Category Archives: Business

GrowthHacking Conference – top ideas below #ghc14

Posted on by
Reply

In case (like me) you didn’t get along to the GrowthHacking Conference 2014 in London today, the good news is there’s a set of group notes available.

And I’ll create the top ideas below, from individual presenters, where each top tip appeals to me/my own experience, using the #ghc14 on twitter to source the quotes:

  • Sean Ellis Testing is the only way to know if the idea is great. Test all growth levers – e.g. Dave McClure’s Pirate Metrics: Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue, Referral
  • Lesley Eccles Investment adds pressure – you HAVE to make it work.
  • Zack Onisko Product Hunt has grown quickly because they only let influencers submit products in the early days.
  • Alex Depledge Apparently when you raise millions of dollars in investment you have to give yourself a C-level title.
  • Nilan Peiris Every app on your iPhone has an insanely high NPS
  • Karl Banks Find out what is deeply stopping visitors and accept that fixing it is the only way to grow.
  • Rand Fishkin In 2007 there were 1 billion Google searches a day. There are now over 6 billion a day & free keyword tool http://keywordtool.io/ (plus check out semrush and buzzsumo) and slide deck below…
  • Marie Steinthaler Use all the tools and build a growth stack (image below)
  • Simon Dance We’ve seen a direct correlation between pages that get crawled regularly & their number of visits
  • Jamie Quint Spend 25% of your engineering time on getting your metrics and dashboards right & focus on longer term usage rather than the number of new users: sustainable growth
  • Sofia Quintero Sustainable business is building a community around your product and transactions.
  • Saul Klein #Technologists need to put structure & discipline around marketing’ & It’s important to balance your growth with your ability to grow & If you’re seeing hockey stick engagement but not downloads or signups, that’s a time to invest in growth & in early stage startups, growth hacking should be around the product and customer acquisition not awareness
  • Peep Laja If you torture data long enough, you can get it to say anything & you don’t need data, you need insights & Leave A/B tests running for longer, not statistically significant until you have 350 conversions; slide deck below
  • Ian Hogarth There’s no framework for growth-hacking, what works for a company may not work for another
  • Morgan Brown Growth is a team sport
  • Neil Patel Just tell ‘em you want to give them free tea AND money (talking about about Instagram influencers promoting brands) & Find sites who have similar audience to you & cut a CPA advertising deal to capture email addresses & grow your userbase

SLIDES

Growth Hackers Conference – PDF download version

 IMAGES

How to find early stage investors using LinkedIn

Posted on by
1

 

LinkedIn_investors

Click the image to go to LinkedIn’s Advanced Search feature, displaying results for keywords “angel investors” & for location “London, United Kingdom”

LinkedIn’s Advance Search is an effective way to find potential investors. Simply put the keywords “angel investor” or “seed investor” with UK as the location. Because of my network the search results in 509 entries for “seed investor” and over 1.4K for the keywords “angel investor”. These included 1st degree connections I can contact directly, 2nd degree connections which share a connection with me, and 3rd/Group connections.

The method that I have been trained in by Mike Clark at a recent Entrepreneurs in London meetup (click link for post-meetup discussion) says you then contact your ‘shared connection’ for 2nd degree connections (the link text appears in green below the entry) and ask them to email the target with the details you want them to receive. It works much better than LinkedIn’s ‘Get Introduced’ feature!

Next, wondering about what to send investor, in the way of a deck and intro text? See below for expert advice from Chance Barnett, CEO of crowdfunding.com:

When you ask for intros, give the person making the introduction a very short email ‘blurb’ of suggested language for them to use. Make sure that blurb includes a single link / call to action. By using a single link to your online profile on a site, you can allow people to pass along your pitch and all your core company info with a single URL. The moment that any potential investor clicks on that link, they experience the pitch and message you’ve crafted for them online, in a more dynamic and powerful environment than just a PPT attachment.

In my case, when I was fundraising for Crowdfunder in the past and people made intros to investors, that message and link went something like this:

“Hey,

I wanted you to meet Chance, the CEO of Crowdfunder.

He’s doing some interesting stuff with equity crowdfunding and the company has some great growth as a leader in the space. Thought you two might want to chat.

His deck and info on the company are here:

http://crowdfunder.com/crowdfunder

Hope you two connect,”