Aladdin Happy - How I create Growth Hacking Plans for startups for $10,000: + TOP 300 growth hacks you can put into practice right away

How I create growth hacking plans forstartups for $10,000 + TOP 300 growth hacking case studies and actionabletricks you can put into practice right away

Table ofcontents:

Astory

Hey there. ;) An exciting and beautiful dayto you.

My name is Aladdin Happy. Originally, Imfrom Ukraine. Now I live in Nashville, Tennessee, USA.

I launched GrowthHackingIdea.com in July2015. GrowthHackingIdea - is an invitation-only community of over 26,000growth hackers. People from companies like Microsoft, Adobe, Disney,Coca-Cola, Uber are among our subscribers.

I share with the community one short growthhacking idea each day.

Very far prior to that, since 1999right after I graduated from school I have been engaged in Webentrepreneurship. I started in Krivoi Rog, Ukraine the city of iron ore,workers and miners.Four giant chimneys of coking plant densely covered the citywith smog. The city of red puddles, red birds, red houses, all red.

Only a USRobotics modem could break throughthe antediluvian telephone line periodically busy with conversationsof people unknown to me. With its help you could get to the magical world aray of hope in the midst of total hopelessness.

Look at this picture to feel, how long agoit was:

Skipping the beginning of my ITentrepreneurship career, by 2005 I managed to create 2 small local profitableweb-services. They generated stable Google cheques - passive income for me,while I was having fun. I called it a retirement :).

In June 2010th I decided to sell one of mybusinesses and create a new BIG THING - my first global service!

The plan was to finish development in 4months and start making money in 6 months at a maximum.

But in fact, after 2 years! the productwas not finished yet and all the money was gone. I sold my car, sold my secondbusiness, sold everything and managed to raise investments. We finished theproduct, launched it, acquired users, and found that nobody gave a shitabout it. Nobody wanted to pay anything.

What is the takeaway?

I invested everything I had into a newgreat idea, that did not achieve Product/Market Fit. But there is no life onMars in business without Product/Market Fit. Its suicide to investmoney into anything before achieving product/market fit.

My friend had a profitable business, thoughhis revenue declined bit by bit.

He invested 1.5 years and over $100K into anew product. And you know what? Nobody gave a shit about his awesome newproduct.

Another friend of mine received >$300Kof investments. They were in all news headlines. He hired the best developers,designers, and other stuff. They were building and tweaking their product for 3years. They launched for the first time, and all journalists were intrigued.And nobody stuck with the product. Then they relaunched second time. And thenthey ran out of money. The last news headline was that their product wasclosed, because there was no demand for it.

I know TONS of the same stories. A LOT,HUGE, and ENORMOUS number of people invest thousands, hundreds of thousands,and even millions of dollars before achieving product/market fit.

Trying to build a business beforeproduct/market fit is like spending trillions of dollars on the mining ofCalifornium 252 ($27 million per gram) on Mars without previous tests of theground.

On the other hand, if you already have acurrent business that makes you money, this means, you achieved product/marketfit in your current business. This is a HUGE value. This means you can applygrowth hacking techniques to it instantly and increase your revenue almostinstantly too. There are tons of ways how to do that.

If I knew it, I would better have developeda growth hacking plan for my existing businesses. But I did not and this is whyI can tell you this story :).

This was Mistake #10 from a list of TOP 10growth hacking mistakes I decided to start this book with.

Members of my community are alwayssending me emails , asking to help them with growthhacking for this and that product. So, I decided to collect all their questionsand create this list of most popular mistakes.

As you can see, these mistakes can cost youyears of your priceless life. Years that you cant get back. They are just goneforever.

Mistake#9: My growth hacking process goes VERY VERY slowly.

In 2013 I was happy to get $50K ofinvestments.

Me and Igor Ryabenkiy (#1 super angel investor in the CIS region).

I had a web-version of a music discoveryservice, but it had a weak retention rate. One of growth hacking hypothesis wasto create a mobile app - music discovery alarm. So that a user can set hisalarm and use our app every day just like any alarm.

What a brilliant idea. After 4 months theAndroid MVP app was launched. I bought some Facebook ads and looked at theretention rate. It was even worse, than the web-version of the service I had.

Then I asked users, what would they want toadd. And after 6 months I launched a new version. And retention did not change.It was as poor as before.

What was wrong, what do you think?

I invested 1 year into testing 2hypotheses . But, as Sean Ellis states, growthhacking is a test driven marketing plan. The core of growth hacking is in thenumber of tests you run every week. If you do not run at least one test a week,this is not a growth hacking, this is a waste of time.

The majority do not tie their growthhacking process to the minimal weekly amount of tests. They have a big list oftasks in their task management system and run them one after another. And onetest can take a week, another - a month, or even 6 months, like in my example.

When you create your growth hacking plan,you need to prioritize tasks this way, so that you can run the minimumamount of tests and do whatever it takes.

Mistake #8: I put mymoney into this channel and this and that, but none of them worked for me.

As you remember at the beginning of 2012 I failedwith my first global startup.

About a month after that I launched a newone and at the end of 2012 I became an absolute winner with it in astartup competition among 330 Ukrainian startups. One of awards was a residencyin a business accelerator.

When I was accepted to an accelerator, Itested a bunch of channels. I was good in iterations. I was testing fast. Itested commenting on Question sites and it did not work. I tested writingarticles and it worked, but the effect flew away very soon. I tested press -the same issue. I tested sharing through the site and it did not work thatwell. I tested this and this and that and every time it did not give thedesired effect.

Only years after that did figure out thereason.

The key is not in WHAT channel you choose.The key is in HOW you leverage this channel. It is MUCH better to choose onechannel with your audience and focus on the QUALITY and on NUANCES insidethis one channel.

When I launched GrowthHackingIdea I focusedonly on referral marketing. And it paid out - 20K subscribers in just 4 months.Then I focused on the nuances of utilizing Amazon as a channel and the bookTOP 101 growth hacks became a bestseller. Now it brings new subscribers everyday.

So, when you create your growth hackingplan, do not try a bunch of channels. They all can work for you if you find anapproach to them. Just focus on one and dive into it completely. Successfulcase studies can help you here.