What is Growth Hacking? Podcast with Gaurav Sharma

Growth hacking is the buzzword for startups.

Growth hacking is an umbrella term for strategies focused solely on growth. It is usually used in relation to early-stage startups who need massive growth in a short time on small budgets.

Growth hacking is a term that you must have heard of being thrown around by marketers who are looking to acquire and retain new customers.

But after reading numerous articles and listening to multiple podcasts, do you really know - What growth hacking is?

Don’t worry, we have you covered.

We recently had Mr. Gaurav Sharma on our podcast (for the second time) to help us understand what Growth hacking really is and how you can hack it for your business.

Podcast Transcript

Crispino  00:01

So hi guys. Welcome back to yet another episode of the business and remote work podcast brought to you by Wishup. I'm your host Crispino along with Neelesh, and we would like to welcome back on our show, Gaurav. So thanks for joining us once again, Gaurav, it's great to have you here with us.

Neelesh  00:17

Hey Gaurav

Gaurav Sharma  00:18

Hey Neelesh, thanks. Thanks Crispino. Thanks for inviting me. I'm thrilled to be here.

Crispino  00:23

No worries Gaurav. I thoroughly enjoyed the last podcast on influencer marketing. And we got some amazing reviews from our clients as well like our customers. So yeah, I thought it's about time we had you back on the show with us.

Gaurav Sharma  00:36

Yeah, it's exciting, man. It's been like, like six months or something. But yeah, time flies. And it's good to be here. Yeah.

Crispino  00:44

Oh, yeah. It's six months. It feels like

Neelesh  00:49

I was listening to that podcast, you know, a couple of days ago. So yeah, it feels like yesterday.

Crispino  00:55

Gaurav was on of the first two guests, like first two or three. So yeah, it's nice to have you back here.

Gaurav Sharma  01:02

It was my honor. To be honest, you guys are doing great, honestly. So having me on the board was great. Thanks.

Neelesh  01:10

Yeah, thank you.

Crispino  01:12

So we were considering this topic growth hacking for quite a while. But we do not know whom to kind of approach for growth hacking like it's, it's, it's quite popular. It's there out there. But it's still a very niche market. And I then stumbled once again, on your profile. And then we realized, I think Gaurav is quite an expert in this domain. So let's get him back on.

Gaurav Sharma  01:34

Thanks. Thanks very much. It's been a while I've been like, almost 10 years in this industry. And we have implemented several growth hacking tactics into the like channels, we used to, like work on like SEO content. And the stuffs has been working out pretty well for us. And that's one of the big reason that my agency is working out pretty well, compared to other agencies in the working the same industries. So good thing is practice we follow, for our clients.

Crispino  02:01

Just to begin with Gaurav, could you set the base by telling us what exactly is growth hacking? And how can us business implement it in its strategy?

Gaurav Sharma  02:10

Yeah. So see, when you just Google growth hacking, and try to learn from there, it's actually confusing, the language is quite confusing, because when I started learning this back in the days, it was always confusing. So I'll try to make it very simple for regular people. So it was a term coined by Sean Ellis in 2010, in his book, and he just wanted to quote this that you just follow any marketing tactic, you know, in a, in a different way, so that you get to grow your customer base, in the lesser time and lesser investment of money on the basis of experimenting, different different marketing techniques, which are not available in the market that is not trending. It's not available. That's, that's very common. So that's all you need to do. So anything you do with marketing, like, for SEO, for content, for viral video marketing, or whatever you do, it just seemed to make it very unique. And try to do something which is able to bring more customer to your, to your profile. So that's all about growth hacking. So it's all about experimentation, honestly.

Neelesh  03:13

So I have a counter question on that Gaurav, what is not growth hacking ?

Gaurav Sharma  03:18

What is not growth hacking, which is a commonly used so if just take an example. People, that do content marketing, right, we just write content, they just go for like 400 word of piece of content, 800 word of content on the blog. That's regular content marketing. What's growth hacking in content marketing is repurposing that content. And like not investing another piece of not investing content, or payment of money or the content by creating new content stop doing repurposing on content reupdate. So after like after like six months or nine months, your content is old. So you upgrade the content by adding like 200 words or 300 words, instead of people what they do regularly. They don't update the content, they invest like, 800 word of content, again, on the new piece of content. And the older content gets old and old. And Google starts like deranking that post and used to investing more on new content. And at the end, when you see after like two years or three years, you have spent tons of money on the content, but only few of your content actually works, which are actually ranking recently. And all content is like it's gone. So if you see the money you have spent after two or three years, you realize that most of the money actually went in the vein. So the growth hacking in content marketing is all about repurposing and upgrading the content.

