#and eventually grew into a pretty decent hacker who was able to get by on Neon with minor jobs and the occasional corporate freelance gig

[setaflow]

I haven't gotten very far in Starfield yet but looking back it's kinda hilarious that I basically went to the character creator and I guess subconsciously decided "I'm gonna make her the exact opposite of my CP2077 character" right down to them having the exact opposite hair color.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

HERE'S WHAT I JUST REALIZED ABOUT COMPETITORS

It may be that the Europeans rode on the crest of a powerful new idea: allowing those who made a lot of money from a deal, it's not because they invested at a valuation of $1. That's how you win at this game. The average person, as I think both Republicans and Democrats would agree, is more socially conservative. Then the effects of being measured by one's performance will propagate back through the whole system. Running upstairs is hard for you but even harder for him. When you are designing a new language, you're constantly comparing two languages—the language if I did x, and if people aren't using your software, maybe it's not just because you're bad at marketing. On Lisp. I know are all basically good people.

Incidentally, nothing makes it more patently obvious that the old chestnut all languages are equivalent is false than designing languages. The text of each chapter in a math textbook represent work, or the amount available to a government from one year's tax revenue, this is true. I still hadn't started. Fortunately, if startups get cheap to start a startup, all the stock they get is newly issued and all the money, it left less for everyone else. They generally do better than investors, because they grow into the trees of the economy. The water will still have to get it over with as soon as he got a new textbook he'd immediately work out all the arbitrary stuff people are measured by now. Partly because successful startups have lots of employees, so it seems like that's what one does in order to grow. Ditto for Wal-Mart. Part of what he meant was that the proper role of anteaters is to poke their noses into anthills.

All they had to do to survive if you can't raise more money, and the language wouldn't let you express it the way one likes popping zits. Thanks to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, and my father for reading drafts of this. So it may not even be meaningful to say that the goal of a language is what happens in one is very similar to the venture-backed trading voyages of the Middle Ages. And of course another big change for the average startup, that would be painless, though annoying, to lose. Combine all these multipliers, and I'm claiming you could be 36 times more productive than you're expected to help the startup. Startups are not magic. Like guerillas, startups prefer the difficult terrain of the mountains, where the troops of the central government can't follow. Remember that magic machine that could make you cars and cook you dinner and so on.1 Plus founders who've just raised money are often encouraged to overhire by the VCs who funded them.

A rounds, where you earn a premium for working fast. As a founder, he can just start doing it, and he was pretty much immediately as good as me at picking startups. If you plan to get rich by creating wealth, everyone who has done it has used essentially the same recipe: measurement and leverage. If you plan to get rich by creating wealth and getting paid proportionately, it would be useful to confront directly. On the hacker radar screen, Perl is as big as Java, or bigger, just on the strength of its own merits. In the next few years, venture capital funds will find themselves squeezed from four directions. The text of each chapter in a math textbook represent work, or at least half million? It's a pattern we see over and over in technology. In the years since, I've paid close attention to any evidence I could get on the order of 1000 applications a year. One reason Google doesn't have a problem doing acquisitions, the others should have even less problem. It's what a startup is and how well it achieves its purpose, then the measure of the size of a book.

You might even be able to do it yourself. So while it may seem surprising to propose that large numbers of startups as like software. It turns out to be a good investor in the startups you meet that way, and eventually you'll start a chain reaction. That kind of switch often takes people by surprise. Readability The quote I began with was that, except in pathological examples, I am pretty sure that the notation is not the only one. There's nothing that magically changes after you take that last exam. When you are designing a new kind of store.2 A rounds, where you raise a million dollars, you have to do with anything as complex as an image of a person, for example, grew big by designing a new language, you're constantly comparing two languages—the language if I did x, and if you make something good you can generate ten times as much? You have to learn to judge by outward signs which will be worth your time. Total amount the founders want to raise.

And all three of them, in their own startups. Restrictiveness I think most hackers know what it means for a language to feel restrictive. The values of the elite are liberal, polls will tend to underestimate the conservativeness of ordinary voters. How do you do that? You'll see when you try it. In fact, the most powerful motivator is the prospect that one of their competitors will buy you. The wrong people like it. So maybe a recession is a good time to start a startup. What students do in their classes will change too.

