Ask HN: What's your top growth strategy that helped grow your startup? - jiblyyyy
======
rsweeney21
Our strategy was to not try and find a shortcut or hack to grow our sales. We
just ground it out by cold calling/cold emailing, paid ads, etc.

The problem with shortcuts is they are usually not repeatable or scalable. For
example, a viral video or website can provide a boost of growth, but you can't
predict if the next thing you produce will also go viral.

What you want to find is a predictable way to generate sales where the
economics work. The economics work if the cost to generate a sale is 1/3 or
less of the lifetime value of the customer. Even if it takes a lot of effort
to generate the sale, if you have a predictable way to generate leads, and you
know how many leads you need in order to produce a sale, and you make a good
profit on that sale, you are golden. You can then ramp up your lead gen and
you know your sales with grow faster. It doesn't take any luck to display more
ads, send more emails or hire sales reps.

This is the strategy we used to grow from $0 to $1M in ARR in six months. We
could then go to a VC and tell them that if they invested $X, we could turn
that into $Y in ARR. It made fundraising pretty simple for us.

tl;dr Treat sales and marketing like a science and design a repeatable
process.

~~~
brilliantcode
holy shit this is by far the most valuable comment I came across of all time
on HN

~~~
exolymph
Allow me to make your day:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=patio11](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=patio11)

------
paskster
We are creating an online marketplace for short term work in Germany
([https://www.instaff.jobs](https://www.instaff.jobs)). Businesses can publish
their jobs on our platform, jobbers apply with their profile and then these
businesses can book the jobbers online. We take care of quality management and
employment overhead (working contracting, payroll accounting, etc.).

We made close to 3 Mill. EUR revenue in 2016. We acquire 90 % of our customers
via SEO and about 10 % via Google Adwords. We don't do any direct sales.

Our #1 growth strategy was creating well designed and highly targeted
landingpages for all relevant keywords. For example if potential customers
search for certain type of jobbers in certain German cities, these are some of
our landingpages:

[https://en.instaff.jobs/fair-hostesses-
agency/frankfurt](https://en.instaff.jobs/fair-hostesses-agency/frankfurt)

[https://en.instaff.jobs/fair-hostesses-
agency/berlin](https://en.instaff.jobs/fair-hostesses-agency/berlin)

[https://www.instaff.jobs/promotion-
agentur/stuttgart](https://www.instaff.jobs/promotion-agentur/stuttgart)

[https://www.instaff.jobs/catering-personal-
agentur/hamburg](https://www.instaff.jobs/catering-personal-agentur/hamburg)

~~~
logicallee
I notice that you have made EUR 3 million in 2016 using a scalable hands-off
model where you can turn adwords directly into cash without needing to own or
touch any inventory, meet anyone, or have any infrastructure beyond a website,
which you have built. You have also solved the chicken and egg problem, since
high-quality companies will only take the time to craft thoughtful and serious
searches if you have a pool of qualified candidates, and qualified candidates
will only post thoughtful and serious listings if the are likely to reach
serious companies they want to work for. Further, knowledge workers - the kind
you connect with companies, as opposed to manual labor, comprise roughly $3
trillion in value and are among the most sophisticated job seekers and very
likely to try your platform: even absent large economies of scale and network
effects you have proven your ability to convert them and monetize them by
offering both themselves and companies that seek them, value in an innovative
and sustainable way.

As a European VC, this is not the kind of opportunity we are looking for.
Please don't contact me again.

\- Edit: see replies below.

~~~
logicallee
_The replies I mentioned have been (rightfully) detached from this thread.

I am adding this reply to make crystal-clear that the above is SATIRE about
how hard it is for European companies to raise money from European investors.
(I'm not a European VC.) You guys are killing it. I hope investors believe in
you too._

~~~
paskster
Thanks ;)

~~~
logicallee
As for my guess - is it true raising money is way harder than it should be,
given your numbers? (And huge market.)

Or did you not have too much trouble and got fair valuations, terms, could
close quickly etc?