Neelesh  04:36

Got it. One more question. So what is the difference between let's say if somebody says he's a growth hacker, and some other person says is a digital marketer? What's the difference between these two?

Gaurav Sharma  04:51

You see, see in India specifically or around the world takes me like 10-15 years that the digital marketing things is actually booming, right But before 15 years back, it was like, it's just not it's not very common it was in USA, but not in like in Asian countries or stuff. So people these days use growth marketing like growth hacker as a coined a term in their LinkedIn profile, but they actually don't know much about it, but who are actually professional and done the growth hacking, they try to find creative ways to just increase the customer base, they just don't go for SEO, they don't go for like regular marketing areas, do the PPC, instead, they try to find different ways how they can lure the customer. So what they do is mostly they analyze the competitor, they analyze the industry, they analyze the customer, the customer pain points, and and after analyzing all the like industry, competitor and the customer, they try to understand the which is the missing part to try to find the missing gap. And then they try to come up with some different ideas that to fill that gap with their brand name. And they went through it and boom, they see success after analyzing all three things. So they don't go for like look, let's do content, let's to PPC, let's do social media ads. And that's how the influencer influencer marketing came into picture like six to eight year back. Initially after like 2012 or something, there was no influencer marketing. But social media was booming that day, right? So there was one brand, is a watch brand, Daniel. So they come up with the influencer marketing practices. And that was a new practice they followed because watching industry is a very old industry. And they they were very new in that space. So they come up with a different marketing strategy, influencer marketing, it worked out pretty well for them. Now it's a multi billion dollar company. So that's what you need to do analyze customer, see where they are, right. And as competitors, see what they're not doing, what you can do extra. And they started doing the barter system instead of paying money to the influencer. So they were just sending out free watches for them, or just doing something for free, and boom, they see good results from that. So that's growth hacking. Regular marketers, digital marketers just do PPC, they do just content. It's a regular stuff. They do the pattern, common patterns.

Neelesh  07:13

Yeah that's so interesting, Crispino you remember, we used to discuss that every new big company or every new unicorn is actually built on a new distribution system.

Gaurav Sharma  07:22

Exactly. That's that's growth hacking.

Neelesh  07:25

So, so actually Gaurav just gave an example of that Daniel watch that they kind of discovered influencer marketing. Yeah, that's fantastic. Crispino you are our growth hacker.

Gaurav Sharma  07:36

Congratulations man.

Crispino  07:37

Should include that on my resume now. So it's quite interesting. But yeah, I mean, maybe we all do growth hacking in a way without realizing it.

Gaurav Sharma  07:48

Exactly. We do

Crispino  07:50

Because we keep finding new ways as well, to kind of get Wishup out there. Unique different methods, different types of partnerships, we are running.

Gaurav Sharma  07:58

Exactly.

Crispino  07:59

With y'all as well. With Attrock. We're doing an affiliate partnership now. Right. So yeah, I think

Gaurav Sharma  08:05

It's all about like, increasing the customer base with less investment and, like, rapidly or like, quickly, that's the whole game of growth hacking. People complicated by different jargons. But the basic concept is this.

Crispino  08:20

Gaurav, can you give us a couple of more examples like you give the example of the watch company for influencer marketing?

Neelesh  08:27

Yeah, I would love to know some more examples because you seem like you know, you have studied this topic very deeply.

Gaurav Sharma  08:34

Yeah, I did, actually. So okay, so a few examples. If you haven't heard the name of Dollar Shave company dollarshave.com. So they launched a campaign like like 6-8 years back. So what they did they just came up with a video. Yeah, the video is very quite engaging. So they come up with the idea that we will send you $1 razor blade every month to your at your doorstep. Okay, and they create this video so now they come up with a recurring model of $1 you will get you just spend $1 every month and you will get it for life and in regular razor is cost like something $10-$50 in the USA so this was a breaking model for razor blades yeah it laid out and this word are pretty well for them and the video watch was watched by something around 25 million people and we got some good bump in the in the traffic and sales so that's that was growth hacking. So they come up with a video or some unique model idea other than the other competitors not just it was a regular razor but it just a lot cheaper but they have a recurring model that supports their business. So the the analyze the competitor, they analyze the pain point, they analyze the industry, they try to come up with the find the competitive gap and the big breakthrough it with the video. They got a good revenue and everything.

