[WAMA] Bronson Taylor - Co-Founder of GrowthHacker.tv - Thursday 12th June 5pm EST/EDT

Welcome to Warrior Forum Bronson!

We're really excited to have Bronson live with us here at Warrior Forum for a Warrior Ask Me Anything event. He has is an online entrepreneur and growth hacking expert.

Watch the Bronson Taylor WAMA Replay Here

Transcription of WAMA Event with Bronson Taylor:

Alright it is 5:00pm Eastern Standard Time which means it is time for ask me anything. I am Bronson Taylor with Growth hacker T.V. So I am in here in the you stream chat room so I am going to be taking questions on you stream. I am also going to be refreshing the warrior forums, so once I start seeing questions come in, I will start answering them on video. Until they come in I am just going to hang out here and wait for you guys to get going.

And drink some iced coffee.

[00:53]

Alright so the first question is, “Hi, what is this about?”

So basically I’m Bronson Taylor, I’m the host and cofounder of growth hacker T.V. and the warrior forum has invited me to come into their you stream and into their forum and just answer questions. I have interviewed 130 almost 140 guests I believe about start up growth, about marketing, about a lot of things entrepreneurial related and so basically you guys just send me some questions in you stream and the warrior forum and I will do my best to help you guys grow your start up, grow your product. I have made a bunch of mistakes, I have done some things right, and I think I got enough experience that hopefully you can take something away from that.

[01:53]

Alright so the questions are coming in here now. Let me look at some of these. Let me find some good ones here.

Melvin asks, “For a blog what are the ways of growth hacking to improve traffic?”

So if you have a blog I would say you have to differentiate yourself somehow. What can you do to make your blog an event? That would be one thing. If you have something special that is happening there…I will give you an example. Quick Sprout is a blog that does an incredible job at really differentiating. He will produce entire eBooks of 30,000 words long and just give them away for free on his blog. And so when you think about Quick Sprout you don’t group it in with other marketing blogs. It stands head and shoulders above the rest. And when you look at the comments on Neil Patel’s Quick Sprout blog, you realize that people are just amazed at how much content they are getting for free and how high quality it is, how well designed it is.

So I would say don’t think about yourself as a blog like everyone else, find some way to just really differentiate.

Another way you can get traffic is do some joint events on your blog. I have seen a lot of companies they have joint events like webinars and things that they are both talking about on their blogs. And so basically you are borrowing the traffic from one group and kind of funneling it into yours. And so that is a great way to get traffic if you have a blog.

[03:24]

Brian B. asks, “What are the key user acquisition metrics?”

It really depends on your business. When it comes to user acquisition I mean if you are talking about an iphone ap or you are talking about a SAS company, those are really different. If you are talking about a blog or some kind of content play. So it really just comes down to what your key metrics are.

A better question might be, how do you know what your key metrics should be, because there is no one size fits all? And I guess the key metric is, if this metric doesn’t go up into the right we all go out of business. Now you know what your key metric is. And if you get a list of five or ten metrics and if they don’t go up into the right, then your business doesn’t work long term, then those are your key metrics and you can kind of ignore everything else until you get those figured out.

So that is how I would define your key user acquisition metrics.

[04:20]

Alright let me go into the chat room and see if I can find some now. It says, “What are top five B to B growth hacks to increase top of funnel?

I don’t know if I have five off the top of my head, this is HelloPro but I have got one that I learned from a guest, I learned it from a few guests. And they swear by it. So one of the things they do is a lot of larger companies that are B to B they have B to B marketplaces. And so for example Mailchimp has a marketplace. So you can go to Mailchimp, you can look at their ap marketplace, and it is basically all the third party aps that work inside of Mailchimp. And so if you run a company that is serving the Mailchimp audience, you can get inside their ap marketplace.

And one of the things that is great about that is marketplaces are really crowded when we are talking about consumer aps. If you are talking about an iphone ap or an android ap, it is super hard to really stand out unless you are in the top 10 or the new and noteworthy kind of thing. But if you are in a Mailchimp ap marketplace, they get real traffic, they have a lot of users and their B to B people using them also want to use your thing. But it is easier to stand out.

I have even heard of people that were able to get funding or kind of some seed money from these places. Like Shopify does this. Shopify sometimes give away award money to companies that will then put aps in their B to B marketplace. So if I was doing B to B and trying to get traffic, I would really try to ride on the coattails of what other big B to B players are doing and try to get into their ap marketplace.

Let’s see what else I can find here. Let me come back over to the forum.

[06:12]

This is from Mike. “Hi Bronson, how long do you usually wait until pitching a product, whether affiliate or your own to a new email list? Also how far out do you recommend building your auto responder sequence? Seven, thirty, sixty days? Or do you just constantly add to it?”

So when it comes to me, and I don’t know if this is the right answer, but when do you pitch a product? As soon as you can. As soon as you wake up in the morning. I don’t do good with waiting. I like to market. I like to push things. I like to go out there in the marketplace and get feedback and try to sell something as quick as possible. So even if it is a new list I am just kind of bold and blunt and just, hey here is what we have got going on, do you want to buy it? Do you want to learn more about this? Or whatever.

And in terms of auto responder sequences, my firsthand experience is really with growth hacker T.V. And with growth hacker T.V. we don’t really have a sequence that goes out for sixty days of new content. What we do though is it lets you know about all the new episodes as they come out. So every week you are learning about the new episode, new recipes as we write those and things like that. So I have content that I am pushing out kind of infinity. I mean it goes on forever, and I like that kind of sequence

So for the first seven, ten, fifteen days, it is set up to be unique. Then after that it is just letting them know what is new and drawing them back in.

So that is what I have done and it seems to work really well.

Alright let me find some other questions here.

[07:43]

Alright, “What are some of the most creative growth hacking strategies you have heard about?”

I have interviewed a ton of people on the show. One of the companies I am most impressed with is Atlassian. One of the things they did is they found a really creative way to know if a feature change was going to be good or bad long term, without waiting for an entire cohort to pass on.

So let me give you an example of what I mean. They knew if somebody gets into their aps, if they click button A and button B and if they stay on this page for x amount of time, and if they do c and d then that means they are going to be a really high revenue customer and they won’t churn for a long time. But if they don’t do A and B and if they don’t stay on a particular page for a certain amount of time, that they won’t be a good high revenue customer.

So they basically knew what the habits of a great customer looks like for them in terms of the features they are using, when they use them and those kinds of things. Then what they do is when they introduce a new piece to their auto responder, a new feature, a new button, a new layer on their onboarding, whatever, when they introduce something new they don’t just look at the engagement metrics around that new thing, they look at how it impacts all of the other things that they know a high revenue customer will actually do. So then within a very short amount of time, they don’t have to wait for an entire month worth of cohort to pass on to see how they did, they can instantly say, “Okay we put this new feature up yesterday. Today it is driving down the metrics that we want to go up, so let’s lose the feature.” Or, “It is driving up the metrics higher that we want to go up, so let’s leave the feature.”

So it is just a rapid feedback algorithm based on historically what their best customers do inside of their aps, and from the second I heard that I was just blown away. I mean once you hear it, it makes sense but until somebody really formalizes it and puts it out there, I think it is an ingenious growth hack.

Alright let’s see what else we have got here.

[09:53]

Conner O. asks, “I have an 18 month old bootstrap start up. We help small businesses create custom training and communication portals. Our product is awesome but because it is a new way of thinking, there is a ton of education before we sign a new client. Any tips for shortening this cycle?”

