And get disproportionate amount of traffic which in turn skyrockets user base by 10 folds.

It’s every growth marketer’ secret dream right?

Some people say: viral marketing happens by chance. But could it be engineered?

Speaking of “engineering”, let’s agree that viral marketing is a buzz word which has no objective meaning. In our case, better to talk in terms of numbers — 3x, 5x or 10x your user base.

This could be You

Real numbers from 2 different startups:

• BLOCKS: From 500 to 5000+ customers who generated $1.6 Million.
• Hiboo: Mobile app downloaded 20,000+ times in App Store.

This didn’t happen by chance, nor was it achieved by using random tactics. This was strategically planned. In both cases, the startups were in their early stage.

Let me show you the strategy used.

Fundamentals — are you ready?

Growth doesn’t start from zero.

Startup must demonstrate product-market fit first. And with the right product-market fit comes traction. Put simply, a few hundred users have to show interest and have to be actively engaged in a relationship.

Brian Balfour (CEO at Reforge and ex-VP Growth at HubSpot) has an excellent essay about this here.

Prerequisites to applying this strategy :

• Your startup has a few hundred users.
• You have strong retention rate, low churn and have a steady stream of new users who keep coming in.

If the above is true, you’re ready to build a ramp which will take your startup to the next level.

Earn Your Way to the Top

A few days ago at a growth marketing meetup, I had a chat with a marketer whose app had a thousand active users but felt they had reached a plateau.

Not knowing who they were, I googled them.

Google returned unimpressive results.

I mean “unimpressive” because Google only returned their social networks links.

I also googled and searched around in their industry.

They were nowhere to be found!

I then pushed it a little further and found only 2 news articles.

I was expecting to see articles, blog posts written about them, about their vision, about who they are and how they’re trying to solve the problem. I was expecting validation from other industry experts in their field. I was looking for testimonials from their users.

But I found nothing.

I see this all the time. An app with great potential lost in the internet noise. They’ve got the innovators but they can’t seem to attract the next cohort of users.

The missing signal which attracts the next cohort of users is TRUST from media, industry influencers and other people.

You have to earn validation from your peers.

Coverage for your startup is earned. You don’t control it. You don’t pay for it.

They’ll question your motives. They’ll scrutinize you. They’ll compare you.

That’s why people trust the media. If you can get journalists, bloggers and industry influencers to write about your startup then you’ve earned their trust. The next cohort of users can therefore trust you in return.

When they’ll write positively about your startup and yourself, then you’ll see massive traffic coming your way.

You’ll be trusted and recognized.

There are many ways to do this. The strategy I’m sharing with you will help you achieve this in a condensed amount of time.

Growth Marketer’s Master Plan — The Process

1. Launch a PR campaign (get covered in the press)
2. Go above and beyond by launching a parallel marketing campaign
3. Be ready to communicate on relevant social media channels in your industry

First, to maximize the effect of the PR campaign, it’s important to “embargo” the news (embargo=request that the information or news be not published until a certain date). This will produce a bigger and better effect in terms of perception. In short, we want all journalists and bloggers to publish the news at the same day.

The secret to a great PR campaign is to plan it in a way that hundreds of journalists and bloggers write about your startup. I will share how to do this in a coming article.

Second, amplify your PR campaign with content that you control. This is an opportunity to create content that would complement news going out that day. This is the parallel marketing campaign that will run next to the PR campaign

When both campaigns will be running, you’ll see what people respond to.

Results you can expect : everywhere people are talking about your startup. Your startup is perceived as big, important and trustworthy. Next time when people google your startup , they can read, listen to podcasts and see videos which educate about problems you’re trying to solve.

This is how you’ll acquire more users for months to come.

Preparation is everything

Preparation is everything. Without proper and careful preparation, you’ll be overwhelmed and you won’t get the expected results.

When a marketing campaign and a PR campaign are launched at the same time, a viral marketing campaign can be the result.

You have to be prepared to deal with the consequences: questions will come from all channels. It’s in these communication channels that many people will be converted. Your reputation will be on the line, people will write about the way you handled this.

You also need to prepare and have the necessary tools in place to measure, iterate and amplify where necessary. To do this you’ll use the growth marketer’s AARRR process (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue, Referral).