Neelesh  09:56

Yes, this is a fine example of what why growth hacking is not marketing because they crack growth through their business model.

Gaurav Sharma  10:05

Exactly, and that's exactly what Dropbox did back in 2008. So when Dropbox came into the picture, as the clouds software, cloud computing, cloud hosting, you can like storage, you can put storage on cloud, and it was new. But the funny part is, if you remember, you see the domain name is dropbox.com. Right now, right. But initially, when they launched, it was a startup, they didn't have enough funds. So they it was not available that dropbox.com was not available. So they bought, get dropbox.com in the in the beginning, and then they started coming up with the different ideas of, if you link your social media account, with our Dropbox, you will get extra five GB 10 GB. So that was a growth hacking tactic that people started doing, because they want like more five GB, 10 GB for free. Right, it was no cost for them. And they already have a customer, and then retaining the customer already existing customers. So that's another because attrition rate is a big problem, churn rate for SaaS brands, right. So they that retention rate increases, they get more like exposure from the social media. And they are putting out their name on social media, because everyone is linking Dropbox in their social media accounts. So they get branding, they get more customer with no extra cost to them. And it was quite rapid for them. So and soon, you know that Dropbox, like a billion dollar company now. And then bought about dropbox.com and redact the old domain. And now people just heard that Dropbox. So that was the story for Dropbox in the beginning. Yeah. And that was the growth hacking tactic for them. But now, if you see, it comes into regular practice, but to in 2008, it was not regular practice. It was new for them. For the industry. Similar things.

Neelesh  11:57

Yeah. I mean, now I understand, like, in fact, that reminds me of two examples, actually. Now since Gaurav, you know, said that, you know, different brands did different things. And that was the first time some anybody did it, and then everybody else copied it. So for example, sadly, I think it was PayPal, who said that, you know, if you send $10 to your friend, we will give you $10 Back to your account.

Gaurav Sharma  12:19

Exactly, exactly. Yeah. And the same thing is now like copied by cash back. You can earn cashback so send like 100 rupees from UPI, you get 20 rupees, cashback or something like this. So it's the same practices, the different versions, people try to come up with.

Neelesh  12:36

Say, for example, I also heard this example of QuickBooks, QuickBooks, when they came to India, they actually did not do any marketing, they just went to these Google resellers. And then just tied up with them. So whoever was selling Google work to you know, the clients, all these resellers were also selling QuickBooks on the site, and they built a $300 million. So does that also qualify as growth hacking?

Gaurav Sharma  13:00

It is it is it is, you're going to the target audience when trying to understand that none of the computers are actually doing this. So that's exactly people do. And that's actually comes into the growth hacking part. Because that's not something you just call it like referral marketing or affiliate marketing. You actually like partner, the right type of people, and try to like market your product to the right audience. So that's definitely a growth hacking. Brilliant. Yeah. So it's always funny, because this term was coined by Sean Ellis 2010. But the growth hacking was existed, like 20-25 years back as well just people started knowing now. Yeah, fine. Yeah.

Crispino  13:42

So Gaurav if I had to incorporate, like, growth hacking into SEO, is that possible?

Gaurav Sharma  13:48

Yeah, it is possible. But it's quite tricky. Let me explain how because like in SEO there, like three things you do like on page, off page and content, that's three things you do in a indefinitive manner. So on page is something you just do one time, in the off page, you can do growth hacking by like, so one thing is, what Google do they Google analyze the pattern that you are like building backlinks. So like breaking the pattern is one thing you can do in growth hacking. So Google says that don't buy backlinks, because who will know you can, you can pay money and you can buy the backlinks. But Google try to analyze by understanding the pattern of your link building, right. So if you break the pattern of buying links, and with a mix of anchor text, but it's more strategically, then you will see a good good, good growth in a lesser time. So that's another growth hacking in SEO, although it's a time consuming, but still, you will find a good growth from the regular stuff you do from SEO. Or maybe you can just build relationships with the influential bloggers and try to do something great with them. And you will get more quality backlinks from the website. And voila, you will see some good growth from SEO there as well. And thirdly thing is the content part. So like I said, doing the content upgrades, doing content repurposing, so that will help in the SEO part. So if people just you need to be more strategic, what's more competitive and Google is keep on upgrading their bots, and they're looking for patterns come up with some different AI's and all it just you need to be more strategic. But yeah, breaking the pattern is the biggest thing you can do in growth hacking SEO.

