GROWTH HACKING 101 - What are the best tactics for growth without budget?

Hello WARRIORS,

As a fellow marketer and being a part of a quickly growing startup, what are your best practices for growth hacking and or acquiring users for a mobile app with zero budget?

A quick summary of our services.

Event Manager - we provide a software to contest organizers that enables them to run their events entirely on tablets with judges etc.

Fan app - the data they type then goes to the cloud and posts results live in our fan app. The fan app provides athlete profiles, event profiles and in-depth stats about those profiles. theres many other features about it and we are still in development on alot of the features.


A few ideas from my end

Influencers - We work with athletes and provide athlete profiles in our application. I was thinking possibly doing athlete takeovers on our instagram account showing fans an inside look at competiton flow. What do they do the morning of the big day, eating, stretching etc. Athletes and their sponsors would then direct traffic to our instagram telling them that "john doe" is taking over the instagram account to give an inside look of competition. This would raise awareness of our app and drive traffic to instagram with hopes of leading to installs.

Working with our partners to cross promote the shit out of the app.
Links on their websites with marketing images to download the app.
social posts (since their events are in the app with live results)
----- The problem I'm having with this strategy is when we end up running 100's of events I will not or a team will not be able to generate the content we currently provide to these organizers. Thinking of a way to automate the process is something I've been working with our dev on but can't wrap my head around a way to do it.


There's alot more, just curious about your ideas for growth hacking in a quickly growing startup and adapting my plan to the pace of the company.

Thanks guys,

Travis