Secrets to Grow a Small Business Without Spending Money

Ex-Google Tech Lead shares his experience in growing a business from 0 to millions of users fast, and his top tips for you to get going too. All too often, we focus too much on the product we're building, without thinking about the marketing problem. But it turns out that marketing is one of the larger (if not the largest) challenge in starting a business. What if, when considering a business opportunity, we were to focus more on the challenge of gaining customers, rather than the challenge of the product? A business may have hundreds of products, half of which will fail, and most of which will be discontinued within a few years. For many businesses, it is not about the product, but about the brand marketing power that generates revenue allowing re-investment into improving a mediocre product over time until it becomes good. Many excellent products fail, and many bad products succeed. Don't underestimate marketing, make it part of your business plan. 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Video Transcript ( Note: This transcript was auto-generated by YouTube and may not be 100% correct.) 00:00 hey template here and welcome to another 00:01 episode now what we're going to be 00:03 talking about today is how to grow your 00:05 next business into a million users now I 00:09 wanted to remind you guys that I am an 00:10 ex-googler 00:12 lead and I have built a number of 00:14 successful apps that have been able to 00:16 get to millions of users we can take a 00:19 look at the dashboard here you can see 00:21 here that this was one of my apps with 00:23 3.6 million users had another app pure 00:26 iPhone app 25 thousand users another one 00:28 with 15,000 users 40,000 users let's see 00:31 and this was another app with 500,000 00:33 users and I have grown all of these as 00:36 well as having worked for larger 00:38 companies in which there were apps with 00:39 many many more millions of users so I 00:42 would like to think that I know a thing 00:43 or two about how to grow a business from 00:45 zero to millions of users and I'm here 00:47 to give you my top 5 tips on how you too 00:50 can do that as well this video by the 00:52 way is sponsored by hosting er comm 00:54 slash tech lead for all of your website 00:56 and hosting domain needs for like 80 00:59 cents per month and this is a pretty 01:00 neat way to get a static website all set 01:03 up for yourself such that you can show 01:05 off your projects that you're doing I'll 01:06 just show you quickly how a hosting girl 01:08 works you come in here they have this 01:09 really nice control panel I've already 01:11 got this domain name that I'm trying to 01:13 use your tech lead procom you can see 01:15 that it's just going to a default 01:17 landing page but I'm going to begin the 01:18 all set up here they have a lot of 01:20 options like MySQL databases PHP myadmin 01:23 and what I'm really looking for here is 01:26 they have integration with WordPress 01:28 which is pretty neat WordPress powers 01:30 30% of the web by the way with and there 01:33 you go installation has been successful 01:35 I can access the site now what I'm going 01:38 to be doing is I'm going to be selling 01:40 my tech lead season when the HD complete 01:42 which you can purchase for 1995 by the 01:44 way and I want to create a really nice 01:46 beautiful landing page for that so you 01:49 know I think this looks really good come 01:51 here and choose what I would like to 01:52 insert I really like how they let you 01:54 just come in here and drop into HTML 01:57 yeah looking good there so now I'm using 01:59 some flexbox to get this great layout 02:01 here now what I'm going to have to do is 02:04 just add in some PayPal buttons alright 02:06 so there you go you can see my final web 02:08 page my land 02:09 page tech lead procom you can check it 02:12 out excellent device excellent videos 02:14 1995 by now through PayPal and you can 02:17 see here I was able to get this shout 02:18 friend all set up very quickly I have a 02:20 website people can visit it there's 02:22 images there's text I got YouTube videos 02:25 I got Pay Pal button I was able to do 02:27 this all without any coding using 02:28 Holsinger comm they'll get you over 80% 02:31 off on web hosting and domain names 02:32 check out my hosting ur comm slash tech 02:35 lead 15% off now one thing that really 02:37 changed my perspective was one time I 02:39 was building this dating website and I 02:41 started researching this and I realized 02:43 that dating websites are actually 02:46 extremely easy to build and they faced a 02:49 certain class of problem known as the 02:50 chicken and the egg problem in which the 02:53 success of a dating website depends 02:55 purely on how many people you can get on 02:57 there that's it it's a marketing problem 02:59 it's not a technical problem at all so 03:02 that made me realize that there are 03:03 certain classes of businesses that sound 03:06 great at a million users but that don't 03:09 really sound good at 10 users or 100 03:11 users right and so the first thing you 03:14 need to understand is that you need to 03:15 come up with a path that gets your 03:17 business from 0 users to 10 users to 100 03:20 users a thousand users and a million and 03:22 so if you think about like a dating 03:24 website it's really not much fun with 03:26 only 10 users or a hundred users or a 03:28 thousand users but once you can get like 03:31 10 million users on there it starts to 03:32 sound pretty fun and this is something 03:34 that anybody can do but it just costs 03:37 huge amounts of investments in marketing 03:39 and advertising to get that going and 03:41 the challenge the trick is how do you 03:44 