Crispino  15:27

I'm curious Gaurav, is it something in growth hacking that's worked for Attrock.

Gaurav Sharma  15:32

For at rock up, we have a different, honestly a different model because being an agency, one thing we did is different is we come up with custom packages for for brands, usually people do they have a silver gold packages, but we come up with a custom packaging for each and every brand. So whatever problem you have, whatever goal you have, give us the pain point or the or the goals will come up with the strategy for you. So that will work specifically for your brand. And that actually worked out for us. Because when I was doing a job for two years in a different agency, they were selling packages, silver gold packages buy backlinks, buy content that's it, they don't take care of they don't see the website. And after three months, client leave you and you have to go for acquisition, there's no retention. So that kind of problem I see, I've seen. And this is what we do in a company that we focus on retention, providing good values, and come up with some custom packages, analyze the website, analyze the backlink profile content profile, during the audit, and then give the exit model that this will work. And at least in India, or like throughout the world I've seen will literally give guarantee for SEO, that for this keyword, I will make you rank because being an engineer. I've seen multiple times I was a developer as well, for a couple of months, then I left. So I know there's a certain formula or algorithm you can come up with to create a certain pattern. And in the SEO as well, you can create a pattern and see a pattern and then define come up with a formula and you can define that how much backlink is required for the keyword how much content is required, what type of content is required, and how much effort is required to make it work and how much time it will take to if you just put X amount of money on a regular basis, X amount of backlink and content on a daily basis. So how much time it will take. So we know exactly how much work and efforts required for any keyword even if it has a KDS score of 90 or 95. And even if your website is 45 or 50 We can make it work. But we'll give you some exact strategy, how it will work. So that's that's a kind of growth hacking or you can say USP we have in our company.

Neelesh  17:48

Sorry to bring back to the example part guys. So I remember two things are Gaurav. So please tell me if that is also qualified as growth growth hacking, say for example, there are these two Indian companies in grocery delivery one one of the names is I think ninja cart, they started giving one kilo onions for one, one rupee. So I think they acquired a lot of customers in a span of like five days or seven days, right? So this would qualify?

Gaurav Sharma  18:21

It does, it does, it does, it totally does because they're just trying to see the main goal is not always to like increase the revenue in growth hacking, the growth the revenue model comes in the later picture of the growth hacking, the main part is increase the customer base, if you have a custom strong customer base, you can like get more money because you just see in online world aapko chaska lagana padta hai you have to just make sure they have habit of buying from online. So you need to like provide things for free for some time so that they are habitual, with whatever you are providing. So yes, they are habitual and they're like loyal to you, because that's the last stage of funnel cycle like retention is one then loyalty then comes advocacy if you are able to create advocates in out of your customer base, then you are awesome, then you are like golden means you are like you will grow like rapidly in the future. So growth hacking brings customer and then advocacy comes to later part of the picture. So the example he quoted is definitely a growth hacking.

Neelesh  19:26

And there is another example which is a very recent company by two I think Stanford dropouts Zepto which has become a like super success in Bangalore, and in some some other parts of India. They promised the grocery delivery within 10 minutes, and they became viral. Now I don't know, is this growth hacking? Or is this just improvement in product?

Gaurav Sharma  19:47

See growth hacking is also about like product optimization as well like optimizing the growth model or the revenue model or the business model as well. It's not about just marketing practices you follow taking doesn't apply for product improvement or model improvement as well. So like Zepto I think Blinkit also do the same thing, 10 minutes delivery, and come up with definite ideas of putting five kilometers or 10 kilometers in every city. So yeah, this is a growing idea. And this definitely works out pretty well for them. Also, initially, they invest heavily because of having a lot of warehouses and everything. But yeah, the main goal is to acquire more customers and later make money out of that. So it is a growth hacking practice.

