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Zack Onisko [email protected] @zack415 Chief Growth Officer, Creative Market

Gaining Early Traction by Doing Things that Don't Scale (Hustling)

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My talk from Sean Ellis' Growth Hacking Conference in London, October 2014. It starts with a story of how I hustled my way into affording a drum set at age 14 by painting curbs in my neighborhood. It then covers a lot of the tactics that we have done at Creative Market to grow rapidly, as well as mentions of other company's successful non-scalable growth strategy.

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Page 1: Gaining Early Traction by Doing Things that Don't Scale (Hustling)

Zack Onisko

[email protected] @zack415

Chief Growth Officer, Creative Market

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MUST HAVE DRUMS

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$7/hr

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$75/hr

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HUSTLED UP SOME DRUMS!

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There are 3 Stages of Growth3 stages of startup growth

Source: http://www.startup-marketing.com/the-startup-pyramid/

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There are 3 Stages of Growth

1) Product Market Fit

3 stages of startup growth

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Photo by @willsh

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There are 3 Stages of Growth

1) Product Market Fit

3) Scalable growth stage

3 stages of startup growth

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There are 3 Stages of Growth

2) The Hustle Stage 1) Product Market Fit

3) Scalable growth stage

3 stages of startup growth

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“Startups take off because the founders make them take off. A good metaphor would be the cranks that car engines had before they got

electric starters. Once the engine was going, it would keep going, but there was a separate and

laborious process to get it going.” — Paul Graham

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There are 3 Stages of Growth

your way to scalable growth

HUSTLE

20 non-scalable ways to

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There are 3 Stages of Growth

1) Manually invite your first customers. Start in a niche.

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There are 3 Stages of Growth

2) Invite friends and family(and other connections)

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There are 3 Stages of Growth

3) Join the conversations at target niche communities and forums.

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There are 3 Stages of Growth

4) Ask your competitor’s customers to try your new service & give feedback.

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There are 3 Stages of Growth

5) Go directly to your users. Ask them to sign up in person.

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There are 3 Stages of Growth

6) Speak directly with users to understand how your product can better meet their needs.

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There are 3 Stages of Growth

7) Community engagement. Reply to every comment.

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There are 3 Stages of Growth

8) Aim for 100% customer satisfaction. Everyone leaves happy!

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There are 3 Stages of Growth

9) Go above and beyond to delight customers.

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There are 3 Stages of Growth

10) Give away free stuff for signing up.

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There are 3 Stages of Growth

11) Allow users to give their friends free stuff.

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There are 3 Stages of Growth

12) Give away new free stuff weekly (retention)

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There are 3 Stages of Growth

13) Content is king. Distribution is queen. Always be writing and sharing.

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There are 3 Stages of Growth

14) Write guest posts on other people’s blogs.

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There are 3 Stages of Growth

15) Forge Partnerships.

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There are 3 Stages of Growth

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There are 3 Stages of Growth

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There are 3 Stages of Growth

16) Trade co-promotions

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There are 3 Stages of Growth

17) Throw Parties

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There are 3 Stages of Growth

18) Run a roadblock campaign across a network of sites in your industry.

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There are 3 Stages of Growth

19) Seed content on your site yourself to get it going.

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There are 3 Stages of Growth

20) Private Beta. Sorry, invite only.

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There are 3 Stages of Growth

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There are 3 Stages of Growth

Study the tactics of your competitors. Become inspired,

but don’t copy. Be more clever!

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HAPPY

GROWING!

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Zack Onisko

[email protected] @zack415

Chief Growth Officer, Creative Market

THANKS!