(If you don't mind sharing.)

~~~
paskster
We tried raising money for 5 months last year and we talked to partners from
about 20 European VC, but we were not successful. We got no or low-balling
offers at best. I guess we were missing what people call "social proof".

This was our pitch deck by the way (not meant for marketing but for context):
[http://www.instaff.jobs/download/InStaff_Pitch_Deck.pdf](http://www.instaff.jobs/download/InStaff_Pitch_Deck.pdf)

We don't need money, because we have been cashflow positive and growing for a
while. And since fundraising was hyper time consuming we will not get back to
fundraising again.

But I don't want to "rage" against the VC scene here. To each his own and I
wish everybody who raises money successfully to grow his business all the
best.

~~~
logicallee
Thank you - I knew it. :)

You don't have to follow up, but if you do: what valuation were you seeking
and what's the highest low-ball offer you received?

For me the lowest valuation given your numbers and model would be $10m - but I
am certain you were seeking a much lower valuation, and did not even get that.
So what were you seeking and what offer did you get?

(By the way, the way I analyze your story it's not a social proof question:
it's that you weren't in silicon valley.)

If you don't want to reply here you can email me at the address in my profile.
Thanks.

------
will_brown
Vblood.com - a vampire themed energy drink. I submitted a contact form on
HotTopic.com (a Fortune 500 retailer) about my product, I received request for
cost/samples, sales grew to 35,000 units/order.

TicketTitan.com - Patent pending software for price (legal fee) determination
on traffic ticket cases. Developed in-house for my former employer and
cannibalized (automated) his business was gained through future referrals, SEO
and some Google ad word spend. Liquidation event.

Partnering for Community Care - Low cost concierge/Direct Primary Care for a
physician office. Specifically not meant to cannibalize the existing
practice/patients, but experiment to determine fit of business model/moving
away from insurance based practice. Word of mouth to uninsured patients. Local
hotel/restaurant owners caught word and filled up the available ~100 slots
very quick.

MedicareMTM.com - patent pending practice management for medication therapy
management (MTM). Initially had a 6 month pilot green lit by Walmart (thru
LinkedIn cold contact), this was stopped due to a conflict. Currently, set up
a pilot with an independent pharmacy and about half dozen local providers, the
pharmacy owner started a network over ~1,000 Indian owned independent
pharmacies...so again the natural word of mouth approach.

These are just some examples, and I know they may not fit into the true
definition of startup. Still I think it is important to keep an open mind
about the specific industry of the startup/business and not apply a one size
fits all approach.

~~~
tunesmith
Can you explain the Partnering for Community Care effort a bit more? That
bullet point was general enough that I don't quite get what you were doing /
trying to do.

~~~
will_brown
See: PartneringForCommunityCare.com for the pilot program the price point was
$20/month (individuals) and $15/month (business with 5+ employees enrolled).
The copay is $10 to see a P.A./R.N.P. or $25 to see the M.D.

Concierge/Direct Primary Care is a model of healthcare where the doctor cuts
out the middleman (insurance companies), more and more primary care and
pediatricians are considering these business models for their practice.
Benefits generally include less staff, no billing/coding, no appeals to
insurers, and generally less patients/more time with patients.

The practice we worked with believes it could easily grow and sustain 2,000
patients per location and we could replicate the business fairly easily by
converting existing practices (more complicated due to legal and ethical
concerns of existing patients using insurance) or scaling providers in-house,
say like UBER with/without brick & mortar locations.

------
asdfasdfa11112
My best tip is to not try one thing to grow your startup. Try everything.

This means that you have to do things very, very cheaply. Think of each growth
hack as a single tactic. Execute in < 10 hours of work. Push into the wild.

You cannot know what will work, before you try it. What worked for others
won't necessarily work for you.

How do you live in a world where any one thing you do is 90% likely to fail?
You do a lot of 'one things', very cheaply, and when one of them hits, you
exploit it.

Growth is a process, one very much dependent on speed. Think in terms of a
growth system, not growth tactic or hack.