I mean one thing I would think about is can you actually get traffic through education so that by the time they are ready to enter into your sell cycle, they are already educated. Is there is a way to create educational content that is also in some small way preparing them for the sell cycle. So then you are not starting cold with somebody that doesn’t know you, doesn’t know about the product, doesn’t know about how it should work. Instead you are starting with a lead that is warmed up. They know about you they know about the space, things like that.

I’ll give you an example. In the next month or so probably, we are going to launch an ap that is going to be for cold email. It is going to be for [10:57 Biz def] people. And we are thinking about, okay how can we really market this ap? How can we put it out there? And so we are kind of doing the same thing. We are thinking alright if we do a webinar where we educate people about how to use email for business development, then all the people that are being educated in that webinar are then potential customers. We are not starting with a cold lead and then trying to ramp them up with a massive education.

In general though education is hard. And so this is kind of a side point, is if you have to educate too much it might not be the market you want to be in. And I know there is going to be a lot of examples where people have done things differently and they have succeeded, even though there is a lot of education, but in general education takes a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of patience, and even with all of that, you may not be able to educate the market enough or you may just be educating the market for a competitor to come in.

I would rather have a market that is already educated and hungry for me and then I can come in and serve needs and I don’t have to tell them why it is awesome, I just tell them why they need my product. So that is kind of a side note.

[12:00]

So let me go back into the you stream here and see what I can find going on there. Alright here is another one. “What is the importance of AB testing?”

I picked that one out from all these because there is a couple of thoughts I have around this that are maybe a little bit unique compared to what other growth hackers might say. Now generally a growth hacker is going to say, “You have to AB test everything. Every small part of your site needs to be AB tested. And eventually we are going to be like Google where we know there is 1000 shades of blue but this shade of blue that the search button needs to be.”

That is true for certain types of companies. If you are Amazon you should do that. If you are Amazon, you have a well oiled machine. You know exactly how much money you make from every visitor. You know exactly all the metrics around everything. You know the feature sets, it is kind of set already, it is Amazon it is not changing dramatically in the next week or two. And so your goal if you are running Amazon is to AB test everything you possibly can and squeeze as much conversion juice as you can from that site, get as much from that traffic as you possibly can. But here is the thing, most people who are listening to this live video right now, they are not Amazon. Instead the way they need to be thinking is this. If you have a car it doesn’t make a lot of sense to polish the chrome is the engine is broken. And for most people watching this, their product has major parts of the engine that are broken. There are massive parts of their features, massive parts of their product that literally don’t work even half as good as they should. There are entire features that everyone is begging for and they are not there yet.

And so what you need to be doing is you need to be thinking what can I do that moves the needle 10x? Not that increases conversion by 1%. What can you do, what feature can you add, what market can you go after, what strategy can you implement that can really blow up things in a dramatic way? You are going to go through that cycle for a long time. Do something dramatic, watch the numbers go up. Do something dramatic, watch the numbers go up. Do something dramatic, watch the numbers go up. Try going for 10x, 10x, 10x. Then when you are mature you AB test like crazy to keep things kind of refined and to keep moving up into the right. But early on there is so much on the table that you can do that has nothing to do with AB testing. You just need to be thinking what massive, awesome, new feature can I put out that will blow people’s minds and help everything go up into the right?

So that is my two cents on AB testing. That being said, it is important, it matters. I AB test stuff a lot but for people watching this there are some bigger fish to fry a lot of times.

Alright let’s see what else we have got here.

[14:47]

“What is the best way to push a new SAS business?”

Recomedia, what do you mean when you say “push”? If you can come back in the chat room and maybe follow up. Do you mean get traffic? Do you mean acquire users? And then I will come back to that question in a little bit.

I want to come back into the Warrior Forum and see what else is going on.

[15:18]

Alright this is from Iris J. “What steps should I take to grow a network of five websites in the beauty, health, fitness and wellness niche?”

Well the first step I would take is figure out who is already getting success in terms of looking at your network of five websites, what are the people that are using it the way you want them to that are converting, that are doing whatever it is that you are trying to get them to do. Figure out who they are and what defines them and what they have in common and then you can start brainstorming about where you can find more of those people because until you know who is getting success from what you are already doing, you don’t know who to go and find more of. So that would be the first thing I would say.

The next thing I would say, because you are in the beauty and health and fitness and wellness niche, is I would say really try to identify with them. People that are interested in beauty and health and fitness, they...I am trying to think how to say this. There is a need they have that is very deep and very psychological. I guess that is the best way to put it. If you are interested in beauty, I won’t say you are vain, but there is something deep inside you that might be broken just a little bit, just to be totally honest. Same thing with health and fitness. Health not as much. But in general people are seeking these kinds of things maybe out of insecurities, maybe because the media is telling them a lot of stuff about beauty that is incorrect and they need to be more secure in who they are. If you can start telling a story around beauty and health and fitness and wellness that is different than what everyone else is saying, everyone else is saying, “You need to get ripped, you need to be a model.” If you hav a story that is, “You need to have overall wellness which looks like x,y,z and here is why you need to overcome your insecurity but not worry so much, but we still have something for you” that can resonate with people.

So I would just say get really deep in terms of the psychology of what is driving those people and then you might be able to kind of use that to grow that network. And as that works you know what to double down on.

[17:33]

Alright, “What skills make up the best growth hackers?”

That is a great question. I would say it is kind of a mix. And let me read my definition of how I define a growth hacker and this will give you an idea of how I see growth hacking. A growth hacker is a creative and data driven individual that uses product, marketing and engineering to scale and sustain user growth.

So really, let me break that down. A growth hacker is first a creative and data driven individual. So I think the best growth hackers have a left and a right brain set of sensibilities that are really strong. If you are pigeonholed in one or the other in terms of the way you define yourself and the way others define you, I don’t think you are going to be a great growth hacker. You might be a good one, but a great growth hacker is going to be the person that is really creative. They know how to see things from a different angle, to come up with novel solutions. They are not afraid of their own ideas. They put bad ideas out into the world to see what happens. At the same time though they like Excel, they like data, they like numbers, they like charts, they like graphs. They want to see those two worlds kind of collide. The creative and the data driven.

So when you put those two together some really cool things happen.

Now the second part of that definition says that they utilize product marketing and engineering. And so that is another thing that a growth hacker really needs to understand. They need to know product. If you are just doing traditional marketing you may not have to really get your hands dirty with the product as much. But a growth hacker needs to understand features and what’s being used and why and the psychology of the user when they are in the product. Not just when they approach the product through the marketing at the top of the funnel. So product is its own set of unique skills. They need to at least have their hands on a little bit.

Also they need to understand marketing. They need to know a little bit about traditional marketing, which might be branding and things like that. They need to know a lot about internet marketing, how to drive traffic, how to convert people on a landing page, how to make people do what they want them to do, the calls to action all that stuff. So they need product, they need marketing, and they also need to understand engineering. The world of growth is moving more and more toward engineering. And what I mean is this. People are using API’s to grow their product. They are using engineers and people who understand software to really get new users. And so when you start including that in the mix that is when some really amazing things can happen.

So what I think makes a great growth hacker; someone that is creative and data driven, someone that understands product, marketing and engineering. If you have all those things which I admit it is hard to have all of those, then you do have the ability to scale and sustain user growth, which is the goal of any growth hacker.

[20:22]

Alright here is another one, it says “What is the difference between growth hacking and inbound marketing?”