Crispino  20:33

Is there any difference Gaurav, the b2b or b2c industry or that doesn't matter. That's irrelevant.

Gaurav Sharma  20:39

It doesn't matter. Honestly, it just, like I said, In the beginning, when I break out that you just need to analyze the industry, analyze the competitor, and analyze your customer. If you're able to analyze all three things and come up with the idea that actually break the competitive gap between that you will break through you will win, it will be win win for you will find customers and you will be but the point is, the company fails is just because they're not able to make loyal customers in the down the line and not able to convert loyal customers into advocates. So that's the problem. The company fails, even after doing a lot of growth hacking practices, because you have seen many companies came up like we have heard about Snapdeal, right in the very beginning. Now it's it's it's growing. But it's not growing that much compared to Flipkart and Amazon and anyone else in the market. Because they're not able to, like create advocates in their company advocates, as a customer in the customer base. And that's the problem, people leave your like, leave your product to go move to the next competitors. And then you will start losing we have spent tons of money and it's not working out. So that's the next step. But yeah, initial growth hacking practices you need to follow to bring more customers to b2b b2c, it doesn't matter.

Neelesh  21:54

So basically, you can acquire, you can accelerate the customer acquisition using features, which is called growth hacking, but you cannot retain customers using those features for retention, you have to have a very good product,

Gaurav Sharma  22:08

Exactly, you need to provide value, you need to provide value. So UVP is is very, very, very important. So even from my point of view, with 10 years of experience, USP is secondary for me, UVP is a primary thing for any product, they also work hard or try to work with uplights.

Neelesh  22:25

That's brilliant Crispino USP versus UVP USP is unique selling point UVP is unique value proposition. Yeah, brilliant. I think you've put it very well. So, I have a question on this, are there any? What are the types? Or what are the times when growth hacking is just not possible?

Gaurav Sharma  22:49

Okay, so that's the tricky one. So it's not possible. See, honestly, it's kind of hard. A nice one. See what I've seen in my past certain, in certain cases, just like SEO is one of the cases that there are certain things you need to follow the certain pattern or the guidelines you need to follow for a particular area. And in that case, you cannot just find not able to find a different a unique practice or unique gap, because the competition is too much either or the guidelines is too strict. So that's when you are not able to find any growth hacking practice. And that's why SEO content, there's certain limited areas you can do in growth hacking. And that's why most of the growth hacking practices are followed by if you see the examples, you will see more about the formal practices, they do persuasion techniques they do and different types of offers they come up with. But you won't find much growth hacking practices in the traditional marketing areas. So if you do affiliate marketing, you don't find much growth hacking areas because there was a traditional stuff. But something you can improvise in the product line, something you can work with the like customer mindset by like persuasion tactics, or discussing urgency for more practices. So those practice are able to like in those areas, you can find growth hacking, but traditional practices, affiliate content, SEO, it's kind of hard there because there are certain guidelines they follow. And then there's hard to say which points you can come up with. But yeah, I believe so from my heart that there might be some areas that you can find, but it's still a point of debate honestly.

Crispino  24:37

So Gaurav what would you say are some of the basic platforms like there is social media platforms there are blogging platforms? What are some of the best platforms for growth hacking?

Gaurav Sharma  24:47

See for growth hacking, for different different like channels, just like you're looking for lead generation, the lead the lead generation is a kind of bigger, bigger problem for many SaaS brands and software companies agency, right? So people to the lead, lead generation from email marketing outbound lead generation, right? From LinkedIn they do, right. So to increase the like, increase productivity, increase the growth, they can go with the lead generation LinkedIn lead generation tool like duck soup, that's one of the good one. expending is a good one for LinkedIn lead generation. If you're looking for just finding emails of your customer base, going after, not able to find just manually, they can use like leadfuse.com, they can do for hunter.io for lead find email finder. And just like somebody looking for creating chatbots, instead of going after like any development agency, asked them to build a chatbot for them, they can just go for Mani chat, line bot. So these are like growth hacking tools, they can use to, like, expedite the process in lesser time, they can come up with some something productive, and just like right content writing go for Hemingway app, just a good one. So Calendly Calendly, if you are looking for meetings, meeting booking, so Calendly is good one and Calendly have done the great stuff in growth hacking, they come up with a free plan and you can just just make it for free. So they just trying to build customer base.

Crispino  26:19

15 minutes is free and 30 minutes, you could update it here.

