Jump starting growth | Justin Wu

So if you're thinking about kind of like growth hacking and jump-starting your first businesses, and kind of the book and the traction book, here's kind of a few different channels that I kind of want to just point out, giving you kind of quick, on-the-ground growth hacks that can give you your first initial customers. And I've been deploying this time to time again for many companies and even myself. So the way that I look at all these different channels is simply an audience and data playground. And there's a lot more other ones too, but these are like the most immediate free networks that cost no money, and there's a lot of users hanging out and congregating. So I like to call this kind of hand-to-hand congruent growth. This requires no money, not necessarily using any tools except going out there, putting in sweat equity, talking to people, building engagements, and really trying to find customers. And all these different platforms allow you to do that. Here's the most first obvious one, just starting out with LinkedIn just to get everything going. Everybody says, oh, it's obvious LinkedIn is a big search engine, but if I look, you know, ask around, a lot of people aren't utilizing LinkedIn, but LinkedIn has every single person organized into different titles, location, it's a playground for all your playbook, all the people that you can go out and engage with. And so I'm seeing it as being really underutilized in many businesses and they're making excuses like, I don't have any customers who are CMOs. I'm like, have you talked to them? They're like, no, I don't want to connect with them, I don't want to engage, I think I'm going to annoy them. I'm like, well, you either don't do anything and lose, or you go out there and try to connect. Now it's up to you to keep switching up your copy and messaging out to people, but the connect button is openly available out there, or you can go Facebook— LinkedIn groups. Or LinkedIn posts from all these other guys that are just talking about topics and go out and engage with them. So I've seen this time and time again where there's these platforms out there that exist and people are not going— and there's customers kind of readily available out there that you can go out directly. People aren't really going out and engaging with them. But LinkedIn is just like a first example of that. Twitter is kind of synonymous in that way where you can find every single person based on location as well as job titles, at least if they put it on their profile. And you can even find people who are talking about specific subjects. But there's a tool that I want to kind of share with you called Audience. And what Audience does is that I can type in developer and it gives me every single developer on Twitter in one— probably like one minute. Then I can export that into a CSV file and then I can outreach with every single developer on there. I can even narrow it down based on how much followers they have. I can narrow it down by location. When they last tweeted. I can do even crazy combinations where I can find developers only in Los Angeles, CEOs or CMOs. I can even find every single investor or VC or angel investor from this tool. And this tool also works on Instagram too. So if you want to find people on fitness, you want to find people on— oh yeah, there's gym or any other type of titles, you can use a tool like Audience to then pull and find all your target sets. Then do what I said with LinkedIn earlier. Go out and just do manual outreach if you don't have any money to spend on advertising to those individuals. But with exporting a tool like this and using that data, you can actually upload all those contacts back into Twitter and you can run ads only to those targets too. So that's very helpful. And Snapchat is going to allow you to do that soon. Facebook used to let you do that to do some email targeting. Username targeting to those individuals. But you being able to use this data allows you to find any target audience from investors, customers, to any target audiences super fast and super easy. Here's just an example, quick tool. You can just go and literally filter it out and export it out. So would you use that to search wherever you want and then you could download it and then use that again to do the advertising after? Yeah, you can do advertising to it after. Or you can even do like a simple like follow and then they'll follow back. Or you can even message them directly. So there's tactics where if you know that you have a customer set, there's companies I've seen, they give it to an intern to go message out. Or they'll go, if they find that it's actually generating revenue, then they know how much a customer is actually bringing in revenue, then they just outsource that out to like a virtual assistant or somebody else to kind of start handling out the automatic outreaches. But again, this is just a good tool. You can export it out. CSV. PDF, any type of file, you can really import that through. Going back to Craigslist, Craigslist, even though Airbnb hit it hard, it's still another great way. Each of the different sections on Craigslist, I've been generating leads all day long on Craigslist because I can find from small business owners, especially local from different cities, all the way to kind of consumers in these different categories from electronics to real estate. To toys. It really depends on who you're looking for and what product and service you're offering. I still think Craigslist is an underutilized tool. And a lot of people make excuses where it's a shady platform and all that stuff. But you have to understand though that on the job sections, business owners actually have to pay money. And so most scammers aren't really gonna spend a lot of money on there. And if you actually look deeply enough, Uber has like 50 ads, like, kind of a week on Craigslist. And they're using it as an acquisition strategy. Yeah, they're putting in a job offer on there, on the different sections, but they really just want people to download the app and potentially become a driver. They just want more exposure. So let's give you an example if you want to hit local markets. Thinking of all these different sections, each section is its own industry. It's