In my opinion, inbound marketing is you know the creation of content to pull people into what you are doing. You are giving them a reason to come to you. You are making something of high value that is probably free and giving them access to it, but you are not onboarding them. You are not necessarily converting them to the sale. You are not necessarily worried about retaining them after the sale. You are not worried about up sales and down sales and cross sales. You are not really worried about a lot of the things that happen after that inbound kind of works. And so I would say inbound marketing is one of the pies I would use at the top of the funnel to get people started into my funnel. But there is a lot more that has to happen to create a profitable ap. And I think a growth hacker should be worried really about the entire funnel, the whole experience, everything, not just one possible way to get people into your product.

Alright let’s see here.

[21:21]

Okay Recomedia has come back. I asked them to tell me what they mean by “push” a SAS product. They say, “Promote, acquire users. I currently just finished developing the site so nobody knows of it. Would like to know how to do these things via growth hacking.”

Alright so you are trying to get new users of your SAS ap. You know when it comes down to it, this might be kind of a helpful discussion to sort of get into, is that you know the first thing you have to think is overall, when you have a SAS ap, what is it you are trying to do? At the end of the day you are trying to have a retained user baser that is paying you money month after month after month. Alright, so to get there, what has to be in place?

So I kind of have four things. I call it the growth framework, and these are the things I think about with my own products, my own projects. These four things kind of define everything that has to happen to make a product successful.

The first one is data. You have to be at the point in your product where you are recording the proper data because right now you know you said nobody knows about you and your SAS product and that kind of thing. If you don’t have the right data when people do start hearing about you, then you are not going to know what to do with that traffic and you won’t know what the high quality traffic is from the low quality traffic. And you are just going to be kind of stuck with a lot of activity happening and you know that a lot of people are looking at your stuff, but you won’t have any insights. You won’t know what to do with it.

So the first thing is you need to set up the right whatever you want to use, whether it is mixed panel, Kissmetrics, or the build it in house, whether it is Google analytics or a mix of all of them which is actually what I would recommend, you need to get your head around the data. You need to understand your funnel and what people are converting at, at different layers of it. You need to understand your cohorts and be tracking them. Understand the sources of traffic that you have and break down sources by how well they perform on your KPI’s. You need to know what your KPI’s are.

So the first thing if you are trying to build a SAS ap or really anything, is you have to have the right data in place and it seems weird because right now there is really no data. Nobody is on your site, nobody is in your ap, nobody is doing anything, so it seem s kind of overkill to build up data, but when it does start getting used and you don’t have data, it is just a lot of wasted opportunity. So get your data in place.

The second thing is, basically then you need to get traffic. Without traffic you can’t do anything else. It is really the first piece of the puzzle after you are recording data.

So to get traffic I break it down into three things. There are three ways to get traffic. And basically the first one is Buy, the second way is Barter and the third way is Build. You can buy traffic, you can barter for traffic or you can build traffic. And so once you get your data in place, you can buy traffic. If you think your lifetime value is high enough, then you can go and buy traffic. There is so many ways you can buy traffic. You can buy traffic on social networks, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn that kind of thing. You can buy traffic in search engines, Google and Bing. You can buy traffic on media property like blogs and things like that, You Tube. You can buy traffic on email newsletters but if the LTV is there, buy traffic.

The next way you can get traffic is by bartering. You can do deep partnerships with relevant companies. You can tell them “Hey, every time you get a new sign up, why don’t you also tell them about us. And every time we get a new sign up we will tell them about you”. And as long as we are not pure competitors and as long as it is a service that they might use both of them then that could work. So now you are getting traffic, but you didn’t do anything for it. You didn’t have to buy it, you bartered for it. You could do promotional swaps with other companies. You can go to a company and say, “Hey I’m going to tweet about you, and you tweet about me. I am going to send out an email about you, you send out an email about me.” You can do that kind of stuff.

Another way to barter for traffic is guest blogging. You are essentially blogging saying, “Hey I will give you value which is inbound content for you, which is a guest post or a podcast or something like that, and in return I’m going to put in the signature, that they can come and they can actually learn about my SAS products so we both benefit.”

Which reminds me, that is what I want to do right now. I have bartered for traffic with the Warrior Forum. So right now if you are listening to this, here is what I want you to do. I want you to go to growthhacker.tv/warrior. And I have got three free growth recipes I am going to send to you. So you don’t have to do anything, just give me your email and we are going to send you three free growth recipes. And you have just witnessed somebody that is bartering for traffic because Warrior Forum asked me to come on here, and I’m thinking in my mind, well that’s great but what I’m actually going to do is, I want to get traffic from this experience. I am not going to do this because I am bored. I have a busy life; I have got stuff to do at home. I am doing this partly because I want to help, but partly because I know I am going to get traffic at growthhacker.tv/warrior and you guys are going to be happy to get three free growth hackers that you can use to grow your startup.
So I am bartering there.

Other ways you can barter is really just find anyone that has an audience, find something they need from you and work out a deal.

Okay the third way you can get traffic is by building your own traffic. This is the long term kind of strategy. You know you can buy traffic and get it instantly. You can barter for traffic and get it this week. You can build traffic and it is going to take you a few months, maybe even longer. But building traffic means you are building inbound content and over the long term people are going to learn that you are an authority, and they are going to come to you. It’s through social media, maybe through referral systems you build your own traffic. You know this person signs up, they refer a friend. Maybe through onetime events like webinars and contests and conferences, you can drive traffic that way. Use back links on things you put out into the world .You can optimize your pages with SEO. You have an affiliate program. But you are essentially building your own traffic. You don’t get to ride on the coattails of somebody else.

So the first thing I said was you have got to have your data in place. Then you have got to get traffic. The next thing is you have got to convert that traffic. You are trying to get your SAS ap out there. I am still answering the question about the SAS ap, how to push it and acquire users. You have got to convert them and then you have got to retain them.

So let me know if you guys want me to dive into how to convert them. Go into the chat room on you stream and just tell me yes or no that you want me to tell you how I would convert traffic once I have actually gotten the traffic. Because I don’t want to ramble on too long on that one question unless you guys are into. So I will wait for you guys to tell me. I think it would be interesting but you can let me know.

Alright, let me see what else we have got here, then I will come back.

[28:01]

Let’s see. “How do you determine user acquisition cost?”

Well I mean the way I determine it, I keep things really simple. There is usually a complicated formula for everything online. You know if you do a search, “how to determine the lifetime value of a customer” there is going to be ten different formulas and some of them you need a degree in Math to figure it out. But usually there is a curl, a heart of truth that doesn’t take a lot of advanced Math. So user acquisition cost is you just look at how much it cost to get one person to sign up. So if you are spending on ads let’s say and you spend $1 per visit from Facebook ads. So Facebook is charging you $1 every time they send somebody to your site, and one out of 100 people actually become an acquired user for you, well that means it took you $100 to get that user because you had to spend $99 that didn’t convert to spend $1 that did convert.

So essentially if you spent $100 on Facebook ads, then $1 to get one person on your site, 100 people come to your site, if your conversion rate is 1% then now it took you $100 to acquire 1 new customer. So now you know how much it cost you to acquire a customer and that allows you to do some other cool things around that.

