👋 Hey, I’m Lenny and welcome to a 🔒 subscriber-only edition 🔒 of my weekly newsletter. Each week I tackle reader questions about building product, driving growth, and accelerating your career.
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…?”
Convince an important (niche) influencer to mention you (e.g. Tinder, Twitter, Clubhouse)
Do something controversial to get people talking about you (here’s some advice)
Buy lots of billboards in a concentrated area (e.g. Brex, Airtable, Venmo)
Release a shareable one-off product (e.g. Copy.ai, Ahrefs, Calm, UberPuppies)
Launch on Product Hunt and hustle to get to #1 (guide, guide, guide, guide, guide)
Publish a viral piece of content (e.g. Clancy’s Auto Body TikTok video, Dropbox, Superhuman)
Get a popular newsletter or podcast to cover you (e.g. Ramp and Packy, Vanta and Acquired, Substack and The Generalist)
Expand to an additional location (here’s some advice)
Share something remarkable about your product or company
Translate your product into other languages (e.g. Facebook, Airbnb)
Organize a high-profile launch event (e.g. Salesforce, Airbnb, Spotify)
Launch on a new platform (e.g. Android, VR)
Orchestrate a PR stunt (e.g. IHOP, Tinder, Salesforce)
Create a viral video (e.g. Descript, Spotify, Blendtec, Poo-Pourri, Dollar Shave Club)
Get your users and investors with the most followers to all post an announcement on social media at once
Run an ad on a large podcast, TV show, or radio show (e.g. Eight Sleep, Coinbase)
Run a killer contest or giveaway (e.g. Jet, Harry’s, Coinbase, more examples)
Create a limited-time deal (e.g. Amazon Prime Day, Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte, more examples)
Increase your product’s virality
Start investing in SEO
Hire a salesperson (some advice here)
Run ads on Google, Facebook, TikTok
Establish a channel partnership (some advice here)
Invest heavily in brand marketing (e.g. Red Bull, Apple, Airbnb)
Start an online community that brings value to your target audience
Launch or acquire a content/media company (e.g. HubSpot and The Hustle)
Encourage annual plans by offering a larger (limited-time) discount
Charge power users more
Offer a limited-time discount if customers buy now
Bundle a product with a bonus (e.g. a free trip, a cool backpack, AirPods)
Double down on expansion revenue vs. acquiring new customers
Make your site faster
Remove a step from the flow
Add a step to the flow (e.g. example from Twilio)
Add more guidance (e.g. example from Airtable)
Add smart recommendations/defaults to questions
Cut 50% of your copy
Have just a single CTA—remove any other options
Add an additional authentication partner (e.g. Google, Apple)
Add an email drip sequence with how-to videos
Remove one thing from the flow that may be distracting the user
Schedule one-on-one Zoom onboarding with new users
Ask customer support and sales about one thing that’s blocking users
Add one element of personalization depending on the user persona
Increase psych
Manually onboard new users, to make sure they see your value
Let users “pause” or “snooze” instead of cancel
Add a level of gamification
Solve one additional problem for your user
Solve a more painful problem for your user
Increase the percentage of new users getting to your activation milestone (here’s a bunch of ideas)
Invest in resurrecting churned users (i.e. growth = new users + resurrected users - churned users)
Stop acquiring low-intent/quality users
Narrow your team’s focus by taking one thing off their plate (e.g. a goal, a project)
Have one or two no-meeting days a week (e.g. “No-meeting Friday”)
Put one person’s ass on the line (i.e. a DRI) for each goal/outcome
Find one blocker that is slowing your team down and unblock it
Ask your engineers what is most slowing their day-to-day work down, and improve it
Cancel a standing meeting and handle it async
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 🙏
Leave a comment
Where great roadmap ideas come from
Common ways to increase activation
How to increase your retention
How to increase conversion
Increase your team’s velocity
Growth inflections
Have a fulfilling and productive week 🙏
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Sincerely,
Lenny 👋