## Q: Love your frameworks, but I could use some concrete growth ideas.
Sometimes you just need ideas. I get that! Here are a bunch to get your juices flowing. My advice is to get your team together and go through this list with the mindset of “How might we…?”
#### Drive more top-of-funnel (short-term)
1. Convince an important (niche) influencer to mention you (e.g. Tinder, Twitter, Clubhouse) 2. Do something controversial to get people talking about you (here’s some advice) 3. Buy lots of billboards in a concentrated area (e.g. Brex, Airtable, Venmo) 4. Release a shareable one-off product (e.g. Copy.ai, Ahrefs, Calm, UberPuppies, and a bunch more advice) 5. Launch on Product Hunt and hustle to get to #1 (guide, guide, guide, guide, guide) 6. Publish a viral piece of content (e.g. Clancy’s Auto Body TikTok video, Dropbox, Superhuman) 7. Get a popular newsletter or podcast to cover you (e.g. Ramp and Packy, Vanta and [Acquired](https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/reverse-interview-with-ben-and-david-at-vanta), Substack and The Generalist) 8. Expand to an additional location (here’s some advice) 9. Share something remarkable about your product or company 10. Translate your product into other languages (e.g. Facebook, Airbnb) 11. Organize a high-profile launch event (e.g. Salesforce, Airbnb, Spotify) 12. Launch on a new platform (e.g. Android, VR) 13. Orchestrate a PR stunt (e.g. IHOP, Tinder’s “Dozens of Dopes” date stunt, Salesforce) 14. Create a viral video (e.g. Descript, Spotify, Blendtec, Poo-Pourri, Dollar Shave Club) 15. Get your users and investors with the most followers to all post an announcement on social media at once 16. Run an ad on a large podcast, TV show, or radio show (e.g. Eight Sleep, Coinbase) 17. Run a killer contest or giveaway (e.g. Jet, Harry’s, Coinbase, more examples) 18. Create a limited-time deal (e.g. Amazon Prime Day, Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte, more examples)
#### Drive more top-of-funnel (long-term)
1. Increase your product’s virality 2. Start investing in SEO 3. Hire a salesperson (some advice here) 4. Run ads on Google, Facebook, TikTok 5. Add a referral program (here’s some advice) 6. Establish a channel partnership (some advice here) 7. Add a freemium offering (some advice here) 8. Invest heavily in brand marketing (e.g. Red Bull, Apple, Airbnb) 9. Start an online community that brings value to your target audience (some advice here) 10. Launch or acquire a content/media company (e.g. HubSpot and The Hustle, Stripe and Indie Hackers, Robinhood and MarketSnacks, Zapier and Makerpad, AngelList and Product Hunt)
#### Improve monetization
1. Encourage annual plans by offering a larger (limited-time) discount 2. Charge power users more 3. Increase your prices broadly (some advice here, and here) 4. Offer a limited-time discount if customers buy now 5. Bundle a product with a bonus (e.g. a free trip, a cool backpack, AirPods) 6. Double down on expansion revenue vs. acquiring new customers
#### Improve conversion and activation
1. Make your site faster 2. Remove a step from the flow 3. Add a step to the flow (e.g. [example from Twilio](https://youtu.be/UMAmj1bciww?t=1246)) 4. Add more guidance (e.g. [example from Airtable](https://youtu.be/dLku0AiGPVA?t=823)) 5. Add smart recommendations/defaults to questions 6. Cut 50% of your copy 7. Have just a single CTA—remove any other options 8. Add an additional authentication partner (e.g. Google, Apple) 9. Add an email drip sequence with how-to videos 10. Remove one thing from the flow that may be distracting the user 11. Schedule one-on-one Zoom onboarding with new users 12. Ask customer support and sales about one thing that’s blocking users 13. Add one element of personalization depending on the user persona 14. Increase psych
#### Improve retention
1. Manually onboard new users, to make sure they see your value 2. Let users “pause” or “snooze” instead of cancel 3. Add a level of gamification (e.g. [Duolingo](https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-duolingo-reignited-user-growth)) 4. Solve one additional problem for your user 5. Solve a more painful problem for your user 6. Increase the percentage of new users getting to your activation milestone (here’s a bunch of ideas) 7. Invest in resurrecting churned users (i.e. growth = new users + resurrected users - churned users) 8. Stop acquiring low-intent/quality users
#### Improve team velocity
1. Narrow your team’s focus by taking one thing off their plate (e.g. a goal, a project) 2. Have one or two no-meeting days a week (e.g. “No-meeting Friday”) 3. Put one person’s ass on the line (i.e. a DRI) for each goal/outcome 4. Find one blocker that is slowing your team down and unblock it 5. Ask your engineers what is most slowing their day-to-day work down, and improve it 6. Cancel a standing meeting and handle it async 7. Let go of underperformers (some inspiration)
Bookmark this post as I’ll be adding to this list as I come across more ideas. And if you’ve had any other ideas, please share in the comments 🙏
📚 Further study
1. Where great roadmap ideas come from 2. Common ways to increase activation 3. How to increase your retention 4. How to increase conversion 5. Increase your team’s velocity 6. Growth inflections
Have a fulfilling and productive week 🙏
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