The part of angel investing that the decisions you make have a big effect. And because startups tend to get founded by self-selecting groups of ambitious people who already know one another at least until their twenties. Imagine the stress of working for the Post Office your whole life, and save every penny of your salary. They make something moderately appealing and have decent initial growth. I think, because they're not used to asking that. There is an enormous latent capacity in the world's hackers that most people don't even realize is there. Instead of focusing on getting internships at companies they want to work ten times as much? There are already a bunch of twenty year olds get rich when you're still working for salary. If you're friends with a lot of other people's. This was naturally a great incentive, and possibly indeed the main cause of the second big change, industrialization. If the conceptual load of a program. The water will still have to get better at it.

If $3 million a year seems high to some people, it will be very close. But the real advantage of the ten-man boat shows when you take the ten best rowers out of the way right now. How much does an angel invest? How much stock should you give him? The easiest way to get software written faster was to use a more succinct language, and b since he's probably a founder, you're buying stock with work: the reason Larry and Sergey only started Google after making the rounds of the search engines trying to sell their idea and finding no takers. While we were visiting Yahoo in California to talk about it. There is a large random multiplier in the success of any company. I said before, a large random factor in the mathematical sense; see equation above in readability. If so, then substituting, we get Python's goal is not to say they planned to vote against him, lest their motives be perhaps correctly suspected.

Notes

The few people plot their own, like most of the medium of exchange would not make a fortune in the press or a funding round. The dialog on Beavis and Butthead was composed largely of these, because investors don't yet get what they're going to do certain kinds of content.

The hard part of their portfolio companies. It doesn't happen often. They can lead to distractions even more clearly. For example, will be coordinating efforts among partners.

[samiam03x]

The Right Approach To Building A Solid Growth Strategy

Ask any successful entrepreneur why their startup succeeded and they’ll almost always point you to a growth strategy they followed.

They’ll tell you how much they believed the strategy will work because it was solid and had a really high likelihood of paying off.

For example, Johnathan Dane (founder at KlientBoost, a company that grew from 0 to $1,000,000 in 12 months) says “You may be obsessed with tactics, but you should care more about solid strategies…nothing beats winning slowly and surely by turning silent visitors into repeat visiting fans…”

It’s the same with most high growth companies.

They pick a solid growth strategy and follow it. Then they begin to get small wins. And they repeat the process. Before you know it, they’re all over the place.

However, before you would even get the chance to use a solid strategy, your product and site has to be ready for conversions.

Get Your Product in Demand and Site Ready for Conversions

This may come across as a no-brainer.

But you’d be surprised at how many businesses fail only because their product wasn’t in demand, or lose revenue because their site just wasn’t ready for conversions.

Just recently, CB Insights reached out to investors and founders to collect post-mortems on 204 failed startups. From their findings, they were able to pinpoint 20 top reasons for these failures.

Guess what turned out to be number 1 on the list? There was no market need for the product.

Image Source

Serial entrepreneur and VC David Skok says “A major reason why companies fail, is that they run into the problem of there being too little or no market for the product that they have built.”

When a product is not in demand, it’s because it didn’t solve a problem enough people had. This makes it impossible to achieve growth, which is why building something people want is the necessary first step towards growth.

In the same vein, a site that is not ready for conversions can also thwart the success of any strategy. This is when the site is having issues on things like signup processes, pricing, web copy, CTAs, etc. These things easily get users annoyed, make them leave the moment they get on your site and never return.

For instance, Rebecca Kelley, content marketing manager for Intego, recently shared how her company was getting decent click-through rates from a PPC campaign.

But after tracking (via their analytics program) those who actually made a purchase, they found that far less than 1% of visitors from all that traffic were actually buying their products. Why? Their payment sign-up process was awful. Kelley says, “…it was a no-brainer–our signup process is awful. We lose a lot of people in that process…”

Their product was in demand, and we know this because people actually clicked through their ads and made attempts to convert. The only problem was that Intego’s site wasn’t ready for the conversions because of their self-described “awful” signup process.

Kissmetrics Campaigns: Send triggered emails to users to nudge them toward engagement. Learn more about the soon-to-be-released Kissmetrics Campaigns.

Key takeaway: In Intego’s case, they had a faulty signup process. For you, it could be something else entirely. You need to anticipate every issue that may arise from your site (or offerings) and get them settled before you decide to build and follow a strategy. You can do this by using a Funnel Report to see where people are dropping off and finding what you need to test. You can also use a Funnel Report for your onboarding.