[29:22]

Alright let me come into you stream here. Somebody is saying yes. Alright so I am assuming you want to know more about how you would convert people once you get them on to your page. So there is a handful of ways that I try to convert people. One of the ways is I consider conversion to be a process. Some people consider just a onetime event and they try to do it all at once. So as soon as you hit the page, they are just trying to throw everything and the kitchen sink at you. But really it is a process and so that is the first thing. And the process might be, you know a good example is Kissmetrics. A lot of Kissmetrics inbound content if you read their blog post, on the right side or the left side of their blog post you will see a thing, “Hey download our free eBook and give us your email address to get it.” So they knew that getting on the blog was the first step, and then getting an eBook in your hands was the second step, and then eventually down the road they might get you into a paying plan on Kissmetrics. But they are viewing their conversions as a process and not a onetime event.

If you came to their blog post and it said, “Hey buy right now. This is the deal, this is the offer, buy it right now” it might turn away some people. It might turn away a lot of people.

So the first thing is realize that conversions in a lot of cases, is a process. The next thing really is a hook. When somebody hits a page, there has to be something that is super compelling. I mean usually this is the headline and the sub headline. There has to be something that just screams at you in big letters that you can’t miss that tells you why you should care. It needs to speak to you very deeply and you need to read it and say, “Yes they get me, they know me, this is the pain that I need solved, or this is the experience that I want to have, or this is the pleasure that I have been seeking.” There has to be something that just takes up a ton of the page that just speaks to them so clearly that now they feel compelled to figure out what the rest of the page is going to say.

And that is true no matter what you are doing, if you are building a SAS ap, if you are building blogs, whatever you are doing if you are selling ecommerce stuff, you need to grab them and let them know yes you are the right person, you are the kind of person we want on this site, we are going to speak to you very intimately and eventually you are going to do whatever we want, what we call actions. So you need a hook.

The hook really just highlights the primary thing that they are searching for very deeply.

Another way you can get a lot of conversions is through scarcity. Think about supply and demand right. If supply is always infinite, then no matter how high the demand is, the supply is never low enough to really create a situation where people need to pay more or act now right. So what you have to do is you have to sometimes arbitrarily reduce supply. You have to create scarcity in the equation.

So one of the ways to create scarcity is through time restraints. Tell people, “Okay here is the deal but it will only last for an hour.” “Here is the deal but it will only last for a week.” So now they have to make a decision and they can’t just wait forever. See you have created scarcity, you have reduced the supply of something, and as soon as somebody knows they might be left out, now they want in on the deal. And I will give you a stupid example.

I drink ice coffees all the time and McDonalds, now their ice coffees are $1 a piece. So I literally go to their drive through every day and I buy them two at a time because I am thinking, man in a month or so their ice coffee is going to go back to regular price which is $2.54 each and that means I have got to pay $5 to get two of these, and now I am only paying $2. So they put a time restraint on this dollar deal .And now I am acting like a fool going to McDonald’s every day buying ice coffees two at a time. They introduced scarcity completely arbitrarily. Why can’t it be $1 forever? Because that wouldn’t make me act that way, and they know that.

Another way you can have scarcity is through event restraints. Only this many people are allowed in, maybe, and once we have this many people at the event, nobody else can come in. So now everybody wants in, even though before they may not have cared at all.

Another way is to have product restraints. We only give these features to certain people, so you have got to get in now to make sure you get these. There is a million ways to do this. Basically introduce scarcity and your conversions will go up. If people can always get that deal at any time, and there is no scarcity in any way, then why are they going to do something now? They won’t, people are lazy, they put things off, they are not going to convert. They will find a reason to not do whatever it is you want them to do on your website so you have to create scarcity and make them do something now.

Another way to get conversions; have social proof and there is a lot of ways to have social proof, but at the heart of it, we are social animals. If there is anything that is true to humans it is that when we are alone for two long we get crazy in our own head. We love community. We love the social aspect of who we are. So you need to include in their case studies, who is using it and why is it working for them because when I read a case study I am thinking that could be me, because I am a social animal, I have the ability to have empathy and imagine myself in their shoes.

You need to have user quotes. Show me somebody that just quotes about you and they are glowing, they love what you have done, and I am going to think wow somebody else in the world loves it, and I am a social animal and so I respect what other social animals say. So you have got to have quotes.

User stats; tell me how many people are using your product. Are ten thousand using it? Are one hundred thousand using it? If I know 100,000 people are doing something, then I am going to feel like a moron if I don’t get onboard because I am a social animal. So to drive up conversions make sure you put in social things.

Another thing that drives up conversions big time is have a story. Another thing about being a human is we love stories. We want to know the genesis of the product, we want to know about the people’s lives who built it. So if you can tell a story that gets them intimately connected to you, they don’t feel like they are buying from a cold faceless organization. They feel like they are really taking part in a movement of sorts. So tell a story.

Another thing is have trust factors you know. The design itself is a trust factor. Make sure your stuff is well designed.

Have risk reversals, when you try to convert people .Make sure there is a money back guarantee. No risk on you, I will take all the risk. Make sure you have on there any accreditations, affiliations or associations that you are with. Put on there, visa card logos and master card logos. Let them know that you are with the right company, you can trust me. Put on there any media coverage you have. If you have been on Mashable let me know. If you have been on Tech crunch let me know, because I need some trust indicators.

Another thing to drive up conversions when people get to your product or whatever it is you are pushing is give them the ability to do research. Now some people think it is all about the research stuff but really this is down after you have already understood it is a process, you have a hook, you have built in the social stuff, there is a good story, they trust you, now they go and they say, “Okay let me do some research.” So you need to have on your site a list of benefits, a list of features, maybe a competition comparison. “Here is what we do; here is what our competitors do.” And people can see that side by side. Give them some data visualizations. Make them feel like they are a scientist looking for the best deal and they found it because if you give them the tools to do research, they are going to feel not only moved emotionally to buy from you, they are going to be moved logically to buy from you.

Give them pricing, let them know exactly what they get and why. Have a frequently asked questions so they can do research that way. Have a live chat, let them interact with you, give then contact information on the site so they can follow up and ask you specific questions about their situation. Let them do research so they can feel good about what they are getting ready to buy into.

And then last thing that I really think when terms of conversions is your call to actions. And here are some things to think about which are called actions. Have a single call to action. Don’t ask for ten things, ask for one thing. If you want something it is the main thing that moves your business forward, ask for it. The next thing is, have the call to action positioned near strong page elements. So if you have a really good quote from a user or there is a really good stat about your company, put the CDA next to that, because they are going to see them side by side. “Oh they got 100,000 users. Here is the buy now button. I am going to click it.”

Make sure the call to action is contrasted in color to the rest of the site. Make it be the thing that kind of sticks out like a sore thumb.

Also in your call to action use action words: “Get access now” whatever that kind of stuff. Let them know it is a movement, there is some flow to it. And just in general, make sure the site has strong energy and a sense of momentum so they really feel like, they come to a site, you hook them with a headline, you tell them there is some scarcity, you need to hurry up and make a decision, here is the social proof all the people who love what we are doing. Here is the story of who we are, you can trust us, here is a bunch of reasons why, do your research. Now boom you are ready to buy.

There is a flow to that and by the time they get to the buy button, I mean they just don’t’ know how to say no if you really handle your conversions right.

So anyway if you are trying to push a SAS product or a lot of other things, get your data in place. Understand the ways you can get traffic, and get that traffic. Then work on converting it with all the different things that I just went through.

[38:46]

Alright let’s see what else we got here. I’m moving onto something different. Alight, “What are some growth hacking tactics to get some early users and also potential customers?”