Conclusion and Recap

Early stage startup which have traction can create a cost effective viral marketing campaign by launching two campaigns at the same time:

• A PR campaign (by getting covered in the press)
• A content marketing campaign (with educational and crunchy content)

The success of these campaigns reside in their preparation.

Getting covered in the press (and bloggers in the industry) is one of the most cost effective method to get the word out about your startup. But you have to know how to do this.

It’s a lot of work.

It’s hard.

It requires focus from everyone in the team.

It’s doable. The results can be amazingly good.

• BLOCKS we managed to get 5000+ articles written about them.
• Hiboo got a few hundreds articles.

Let’s Connect and Continue this Conversation

Watch out for my next article where I explain in details how to create a PR campaign like a growth marketer.

Sign up at 101experiments.com if you want to apply this strategy for your startup.

Thank you for reading.

Beyond crowdfunding, I believe these teachings apply to anyone who has a tribe online.

1. WHAT’S IN IT FOR THEM?

Everything you do should be centred around this principle.

Why would anyone take part of your project? What’s in it for them?

It has to start with what they want.

Validate your project: make sure they want it.

Only if you nail it, will you succeed.

Every decision should be centred around them.

If you are obsessed about making sure they benefit first, your campaign will succeed.

2. LAUNCH WITH A BIG BANG

Your launch will only happen once, so make it as big as possible.

Imagine what it would look like if every person you knew shared your crowdfunding page to their social network? What if you could get people you don’t know to do the same?

Imagine what it would look like if you had the biggest PR ever!

And on the same day you launch, hundreds of journalists and bloggers write about your project.

This is exactly what happened to BLOCKS. We launched with the hugest BANG we could produce.

The secret is to prepare the BANG.

3. LISTEN TO YOUR CROWD

A crowdfunding project has 3 main parts: The crowd, you and your project.

The crowd and yourself are the most important.

It’s a relationship. You have to listen to them. You have to talk to them.

Imagine what happens in their minds when you start referring to your project as “our” project: they feel like it’s theirs, and they help you succeed.

It’s old like history but the only way a relationship can work is by showing that we understand each other, that we listen to each other.

When in doubt, just listen and ask. You’ll be amazed.

It’s not only about listening, it’s also about showing that you care about them.

• What are they saying in the comments?
• What are they saying in the emails they send?
• What are their dreams?
• What pisses them off?
• How do they want to be involved in your project?
• What content are they sharing?

Listen to them and they’ll guide you.

Check out this book by Mark Goulston: Just Listen.

4. HAVE A SOLID MARKETING PLAN

Marketing is about attracting the right people to you.

Attract the ones who believe what you believe.

Start with WHY.

I love Simon Sinek’s TED Talk: Start with why, from the book of the same name.

Then read Seth Godin’s books.

When it comes to doing marketing the right way, to me, he is THE person to listen to. He really focuses on creating a connection and doing great work.

If you’re new to marketing, apply Seth Godin’s teachings, the results will amaze you.

5. IT’S A LOT ABOUT HOW THEY PERCEIVE YOUR CROWDFUNDING CAMPAIGN

When you have an important event, you dress well, you make sure you look good right? So should be your crowdfunding project.

If your crowdfunding page and videos look really good (professional and educative), you’ll inspire trust.

If you took the time to take care of the details of your crowdfunding project, it will show. And people will do the same, they take the time to read and digest your material.

Make your crowdfunding campaign look so good everyone who passes by stops to check out your project.

6. ASK FOR HELP

It’s your project, if you ask for help, you put yourself in a vulnerable position. And it doesn’t feel good.

Beyond your friends and family, I believe you should ask even total strangers for help.

Crowdfunding takes a lot of energy and effort, a few more hands on the project will definitely help.

At BLOCKS, we asked fans for help and what came out was the “Ambassador program”.

Imagine the multiplier effect.

Don’t take my word for it, read the book: The Art of Asking by Amanda Palmer.

And by the way, Amanda Palmer launched 3 successful Kickstarter campaigns. Needless to say that you should definitely learn from her.

7. BE MORE HUMAN: ADD STORIES AND EMOTIONS

Stories and emotions are what makes us human.

Kids love stories, so do we.

We always want to know what happens next.

We learn better with stories. We remember events in form of stories.

Stories are about trouble and overcoming them.

We are internally wired to want to know the end of a story. Use this. Share your stories.

Here is a good book: The storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall.

Connect with emotions.

We are emotional beings. We connect with people who makes us feel something.