Here are few things you should be looking out for:

Site speed and responsive design: We’ve seen enough stats and surveys over the years proving that poor site speed annoy most visitors. Make sure your site loads quickly and works on mobile. Use Google’s speed test and mobile tools to make sure you have your bases covered.

Messaging: Your copy, from homepages to other pages, matters a lot. If your messaging is not intact, people will have a hard time seeing your offerings as their solution. Kissmetrics has a lot of resources on copywriting. Take your pick from the hundreds of articles.

Social proof: If you’re a startup, it may be difficult for some visitors to hand over their information (let alone credit card number) if they don’t see others haven’t done it first. This is why it’s so crucial to get social proof and testimonials on your site. A site without these critical elements can be getting lots of traffic with little to no conversions if there is no proof that their products really solve problems for people similar to those visiting the site.

Design: Good design with clean copy shows to visitors that you care about your craft and likely have a solid product waiting for them after they signup. Focus on getting your design right before launching. If you’re looking for a simple way to get started, check out Launchrock. Quality templates are always a safe bet if you (or anyone on your team) are not design-inclined.

The issues you cannot anticipate: This is the the tricky part. There are some things you cannot foresee becoming an issue. This is why it’s important to have a feedback loop in place so you can gather this information and then react quickly to solve any issues that arise.

Bottom line: No matter how solid a strategy is, it will eventually flop if it’s selling a product that nobody wants, or if the marketing site doesn’t convert.

Building Your Strategy: Aim for Small Wins

Once you get your product right and your site ready for conversions, next thing to do is target small wins.

After all, virtually no one hits it big at once.

And by now, most marketers know this already. Every high growth company you see created a strategy that had a high likelihood for success and followed it till they hit their breakthroughs.

This strategy is usually filled up with subsets of tactics that bring in results gradually, little by little. And then in the long run, those small pieces of results come together to become a big bang. To those not watching the company day-to-day, it may seem like they were an “overnight success”. But few of those companies that truly achieve the “overnight success” tend to fade quickly.

In contrast, the companies that seem like overnight successes actually had small, incremental wins that led them to their success. They achieved their first major customer, got on the frontpage of inbound.org, were featured in the press, etc. Every successful company had their small wins that contributed in making them what they are today.

Buffer, for example, is one of these companies. They had their strategy, which was to write guest posts and get users from the blogs they write for. Now they’ve reached a stage today where they’re used by thousands of users and companies.

But a whole lot of those guest posts were the small wins that led them to where they are today. Leo Widrich (Buffer’s co-founder) says he had to write about 150 guest posts within the space of 9 months before they got their first 100,000 customers.

Image Source

Each of those 150 guest post were small wins that led to their big win — 100,000 users.

That’s how high-growth companies grow.

They accumulate a good number of small wins and end up with a bang. They go from 500 users to 1000, 3000, 6000 and so forth.

Another example that comes to mind here is Groove. Back in 2013, Groove rolled out a series to share their journey to $100k in monthly revenue with their blog readers. Their plan was to get lots of subscribers via this series and ultimately grow as a business.

The strategy worked. Today, Groove has thousands of paying customers and is now close to $500k in monthly revenue.

Image Source

But here’s the thing (again), they understood they wouldn’t get to where they desired at once.

So they targeted small wins:

They built relationships with more than 80 influencers– even before launching the series.

Got a spot on the front page on Hacker News.

Started to get their stories featured on well-known publications.

And so forth…

Small wins. Accumulate them well enough and you’ll have an aggregate big win in the long run.

Even more, small wins are the best productivity boosters for business people. According to a study by Harvard Business Review: “Through exhaustive analysis of diaries kept by knowledge workers, we discovered the progress principle: Of all the things that can boost emotions, motivation, and perceptions during a workday, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work.”

The more you achieve small wins, the more motivated you get to do more — because it just means you’re heading in the right direction.

What Happens When Your Strategy Goes South?

Your strategy, no-matter how solid it looks, can fail. Experienced marketers know this already. It’s a bitter truth. But it is what it is: the truth. And I had to learn this the hard way.

A few years ago when I started out as a freelance writer, I had a “brilliant strategy” for my freelance business. I saw what other experienced writers were doing but for some reason decided to do something entirely different, thinking I’d get a better result than other writers.

My “brilliant strategy” was to launch a blog about startups. I thought I’d use that to attract founders. And when founders came to my blog and read my content, they can consider hiring me as their writer. After all, startups usually need a lot of content.

