Nov 18

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No fluffy content. If your goal is to build a $100m ARR business, this is not the right post. Here I am are NOT going to talk about building the next Facebook or Twitter. If your goal is to make a $1K to $10K MRR, continue reading.

This post will cover one SAAS area and talk about multiple niches in this space. This post also explains how to do tech implementation, do market analysis, how the current players are doing, and ends with a cost analysis to understand the overall cost for 100 users.

If you are working in the SaaS industry, Growth Hacking needs no introduction. Growth Hacking has become one of the fastest ways these days to get traction, improve conversion, bring loyalty and reduce churn. Let’s see some of the tools in this space.

RightMessage: RightMessage helps you uncover who’s on your website, what they do, and what they’re looking for from you – and then shows highly personalised, non-invasive CTAs and lead magnets in the form of beautiful, personalised surveys, quizzes, and opt-in forms.

GetRhys: On-demand SaaS marketing consultant. An on-demand, skilled and experienced SaaS marketing consultant ready to solve critical marketing bottlenecks for just $395/m.

QAPop: An automation tool for Quora that finds the popular questions with maximum ROI and also automates the 'answer draft using AI.

KickOffLabs: Quickly and easily setup viral giveaways, sweepstakes, and product launches where fans earn points and rewards for referring friends and promoting brand.

MissingLettr: Missinglettr is an all-in-one social marketing platform that turns your content into engaging social media posts and helps you solve distribution by finding the best influencers in your niche.

HelloBar: Growth Hacking with email capture. Beautifully designed popups for website with audience targeting.

Gleam: The Business Growth Platform Marketing apps designed to help you grow your sales.

GrowthBar: Make SEO content that Google Loves. Get billions of keywords, backlinks, and create blog content that Google loves, powered by OpenAI.

Hivoe: Automate Your Twitter Direct Messages. Discover your audience needs. Transform followers to supporters. When you get a new follower, Hivoe sends the welcome message for you. So you can focus on starting meaningful conversations later.

Sparrow: Scale customer acquisition for your bootstrapped SaaS in 90 days. Hands-on scale mentorship calls at a fraction of the cost of an agency or hire. Learn instantly from founders who built, scaled and sold their own startups for millions.

Howitzer: Howitzer is the first direct marketing automation tool for Reddit. Howitzer helps you find potential leads on Reddit, and send personalized Reddit DMs and chats, at scale with automation. Founded March 2021, received 500K funding in less than 6 months.

Aklamio: Aklamio is a growth engine with a Customer Incentives Platform that enables you to incentivize new and existing customers by enriching their customer journey.

AppCues: The easiest, most flexible way to build sleek, personalized product experiences that improve how users engage with products and require no coding.

LandBot: The Most Powerful No-Code Chatbot Builder Convert leads, capture data, and personalize client journeys in real-time. The estimated revenue is $3.5M/year.

WotNot: Automate interactions with your current and future customers. WotNot builds a pipeline of qualified leads, automates support, without increasing headcount with a no-code chatbot platform.

🔒 👉 [In Pro] See which automation tool made $2500 in sales with Life Time Deals.
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See which company in Growth Hacking niche is making $18K per month and growing strong with close to 300 paying customers.
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See which company crossed $1.1M in revenue with 4500 paying customers.
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See who is estimated to be making $5K per month with growth consulting.
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See which social marketing platform, founded in 2017, is making $8K per month with about 600 paying customers.
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See which company’s estimated revenue is $4M per year with a tool for email capture.
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See which company’s estimated revenue is $12M per year from a Customer Incentives Platform.
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See who is making $75K per month with a tool for viral giveaways, sweepstakes
🔒 👉 [In Pro] See which company is having $4M per year in revenue from a tool for customised product experiences.

Negative Nancy says - Growth Hacking cannot be automated.

Me - Right, growth hacking cannot be automated until you find a marketing channel. But once you find a marketing channel that works for your product, you can automate it using various tools and services.

Negative Nancy says - It’s tough to find a proper growth hacking marketing channel.

Me - Each product is different. Earlier people used to look for ‘product-market fit’ for the products. Now people are more looking for ‘sales-market fit’ where founders can find a working sales channel. Often it takes a lot of trial and error experiments to find a proper growth hacking channel. But there are productized services that can do that for you and this can be an excellent way to build a ‘productized service for Growth Hacking’. For example, GetRhys is an on-demand growth marketing service with an estimated revenue of $5K/month with growth consulting.

Deep-dive & Some niches

With the number of founders increasing every day building Micro SaaS products, it has become increasingly tough to promote these products to users. While betting on SEO is one way to get results, SEO often takes time. The other alternative to get some traction is ‘growth hacking’. Growth Hacking could be of many forms.

Below are a few examples of growth hacking.

Creating a sub-product to drive sales to the main product. Threado has been working with this model and can drive targeted traffic to their main products. Threado created multiple small products related to their main product and did multiple launches on PH and drove quality traffic with this growth hacking model.
Creating memes on Social Media and driving traffic to your main product/service. Dagobert found his growth hacking channel by creating memes every day for startup founders and eventually grew his Twitter to 50K followers and drove sales to his startup Logology. Dagobert tried many channels before finding his best 'growth hacking channel with memes.
Create a newsletter and drive targeted traffic to main products.
Create a listing of the related products and launch on ProductHunt and other places.
Content Repurpose by posting the same blog into audio and video format and posting to other platforms like Youtube, Twitch.
The other approach is targeting SEO and offer freebies. For example, UpLeadspent 6 months to make a free ebook and created a website for it at ColdEmailBook that can act as a growth-hacking channel and made $8M in sales. See how UpLead got $8M in sales here - a great Twitter around this. Create great free content that can act as a lead magnet and repurpose this across various channels

Like this, there are multiple ways to think about growth hacking products and building products/services around Growth Hacking.