And we are social animals.

• Make them cry.
• Make them laugh.
• Inspire them.
• Make them feel important.
• Surprise them.
• Make them part of something bigger than themselves, a big project, a community.

8. PR WORKS. YOU JUST NEED TO DO IT RIGHT

You don’t need to know journalist and bloggers in order to get your crowdfunding project published on their websites.

They’ll do it if you ask them correctly and if you respect their work and their constraints.

They’re busy. They have tons of emails in their inbox and they want to write about newsworthy stories.

• What’s your story?
• is it newsworthy?
• Is it new?

Nobody likes to receive spam, so don’t mass email them.

Read about them and personalise your emails with information you’ve learned about them. It’s easier to personalise an email when you known what the journalist/blogger has written.

Help them instead. Make their work easier.

i.e: It’s not a good idea to attach a PDF to your email when you know they’re probably be using their mobile phone to read their emails.

Just make it as simple as possible: plain text and links.

I emailed hundreds of journalist and bloggers during BLOCKS crowdfunding campaign. The results were amazing because I kept it simple.

Here is Mike Butcher’s article on how to do PR the right way: http://mbites.com/2015/07/01/the-press-release-is-dead/. You can adapt it to your case.

9. USE DATA TO GUIDE YOUR ACTIONS

Data does one thing: it tells you what you’re doing right or what you’re doing wrong.

It’s that simple.

In my opinion, everything else is answered by creativity.

Data doesn’t lie. It won’t tell you where you went wrong. You’ll just know if the desired effect was met.

The wrong way to use data is by collecting a huge amount of it, then ask analysts to tell the stories behind it.

It turns out it doesn’t work that way.

You shouldn’t start with data in human affairs. You should start with a question, then you collect data which in turn will help you learn something.

Don’t take my word for it, just read the book : Ask, Measure, Learn from Lutz Finger, Director of Data Science at LinkedIn.

Data will help you take informed decision when it comes to your crowdfunding project. You’ll know what your crowd likes, what they share, the actions they take.

LET ME WRAP UP

Your crowdfunding project is a journey.

It’s definitely not about making a quick buck.

You’ll discover what makes your people tick. Use it to do great work that will make them happy.

Crowdfunding will not only help you raise funds, it’ll also help you build a community around your project.

Invest in them and they’ll invest in you.

Let’s connect and continue the conversation

If you found this article interesting, sign up for my free newsletter on www.101experiments.com

Thank you for reading and see you soon for another one.

Humans are irrational.

Psychology hacks aren’t meant to manipulate. We naturally do this without thinking.

When you go on a date:

• How do you look?
• Do you say everything about yourself the first time you meet someone?
• How do you want the other person to perceive you?

You’ve been using psychology hacks all your life, and by aligning yourself to how the human brain works, you increase your chances of success.

Let’s dive into the hacks:

1. Be Fascinating

On a date, the stories you tell are the ones which are the most fascinating about yourself, right?

Same thing goes for your crowdfunding story. Your story must be fascinating in people’s eyes. They’ll ask you where your idea came from, so tell them your story in a way that fascinates them. You must see their eyes light up with wanting to know more. If they keep asking more questions, you know you’re on the right track, they’re fascinated!

2. Be Trustworthy

You definitely want your date to trust you right? This way you can go on more dates and prolong the relationship.

When it comes to your crowdfunding project, the way you appeal trustworthy is by using these 3 principles: repetition, consistency and familiarity. By emailing them regularly (repetition and consistency) you’ll build a sense of trust. At some point your email will be familiar to them because they read it often. Also, celebrate together successes and tell your people what’s going on with the project at every stage, even if you’re having difficulties. Every time you’re having difficulties let them know. Let them be part of every moment. Build trust.

3. Be Prestigious

I bet you put on nice clothes when you go on a date. You make sure to look at your best.

We are naturally wired to see increased value in prestige. So, going back to your crowdfunding project: your project must be seen very valuable. Don’t be cheap. Don’t look cheap. The price of your product could be relatively high. Premium prices command prestige. This is one of the reasons why people love Apple products. They are expensive. Go premium and make sure you step up quality standard too.

4. Be Mysterious

On a date, you don’t say everything about yourself the first day.

You must inject some mystery into your crowdfunding project. Reveal details gradually till the day you launch. And make sure to always be clear. For example: “I will reveal something in 3 days”. It could be about your story or about the product itself. Be mysterious about the launch date, reveal it only a week before.