grow it to that size and this is really 03:46 not a trivial thing so you have to have 03:48 a good marketing plan in place for your 03:50 product so that's the first thing is to 03:52 understand that marketing is a very 03:54 interesting problem and for some 03:55 businesses it is actually the core 03:57 problem for the business itself I 03:59 remember one time I had collaborated 04:01 with a team member to build this 04:03 framework you know when we were building 04:04 that I said well we got to make this 04:06 really cool landing page and sell it to 04:08 the developers and tried to get a lot of 04:10 people using this stuff and then that 04:12 other developer just didn't seem to care 04:13 and all he did was he put up like a 04:15 readme file like just a plain readme 04:17 text file and then he just launched it 04:19 and said oh an email 04:21 marketing campaign and guess how many 04:23 people actually adopted this product it 04:25 was like 1 or 2 almost nobody was 04:27 interested in using this framework and 04:29 essentially that just tanked the whole 04:31 project so even though this was simply a 04:34 piece of code oftentimes the impact of a 04:36 developer especially if you're working 04:38 and say infra is how many people are 04:40 actually using your code how many people 04:42 are adopting that piece of technology 04:44 that you wrote so in more places that 04:46 you may imagine and actually in all 04:48 aspects of life from say your dating 04:50 life to your personal branding to pieces 04:53 of code that you write to how you 04:54 negotiate and to the businesses that you 04:56 grow marketing has a huge impact on 04:59 anything that you do marketing is very 05:00 important and so you just have to make 05:02 that a priority I know we all just want 05:04 to start building the product and that's 05:06 the most interesting and fun part about 05:07 it but marketing is something that 05:09 cannot be ignored you have to take it 05:11 seriously 05:11 whenever I start on a new project 05:13 actually it is usually spurred by a new 05:16 marketing opportunity so if there's a 05:18 new app platform that opens up say 05:20 Facebook apps open up or iPhone apps 05:23 open up that is a brand new marketing 05:25 opportunity it's not so much the 05:27 technology the technology may be 05:29 interesting and cool too but it is that 05:31 distribution part that actually 05:32 motivates me to jump in and start 05:34 building something 05:35 I won't take on the project if I don't 05:37 have a clear idea about how I'm going to 05:39 get the first hundred users when I 05:41 started the panel apps which is my 05:43 time-lapse photography software 05:44 I had already pre identified a small 05:46 community of photographers who are very 05:49 interested in time-lapse tricks getting 05:51 sliders and motion and all of that stuff 05:53 so I knew right away that if I were to 05:55 build a piece of software I could 05:57 advertise straight to that community of 05:59 people and they would be interested so 06:01 you want to look for niches small sub 06:03 communities like subreddits Facebook 06:05 groups in which you'll be able to talk 06:06 and people will listen if you try to 06:09 talk to everybody you speak to nobody 06:11 now the second tip I have for you is to 06:13 write the current trends in distribution 06:16 and there's always a trend going on 06:17 somewhere these days is quite 06:19 interesting I would say that the trend 06:21 is in influencer marketing you can go 06:23 find youtubers Instagram influencers 06:25 people much like myself and you go as 06:28 them to promote your product so the key 06:31 difference here is that I would say we 06:33 are in an air 06:34 of influencers in the past technology 06:36 had largely been driven by platforms you 06:39 had platforms like Twitter Facebook 06:41 Google+ and essentially it would be 06:43 grassroots campaigns in which you would 06:45 brought has a post that post would be 06:47 shared by many friends and then that 06:48 post would eventually go viral it may go 06:51 Varro around hashtags on Twitter so in 06:54 the old days it was scattered friends 06:55 who would share news and then you would 06:57 say things like oh well you got to go to 06:58 Facebook or Twitter and you would talk 07:00 about these large platforms today the 07:03 difference is that we have gelled into 07:05 communities centered around influencers 07:07 and there's not so much the platform but 07:10 it is the influencer who you should be 07:12 talking to that is the person you 07:14 advertise with there used to be 07:16 something called bloggers and you would 07:18 go to these bloggers who ran their own 07:20 little independent websites and you ask 07:22 them to write about your stuff but 07:24 bloggers have kind of faded out these 07:26 days to be replaced by the influencers 07:28 that's who you need to go to that's the 07:30 trend these days and so overall I would 07:31 recommend you check out YouTube Twitter 07:33 Instagram maybe read it find out who the 07:35 influencers are in your specific niche 07:37 and go ask them to promote your stuff 07:40 maybe pay them a little money or 07:41 something like that get that all set up 07:43 for you not the third tip I have for you 07:45 about how you can grow your business is 07:46 to be genuine being genuine is trending 07:51 these days I would say you know in the 07:53 old days used to be all corporate speak 07:55 people hid behind this bill and 07:57 customers seem to appreciate that they 07:59 thought it sounded professional but 08:01 these days there's been sort of a 08:03 backlash against corporatism so this is 08:06 about building a natural relationship 08:08 with your customers your audience your 08:10 viewers how are you guys doing