(this is what I call a strategy)

~~~
franciscassel
I disagree with the "try everything" part. Startups are resource constrained,
and can't afford the time or money to try _everything_.

(In marketing, the world of "everything" is pretty substantial, and few of the
channels can be properly tested cheaply: paid and organic search, paid and
organic social (which includes many different platforms), email, old-school
(e.g., print, radio, and TV) media buys, ...the list goes on.)

A smart and experienced marketer will know the tools and techniques for
deconstructing what channels are the most successful for direct competitors.
They'll also be able to figure out the niche channels where the target
audience "hangs out" that competitors _haven 't yet discovered._

tl;dr: Don't try everything. Hire a marketer who will help you skip the
guessing game and target the _already-proven_ channels in your market.

------
karmajunkie
The best thing we've done in the last year was start marketing, period.
Previously, we made all our sales through essentially an enterprise model—get
one national customer and pick up all their local affiliates. The sales cycle
was long, and most growth happened word of mouth, but it wasn't fast. We had
zero marketing presence aside from going to the relevant trade shows.

Last fall we finally hired a marketing consultant, built out a marketing
website with a contact form, and are trying out some different pricing models.
We've seen fairly consistent interest, which I'm reading as pent-up demand.

Lessons learned: I think the word-of-mouth angle was good for us at first. By
keeping a closer control on our customers we were able to really make the
product solid and understand the customer needs in depth, and how to segment
the market with pricing and features. I wish we'd flipped the switch on the
marketing website sooner, but there were benefits from waiting. The number one
lesson if you're going to do that is give potential customers who hear about
you a way to contact you—otherwise word of mouth has zero benefit. (I realize
these probably seem obvious to most, but our market is a little niche and
knowing that we wanted to market primarily to the national customers instead
of their local affiliates pointed us in certain directions early on.)

------
normster
[https://www.mailinator.com](https://www.mailinator.com)

Provide a exceedingly useful free service that naturally lends itself to
aiding QA. We weren't clever in all this, the customers found us. We did
however react when the opportunity presented itself.

We added features to make their use case easier and better. The free service
takes a good deal of infrastructure but the brand and value provided make it
worth it.

~~~
ssharp
I have been a long time user of Mailinator but recently needed to run a gambit
of email tests wanted to avoid typical Mailinator blocks and also would have
preferred the emails to persist longer. I started Googling options, considered
just registering quickly for a domain and email service, etc. but then I
realized I could _pay_ for Mailinator to get exactly what I was looking for.

Consider this a testament to how exceedingly useful your free service is. I
was actually able to run my whole gambit of tests with the free service,
probably using 100+ addresses, and used one of the alias domains to avoid
blocking, though it took a few tries before I found one.

Now a paying customer :)

------
callmeed
You're obviously going to get a variety of answers because it really depends
on your product and market. Saas vs hardware, consumer vs smb vs enterprise,
mobile vs web, etc.

My advice is to read Traction and apply the framework to test out as many
possible strategies as possible. There are tons of other blogs and strategies
about growth but I find Traction to have the most practical and actionable
format. Plus, I like having a hard copy. I've probably bought 5 copies of it
for friends.

Create a Trello board to track your experiments and progress. You will find
something that moves the needle–BUT it might not be what you expect. For
example, I've had tons of success at trade shows in past projects.

Good luck.

[http://tractionbook.com](http://tractionbook.com)

~~~
ccvannorman
Traction is an easy read and an excellent jumping off point into the "growth
strategy" space.

------
reflect
For us ( [http://www.startupdaybook.com](http://www.startupdaybook.com) ) a
few things have been very effective -- but it did take a lot of trial and
error to find those few things.

BetaList and Reddit have been a big driver of signups as they have the exact
audience we are looking to help (startups) and a wide audience.

Blogging has also been a big part of getting signups. Creating helpful posts
on Medium with a small product mention at the bottom brings in a good amount
of the right people.

Twitter is great for driving traffic to the blog posts which then in turn gets
people interested in us and our product. Buffer is awesome, and Quuu is a
great service that has a community retweeting your tweet for a nominal fee.

Overall our landing page conversion rate is 29.8% right now, so driving the
right traffic really matters.