26:22

Exactly. So that's a good thing practice they did. And when it's like these timesheet clock, called Clockify. So there is time doctor, and Hubstaff, and the many, there are many tools available in the market. So clockify, if I came in the market, like three years back, we are using this API, that's fine. And they come up with a free plan. Every other brands provide us like per user cost, like $5 per user, just like Slack or teams. So they come up with one plan of $10 unlimited users. So they're trying to create competition by a lesser cost, and no customer. You can say condition on that. So that's one that's one and later they come up with some upgrades and upgrades. And after three years, now they have like a per user cost, because they have locked down the customer is habitual, they are like stuck to the clockify now they will stay there forever. And now they have good acquisition rate. Now they will good branding. Now they are growing really fast. So that's the way you can just move it, move it and build a good brand.

Crispino  27:25

So Gaurav I want to discuss something with you now over here, this has given me a good idea. And it's kind of brought back an idea that I pitched to Neelesh earlier. If Neelesh doesn't like it, we'll just have to chop it out the podcast. But okay, let's see. So we have a seven day refund policy. So if the client doesn't like it, we refund them within seven days. So I've been pushing Neelesh to rebrand that to a seven or a 14 day free trial to market it out that way. So is that a way of growth hacking?

Gaurav Sharma  27:56

It is it is means See, one thing I like to say because this is a very common practice we follow by selling courses. I have worked with many like influencers who sell courses. And we do this like, we provide 30 days money back guarantee. And 30 days, it was quite enough. If you see an employee that 30 days, they they can simply read the content and just ask for the refund. So it will be like a bad deal for us. But honestly, if you see a common practice, if you do a survey in your industry, you will see that people don't if they buy a course, they get like lazy and they just don't read the content on like a cost basis. So you won't see much refunds. So it's all about your customer understand the customer that how it actually was because for Initially when I started on the in the in the selling courses stuff, the first thing was like 30 day money back guarantee. And I was like, yeah, that is too much. We should not give this this much time. Because if I'm a user, if I'm like keen learner, I don't have enough money or being like a college student or whatever. I'll just buy it, like wash it for in 14 days. Because usually the courses are like for like 24 hours, 21 hours that there's too much or 50 hours max. And I'll consume it in like two weeks. But honestly, when you buy it, you become lazy that okay, I'll just watch it tomorrow, and you start watching it for like 15 minutes and use it. Okay, let's chuck it. So it's a very common habit. So the same thing and we'll see how you're actually audience works, how it reacts and see how much like lifetime value of your customers or how kind of how much time how much of your phone you are getting in a regular basis if it's 7 days and see how much time people are taking in your in your product and then come up with the idea okay, the 14 day works because if you increase the number, this will definitely helps you a lot but you need to be strategic. That's what I always want that people should be that just make sure that you have the numbers in place that you This is how much people are spending time. They say how much they will take when they just buy a product and how much they're engaging in and then see how it goes. So yeah, but yeah, this will be a good thing that for you as well.

Crispino  30:07

Yeah, I think we lost when we have a few beers on the bench we could. Yeah. I bet. Yeah, for sure. No. Yeah, I think the rebranding will help. Definitely for free trial, because who doesn't love a free trial? Definitely. That's the best. That's it. Yeah, exactly. Cool. Yeah, Gaurav it was again, once again, amazing having you on the show. I think we again, learned a lot from your growth hacking, and it's given me a few new ideas to discuss release later on as well.

Neelesh  30:42

Yeah.

Gaurav Sharma  30:43

Thanks. Thanks. I'd like to say one thing is very common thing I had in my mind that you guys use iPhone, right? Yes. Yeah. So you have seen that in the very beginning when the iPhone was a was in hype that in 2010-2012. So people used to send email from iPhone, right? And they receive us text below the signature, that email came from my phone, right? Yeah, so that was a growth hacking used by iPhone, but they actually copied it from Hotmail, and Yahoo, back in 1990. So that's what Yahoo has done. And Hotmail has done that email sent from Hotmail email sent from Yahoo. So that was, that was a very funny example that I feel that okay, it was, like 20 years back. Now, iPhone like big company, Apple copied it from them, but it still works out. So there are certain practices still works out. And it is very funny that people sometimes just overlook it.

Neelesh  31:37

But now that I think about all these brilliant ideas are all growth hacking tactics like all these?