Here is one that I like. I like betalist. You can go on betalist, they have a huge following of people that like to know about new products that are coming out. They want to be the beta users, thus betalist. And what I always do is I always put up a landing page for anything I am doing on betalist, and you can get I mean a few hundred and sometimes a few thousand depending on your product and how well positioned you are, people to sign up on your list and sign up for you product. Here is a little hack you can do with betalist. You can actually put up a landing page for a new product that betalist will link to, but instead of it being a new product it can be a new feature within your existing product that allows you to grab a couple more thousand emails.

So for example on growth hacker TV we wanted to start doing recipes where we write some core recipes that can help you grow your startup. And by the way if you want three free growth recipes, go to growthhacker.tv/warrior and we will give you three free growth recipes.

But anyway we wanted to give away growth recipes as part of what the subscribers get. And so we actually made a landing page for growth recipes as if it was a new product, put it on betalist, got a bunch of people to sign up as if it was a new product and then funneled them into our existing growth hacker TV. And that way we were kind of able to kind of have a launch even though it wasn’t a new product.

And so that worked really well for us. I love betalist so maybe try that one.

[40:29]

Alright let us see what else we got here. Let me come back to the warrior forum now. Let me refresh it and see what we got.

Alright somebody said, “I really like your timer and scarcity on the growth hacker recipe page. That is interesting. I see that happening a lot also on warrior forum with salestime and dimesales.”

Yeah I would say, I will just give you some insights here. That drop down timer, internally we call it the hombre bar because he first one we ever built for growth hacker TV it said, “Hey hombre” on the top left in bold letters there and so it is kind of our funny name for it, it is the hombre bar. The hombre bar is like a psychological masterpiece. I mean it is an orchestra of awesome in terms of growth hacking.

Basically it gets their attention, a few seconds on the site and this bar drops down from the top and it says, “Hey hombre” which is just a weird way to talk to anybody. And so they see it and they want to know what it is. And it basically tells them, look here is a timer and it is counting down right now, you can watch it count down. And if you do something before that timer hits zero it is going to work out in your benefit. When people see the hombre bar they freak out psychologically and they have to go and do something right that second.

I have used it a few different times and a few different products and the conversion rates just sky rocket every time we put it into place. So I would recommend installing an hombre bar on just about everything. And you are going to get some pushback from some people. And here is the thing though, your conversion rates are going to be so good, it just doesn’t matter. So I would say definitely put that into play.

[42:10]

Alright another good question. “How do you figure out what price to charge for a SAS business? Good ways to ask?”

It is always a tough thing about pricing but it is really, here is what you have to realize, it is arbitrary. How much does something cost? Well how much will they pay for it. The value of anything is in the eye of the beholder. And so there is no right price to charge for any product. There is the price that will maximize your profit, that is all there ever is. There is not a correct price. Imagine though it is kind of a bell curve and somewhere on that bell curve is the price that maximizes your profit but in no way is that the “tight price” that is just the one that maximizes your profit. So that might be the right one for you.

So what you have got to do is you are trying to find where that center of the bell curve is. You charge too much and you don’t get enough people signing up to make up for charging too much. You charge too little and it is tapered off on the other end. And even though you have a bunch of people you are charging so little you are not maximizing your profit. But there is somewhere in the middle of that bell curve right at the top of it, where you have charged the amount so it is the right amount of people so that they are not leaving because it is too expensive, but there is not so many of them because it is so cheap and you are really maximizing your profit. And the only way to do that is through testing.

You can look at what other companies are charging and if they are companies that you know are interested in data then you probably can realize they have done some testing, and maybe you can just assume some outcomes they have learned there. But there is no way to know, you just have to put it out there and see what will happen. And then don’t be afraid to change it.

I mean that is the thing about business in general. People think once they make a decision it is just set in stone forever. But who decided that? You can do anything you want. Right now growth hacker TV is $29 a month. If I want to make it $35 a month tomorrow, I can and that’s fine and who cares. If I want to make it $50 a month tomorrow, that is fine also. If I want to make it $10 a month tomorrow, it just doesn’t matter. I get to do whatever I want because I own the business. So that’s the way you need to view it. Try some different things, see what happens, but again make sure the data is in place or you are just changing things and not really knowing how much it is helping or hurting you.

But yeah so there is no quick answer but hopefully that helps a little bit.

Alright let’s see here.

[44:30]

Alright this one maybe you can follow up with and give me some more info. “What is the most effective way to pitch an idea to a company?”

What do you mean? Are you talking about being kind of an entrepreneur where you are pitching an idea to a big established company and they don’t really want new ideas? Are you talking about pitching an idea to an investor? Pitching an idea as a sales process, to another company? This is Shovehandemgandem. So come back in the chat room on you stream and follow up with me there and let me know what you mean by that.

Alright let me see what else we have got here. Let me scroll through some more of these questions.

[45:15]

Alright this is a good one from Pratheeb, he says, “How do get more international clients. For an example I am in Asia and my target customers are in UK. How can I reach them? Yes can set up website and get it ranked on Google for UK local keywords. Other than that give me some tips on getting international clients. Direct mailing; will it work? Thanks in advance for your tips.”

Pratheeb, I would say the best way is to ride on the coattails of someone else who understands that market because here is the thing if you are not in that market your knowledge of what they need is not going to be very deep. You knowledge of how to serve them is not going to be very deep. Even if you are great in your country, going to another country they see things in their own way and it may not translate. So what you need to do is you need to find someone you can have a strategic partnership with. And what this means is you need someone on your team that is great with business development.

We have a guy on our team, he is one of the cofounders of growth hacker TV, Mike Hardenbrook. He is one of the best guys at business development I have ever seen in my life. It is unbelievable the kinds of strategic partnerships that he can get into place. If you don’t have that skill set of biz dev, you need to find someone to be part of your team that can do biz dev because if you are going into a new market and it is an international market you need someone who can structure some deals. And then you can have open to you a knowledge base of how that country thinks. You can open to you a set of users that are willing to use your products and you have the trust of this other company handing off some of their users to you and then they trust that company so they are implicitly going to trust you also.

And so you really need some biz dev strategic partnerships I would say. And then once you get things rolling with that, then you can know enough to really do some paid per click maybe or all the things we talk about, ranking for local words and stuff like that. But I would try out partnership. It is a short cut to some really big wins sometimes.

Alright let’s see what else we got.

[47:23]

Alright this is a good one. It says, “Growth hacking seems to be a skill that large companies with lots of investment use to achieve exponential growth. How can I apply growth hacking strategies or tactics in a small ecommerce site.”

Yeah I mean I would say that the fundamental principles of growth hacking, it is really understanding your data, understanding conversions, understanding traffic and understanding retention. And all those things are not necessarily just for a large company. Anyone can apply those you know even to an ecommerce site. So really do you have data in place? Are you tracking what you need to track? Have you put in all the levers that I mentioned that really can help you convert those people? Have you thought about the three ways you can get traffic? You can buy, you can barter, you can build. Are you getting traffic those three ways? Why are you ignoring one of those ways, is there a reason?

And then once you get that traffic, once you convert it, are you doing the things you can do to retain traffic? I mean all those things work for ecommerce all the same. And so I would say don’t get caught up in thinking growth hacking is just a viral loop and is just for consuming facing free iphone aps. It is much broader than that. So I would just broaden how you view growth hacking.

And then it definitely applies to ecommerce sites. You know we talked some about scarcity. What is a deal you can give them that is scarce and then they will want to buy it from you?