~~~
benjaminfox
Thanks for sharing. Which subreddits helped you?

~~~
reflect
/Startups has a "Share Your Startup" each month which is great

------
r0fl
Lots of hard work, no unnecessary spending, and reinvesting 100% of the
profits for several years. Works every time.

------
zinssmeister
We are a marketplace for great projects looking for great designers
([https://www.designinc.com](https://www.designinc.com)), something that needs
to grow on two ends. What has worked really well for us is putting out high
quality content marketing. Our YouTube channel has a weekly show that is shot
with great sound and video quality. When we write blog posts we try to be very
specific and insightful rather than pushing lots of cheaper/easier content
every week.

Another great channel for us is SEO. Here we also take the high quality over
quantity route by building fewer but more insightful landing pages. We want
people to spend more time on our content and get value from it.

------
minhajuddin
I am lucky to be in a position to have a free version of the app
([https://getsimpleform.com/](https://getsimpleform.com/)) before building a
better paid version [https://liveformhq.com/](https://liveformhq.com/) . Most
of my conversions come from the link on the free version of the site.

~~~
mazlix
I just want to thank you for making getsimpleform. I've used it in multiple
projects and recommended it frequently!

~~~
minhajuddin
Happy to hear that. Do you have any feedback on how it can be improved? I am
currently planning on spending some time to make simpleform better.

------
kamphey
REFERRALS: 90% of my new clients come from current customers. Not only do I
provide a good service that is rather hard to find but also only really
applicable to certain people. (It's good to know your customers), I also send
out little reminders every few months that I'm open to referrals and gladly
give a referral fee or a month free of my service.

I find that people also refer me the first week they sign up. Which is
something that is a bit of a hack. I heard this advice a couple years ago and
I thought it was crazy but it totally works and is awesome. Someone finally
made the decision to buy my service and it's at that point that they are most
excited about it and love to refer people.

------
throwaway29183
We've used a mixture of cold emailing and social media to generate growth in
the past. The trick with social media is figuring out how to make your content
both engaging and relevant to your product.

We're experimenting with Instagram stories on our latest project: JQBX
([https://www.instagram.com/jqbx.fm](https://www.instagram.com/jqbx.fm)
[https://www.jqbx.fm](https://www.jqbx.fm)). Having good content lets you get
more eyeballs on your stories which, so far for us at least, haven't driven
people to unfollow since the feed content is of a high quality.

------
scraft
I'm not sure whether you'd count me: I went from 0 to 10 people in about 5
years (hardly massive growth), there was no secret, just a process of being
conservative, slowly growing each year, attempting to full utilize all
resources we have, and trying to bring in contracts which will support us both
now and in the future.

~~~
wheelerwj
10 employees or customers?

~~~
scraft
Employees

------
cdiamand
I've been promoting Opps Daily (a daily software opportunity newsletter) by
sharing our growth stats weekly.

You can check it out here
[http://www.oppsdaily.com/blog](http://www.oppsdaily.com/blog).

I share the stats on hacker news, indiehackers, reddit, and the solo founder
slack chat.

Its been effective so far!

~~~
tmaly
I signed up the other day. How often do you send out an email?

~~~
cdiamand
Every day. Did you get a opt-in in your e-mail after signing up?

~~~
tmaly
I did get an opt-in which I confirmed

------
profpandit
I have found that the maximum propensity to gain is to set your priorities
right and then sit back and watch the river flow I don't mean that as a
fishing analogy but more as a "let your ideas evolve in a organic way" So you
would expect that you would achieve your top priority the soonest and lower
priorities later How much you achieve is a rate issue and I don't think there
are any fixed answers for that Obviously the are ways to accelerate your rate
of progress through an analysis of the data and this is typically what the
pundits vouch for But this a grey area. Since most start-ups are driven to
grow revenues rate acceleration is very typical but that is a more a matter of
business than engineering

------
yesimahuman
Find a passionate community, make something awesome for them, get their
contact info (email, twitter, etc.), stay engaged w them, improve and engage
consistently. Have used this process for a number of products and it works
very well in the beginning stages.

~~~
williamle8300
Some people are product visionaries... while I agree with your approach for
market-driven products, what would your advice be for people who start with a
product instead of a userbase?

~~~
yesimahuman
Think about it as starting with a product in a _market_. If you can't identify
a market, then you should stop and do something else. A market doesn't have to
be big and vague, it can be small. For example, people who develop apps with
Angular JS (to use an example from my company). You can then expand from there
assuming you have a vision that allows for that and the market isn't only as
big as the small one you started with.

