, but there are some strategies you can look to as jumping off points.