We had a guest on growth hacker TV and the name of the company is escaping me but it is a large company and if I remembered it you would know the name. And they sell clothing. And one of the things they did before sign up is they had a beta page there and you could sign up. And if you were one of the first x number of people to sign up, you got in early. And they are just an ecommerce site. And yet they had all this frenzy around signing up early, make sure you get access, and make sure you get this discount or something. And that is straight out of a growth hacking playbook and yet they are an ecommerce men’s clothing company. So really there is so much you can do there.

Alright let’s see here. Let me scroll down here, I’ve answered a lot of these so I’m trying to find some new ones here. I’m going to refresh the page.

[49:55]

Okay here is a good one. “What kind of programming languages should a growth hacker know?”

You know it is funny, any time you talk about programming languages, it becomes a religious battle. So there is no way to answer this without making a lot of people mad. But the truth is, who cares? I mean who cares what language something is written in honestly. I mean a lot of people are, you know, think Ruby on Rails is the greatest thing ever. Yeah? Well Facebook is in PHP and they are worth billions of dollars. So okay who cares? It doesn’t matter what language you are using. The thing about growth hacking is it is more about psychology, it is more about marketing and understanding the flow of traffic online. How you program the thing that you are going to use, who cares? I mean people don’t look at your code and buy your product. They look at your headline and buy your product. I am more concerned with your copywriter than what language you are writing in.

So really it is just a matter of really majoring in the majors, minoring in the minors. I mean we write everything in PHP. Really that is old school and people think that is dumb. Do we really care? There are a lot of failed companies that use Ruby. At the same time there are a lot of awesome companies that use Ruby and there are a lot of growth hackers using Ruby.

So at the end of the day I don’t care what language anything is written in. It is about the end user experience and the growth hacks you do around that. It is not about the things that nobody is actually going to see.

Alright let’s see here.

[51:16]

“Is the audience based business model only profitable long term, podcasts etcetera?”

Audience based business models. I mean growth hacker TV is an audience based business model and I mean it has been profitable in the short term and so far it is profitable in the long term. I mean we have only been around a year but our numbers are still going up into the right, nothing is tapering off. So I don’t have firsthand experience of what it looks like in five years, but I mean in the short term you know we are in the audience based business and it has been good in the short term and the long term. I think that you have got to keep things fresh, and you have got to serve your audience, and you have to have your hand on the pulse of why people are watching or listening to you, but I mean TV is audience based business model and the TV is doing well you know. And yeah there is some ad spin coming online hat used to be on TV and things are moving and shifting, and there needs to be more spend in mobile compared to how big mobile is, but TV is not going anywhere, we are still obsessed with it, and all they do is build audiences. There is a lot of ways to build audiences and make money, short term, long term, all kinds of ways. So hopefully that helps a little bit.

Let’s see here.

[52:39]

Okay this is one that says, “I have a graphic intense software. How do I pitch the idea for a start up to angel investors?”

If it is graphic intense and I am assuming what you mean is the graphics are core to the actual idea, that if they don’t, if you can’t visualize it then it is going to be hard for them to actually give you seed funding and that kind of thing. I would say you have to at least give them blow away screenshots. You know in this lean, starve environment it is really hard to give an excuse as to why there is not a working prototype. I mean people just don’t buy it. There are too many programmers looking for an opportunity. If you are a decent leader at all you can get somebody to program something for you for a little bit of money or a little bit of equity.

So the first question they are going to have is, if it is graphic intense and yet you don’t have anything to show me graphically, then you are not a good entrepreneur because you couldn’t get somebody to give it their time for the possibility of what you could give them in the future. And if you can’t get somebody to give up something, then you are not able to lead a company. You have give people a vision on where we are going and what it is going to look like when we get there, and how awesome it is going to be if you get involved and your skill set plays into the start up.

So you actually have to do something. You need either some super high fidelity screenshots to get the visuals going in their mind or you need a prototype that doesn’t look bad. But I mean there is just no excuses. Ideas are too cheap, nobody cares about ideas. So if you can’t show some execution before talking to an angel investor, I don’t think they are going to be that interested. They want to see some execution because there are too many armchair entrepreneurs. “I had this idea, I had that idea, I knew about that ten years ago.” Who cares? Build something and then we will care.

Okay let’s see what else we have got here.

[54:28]

“When is the right time to give a user a referral link? After a conversion, a sign up etcetera?”

Yeah I mean I wouldn’t wait too long. Basically the way I view people buying when they get onto the site is it is a series of yes’s. You are getting them to say yes to the headline. You are getting them to say yes to your social proof. You are getting them to say yes to your benefits and eventually your features. You are getting them to say yes, over and over and over and over until eventually you get them to say yes to the big thing which is, “Here is my credit card number. Yes I want to buy this right now.” They are excited about whatever you are doing. By the time they buy they are really excited about who you are and what you are doing.

So at that point in time, get them to refer people or maybe you know right before that if it makes sense, if you refer people you get a discount. However you do it, don’t wait until tomorrow, don’t wait until next week, I mean it is when they are in that momentum of yes. They went from headline to buy now. They have gotten so much momentum, that snowball has gotten so big that there is just no reason you don’t take advantage of that to get everything you can out of them in that point in time because by tomorrow they are in somebody’s else’s snowball. Tomorrow they are in somebody else’s site getting all that momentum saying yes to them. And if they get an email from you tomorrow saying, “Hey why don’t you refer your friends?” They are like. “I was really sold yesterday but now I am really excited about this other thing.

So I would say when you get them saying yes, keep them saying yes until you get what you need out of them.

Alright let’s see here.

[56:04]

“Making a website full of ads makes the user go away from the site, then what should you do to get paid?”

I mean you have got to have a good business model you know. If you can’t have enough ads to keep the people looking then that business model is broken for your vertical. There are some companies, I am trying to think of some of the names of them here. There is, hold on let me look it up see what I can find. I can’t find it. But I mean there is always these gear sites when they have like gear for men and it is just like all these awesome products that men love and they have ads on there galore. Nobody cares because the ads are awesome, the content is awesome. I mean if people are so driven away from you because of ads, there is something more fundamental broken. You don’t really have their interest. They don’t really love you yet. Maybe the ads you are showing are not relevant enough. There is something deeper about the business model that needs to be fixed.

[57:07]

Alright, “Why email is still one of your most effective channels?”

I love this question. Alright, why is email so awesome, because email lets me put something on your to do list without you giving me permission. I mean think about it. Like I am inbox zero type of guy okay. When I wake up in the morning I like to get my inbox to zero or as close to it as I can. So if you have emailed me something I feel compelled to archive that email. I need to get it out of my inbox. But I am also a nice guy and I don’t like archiving stuff if they ask me a question, or they need something from me, or they need a favor and I can do that for them. So what that means is I have two things at play. I have got to get my inbox to zero but I am too nice to delete it without really trying to help. So what am I going to do? I am going to respond. And I am not the only one that does that. There is a ton of people that they want to get rid of emails but they are also going to do something for some of the emails when they can.

And so email is just this amazing way that gives you a direct connection with people. They are focused on only your email, they are not focused on ten emails at once. You have their attention, it is personal, you can make it sound like it is one to one communication and not one to many. And there are just so many things that email does, that is just different.