------
rdlecler1
Distribution is a hard problem for many startups. It's not enough to make
something that people want if they never know about it. We started publishing
an annual Agtech investing report at the beginning of 2015. This put us on the
map and in the media.

------
nixy
For B2B: be local. Have presence where your customers are. B2B relations are
so much easier if you are local, so you'll be rewarded if you are able to open
up offices close to strategic customers or in potentially big markets.

~~~
kristineberth
Or travel and meet face-to-face. Works just as well.

------
CarlNew
While I do agree on following a solid mid/long term strategy to generate
sustainable growth, a Startup can often benefit immensely from hacking an
unconventional marketing channel at an early point in its trajectory. If that
doubles or triples your signups even for a short time, it can be immensely
helpful to get investors to take you more seriously while you're grinding out
the longterm strategy. It also helps to get feedback from real users while
you're still in the development phase.

------
johndavi
We priced our product appropriately for our customer base and the value
offered by our product: which is to say, an order of magnitude more costly
than a typical VC-subsidized, "make it up in volume" startup approach.

This certainly resulted in the opposite of growth, raw-customer-count-wise,
but it's led to a legitimate, sustainable and growing business; streamlined
our maintenance and support costs; and focused our product roadmap.

------
garysieling
For [https://www.findlectures.com](https://www.findlectures.com), I've found
writing articles for other places helpful. E.g. dev.to has a big twitter
following, which leads to things getting passed around.

Similarly, if you write something that does well on small subreddits, a lot of
times they will make it into Cooper Press email lists later.

~~~
petercooper
Thanks for the mention! :) However, people who email us with something to
include tend to do even better with making it in or even getting highly
featured. We are increasingly finding things we get first and feature _then_
end up on HN or Reddit the next day, so we want to encourage that ;-)

~~~
garysieling
Nice, thanks for the reply, it never occurred to me to do it that way :)

~~~
petercooper
We have not been very good at communicating how we find stories and hope to
improve that :)

------
mherrmann
I'm launching a file manager for programmers [1]. What helped immensely was to
get it featured on BetaList [2]. This brought about 1000 new users. I'd
definitely do that again.

[1]: [https://fman.io](https://fman.io)

[2]: [https://www.betalist.com](https://www.betalist.com)

------
profpandit
This is a very sincere and honest question, one that few start-up founders, if
they look deep inside their hearts, would have a top of the hat answers for.
Yet, it beleagers start-up critics such as TechCrunch and people interested in
start-ups in general. While there are no cookie cutter answers

------
sedzia
Sending out coupons, kidding. For a niche API platform like ours
([https://voucherify.io](https://voucherify.io)) getting SEO right seems to be
the best "growth hack". Other than that, top-notch customer service does
wonders.

~~~
ezekg
I really like your site. I have an API-based service for software licensing.
How important has language bindings/SDKs been for developer on-boarding? Just
curious, as I don't have bindings ready and have detected a little bit of
friction because of it. I also don't have an admin dashboard yet. Joys of
releasing a beta early. :)

------
gwbas1c
[https://www.syncplicity.com/](https://www.syncplicity.com/) took off when it
targeted a niche that Dropbox didn't: business users.

The other half of the story was that Syncplicity basically replaced network
file shares for small Mom and Pop companies that didn't want to hire a
consultant every time the network file server. Its premium support was much
easier and cheaper to work with than bringing in a consultant.

So, I would summarize as: Target a niche that your competitor isn't targeting,
and at the same time, find a product to replace that your customers will be
happy to see go.

------
chrischattin
Good old fashioned sales and word of mouth.

~~~
ezekg
I'm learning this the hard way. I thought the hardest part was developing the
product.

~~~
ci5er
> I thought the hardest part was developing the product.

I'm curious: Why did you think that? There are articles, from time-to-time,
that decry this notion, and yet I find that young/first-time entrepreneurs
often think this. Since it's such a common notion - I've become generally
increasingly curious about how it (this idea) is spread. How it gets into
people's heads. Any thoughts?

~~~
ezekg
You also read time and time again of a developer building a project they've
put little marketing effort into banking them 5k/mo while allowing them to
quit their full time job.