an easy way to go out and get your initial customers. Another cool platform to growth hack is meetup.com. Meetup.com is awesome because you can go and literally find a jump to different cities. You can find different groups within your specific topics and industries. But guess what? You can even message people in those groups if you're joining in their groups. So I literally had a friend wanted to build his first local startup event organization in Seattle. And so what he did was he went to all the other meetup groups in Seattle, all the professional networking groups, and he just messaged every single person. He messaged thousands of people, of course over time, and then he pointed them to a Facebook group. And now his meetup group, because he's siphoned all the traffic, has 1,000+ users. And he's packing 100 to 200 people a day, and they're all— I mean, per event, and they're all paying for his event now. And so what he did to growth hack that and multiply to different cities now, Now that he found that that model was worth it for him, this is where the growth hacking piece comes in. That's where he built a software script to go out and automatically message people inorganically. But before he did that, he also hired like a virtual assistant to also send out messages outbound. But again, it's just like looking at all these platforms, there's people congregating together. And it's an easy win for you to go out and just go and engage with these audiences. Another, another one is good, another good business is to go after is Groupon. What we do with Groupon is more if you have like a B2B business or you want to cater towards business owners, then you simply know that all these people, first of all, they're getting, all these businesses are getting ripped off because they have to pay 50% usually off their, for their business, and then they have to give like an almost 50% cut to Groupon. So they're not really making any money off of the Groupon unless it's like a class or like a service that doesn't really have any cost. But you know that these companies just want more lead generation and growth on their digital forefront. So you can literally go up to these businesses. I have other startups that literally built businesses off of targeting, going to these customers on Groupon. Of course, Groupon doesn't have all the contact information, but you know the business's name. So go find them. Go on Yelp. Go on Yellow Pages. Go on White Pages. And pick up the phone or go in person and get that lead or deal. You can simply say that you spent all this much money, X amount, and you can see how much sales they have. On Groupon, and you can go help them with their digital marketing, you can help them with their growth, and you can find different industries based on different topics because of that. More of like an offline growth hack that I've been able to just constantly generate leads is through building kind of a massive network and targeting people who are targeting my similar audiences and customers. actually one of the fastest ways to grow with not much money at all. Because it's definitely similar to affiliate marketing in a sense where, let's say I'm targeting small business owners and entrepreneurs, right? So then I'm thinking about who is going out and talking to these people? I can go to my competitors, of course they're not gonna give me business. But what if there's other businesses out there? There's law firms that cater to startups. Okay, they have a lot of startup clients. Alright, what if I— hooked up this law firm. If they give me a lead, I'm gonna give them 20%. Maybe 20% residual. I don't know. I'm gonna work a deal with them. Accounting firms that target startups. Agencies. So like what I did was I went out and I knew that I was offering growth and marketing services. So then I went after design and development agencies. People who are going out to business owners and people who have app ideas trying to build their product. All right, the next stage is growth. Alright, they're gonna hand me a lead. And I know those people already paid, you know, $50,000, $100,000 on app development. They need to launch their product. And so I work out a deal with these agencies. Another one that I figured out was commercial real estate agents. They only, they deal with business owners. Alright, well that's another great way for me to go out. Event organizers, going out to people who are the most social. And they are also kind of influence magnets. And I'm more so like an introvert. I don't really like going out and really engaging with a lot of people. So, and it takes a lot of energy for me. And going out and speaking and doing all these different event organizations, you can't really cover all the ground by yourself, especially if you're just a single-person startup or a small team. So why not put more feet on the street out there? Event organizers or other related businesses can help you grow. The tactic that I've been able to really make this work, and this is really important, is to really come together and shake hands with that person and Agree with them a strong compensation plan and make sure that you pay them ahead of, like, I would pre— like, if somebody brings me a good lead, I make sure that they feel that they're taken care of and they're gonna keep bringing me more business. 'Cause if it's loose, people are just gonna go on their business not handling it. But the moment you start giving somebody money, they get the idea, they're gonna start bringing you businesses. And I literally have referrals just constantly coming in and not doing any marketing. I don't have much salespeople on my team, and it's just constantly regenerating more leads for me and my businesses. And you can think about this for any other type of business you have. Just go out and engage with people who are just related to all the different businesses and services that you're looking to offer. And just build an affiliate relationship with those individuals. Again, this is more like offline growth hacks by utilizing other people's networks without using any technologies. But you can go out and outreach with Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn to find all these other people and go out and engage with them too.