When you are on Facebook there is ads galore, there is ads everywhere. And to go back to the last question people use it because they love Facebook so much. It is okay that there is ads and sometimes they even like that there are ads because it is things they are interested in. But with email think about the difference in reading email and looking at Facebook. On Facebook you are in competition with the newsfeed, with the ads, with the chat, with the real time messages you are getting, everything. In email you are not in competition with anybody. They are opening your email and if you have got a good subject they will open it. And once they open it if you have got good content that doesn’t take forever to read and gets to the point, they are going to read it. And if the call to action is clear they are going to respond and do what you want.

And so email is just super powerful for really all those reasons.

Alright let’s see what else we got here.

[59:15]

Alright a more basic question. “How do you find partners? Suggestions to convince them to work with you?”

You know when it comes to finding partners, I mean partners just having basic social skills I mean I mentioned Mike Hardenbrook before but me and him became partners because we met for coffee to talk about business and some possible projects. But it was just we were not afraid to meet somebody in real life and have a cup of coffee and talk business. We didn’t know what the agenda was and we didn’t know how it was going to play out but we just thought nothing can go bad by meeting and talking and learning from somebody.

And so if you just sit in your room all day and you are not interacting with the world it is hard to get partners I think.

Another way how to find partners is be an inspiring person. If you have boring ideas and boring strategy to reach a boring market, well nobody is going to want to partner with you. But if you have an exciting idea, an exciting market, an exciting plan and you can communicate it with just a little bit of energy then people are going to want to be a part of what you are doing. They are going to feel like they are missing out by not getting onboard with you. And so you need to really, it is basic leadership is what it is, but those things really matter.

Another thing I would say is make sure that your brother is a genius, because that is what I did. I just made sure that my brother was a software genius and that way I could partner with him when we became adults and it would all work out. That one is a little bit harder because you have no control over it whatsoever. But if you find a way to actually control that, just make sure your brother is a genius and then things kind of work out long term.

Alright let’s see what else we got here. Let me refresh.

[01:01:08]

Alright here is a funny one. “Why don’t you use your @bronsontaylor Twitter account? We would like to read your opinions on Twitter for everyone.”

Yeah I don’t really use Twitter because in the past I’ve tried it a few times, to personally use it and I just realized it is a massive colossal naval gazing waste of my life. That I mean, you know I am trying to get sales on something usually. And so if I am trying to drive traffic to my personal account it is not the best way for me to get sales. We have a growth hacker TV account that is a good way to get sales, so we use that.

It also makes me, every time I am in life I am trying to think what is a clever way to say this on Twitter or what is a great photo I can take for Twitter instead of just living my life? I like living my life. I like living in the moment. I don’t like thinking about how am I going to make my own life palatable to someone else all throughout the day. And so you know, Twitter just doesn’t work for me personally. In the future I might use it, I’m not saying I won’t, but I just haven’t been compelled to yet, I’m not sure why I would do it yet. There is just not enough reason there. Because on growth hacker TV I get to express myself, I get to give my opinions about things, I get to interact with people in things like this. This is meaningful to me, I am trying to help and I am really giving my heart to this. This is more meaningful than me just putting stuff out on Twitter all day. And Twitter it seems like people are just retweeting and favoriting without actually thinking. If it sounds clever they will favorite it. If it will make them look interesting they will retweet it. But I wanted to do something like this because I know we are actually interacting. I feel like this is deeper for now.

So that is what I am doing.

[01:03:00]

Alright, “When creating video for the web how do you find what content will resonate? Google trends, social etcetera?”

Yeah I mean I create video for the web and you know I am all about data and there is a lot of services where they will show you in your video when your traffic goes away. So basically when does your video get boring and they stop watching. So you can use those things and you can insights about your video. Find out why they leave at certain points and why they stay at other points, and you are learning about their psychology.

But here is the real thing when it comes to video. You have to know the audience. You have to know what it is they are looking for, why they are looking for it and you have to give them the goods. Video, it is a hard medium because you can’t scan a video. Like right now you can’t just scan the cliff notes of what I’m doing on you stream. You are either here and you are engaged, or it is not interesting to you and you are going to leave. And so I have to actually know what it is you care about and make it engaging and give you insights and help you move the needle in your own business.

And so I would say in the same way you just have to really know your audience and what they are after and bring them the goods.

At growth hacker TV one of the things I do is I ask questions that I really want the answer to. I don’t ask questions unless I am interested in them personally. And so if you start the first episode and work your way forward, you are going to see my growth as a marketer, my growth as a growth hacker. The questions I asked early on were basic because I needed more basic insights. As I get further along, I ask things that are more nuanced because I have learned some of the basics and now I am trying some different things with those basics. And so I would say I ask questions that I care about and that means a lot of other people probably will too. And the cool thing about growth hacker TV is wherever you are at in that continuum there is something for you there.

Also for people that are coming in new here, if you go to growthhacker.tv/warrior I have a free gift for you. So you can get three free growth recipes at growthhacker.tv/warrior.

[01:05:14]

Here is one. “Do you think web shows like yours on business could create traction if it was based locally?”

Maybe in the right location, San Francisco, L.A, New York, those kinds of places, a decent sized city, then maybe. Colorado, there is some stuff going on there with the foundry and you know they have some stuff around some of the cities there. I would say it is possible but it is hard because it is a funnel, so if you reduce the amount of people you are reaching by saying I am only going after this city, that conversion funnel may only have a few people by the end of it. Where if I am worldwide, my conversion funnel, the math just works better.

So it is possible. I don’t know if it would be a business – business. But try it; who knows.

[01:06:06]

Alright, “What about Instagram made it worth 1 billion by Facebook?”

I’m not a financial expert, I’m not going to say this is the answer or anything like that. But I mean what it comes down to is it is communication. Communication is so basic to being a human that to not communicate makes you un-human. It is hard to imagine what it means to be a human if you don’t speak to other humans and have them speak to you or communicate in some way. And that is really all Facebook is. Facebook is a way for me to communicate and other people to communicate with me. With the rise of these great cameras on our phone and the rise of just the visual medium of the internet, because early on the internet was all text, now it is video and it is photos as much as text. Instagram was really a visual communication and it was so good at communicating that Facebook saw it as a threat and they decided to buy it. And that is the way Facebook is going to view anything that is communication based. Anything that allows people to communicate with people, Facebook is either going to view them as a competitor or an acquisition target. And Instagram was a way to communicate, not just a way to take photos. It wasn’t a photo ap it was a communication ap. And I think that was why it was worth $1 billion. Communication will always be one of the greatest in terms of valuation things that we can do as a species.

[01:07:40]

Alright here is one. “Do you think the quality of videos make a huge difference in creating an impact at the beginning?”

Yeah I mean people are sensitive to quality. We live in a world where you know we know what it looks like when something is done well and we know what something looks like when it is not done well. But I would say it depends on what you mean by the word “quality.”

So for growth hacker TV it has never been quality in terms of the video resolution, it just hasn’t been. It has never been quality in terms of the most perfect sound ever. I use a decent microphone, I use a decent camera, I use decent lightning. I don’t use world class microphone and video and lighting. But what I do bring quality with is the content. If you watch the episodes you will learn an insane amount. And so I’ve decided I am not going to skip on that quality but on the other stuff I’m not going to break my back to have the quality of CNN because people aren’t watching me because I have a tricaster and $1000 in lights. They are watching me because I’m going to help them grow their business, and as long as I keep helping them grow their business, then my business is going to grow. So you have to define what quality is for your audience and then work backwards from there.

And don’t catch someone else’s definition of quality or you will just be chasing something for no reason.

[01:08:56]

Alright let’s see. Alright, “Can you suggest the best low cost method of reaching wide young audience for a custom apparel store?”