I think after putting a huge amount of time and effort into a project, you
just kind of convince yourself that it's good enough to sell itself.

~~~
ci5er
That's a pretty good point. Still, I think it's relatively rare
(statistically, out of all those who attempt it), unless they themselves are
active among the community of users that adopters -- and even then stories of
developers building developer tools in return for almost zero donations are
not uncommon.

Thanks!

------
pryelluw
Focusing on providing value.

------
jscheel
This is a good read:
[https://www.groovehq.com/blog/focus](https://www.groovehq.com/blog/focus).
Remember though, every company is different. What works for one may not work
for another.

------
edoceo
There is a book called Traction that outlines more than a dozen plans and
emphasis on trying more than one to see what works for your case. What works
for StartupA isn't what works for StartupB. Try and test

------
hamhamed
Partnerships with other startups for us. Find where your customers are
chilling at, and create a partnership or promotion to target them

------
7cupsoftea
SEO and I highly recommend Ryan Bednar at www.rankscience.com. They are in YC
right now and doing a pretty amazing job.

------
idlewords
Compete with a Yahoo product

------
n1tro
the mix of luck (lots of it) and timing

------
applecore
You want to grow your startup? It's much easier when you Make Something People
Want.

~~~
beaconstudios
true, but marketing is not superseded completely by product quality and
product/market fit. You also need to make people aware of your product and
make a strong value proposition.

~~~
zanek
I know everyone may say these are outliers, but Google, Facebook, Instagram,
Snapchat, etc all had ZERO marketing and acquired millions of users. Part of
me thinks that alot of what people are saying about marketing applies to
companies with a weak product or little differentiation. A monster, highly
wanted product does appear to be the the exception

~~~
beaconstudios
Google was the first actually-decent search engine - it allowed people to
access the internet. All the others are social networks and largely rely on
the network effect and being the one that becomes trendy, and thus aren't
valid comparisons.

If you can spot and build the next Google then you may not need marketing, but
those opportunities are rare.

------
throwawaydbfif
If your product doesn't suck and it won't sell you suck at marketing. "Growth
hacking" is just a SV koolaid rebranding of marketing.

It wasn't a start-up but a consulting company I worked at that had stagnated
for about 7 years.

6 months later we had redone our whole marketing setup. New site, new
branding, new software, lots of advertisement $ shifted.

A year later revenue was almost 3x. We raised our rates so profitability was
even more than that.

The problem is finding a great marketing expert is just as hard as finding
good coders. The company blew through countless consultants and 3 "marketing
majors" with no returns until they found me and we turned it all around.

I would say marketing and coding are equally important for a start-up, easily
the two most important things. If you have two founders one should be a
marketing guru. If you don't your first employee should be.

Another thing is don't hire any marketing expert that can't code. The actual
marketing setup is more than 50% coding. You need to find a coder that loves
marketing

~~~
shostack
As a fellow experienced marketer I would implore you to not use the term
"marketing guru." The word "guru" has a really bad connotation with all of the
info product snake oil salesmen and wannabe marketers out there.

The reality is that marketing is an increasingly specialized and technical
domain requiring knowledge of coding, data, etc. and it can be hard enough as
it is to help people trust we're not all scammers (particularly a technical
audience such as this one) and that there are in fact good marketers who have
ethics and deliver results.

