FREE Tool: Track & optimise your Growth
How to actually create growth. Avoid the common 'Growth Fallacy'. And use the free Growth Tracker tool!
Every company’s goal is growth, however there is a massive misconception about what that actually means.
The pressure to see a massive influx of customers can cause many startups to spend years chasing unicorns.
Also known as - Chasing the 'Growth Fallacy'... *que thunder*⛈️⚡
The Growth Fallacy is:
"The reliance on a single transactional decision (or act) that is expected to create instant, large scale, highly positive and sustainable influx of customers that should boost the companies growth dramatically”
Basically, relying on a single idea that is so mind-blowingly amazing that it causes your entire market to drop everything they’re doing and immediately purchase from you...
Growth fallacies can take many forms, but some common ones you might find are:
Magic feature releases that creates product-market-fit & catapults word of mouth.
A secret marketing hack that makes you go viral.
Some new gun sales hire that will start closing everything.
A game-changing partnership deal that’s a referral gold mine.
Signing a new golden logo that will cause your whole market to follow with envy.
It’s an inconvenient truth to accept, but avoiding it will stop you from chasing waterfalls and incurring a whole lot of disappointment and pain.
Chasing these tactics is like trying to get rich from lottery tickets.
Sure it's possible. But relying on it as a strategy is basically gambling loaded with disappointment…
Instead, let’s consider what growth actually looks like for the 99%:
"The continuous optimisation of each individual step your buyer will take from not knowing you exist, to becoming a raving fanatic about your product."
To put it complicatedly...
Growth is the empathetic identification of the next largest bottleneck in the customer journey.
That is scrutinised and rationalised to find it's root cause.
To which a solution(s) is then hypothesised, tested and validated to solve this and (subsequent) ongoing bottlenecks.
Until compounding improvements trigger an exponential effect and scale the product's market traction.
Or to put it simply:
Growth is about finding the biggest problem blocking your customer journey.
Understanding why it might be happening.
Then, coming up with ideas to fix it.
Test these ideas in low risk experiments, putting the best solution into action.
Document and learn from those that don’t work.
Then keep fixing these problems, one by one, until the small improvements add up and make the product grow faster and faster.
Whilst step change can exist, there is rarely ever a single 'big thing' that will lead to glorious 'hyper growth'.
Like any form of realistic and sustainable growth - the results are typically incremental but compounding over time.
Not immediately exponential.
3% improvements might not seem like much.
But when done consistently over time, it will (theoretically & mathematically) lead to exponential results...
In 2023, I had a goal to increase brand awareness and followers on LinkedIn for both myself and my clients (i.e. a type of demand gen - more on that here).
I tried my best not to succumb to seductive hacks or ai short-cuts.
But I did. I tried a lot of them. And of course, none of them worked.
I instead started listening to experts (go figure) and focused on content quality and optimising my reader’s experience.
Right down to the finest detail:
I experimented with opening sentences and captivating hooks.
I tried different story telling techniques, the rule of 3 and many more.
I trialled short form and long form content.
I tried videos vs. image vs. text only posts.
I tried changing the colours and text sizes on my images.
I tried links, tagging, not tagging, sharing, and posting at all times of the day.
Bit by bit my content got more engagement. I learnt new things everyday.
I tested one particular post 5 times until it saw big results.
In 12 months I grew my followers by 2,000+ and my post impressions went from 100-200 per post to 1,000+ with a lot more engagement.
It has been a massive learning, and one I still continue today.
So the lessons is - don’t get seduced by shiny growth hacks.
Most won’t have the outcome you expect, and will only waste time.
Instead, focus on forever optimising your customer's experience, and growth is bound to follow.
Growth Tracking Tool
When it comes to ‘growth’ one thing is for certain - we all have a million ideas on how it could happen, with no certainty of any of them!
Whilst having ideas is a good thing - the problem is - most startups have very little time and even less budget to spend on them.
For larger more advanced organisations, there are teams and large data tracking processes that help track and optimise growth experiments.
But for early stage companies, growth experiments need to be simpler and easier to keep track of, prioritise and test.
Below is a Growth Tracking Tool template that I (and my clients) have used many times over the years.
It’s simple enough to get started and can be used in almost all areas of your marketing.
It can help you record all the ideas you have, then give you a month to month planner on what to prioritise, action and scale:
The instruction are:
Download your copy first ☝️
Add any and all ideas you are keen to test.
Prioritise the ones you feel would be most impactful.
Add 1-3 of the most prioritised ones to the "Monthly Initiative" (2nd tab).
Test your ideas, record what happens, validated if it worked or not.
If it worked - can it be added to your usual monthly schedule?
If not, document what you learnt (in the BLUE part to the right of the ideas tab) so you can improve or iterate on.
Keep adding ideas and testing them to constantly learn, improve and grow.
Download your copy and start tracking your growth experiments today!
If you are a B2B SaaS company who wants to work on their marketing strategy - click here to book a discovery session with me to see what might work for your company.