Long story short, the plan failed.

Why? Most startup founders don’t oversee the writers that their companies hire. That’s the job of their content/marketing managers. Those are the people my content should target, not founders!

So I was writing content for the wrong set of people. My “brilliant strategy” was a big mistake that wasted a lot of my time and resources. But guess what? I learned…and grew. It’s pretty much the same case for you. That’s what you should do if your strategy goes south: Learn…and grow.

Summing Up: Get a Solid Growth Strategy

That’s the one secret that virtually every high growth company you see have in common. They get a solid growth strategy, and follow it to success. But again, before the strategy, ensure your offering is in sync with the market. Once that is done, everything else becomes relatively easier. Lastly, if your strategy goes south, simply re-strategize and get a new solid plan.

About the Author: Victor Ijidola is a freelance business writer (for hire) who’s been featured on sites like Inc.com, The Next Web, MarketingProfs, etc. He’s also runs Premium Content Shop.

http://ift.tt/2o9fXJm from MarketingRSS http://ift.tt/2or4sJf via Youtube

[marie85marketing]

The Right Approach To Building A Solid Growth Strategy

Ask any successful entrepreneur why their startup succeeded and they’ll almost always point you to a growth strategy they followed.

They’ll tell you how much they believed the strategy will work because it was solid and had a really high likelihood of paying off.

For example, Johnathan Dane (founder at KlientBoost, a company that grew from 0 to $1,000,000 in 12 months) says “You may be obsessed with tactics, but you should care more about solid strategies…nothing beats winning slowly and surely by turning silent visitors into repeat visiting fans…”

It’s the same with most high growth companies.

They pick a solid growth strategy and follow it. Then they begin to get small wins. And they repeat the process. Before you know it, they’re all over the place.

However, before you would even get the chance to use a solid strategy, your product and site has to be ready for conversions.

Get Your Product in Demand and Site Ready for Conversions

This may come across as a no-brainer.

But you’d be surprised at how many businesses fail only because their product wasn’t in demand, or lose revenue because their site just wasn’t ready for conversions.

Just recently, CB Insights reached out to investors and founders to collect post-mortems on 204 failed startups. From their findings, they were able to pinpoint 20 top reasons for these failures.

Guess what turned out to be number 1 on the list? There was no market need for the product.

Image Source

Serial entrepreneur and VC David Skok says “A major reason why companies fail, is that they run into the problem of there being too little or no market for the product that they have built.”

When a product is not in demand, it’s because it didn’t solve a problem enough people had. This makes it impossible to achieve growth, which is why building something people want is the necessary first step towards growth.

In the same vein, a site that is not ready for conversions can also thwart the success of any strategy. This is when the site is having issues on things like signup processes, pricing, web copy, CTAs, etc. These things easily get users annoyed, make them leave the moment they get on your site and never return.

For instance, Rebecca Kelley, content marketing manager for Intego, recently shared how her company was getting decent click-through rates from a PPC campaign.

But after tracking (via their analytics program) those who actually made a purchase, they found that far less than 1% of visitors from all that traffic were actually buying their products. Why? Their payment sign-up process was awful. Kelley says, “…it was a no-brainer–our signup process is awful. We lose a lot of people in that process…”

Their product was in demand, and we know this because people actually clicked through their ads and made attempts to convert. The only problem was that Intego’s site wasn’t ready for the conversions because of their self-described “awful” signup process.

Kissmetrics Campaigns: Send triggered emails to users to nudge them toward engagement. Learn more about the soon-to-be-released Kissmetrics Campaigns.

Key takeaway: In Intego’s case, they had a faulty signup process. For you, it could be something else entirely. You need to anticipate every issue that may arise from your site (or offerings) and get them settled before you decide to build and follow a strategy. You can do this by using a Funnel Report to see where people are dropping off and finding what you need to test. You can also use a Funnel Report for your onboarding.

Here are few things you should be looking out for:

Site speed and responsive design: We’ve seen enough stats and surveys over the years proving that poor site speed annoy most visitors. Make sure your site loads quickly and works on mobile. Use Google’s speed test and mobile tools to make sure you have your bases covered.

Messaging: Your copy, from homepages to other pages, matters a lot. If your messaging is not intact, people will have a hard time seeing your offerings as their solution. Kissmetrics has a lot of resources on copywriting. Take your pick from the hundreds of articles.