over 08:12 there say hi to your mom for me I want 08:15 to show you lose something that kind of 08:16 surprised me when I first saw this but 08:18 there's something called the style and 08:20 tone guide for large companies and we 08:24 take a look at what Google has here they 08:26 say that even for them officially they 08:28 want you to aim for a conversational 08:30 tone rather than a formal one be human 08:33 let your personality show be memorable 08:36 you can even be a little funny now in 08:38 then they say aim for a voice in tone as 08:40 conversational friendly and respectful a 08:43 voice that's casual and that 08:45 and approachable and you can see that 08:47 this is actually reflected in other 08:48 documentation as well if you check out 08:50 MailChimp at mail chip we've walked in 08:53 our customers shoes using offbeat humor 08:55 and the conversational voice we play 08:57 with language to bring joy to work we 08:59 don't take ourselves too seriously 09:01 we are plain spoken we are genuine so if 09:04 the way you are communicating with your 09:05 customer is very formal and you think 09:07 that's professional it's actually not 09:09 you're actually damaging your brand and 09:11 you are distancing yourself from your 09:13 customer and you're just being very 09:15 corporate faceless non-genuine entity 09:19 and you lose that chance to develop a 09:21 more human personal relationship with 09:23 your customer which your competitors 09:26 probably are doing so that's the current 09:28 trend these days if you're trying to act 09:30 out corporate and professional then just 09:31 stop that right now now my fourth tip 09:33 for you is the optimize your conversion 09:35 funnel so maybe you set up this 09:37 beautiful landing web page you want to 09:39 make sure that as people are entering 09:40 your website you aren't losing them and 09:42 this is something that you have to 09:43 really be mindful of about I want to 09:46 show you some interesting landing pages 09:47 here actually if you take a look at the 09:49 landing page for Amazon it's quite 09:51 interesting actually that when you get 09:53 towards the purchase flow you'll find 09:55 that nothing on the page becomes 09:56 clickable anymore except the continue 09:58 button in which you can continue to buy 10:00 stuff the Amazon logo that banner you 10:02 can't click on it they just remove that 10:04 so you don't keep going backwards 10:06 even this learn more button if you ever 10:08 tap on that it just opens a brand new 10:10 window in the pop-up but it doesn't 10:12 actually redirect me from this site once 10:14 I get into this portion it just follows 10:16 me straight into the portion where I 10:18 have to place an order you want to 10:20 minimize the number of clicks that your 10:22 user has to make if you check out my 10:23 website here I don't even have a cart I 10:25 just asked for your credit card number 10:27 and then there's a Buy Now button right 10:29 there which completes the whole 10:30 purchasing process for you it's one 10:32 click by essentially accessibility is 10:34 something that I think a lot of people 10:36 underestimate and what you want to make 10:38 sure that your site is easy and simple 10:41 to access for anybody and you want to be 10:43 thinking about people like your mom for 10:45 instance with someone like that be able 10:47 to navigate your app your business your 10:49 website and really understand it and go 10:52 through the whole flow for example if I 10:54 were to build a website many 10:55 so I would just use a standard button 10:57 I'm not going to try to customize it and 10:59 make it look all cool and shiny and 11:00 round it because then it doesn't really 11:02 look like a button anymore right and 11:04 people may not know that that's 11:05 clickable and that whole entry should be 11:08 fun simple clean and understandable now 11:10 the fifth point here is you want to 11:12 consider what people like to call the 11:14 viral loop right which is the flow in 11:17 which when the user gets into your app 11:19 or your business or whatever it is how 11:21 are they going to spread that through 11:22 word-of-mouth and you want to make it as 11:25 easy as possible for people to share 11:27 your stuff so don't underestimate 11:28 building out this referral process in 11:30 which you can give people some goodies 11:33 and bonuses in exchange for them sharing 11:36 your service with their friends their 11:37 family you know I have spent tens of 11:40 thousands of dollars on advertising a 11:42 lot of that stuff doesn't really work 11:44 like I'm not sure if I've ever gotten 11:46 any payoff that felt really tangible to 11:49 me for advertising whereas if a product 11:52 is really good then it will be able to 11:54 grow on its own and that is really how 11:56 you get massive amounts of growth right 11:58 if your goal is to get like say five 12:01 hundred thousand users you're not going 12:03 to get to that amount by paying for 12:04 every single user it's just going to 12:06 cost way too much so you have to make 12:08 sure that there's a way for your 12:09 business to grow in sort of a viral way 12:12 exponential way without you having to 12:14 pay for each single person so for a lot 12:16 of the apps and games I make I always 12:18 take into consideration the time to 12:20 build some sort of referral process in 12:22 which people can have a special link if 12:24 they were to share that they would get 12:25 some in-app goodies some virtual items 12:27 virtual goods something that would just 12:29 incentivize people to help grow that 12:31 product let me know what your top tips 12:33 are on growing a business if you like 12:35 the video give the like and subscribe 12:36 and I will see you next time bye