You know when it comes to fashion, it is one of those things where we know word of mouth matters for everything. There is no company no matter how data driven they are, no matter how much they know where a lot of traffic comes from that word of mouth doesn’t play some role in it.

I mean just think about general life. You are sitting around on the couch and you show someone an ap on your phone, “Hey have you seen this?” That is word of mouth. And then they download it, and then they show somebody who downloads it. Word of mouth really matters. When it comes to apparel I mean it is social proof being worn on somebody’s body. So you need to decide what local area you are going to become ubiquitous in.

So what I mean is this. Pick a city that you think resonates with your band. And you need to find a way to get that brand and get that logo on every shirt you can possibly get it on in the shortest amount of time you can, because you know to win America you have to win a city in America when it comes to apparel. And to win that city you need to win some local smaller community. So start with something and then grow out from there is what I would do. And there is this weird thing that happens. I don’t know if you guys have seen those stickers of Andre the Giant that say, “Obey.” I don’t know if you know why they are out in the world because they make no sense. It is a silhouette or whatever it is of Andre the giant and people don’t even really know who he is. They are sort of familiar with him. And then it just says “Obey”.

Well there was a graffiti artist back a few years ago and it was kind of an experiment. His name was Shepherd Ferry. And he decided he was going to put this sticker in so many places that people would think it was more important than it was. And that is exactly what happened. People started to see it so much, at the gas station, on billboards, on the side of these brick structures, bumper stickers on cars, they started to see this sticker so much in this small local area they thought it had to be some massive movement that was just taking over the world. And so it grew. And so now you can go anywhere in the world and see Andre the Giant’s silhouette and “Obey” below it.

Now imagine that is your apparel brand. You have to make some group of people somewhere see you so much in a short amount of time that they think you are the greatest most important thing that ever happened.

And that is what I call ubiquity. You need to make people think you are ubiquitous and then they are going to give you an amount of relevance that you haven’t earned necessarily and they are going to think you are bigger than you really are. And so just find a way to be everywhere in a small area.

Alright let me refresh the forums here and see what else I can get.

[01:12:18]

Alright here is one, it says “Why are you so awesome? No but really aside from that, what is the most commonality you have found among the 130 guests you have interviewed?”

There has been some similarities. There are a lot of differences. They each have their own angle, their own flavor, their own way of doing things. The similarities I would say they are all willing to try things and they are not afraid to look really stupid. So that is one of the things I would say, they try stuff.

I would say they are honest with the data. You know you heard the quote before, they say, “If we are going to use data, use data and if we are going to use opinions let’s go with mine.” And that is really the way these people think is, look if we want to do opinions that is fine let’s go with mine, but if we want to go with data let’s use data. And so they really do look at the data. They are not afraid to try things.

Let me think what the similarities are. This is kind of interesting too, it is somewhat self selecting but everybody that has come on they are willing to share what is working and that may seem weird because we feel like growth is supposed to be this cagey dark thing that nobody shares how they do it, but the people that are just out in the world sharing what they do and talking about it openly, I don’t really know the reasons why but there is something about putting out real information that is valuable that just allows you to learn and grow more as well. So the people that teach and educate and share and inspire they end up growing more because of that.

So those are a few of the things they have had in common. One big thing is they have done things in the real world. And what I mean is they didn’t just read a bunch of blogs about growth and think they understand growth. They didn’t study a company that grew and thought they understood growth. I mean you can give me somebody that has been blogging about growth. You give me a writer from Mashable that has been blogging about start up growth for five years and you put them behind a computer and say, “Hey here is a startup, what are you going to do to grow it?” They don’t have an answer. They know why Facebook is so big and they know why Google is so awesome, and they know what Apple is doing so well but they don’t know the first step of actually growing a start up because they have just been writing about it, they have been talking about it, they have been thinking about it; they haven’t been doing it. Every guest on my show, they have done it. They had a start up and it failed. And they had another start up and it failed. And then finally they had a startup that didn’t fail as bad. And then finally they started to succeed a little bit. And then finally they realized wow I know ten things about growth now and if I apply these ten things to the next thing I’m doing I am really going to be able to knock something out of the park.

And so they were just in the real world doing real things. So those are some of the similarities that I have seen.

So I’ve got a few more minutes here and then I’ve got to get going. I’ve got newborn twins at home so I don’t have too much time, but I’ll take a few more questions here. Let me find some good ones. I’m scrolling through and trying to find some good ones that maybe touch on stuff we haven’t talked about yet.

[01:15:40]

Here is one, it says, “I love the Pirate start up metrics, A.A.A.R.R. Do you have notable growth hacking strategies that you know worked really well for each of these metrics?”

Well that kind of goes back to what I mentioned before that there are different things you can do at different parts of the funnel. What I will say is this, I would start with AAARR as a fundamental thing if you are going to try to be a growth hacker. I would go and really study what [01:16:09 McClure] has taught. He is one of those guys that has put stuff out there and one of my favorite quotes from him is that, “Most startups are functionally illiterate when it comes to marketing.” And I agree with that. I mean so many startups they don’t know the first thing about getting something off the ground and that is why he put together that framework.

And I actually interviewed somebody who learned from McClure it was one of the 500 startups. And we go through the AAARR funnel on an episode of growth hacker TV. His name is, I think Rodriguez. And so I’ll look and see if I can find it in a minute. But he is one of the guys and we actually went through an entire episode just on the AAARR funnel and some of the strategies and tactics there. So I won’t repeat it all but I will so go watch the episode. I believe his last name is Rodriguez and he is one of the first few episodes. So scroll back to the beginning there.

Alright let’s see, let me find one more good one here. And then we’ll call it a night.

[01:17:26]

Alright this one is from Trish. “How would you approach selling conference tickets to an event from a growth hacking perspective?” You know from a growth hacking perspective I guess I would be thinking how can I turn one ticket sale into two. So maybe if you are originally going to charge $20 for the conference, and I am just throwing out $20 I have no idea you may be charging $2,000 but let’s say you are charging $20, can you instead charge $40 so you have raised the initial price, but you have only raised it so you can lower it through growth hacking. So you have said arbitrarily, “The ticket is now $40 but here is the deal. If you buy one I will give you one free to give away to your friend and so you can have a buddy to come to the conference with.” So they think they are getting a deal because they think wow, I buy one ticket and I can give one to a friend so I don’t have to travel and be there alone, when in essence they have actually just bought both tickets and they don’t know it. And so pricing allows you to do all kinds of clever stuff if you are not afraid to raise it and lower it somewhat arbitrarily and then people feel good because they feel like they got a deal and the friend feels good because they had to come along, and they weren’t initially, and so I would just play around with pricing, play around with referrals, how can you incentivize them and think through it like that.

Alright well it is 6:20pm here, I have been going for about an hour and twenty minutes, so I want to call it a night. Hopefully I added some value to you guys, that was my goal. Again go to growthhacker.tv/warrior and you are going to be able to get three free growth recipes. These are recipes that we have written that we think can really lead to some growth. And we call them recipes because we give you the ingredients, here is what you need and then we just tell you exactly how to mix things up and how to make you grow your start up. So go and make sure you get those three free recipes at growthhacker.tv/warrior.

Alright thank you so much guys for having me. Bye bye.

[End Recording 1:19:20]

Here is the free growth recipes for attendees growthhacker.tv/warrior

Hey Bronson Sir,
Thank you so much...
I just love all your awesome growth hacks on GrowthHacker.tv !!!