Social proof: If you’re a startup, it may be difficult for some visitors to hand over their information (let alone credit card number) if they don’t see others haven’t done it first. This is why it’s so crucial to get social proof and testimonials on your site. A site without these critical elements can be getting lots of traffic with little to no conversions if there is no proof that their products really solve problems for people similar to those visiting the site.

Design: Good design with clean copy shows to visitors that you care about your craft and likely have a solid product waiting for them after they signup. Focus on getting your design right before launching. If you’re looking for a simple way to get started, check out Launchrock. Quality templates are always a safe bet if you (or anyone on your team) are not design-inclined.

The issues you cannot anticipate: This is the the tricky part. There are some things you cannot foresee becoming an issue. This is why it’s important to have a feedback loop in place so you can gather this information and then react quickly to solve any issues that arise.

Bottom line: No matter how solid a strategy is, it will eventually flop if it’s selling a product that nobody wants, or if the marketing site doesn’t convert.

Building Your Strategy: Aim for Small Wins

Once you get your product right and your site ready for conversions, next thing to do is target small wins.

After all, virtually no one hits it big at once.

And by now, most marketers know this already. Every high growth company you see created a strategy that had a high likelihood for success and followed it till they hit their breakthroughs.

This strategy is usually filled up with subsets of tactics that bring in results gradually, little by little. And then in the long run, those small pieces of results come together to become a big bang. To those not watching the company day-to-day, it may seem like they were an “overnight success”. But few of those companies that truly achieve the “overnight success” tend to fade quickly.

In contrast, the companies that seem like overnight successes actually had small, incremental wins that led them to their success. They achieved their first major customer, got on the frontpage of inbound.org, were featured in the press, etc. Every successful company had their small wins that contributed in making them what they are today.

Buffer, for example, is one of these companies. They had their strategy, which was to write guest posts and get users from the blogs they write for. Now they’ve reached a stage today where they’re used by thousands of users and companies.

But a whole lot of those guest posts were the small wins that led them to where they are today. Leo Widrich (Buffer’s co-founder) says he had to write about 150 guest posts within the space of 9 months before they got their first 100,000 customers.

Image Source

Each of those 150 guest post were small wins that led to their big win — 100,000 users.

That’s how high-growth companies grow.

They accumulate a good number of small wins and end up with a bang. They go from 500 users to 1000, 3000, 6000 and so forth.

Another example that comes to mind here is Groove. Back in 2013, Groove rolled out a series to share their journey to $100k in monthly revenue with their blog readers. Their plan was to get lots of subscribers via this series and ultimately grow as a business.

The strategy worked. Today, Groove has thousands of paying customers and is now close to $500k in monthly revenue.

Image Source

But here’s the thing (again), they understood they wouldn’t get to where they desired at once.

So they targeted small wins:

They built relationships with more than 80 influencers– even before launching the series.

Got a spot on the front page on Hacker News.

Started to get their stories featured on well-known publications.

And so forth…

Small wins. Accumulate them well enough and you’ll have an aggregate big win in the long run.

Even more, small wins are the best productivity boosters for business people. According to a study by Harvard Business Review: “Through exhaustive analysis of diaries kept by knowledge workers, we discovered the progress principle: Of all the things that can boost emotions, motivation, and perceptions during a workday, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work.”

The more you achieve small wins, the more motivated you get to do more — because it just means you’re heading in the right direction.

What Happens When Your Strategy Goes South?

Your strategy, no-matter how solid it looks, can fail. Experienced marketers know this already. It’s a bitter truth. But it is what it is: the truth. And I had to learn this the hard way.

A few years ago when I started out as a freelance writer, I had a “brilliant strategy” for my freelance business. I saw what other experienced writers were doing but for some reason decided to do something entirely different, thinking I’d get a better result than other writers.

My “brilliant strategy” was to launch a blog about startups. I thought I’d use that to attract founders. And when founders came to my blog and read my content, they can consider hiring me as their writer. After all, startups usually need a lot of content.

Long story short, the plan failed.

Why? Most startup founders don’t oversee the writers that their companies hire. That’s the job of their content/marketing managers. Those are the people my content should target, not founders!

So I was writing content for the wrong set of people. My “brilliant strategy” was a big mistake that wasted a lot of my time and resources. But guess what? I learned…and grew. It’s pretty much the same case for you. That’s what you should do if your strategy goes south: Learn…and grow.