Gaurav Sharma  31:45

It is. So yeah, it's always fun to like, work on growth hacking, because you find something creative things, you analyze competitors, industries, customer pain points, and becoming something new. But yeah, there's always a failure as well. It's not always that what can you do? It will work out? To be honest. It's sometimes you fail, and you will realize, okay, it's not working out because something, there's some different problem, you looked overlooked something between the analysis, just if you are more strategic, and less all three verticals that I've mentioned, I have a strong feeling that you will succeed easily.

Crispino  32:24

Yeah, I think it needs a strong monitoring.

Gaurav Sharma  32:30

It is. It should be more strategic. Just make sure you analyze all three things really carefully. And I've done some kind of surveys as well to make sure data is good, maybe go like, small basis, because I like this Swiggy idea because Swiggy, when they started, they started localized, they started with Mumbai, Bangalore, then moved out different like Delhi in different different cities instead of growing nationally, all in one. That's a good strategy. Also, they are like product based model, different strategy people follow, see how it works. But these are also growth hacking practices, because they just want to make sure that they don't come up with some bad reviews, they are not able to like cater people, they are able to serve the customers, right? These are the different pet model practices people do. But those things that will help them grow really fast. Like getting fallback.

Neelesh  33:27

That reminded me of one example, just wanted to share before we end this podcast. So Crispino, you are asking me you are asking Gaurav, are there any growth hacking tactics? In SEO? Right? Do you remember we had a discussion where we saw that when you search any two tools and how to connect them, for example, How can I get my email from Gmail to slack? Right? Whenever you whenever you do this kind of a search, Zapier pops, pops up, right? So basically, they have they have created these 1000s of specific links URLs, where they say, connect Gmail with Slack connect slack with right, and blah, blah, blah. So this is a growth hack in SEO,

Gaurav Sharma  34:24

I think I will do this. Yeah, this is the one because this the same thing we did with one of the client Heepsy. They are influencer marketing tools. So what they did initially, they were creating content on on different brand focus. But later they realized that issue instead of creating tons of content, investing like 1000s of dollars of content, creating content, they already have a database. So created the Create influence profile on the brand name on the left profile, a profile name and make it public. So they just created like 1000s of pages in one go. And they all get indexed. And because the brand name because they're influenced They already have like, good followship people also already searched those names. So they start showing up really fast and they see a good spike in the growth in the traffic. That was there was another good one.

Neelesh  35:11

There is another example. So if you think of banks, right. Banks like HDFC and Axis, what do they do? So, this was a question asked on one of our groups in IIT Madras groups saying that, hey, why are they giving us this fancy credit card? free of cost? So, I mean, we always everybody had this question, why are they giving this free of cost plus, they give the certain cashbacks, free of cost concept of loss leader. So loss leader is when you give out a small product for a loss, so that many people capture it, and then using that customer information, then you upsell them, bank accounts, savings accounts, loans, etc.

Gaurav Sharma  36:00

Right, right. That's, that's, that's a good one. Yeah, that's banking been using like for years. And still people don't understand the like, the trap of credit cards, though, like high interest rate and everything. But yeah,it is. It is fun. It is crazy.

Neelesh  36:18

These are all growth hack tech tactics, actually.

Gaurav Sharma  36:20

Yeah. They're building new customers out of this, and then later making more money out of it. Because if you have like a strong product, good value, people will stay with you for longer term. And if you provide more customer experience, good customer experience, because if you are I have like facing Amazon compared to Flipkart. That's my personal choice. Just because the customer experience I have received from Amazon is huge. It's like superb. So I'm like, I'm like too much into Amazon. Even if I buy some I want to buy some I just go for Amazon buy my mind buy me they will now become my advocate. I'm even I'm right now just talking about Amazon instead of Flipkart. Although Flipkart is good, no complaints.

Neelesh  37:00

Because you feel secure.

Gaurav Sharma  37:02

Exactly.

Neelesh  37:03

I ordered something I used it after 10 days I didn't like it they still took it back so I feel very secure that you know like you know they have, are good people they will take it back the brand they like good people Amazon is good.

Crispino  38:01

Gaurav was one of the best guests we've had for influencer marketing with growth growth hacking now. Alright Gaurav thanks then. And thanks for the evening and I hope to see you again.