~~~
thibauts
As a programmer I'd be really interested in knowing what kind of coding skills
are useful to marketers. Could you give me examples of use cases and useful
tools / languages ?

~~~
shostack
The other response pretty much nailed it.

Basic working knowledge of how code works on the web, and how data flows from
Point A to Point B is a bare minimum in my mind.

Then you're often dealing with a data warehouse, BI tools and the modeling
hell that comes with it, etc.

Beyond that, there is using code to improve performance directly. Speeding up
page load times directly impacts SEO these days with Google. Knowing where and
how tracking breaks (ad blockers, cross-device cookies dropping, messed up UTM
params, cross-domain tracking setup, cross-channel attribution, etc.) and the
million "gotchas" that come with any analytics platform is also quite
technical.

Then outside of the tracking there's things like media and ad buying. There's
some crazy work that goes into bid algorithms used by all the big search and
display platforms.

The other poster's point about getting it into all the nooks and crannies of
your marketing channels is spot on. Involving marketing and adding tracking to
every single new feature is a requirement for product development. Linking all
marketing systems under one roof and determining a SSoT is critical, but often
Sisyphean, task.

In terms of a basic tools/languages list, I'd say...

\- HTML, JS, CSS \- Whatever stack you're working on...so common ones probably
have some PHP or RoR \- Google Analytics and/or Omniture, or some other solid
analytics platform, as well as their respective APIs for dealing with events
and other goodies \- Other pieces in the marketing stack such as data
warehouses (Redshift, etc.), email platforms, CRMs, bid management platforms,
ad servers, tag management systems, CMS's, etc. These all need to be linked
together in an ideal world.

Feel free to ping me if you have any other questions. Contact info is in my
profile.

------
fairpx
For us, running [http://fairpixels.co](http://fairpixels.co) (a logo design
boutique), the one thing that generated the most leads and projects by far was
one of our side-projects called: [http://logodust.com](http://logodust.com), a
place where we started open sourcing unused logo designs. It quickly got
featured by some major publications and it provides a steady stream of
clients.

------
throwaway-6006
Would someone please suspend this account already. He is not a "YC tech
manager" as his profile implies (assuming he hasn't changed it just now).
Based on comment history, he appears to be a troll that has hijacked a dormant
account with high karma.

Frankly any account that falsely suggests a YC affiliation should be suspended
without warning.

If you have 1000+ karma, please use a secure password. Warning: red herrings
below...

~~~
logicallee
Hi - the above is very obvious satire: I am showcasing how insane European
VC's are.

You can see another take from me on this same theme by reading this comment:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12198883](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12198883)

You can read that and then read my reply (scroll down to about the third
comment), part of which I'll quote "you've given a lot of hard data but fail
to draw the obvious correct conclusions, that the reason you haven't raised
financing is because you're not located in Silicon Valley and don't have an
office there."

Regarding the comment you just responded to: I purposefully made my comment
extremely over the top (and insane), as satire. But I hoped the parent poster
would reply by saying "if this is satire you are correct - this is exactly the
reception we got. The last valuation we were offered is 1 million - and they
wanted two thirds of the company." (Which would both be insulting, and kill
the company.)

Anyway I am within my edit window but don't feel a need to edit my obviously
satirical (by no means troll) comment.

Email me at the address I have listed (which likely on archive.org or
elsewhere you can see has not changed in a long time), and I will confirm for
you. I cannot emphasize enough that it is extremely obviously satirical - it
makes fun of closed-minded European VC's. It was meant to evoke a sense of
injustice. As clear and obvious satire - you can tell it's satire due to the
facts it chooses to draw attention to, which are stellar. The "punchline", the
second paragraph, is a total non sequitur. Given how - genuinely, really -
amazing everything mentioned is, why would any VC want to rudely shut
themselves out? Oh right - because they're a European VC, which was my
satirical point.

Finally, even if for some reason you didn't get right away that it's satire,
there is no other explanation because the parent poster didn't ask for
anything, and even if they had this would not be the place to post a reply.

In case I have to spell it out, I'm obviously not a European VC and the post I
replied to obviously did not try to contact me. I'd appreciate it if you made
your comment less accusing.

~~~
hobofan
I feel like I understand what you are trying to say, but I still don't see the
connection to OP's comment.

~~~
logicallee
The connection is "We are creating an online marketplace for short term work
in Germany" and I wanted to congratulate them on getting 3 mil Eur revenue in
2016. To be honest I wanted to hear from them how raising funding has been and
made an assumption (which they haven't responded to.) I can't overemphasize
what huge genuine revenue numbers those are, for a startup, on the model he
has described. If they're not getting investors tripping over themselves to
invest at a $10M valuation (and they're almost certainly not) then it really
frustrates me. Everything they described was great! I hope this makes the
reason for my comment a bit clearer.

I would also love to hear from paskster (the OP I replied to) with what their
experience has been like building this kind of game-changing startup,
specifically as regards venture capital funding.

------
foundersgrid
Reaching out directly to companies who would be a great fit changed my
business overnight, which formed the basis of starting my new company which
helps others do the same: [https://GrowthList.co](https://GrowthList.co)