Summing Up: Get a Solid Growth Strategy

That’s the one secret that virtually every high growth company you see have in common. They get a solid growth strategy, and follow it to success. But again, before the strategy, ensure your offering is in sync with the market. Once that is done, everything else becomes relatively easier. Lastly, if your strategy goes south, simply re-strategize and get a new solid plan.

About the Author: Victor Ijidola is a freelance business writer (for hire) who’s been featured on sites like Inc.com, The Next Web, MarketingProfs, etc. He’s also runs Premium Content Shop.

[ericsburden-blog]

The Right Approach To Building A Solid Growth Strategy

Ask any successful entrepreneur why their startup succeeded and they’ll almost always point you to a growth strategy they followed.

They’ll tell you how much they believed the strategy will work because it was solid and had a really high likelihood of paying off.

For example, Johnathan Dane (founder at KlientBoost, a company that grew from 0 to $1,000,000 in 12 months) says “You may be obsessed with tactics, but you should care more about solid strategies…nothing beats winning slowly and surely by turning silent visitors into repeat visiting fans…”

It’s the same with most high growth companies.

They pick a solid growth strategy and follow it. Then they begin to get small wins. And they repeat the process. Before you know it, they’re all over the place.

However, before you would even get the chance to use a solid strategy, your product and site has to be ready for conversions.

Get Your Product in Demand and Site Ready for Conversions

This may come across as a no-brainer.

But you’d be surprised at how many businesses fail only because their product wasn’t in demand, or lose revenue because their site just wasn’t ready for conversions.

Just recently, CB Insights reached out to investors and founders to collect post-mortems on 204 failed startups. From their findings, they were able to pinpoint 20 top reasons for these failures.

Guess what turned out to be number 1 on the list? There was no market need for the product.

Image Source

Serial entrepreneur and VC David Skok says “A major reason why companies fail, is that they run into the problem of there being too little or no market for the product that they have built.”

When a product is not in demand, it’s because it didn’t solve a problem enough people had. This makes it impossible to achieve growth, which is why building something people want is the necessary first step towards growth.

In the same vein, a site that is not ready for conversions can also thwart the success of any strategy. This is when the site is having issues on things like signup processes, pricing, web copy, CTAs, etc. These things easily get users annoyed, make them leave the moment they get on your site and never return.

For instance, Rebecca Kelley, content marketing manager for Intego, recently shared how her company was getting decent click-through rates from a PPC campaign.

But after tracking (via their analytics program) those who actually made a purchase, they found that far less than 1% of visitors from all that traffic were actually buying their products. Why? Their payment sign-up process was awful. Kelley says, “…it was a no-brainer–our signup process is awful. We lose a lot of people in that process…”

Their product was in demand, and we know this because people actually clicked through their ads and made attempts to convert. The only problem was that Intego’s site wasn’t ready for the conversions because of their self-described “awful” signup process.

Key takeaway: In Intego’s case, they had a faulty signup process. For you, it could be something else entirely. You need to anticipate every issue that may arise from your site (or offerings) and get them settled before you decide to build and follow a strategy. You can do this by using a Funnel Report to see where people are dropping off and finding what you need to test. You can also use a Funnel Report for your onboarding.

Here are few things you should be looking out for:

Site speed and responsive design: We’ve seen enough stats and surveys over the years proving that poor site speed annoy most visitors. Make sure your site loads quickly and works on mobile. Use Google’s speed test and mobile tools to make sure you have your bases covered.

Messaging: Your copy, from homepages to other pages, matters a lot. If your messaging is not intact, people will have a hard time seeing your offerings as their solution. Kissmetrics has a lot of resources on copywriting. Take your pick from the hundreds of articles.

Social proof: If you’re a startup, it may be difficult for some visitors to hand over their information (let alone credit card number) if they don’t see others haven’t done it first. This is why it’s so crucial to get social proof and testimonials on your site. A site without these critical elements can be getting lots of traffic with little to no conversions if there is no proof that their products really solve problems for people similar to those visiting the site.

Design: Good design with clean copy shows to visitors that you care about your craft and likely have a solid product waiting for them after they signup. Focus on getting your design right before launching. If you’re looking for a simple way to get started, check out Launchrock. Quality templates are always a safe bet if you (or anyone on your team) are not design-inclined.

