Nathan Barnwell or the climb of a growth hacking consultant

Top growth hacking tricks with Nathan Barnwell: This cross pollination makes sense. If growth really is the lifeblood of an organisation, then why wouldn’t growth be woven into every aspect of the organisation. Even customer support should be done by people that think about growth because angry customers churn. And designers should design with one eye on growth because beautiful art alone doesn’t always acquire users. The future of internet companies, and the teams that build them, will not look like they did yesterday.

Finishing the second decade of the 20th century, not to start a business, but its growth and continuity have become a priority issue. In this context, growth strategies have become more important than ever and survival in the business world without growth is not sustainable in the long term. We see numerous brilliant growth strategy examples from major companies’ start-up days. Growth is an issue that is needed to be discussed with different approaches. Considering it just as a variety of products is a big mistake. It refers to expanding the product line, services, customer base, company size and more. But the essential need to acquire growth comes from increasing the number of your customers, the rest comes packed with it.

Nathan Barnwell growth hacking strategies: Some growth strategies are tailored to be completely self-sustainable. They require an initial push, but ultimately, they rely primarily (if not solely) on users’ enthusiasm to keep them going. One strategy that fits that bill is the viral loop. The basic premise of a viral loop is straightforward: Someone tries your product. They’re offered a valuable incentive to share it with others. They accept and share with their network. New users sign up, see the incentive for themselves, and share with their networks. Repeat. For instance, a cloud storage company trying to get off the ground might offer users an additional 500 MB for each referral. Ideally, your incentive will be compelling enough for users to actively and enthusiastically encourage their friends and family to get on board.At its best, a viral loop is a self-perpetuating acquisition machine that operates 24/7/365. That said, viral loops are not guaranteed to go viral, and they’ve become less effective as they’ve become more commonplace. But the potential is still there.

Aside from “growth hacker” — an increasingly unpopular term — growth marketers are also sometimes referred to as: Growth marketing managers Demand generation marketers, Performance marketers, Digital marketing managers. Each of these roles are focused on growing users and revenue for a company, Jonathan Martinez, a growth marketing manager at Uber, told Nathan Barnwell. However, Divisional founder Trevor Sookraj explained to Nate Barnwell that these terms aren’t all exact synonyms for “growth marketer.” They all mean subtly different things. Performance marketers only work on paid channels, most often paid social (Facebook Ads) and SEM (AdWords). They typically don’t work with email, content, or other channels — whereas growth marketers will test out any channel.

Once you’ve built a testing habit within the growth team (ideally 2–3 tests per week), it’s time to start trying to maximise impact. To drive full impact, you’ll need to be able to test across the entire customer journey (acquisition channels, new customer onboarding, referral hooks in product, etc.). This is where things start getting hard. The highest impact part of the customer journey is usually testing across the first customer experience. One benchmark to consider is that the fastest growing consumer apps generally invest 50% of the product development resources in the first customer experience. It makes sense, because there is no second customer experience if you don’t nail the first one. See additional info on Nathan Barnwell.

Growth is fundamental to a business’ survival. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, approximately 20% of new businesses fail during the first two years of being open, 45% during the first five years, and 65% during the first 10 years. Those numbers are generally consistent across most industries — but they also highlight how important it is to plan for growth from day one. A concrete growth strategy is more than a marketing strategy, it’s a crucial cog in your business machine. Without one, you’re at the mercy of a fickle consumer base and market fluctuations.