
How we achieve growth by ignoring conventional startup advice - mese848
https://medium.com/swlh/how-we-achieve-65-yoy-growth-by-ignoring-conventional-startup-advice-24a3eef619c1
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TACIXAT
The stuff listed as conventional advice, I've never seen anywhere. Mixpanel,
the biggest player in the space says just focus on a few key metrics.

>You should track “dozens of metrics” without fail.

>You should A/B test every variable.

The unconvential advice is exactly what you see on YC. Talk to customers.

>All of the not-so-sexy tasks I was focusing on — actually engaging customers,
implementing feedback and building a library of educational content — were
building momentum.

Legit thought I was gonna read something about how they never talked to
customers, attended conferences and founder meet ups, made a shit product and
struck it big.

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warent
> Legit thought I was gonna read something about how they never talked to
> customers, attended conferences and founder meet ups

I can't tell, are you saying that attending conferences and founders meetups
are conventional advice, or that the conventional advice is that they
shouldn't be attended?

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TACIXAT
The conventional (or what I consider conventional as I see all the YC
propaganda) advice is you shouldn't "play founder". There are hundreds of
events that can jerk you off and make you feel like a star.

That said, conferences can be productive. There was a good talk during Startup
School this year about going to a conference with a 100% booked meeting lineup
and walked away with a bunch of deals. As well, peer groups can be very
beneficial (that is very much what Startup School is). They might have been
poor choices as proxies for "playing founder".

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everythingswan
Jokes on you if you're rolling your eyes as you open the article, as I was.
It's actually very practical advice on marketing for any company into revenue.

I frequently revisit the idea that you are a sum of what you do. For companies
that are products, you should be product-centric with your time and resources.
For service businesses, probably more focused on process and the people behind
it since they are your product. It's stressful dealing with the influx of
pressure to be growth-hacky and growth-focused every day. It's a pretty gross
environment in digital marketing right now, especially in SaaS and eCommerce,
and it's no surprise that innovative or high quality companies discover the
growth secrets: because they have great products!

Aside: I used to do more SEO and have used ahrefs a few times, more often
using their competitors, but I still follow quite a few SEO's on Twitter and
via email: they all _love_ ahrefs. Stellar product and about within the last 7
days I saw a huge Twitter thread about how helpful their latest feature
release is. I would say they're living it.

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notoriousjpg
A refreshing take. On the surface it seems to be common sense (focus on
product, talk to customer) but the real take away is to not get bogged down by
metrics and a/b testing because you feel like its some mandatory part of
success. It's okay to leave some of those things to the wayside if you dont
feel like it's feasible for your situation. Given unlimited resources i'm sure
the author would have people tracking more metrics and running more tests.

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puranjay
Helps that Ahrefs has the clearest value proposition among all the other
players in this space. Moz and SEMRush might be bigger but I can never tell
what specific thing they truly excel at.

With Ahrefs, I know that they have a very good index and that's the key value
proposition

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jmatthews
"All" the conventional wisdom would include a solid content marketing
strategy.

Respectfully, I feel like you buried the lead on this one.

Please allow me to highlight the conventional wisdom you ARE following.

1)Nothing buries a bad product faster than good marketing (ahrefs is a great
product)

2)Do one thing very well instead of chasing trends (great content marketing)

3)Create genuine value for your audience and they will generate value for you.

Great article, I just disagree with the premise.

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Rainymood
>1)Nothing buries a bad product faster than good marketing (ahrefs is a great
product)

I don't get this one, what do you mean exactly?

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virgilp
Well, great marketing gets a lot of people interested in your product. Create
a high expectations + bad experience combo for a lot of potential customers,
and now you got into a very bad position where even if you improve the
product, you can't get people to try it out (because all/ most potential
customers already did, and were sorely disappointed).

~~~
abapologist
I think this is inaccurate. One, you can control your exposure while your
product is crap. It’s just unlikely you’ll saturate your market before you can
improve the product, if indeed your company is capable of improving the
product.

Additionally, the downside isn’t “customers won’t use us bf they were burned”.
It just creates a bump for the sales process to overcome. It’s an impediment
to a sale, not a blocker.

Finally, before p/m fit, you need to be optimizing for learning over all else.
More customers, even if they have a bad experience, brings more feedback.
Also, you will have an asset - email list - of people who have signed up
because you’re solving a problem they have curiousity / interest in.

Look at mongo. They’re now pretty successful by most evaluations, and they did
this exact thing. Outside of Hn, very few remember how they over promised and
under delivered.

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navinsylvester
I am not sure about the feature discussion on slack. Too much chatter happens
in slack and important information can totally get lost. Even in the listed
conversation one is asking didn't we discuss about it.

I think the proper place for these sort of brain storming is via a feature
request task entry in your project management tool. This helps to properly
focus and not lose track of it. I think too much of slack chatter is
detrimental to productivity.

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scarejunba
Maybe this performs that prioritization in an adhoc way. If it keeps coming
up, then he’ll notice and push it harder. Otherwise if he could forget about
it it’s not worth thinking about.

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caseyf7
Surprised to see a search marketing firm using Medium for its blog. Most of
the feedback on HN is that you shouldn’t do this. Why do you stick with
Medium?

~~~
notoriousjpg
My guess would be that they have so much SEO juice, that losing some traffic
to Medium for their blog doesn't matter. Their core audience is probably
immersed by the time they read their content, and in addition to their strong
reputation/WoM where they host their blog is a non issue. Maybe they also
believe a lot of savvy people searching SEO content arent googling and picking
up the same blogspam that exists when you search these types of topics.

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barbecue_sauce
I love how on HackerNews posts, the top two comments are always two
diametrically opposed takes on the same article.

~~~
cbkeller
Might be a sign that we're not in an epistemic bubble, which would be good!