The issues you cannot anticipate: This is the the tricky part. There are some things you cannot foresee becoming an issue. This is why it’s important to have a feedback loop in place so you can gather this information and then react quickly to solve any issues that arise.

Bottom line: No matter how solid a strategy is, it will eventually flop if it’s selling a product that nobody wants, or if the marketing site doesn’t convert.

Building Your Strategy: Aim for Small Wins

Once you get your product right and your site ready for conversions, next thing to do is target small wins.

After all, virtually no one hits it big at once.

And by now, most marketers know this already. Every high growth company you see created a strategy that had a high likelihood for success and followed it till they hit their breakthroughs.

This strategy is usually filled up with subsets of tactics that bring in results gradually, little by little. And then in the long run, those small pieces of results come together to become a big bang. To those not watching the company day-to-day, it may seem like they were an “overnight success”. But few of those companies that truly achieve the “overnight success” tend to fade quickly.

In contrast, the companies that seem like overnight successes actually had small, incremental wins that led them to their success. They achieved their first major customer, got on the frontpage of inbound.org, were featured in the press, etc. Every successful company had their small wins that contributed in making them what they are today.

Buffer, for example, is one of these companies. They had their strategy, which was to write guest posts and get users from the blogs they write for. Now they’ve reached a stage today where they’re used by thousands of users and companies.

But a whole lot of those guest posts were the small wins that led them to where they are today. Leo Widrich (Buffer’s co-founder) says he had to write about 150 guest posts within the space of 9 months before they got their first 100,000 customers.

Image Source

Each of those 150 guest post were small wins that led to their big win — 100,000 users.

That’s how high-growth companies grow.

They accumulate a good number of small wins and end up with a bang. They go from 500 users to 1000, 3000, 6000 and so forth.

Another example that comes to mind here is Groove. Back in 2013, Groove rolled out a series to share their journey to $100k in monthly revenue with their blog readers. Their plan was to get lots of subscribers via this series and ultimately grow as a business.

The strategy worked. Today, Groove has thousands of paying customers and is now close to $500k in monthly revenue.

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But here’s the thing (again), they understood they wouldn’t get to where they desired at once.

So they targeted small wins:

They built relationships with more than 80 influencers– even before launching the series.

Got a spot on the front page on Hacker News.

Started to get their stories featured on well-known publications.

And so forth…

Small wins. Accumulate them well enough and you’ll have an aggregate big win in the long run.

Even more, small wins are the best productivity boosters for business people. According to a study by Harvard Business Review: “Through exhaustive analysis of diaries kept by knowledge workers, we discovered the progress principle: Of all the things that can boost emotions, motivation, and perceptions during a workday, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work.”

The more you achieve small wins, the more motivated you get to do more — because it just means you’re heading in the right direction.

What Happens When Your Strategy Goes South?

Your strategy, no-matter how solid it looks, can fail. Experienced marketers know this already. It’s a bitter truth. But it is what it is: the truth. And I had to learn this the hard way.

A few years ago when I started out as a freelance writer, I had a “brilliant strategy” for my freelance business. I saw what other experienced writers were doing but for some reason decided to do something entirely different, thinking I’d get a better result than other writers.

My “brilliant strategy” was to launch a blog about startups. I thought I’d use that to attract founders. And when founders came to my blog and read my content, they can consider hiring me as their writer. After all, startups usually need a lot of content.

Long story short, the plan failed.

Why? Most startup founders don’t oversee the writers that their companies hire. That’s the job of their content/marketing managers. Those are the people my content should target, not founders!

So I was writing content for the wrong set of people. My “brilliant strategy” was a big mistake that wasted a lot of my time and resources. But guess what? I learned…and grew. It’s pretty much the same case for you. That’s what you should do if your strategy goes south: Learn…and grow.

Summing Up: Get a Solid Growth Strategy

That’s the one secret that virtually every high growth company you see have in common. They get a solid growth strategy, and follow it to success. But again, before the strategy, ensure your offering is in sync with the market. Once that is done, everything else becomes relatively easier. Lastly, if your strategy goes south, simply re-strategize and get a new solid plan.

About the Author: Victor Ijidola is a freelance business writer (for hire) who’s been featured on sites like Inc.com, The Next Web, MarketingProfs, etc. He’s also runs Premium Content Shop.

The Right Approach To Building A Solid Growth Strategy