5. Do something Forbidden

You see this in every romantic movie: at some point they do something that they aren’t supposed to do: sneak into a park at night or jump undressed into a river.

Add a forbidden aspect to your project. The more we know we shouldn’t do something, the more we want to do it. We literally can’t seem to get that idea out of our head. The point here is to behave in a way that you aren’t supposed to. Do something out of the ordinary.

6. Make them Wait

You know you want to call your date after a beautiful night out but your friends always tell you wait. And at the same time you’re longing for them to call you.

Anticipation always works like a charm! Make your crowd wait. Tell them in advance you’re going to launch a crowdfunding campaign but don’t tell them when it’ll happen. They know precisely what, but they don’t know when. Play with time.

7. Inject a sense of Threat

Funny how Hollywood plays with this so well: they love each other, but for some reason they can’t be together. And that makes the relationship more desirable.

Crowdfunding works well when there is a time limit. The shorter the better. And if you can add other forms of threat like limiting the available quantity it’ll work even better. The early bird price is an excellent threat. They must feel like it’s now or never.

Final thoughts

With great power comes great responsibility.

These tactics must help you create the best product for people who will back you.

Beyond crowdfunding, you should use these hacks in your marketing strategy. In growth marketing terms, this means that you make sure your conversion rates improve. You should also A/B test your call-to-actions? i.e: May be you could ditch the infamous “sign up now” on buttons for something more mysterious and see what works best.

PR for Crowdfunding and for Startups

PR coverage for launching a campaign is science.

You don’t need years of PR experience to do it. Nor do you need years of marketing experience. It’s a step-by-step formula. PR is the most cost effective marketing strategy! As a matter of fact, with a small team of 7, we implemented it for the first time and we raised $1.6 Million on Kickstarter (BLOCKS). Working with another startup of a team of 4, we launched an app on the AppStore using the same strategy and tactics which resulted in 20.000+ downloads in 1 week (Hiboo.co)!

I’m currently gathering a small number of startups.

Sign up on www.101experiments.com to get the DIY PR system that will maximise your startup launch or crowdfunding campaign.

Thank you for reading.

On Growth Hacking BLOCKS’ Kickstarter campaign to $1.6 Million (and how it can be applied to any Startup Launch)

To growth hack?

It’s become a common verb used in the startup community nowadays.

One sure thing is that it implies doing unconventional marketing that drives growth.

Your Startup Launch

You’ve been working hard on your product for months, you can’t wait any longer and it makes you nervous.

It’s time to launch.

You’ve prepared your launch: you talked about what your product does and the problem it solves. Time has come to set a date and go through your launch checklist.

Yet, deep down you fear that you’ll launch in silence.

You fear that you won’t reach your goal.

Uncertainty about how this will play out gives you the creeps.

What if you could guarantee that your launch is a success?

It’s exactly what we did at BLOCKS, we knew the launch would be a success, but we didn’t know the magnitude.

$250,000 goal reached in 54 minutes

BLOCKS (The startup company behind BLOCKS Smartwatch) launched on Kickstarter October 13th, 2015 and reached their funding goal in 54 minutes, an astounding $250,000 (that’s an average of $4,630 per minute) to a total of $1.6 Million at the end of the campaign.

Those are the kind of results growth hacking bring.

I was in the trenches in BLOCKS team.

It wasn’t luck. It wasn’t magic. It wasn’t random.

There is a science behind these results and that’s what I’m going to show you.

I can hear you say: what’s the secret?

Before I answer you, let me go through how a typical launch is done.

It seems to always start with a checklist of things you need to do.

7 things you need to do to successfully launch your startup

1. Have massive PR — Get featured on the biggest tech news sites
2. Have massive amount of followers
3. Get featured on tech sites, some of them ask you to pay
4. Get featured on ProductHunt
5. Have a huge email list
6. Ask influencers to talk about your product
7. Be number one on Google search for your keywords: SEO

Why 7?

Why not 25 or 99?

You see these headlines everywhere on the internet when you research about how to launch. And any list of tactics doesn’t cut it. How do they fit together and in what order?

The first question people ask: what’s the secret for raising that much money?Then they ask if we got featured on the biggest tech news sites: TechCrunch, The Next Web, Wired, Engadget, Gizmodo, Mashable, The Verge …

It’s also common to think that you need a certain number of followers on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Pinterest before you launch.

