6 Startup Growth Strategies from a Forbes Top VC | Seed to Billion Dollar IPO | Office Hours Ep.3

Startups equal growth, and you need a lot of it. Can you triple your revenue two years in a row, then double it three years in a row? That's the bar for a SaaS company to get to a hundred million dollars a year in revenue and get to an IPO. Today, we're gonna talk about how to get that growth. Here's half a dozen ways to grow your startup that I usually try to think through to see if it could work for that startup. Remember, every startup is totally different. History doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme. These lyrics might just work for you. Let's get into it. So say you're lucky, you have product market fit, your team is humming, customers love it, and you have great retention. How do you grow? Well, this is where sales and marketing come into play. For sales, there are two books that I recommend, Both of these books will be linked in the description below. Sales is incredibly important, and for those hundred thousand dollar contracts or larger, you need enterprise sales. For marketing, there are just so many ways to do it. Here's a non-exhaustive list just to give you ideas. PR is a great way to think about how you get people in the door. A good press article can move the needle for you. This is how I did it in 2008, actually. Posterous when we were actually making new features, we made sure that every single new feature turned into a news article by one of the big blogs, TechCrunch, VentureBeat, or Mashable. Every time I made a new feature, I made sure to get coverage. And this is really hard in 2021. I'm not sure if you can actually do it anymore. It doesn't also always have to be good news either. Do you remember Soylent, the meal replacement shake for software engineers? I remember meeting them at YC and funding them right when they went from being a networking hardware startup to their current idea. I actually told them to change their name. I said, don't you know what Soylent Green is? You gotta tell them Soylent Green is people! But I was wrong. They ended up building a huge recurring revenue business with minimal marketing spend because they got hundreds of millions of dollars of free advertising all just by PR, blogs, videos, and news articles about the name itself. I don't like this, but the reality is controversy sells. It's hard to pull off, but it was one of the strongest lessons to learn lately, especially around this idea that every business is now a meme. If you have a good story that touches your users or is meaningful or valuable to society, or even controversial and sparks a lot of discussion, you gotta keep PR in mind in terms of how you can grow. Beware though, these things tend not to scale, and most startups cannot rely on this at all because most reporters and even bloggers are generally focusing on much bigger stories, especially in 2021. Next, content marketing. It's a great way to get attention, and it just takes you writing informative articles full of facts and data, things that people actually find interesting to get the story out there. My favorite example of this is OKCupid. They were able to grow their user base massively just by using statistics about dating from their user base. The most extreme version of this that I saw with my own eyes while I was a partner at Y Combinator was actually a startup called Your Mechanic, which made tens of thousands of blog posts about every possible thing that could go wrong with your car. All of it led back to their homepage, which is a marketplace for car mechanics. I'm pretty sure they got thousands of leads per day just because of that. This leads actually perfectly into the next section, which is basically SEO, search engine optimization. If the internet is one brain and you can show up top of mind when the brain is looking for info about something, it translates into many, many new customers for you, basically for free, sometimes enough to build a billion dollar startup. The craziest example that I saw is Zapier. Zapier was a YC company that built a fundamental piece of what now we call no code and low code. It lets every possible cloud service work with every other one. And the approach was really simple. Make a connector for every possible website connecting to every other one. So say you want to connect Gmail to Airtable, you want to connect Trello to Slack. The cloud is growing so quickly, there are so many people trying to figure out how to get these tools to work together. And when they searched for it in Google, they found Zapier. Today, Zapier is worth more than a rumored $4 billion. I suspect a good chunk of it is connecting the highest intent thing in the world, a Google search to their service, and then just having highly ranked pages that took many years to become top of that search engine. This is the most dramatic form of winning the internet I have ever seen. Now, if you can't win the internet, sometimes you can buy it. Yes, I'm talking about Google ads. You could also call this strategy search engine marketing for short. My wife actually worked at Google for a few years as an ad optimizer in their operations team. And the craziest story I remember from hearing about her work was that some of her clients were actually literally doing colonic kits, so colon cleansing. But some of them started off as tiny operations, maybe 100 to $1,000 a month. And as they made profit, they reinvested in it to get to as much as a million or $10 million a month in revenue. That sounded crazy to me. But now I realize that's actually relatively common. There are all of these ways that you can reinvest your profits in SEM. If you can buy ads and make more money from them than you paid for them, it's a powerful engine for growth. It is not that common, but it still does happen. Well, we can't talk about marketing without thinking about social media, both ads and influencers. They're an amazing way to get customers. And there are too many examples here to name, really. Think of almost any D2C brand that rose up over the past few years, and you'll see that they did it on the back of Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, or even Twitter. Look at what Rihanna was able to do with her brand Fenty or what Ryan Reynolds was able to do with Aviation Gin. Now, for more resources, I recommend that you follow Nick Sharma on Twitter. He's a wealth of knowledge about how to work with influencers and leverage social media to actually build a great brand. Finally, we can't talk about how to grow without thinking about partnerships and business development. Probably the most famous example of this was actually Microsoft with IBM. Somehow Bill Gates got IBM to choose MS-DOS to be licensed as the operating system for their new personal computer, the IBM PC. That choice alone literally made Microsoft. And today it remains one of the most durable cash cows for that tech giant, one that set them up even for a second one in Microsoft Office and productivity software. So that's not totally a complete list of ways to grow your startup, but I hope that gives you a good sense of where to start. That's it for me for now, but really excited that you're taking this step to learn how to build a startup. As always, please click subscribe and the bell icon to get notifications for whenever I post. And if you found this helpful, leave a comment below and share this video on LinkedIn, Twitter, and with founder friends who might get something out of it. My goal is to help as many founders as I can, and I really appreciate your help here. Be well, and I'll see you next week. Bye.