Let’s see some of the possible revenue-generating ideas/products/services in this niche.

Social Proof Tools: The whole point of building a Social Proof tool is to show the power of your users' actions and get more users by displaying those actions. It relies on the core principle of “crowd brings more crowd”. For example, if a user is browsing your site to buy a product and suddenly he/she sees a small popup on the screen that says - “Sam from SFO purchased this product 2minutes ago” - Imagine the kind of confidence your current user gets. This is as same as a retail store where the crowd pulls more crowds. You would be more inclined to visit a crowded store than a store with no buyers. This isn’t new. This is another form of social share that shows other users' actions to drive more actions by the current user. For example, Fomo.com founded in 2016 in this space has an estimated revenue of $1.2M per year revenue with 5K customers.

Growth Hacking with Programmatic SEO: If you are new to the concept of Programmatic SEO, see here and here. Programmatic SEO is a new pattern where you create hundreds of pages programmatically based on required keywords and data combinations. Create a tool that can ease out this process either using a No-Code tool or using an API or just with a GUI editor. Make sure you research and study the concept of Programmatic SEO fully and see how you can bundle this into a product or a productized service. The concept of Programmatic SEO is gaining traction. Create a simple tool to create thousands of pages with data where users can map the meta-data of pages from the data sources. This way users can create thousands of pages and can squeeze SEO benefits.

Growth Hacking with Quora: Quora is one of the most popular tools that drive a lot of traffic. But one of the biggest issues around Quora is often finding the best questions you should put your efforts on. For starters, Quora is the world’s most popular Q&A platform where users ask questions and anyone can answer. The better the answer, the higher the number of upvotes, thus giving more traffic for the links in the answer. Create a Micro SaaS tool that can automate this and give this data of the questions vs the number of current answers vs the number of views for each answer etc. The tools should tag the questions for certain keywords and search topics. When a user searches for interesting topics, the tools should be able to recommend the best questions he/she can answer that would give the highest referral traffic. Users can certainly start answering every question around a topic but this would relatively take more time. Heard of the 80/20 rule? 80 % of traffic is driven by 20% of questions. Help the user find that 20% of questions to answer and drive more traffic. But note that, there is no official Quora API yet, and it’s often not easy to scrape Quora content. So, you should be using power tools to get this data or maybe use browser extensions so that the queries/quick scraping can be done on the client-side or use anonymous IPs to scrape the content. Scraping content is against Quora principles. So, see the legitimate way how you can just index the data without actually scraping the whole content. Tools like these will help build backlinks and generate traffic over the long run. QAPop did great work in this space and made $2500 in sales with Life Time Deals. As a growth marketing channel to support this, you can build an Influencer discovery platform around Quora writers so that founders can search for Quora writers around a given topic.

Growth Hacking with Memes on Social Media: Memes are driving a crazy amount of followers on Twitter. But the key is consistency and picking a niche. Posting memes on a vast amount of topics cannot get you attention. Similarly posting memes on a niche but not posting consistently will also not give you any traction. Create a tool that can generate Memes automatically based on a topic. See SuperMeme for inspiration. Create a Micro SaaS tool around memes and provide memes consistently to users on a specific topic. To start with you can manually generate memes for your paid users as a paid service. You can start charging $10/m or $20/m and send memes that users can use for Growth Hacking. Once you have enough audience, you can start to automate the process by building AI/ML based meme generator like SuperMeme. Note that SuperMeme evolved from another fun growth hacking project - MemeDB (a repository of memes).

Growth Hacking with Keyword Monitoring Tools: Keyword monitoring is a great way to find where and when users are talking about a related discussion/product/service and get notified to participate in the conversation. For example, if someone is discussing ‘growth hacking’ on Reddit, the keyword monitoring tools should be able to detect that and send an email so that users with ‘growth hacking’ tools can join the conversation and drive more sales. This is also a great way to get backlinks. Create a simple keyword monitoring Micro SaaS product that monitors most happening websites like Hackernews, Indiehackers, Lobsters, Reddit, Twitter. The SaaS tool should be able to notify the users via email. A good add-on would be to integrate the notification system with Slack, Telegram, etc. Most users would love to be notified on Slack or Telegram. Keyword monitoring solution gets more users only when the tools monitor more places. So, add as many platforms as you can monitor. For inspiration see Syften and PMAlerts that are profitable. You can also improve this by extending the search to the entire web instead of a few sites. Instead of just searching only in specific forums like Reddit, Quora, Hackernews, Lobsters - check for the mention across the web using Google search API. Most growing founders (with less than 50 customers) often search on Google and Youtube to see if anyone is writing about it. A simple service that can do this for founders launching new products will bring in some revenue. Then start doing user interviews. Then as an add-on, get the contact info of the website that mentioned the product. This could be someone writing a blog post about your product or someone creating a small video on Youtube about your product or someone mentioning your product in newsletters. Use Google search API to find out these things and then combine this information with the website contact/Youtube channel creator contact or newsletter contact so that the founder can find it easy to interact with people who wrote about their product. When you start, doing things manually will validate the idea and save you a ton of effort. “Doing things that don’t scale”

🔒 👉 [Get access to 800+ additional ideas and more additional ideas in this niche and across all niches from Pro version with data points, revenue information].

Technical chops

Learn technical pointers on how to build products around this niche.

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Marketing chops

Learn Marketing pointers on how to start marketing the products for this niche. This should give you a marketing head start.

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Cost Analysis for 100 customers

Learn how much it costs to build a product in this niche and cater to 100 customers.

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