What hacks did you use? What tactics did you use?

My thoughts: tactics and hacks are powerful. You should definitely know them. But used randomly, they produce random results.

There are no secrets, no silver bullet.

In my opinion, no amount of getting featured on major tech sites will bring you most of your customers.

And about followers: many successful startups don’t have Facebook pages.

Your launch succeeds because you’ve done the work months before.

The answer to all your questions is growth hacking.

Growth hacking is about solving marketing problems with an engineering perspective. We experimented with various marketing ideas in order to grow very fast.

It is a process, a system, which, when executed properly guarantees the launch succeeds.

At BLOCKS, we started to work on the launch months before, as well as during the campaign.

Create a vision that draws your first people to you

Months before the launch, we built a tribe, a tribe of people who loves BLOCKS, believes in BLOCKS and what it stands for.

We knew that our tribe would buy our product.

According to the law of diffusion of innovation, the first cohort of people to join a tribe are the innovators.

The innovators are also ambassadors. They will tell other people about their tribe by spreading the word out. They are your true fans.

The innovators help bring the next cohort of people: the early adopters. That’s why we only focused on bringing in these 2 groups.

Growth hacking on a daily basis, how it works

First, you need a team.

At BLOCKS, we had a combined set of skills in engineering, marketing, design and product.

Second, you need to know about the 5 stages of the growth hacking process.

Months before our launch we started to work on the growth hacking funnel which has 5 stages:

1. Acquisition : get people to visit your site
2. Activation : turn your visitors into users with whom you have a relationship with
3. Retention : nurture the relationship and make them part of your tribe
4. Revenue : people of your tribe become your customers
5. Referral : your tribe spreads the word about you and bring more people

At every stage of the growth hacking funnel there is a process for generating experiments based on marketing ideas:

Question -> Research -> Hypothesis -> Experiment -> Data -> Conclusion

We had a huge backlog of ideas and we tested each one (the experiment).

Growth hacking always start with human psychology and behaviour. No wonder Sean Ellis who coined the term created Qualaroo a tool that tells you why people do what they do on your site.

If you understand what motivates people to take action or what prevents them to do so, then you increase your chances for solving their problem.

This process is fun because it’s art and science.

Science helps you eliminate guess work, stay on track and accelerates work while art is the creativity part which proposes solutions.

4 untold side effects of growth hacking

1.Your results will depend on how good you are at prioritising. Believe me when I tell you that it almost cost me my job not to do this well. Prioritising is a sensitive issue and it’s a silent killer. You’ll have plenty of ideas at any stage of the growth hacking funnel, but not all ideas weigh the same. The weight of an idea depends on its impact, how easy it is to implement, how long it runs and what you can learn from it.There is a good ratio to have and focusing on either one of them too much will lead to missed goals.

2.Your growth team will fight over resource at some point. At BLOCKS we ran into this so many times. Our designers could only produce so many original high quality images. Prioritising based on impact will usually solve this issue, or you could add a new team member.

3.Growth hackers will take the experimentations a little too far and that’s a good thing. I can’t tell you how many times I was told this: “You’re taking this too far, it doesn’t align with our branding”. I believe innovation happens at the edge and those who surf in these waters find hidden gems.

4.Growth hacking is never ending. You have to keep on iterating so that you keep on learning and those learnings give you new ideas to experiment upon. Speed is key: the more experiments you run, the faster you learn, the more ideas you have, the more you keep experimenting. Very few growth hackers will tell that it’s actually hard to keep moral up when 90% of your experiment aren’t conclusive.

Double down on what’s working

As I just mentioned above, the reality of growth hacking is that 90% of experiments don’t go anywhere, you can’t seem to find a conclusion, rather than speculating (strong human tendency), move on and let data speak for itself.

But when an experiment works, you have to go all in on it.

Double down on what’s working because at a given time, one channel will bring most of the results. So, run the experiment till you saturate the channel. Frankly, those moments are so rare that it feels like finding unexpected gold, so keep digging, get as much as you can and as long as you can.

Let’s connect and continue the conversation

If you found this article interesting and want more, sign up for my free newsletter on www.101experiments.com

If you know someone who will launch soon, do let them know if you think this article might help them.

Thank you for reading and see you soon for another one.