Demand Curve - The Growth Newsletter #137

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The Growth Newsletter #137

Keyword monitoring, 5-minute favors, and proven newsletter tactics.

Welcome all you growth-loving founders and marketers!

Fun fact: daycare here kicks out your kiddo on Sept 1st, and kindergarten starts Sept 18th.

So I'm writing this after spending the day on a beach with kiddo and puppy—hmm maybe I should do that more often. Not a bad way to get the creative juices flowing, right?

Anyway, let's talk about keyword monitoring, 5-minute favors, and proven newsletter tactics.

– Neal

Thanks to our sponsors for keeping this newsletter free for all of you! Check them out :)

Brought to you by Wistia, in their new "Fix my Setup" video series, they'll take you from "video zero" to "video hero."

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And by copy.ai–AI is here, yet we all seem to be doing the same boring, manual work.

That’s why Copy.ai built Workflows. It lets you create custom AI workflows that automate repetitive tasks. Stuff like product descriptions, email sequences, brainstorming, SEO blog content, slide decks, and personalized outreach.

HubSpot, Datadog, and ZOOM use Copy.ai to help drive results and focus on work that moves the needle—rather than busy work.

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Want to be featured in front of 81,600 founders and marketers? Learn more here–booking into November.

Why most ad agencies are bad for startups

What startups want:

• Transparent, affordable pricing
• Flexible month-to-month contract

• Fast execution

• Ability to runs ads on any ad channel
• Full stack ads team (strategy, ads, creative, reporting)
• A partner that works how they do (mainly async with little to no "meeting bloat")

What startups get:

• High fees and complex pricing hidden behind a lengthy sales process
• Long, binding contracts
• Weeks (if not months) of drawn-out onboarding
• Limited to the few channels their agency specializes in
• Lured in by an impressive agency founder only to be handed off to an inexperienced team after signing
• Tons of meetings and just general slowness

That's why we created Ad Labs—the exact paid marketing service that we, as founders, would actually want to work with.

Ad Labs will normally cost $7k/month.

But, as this is a new offer, we’re dropping it to $5k/mo for the first 10 clients.

Learn more and apply here

Okay, onto our regular scheduled programming:

1. Monitor keywords to jump into convos

Insight from Reilly Chase.

This is for the scrappy folks in the crowd. The "do things that don't scale" people.

Being active in communities is a great way to build up your initial user base and network.

BUT! You don't want to just pitch yourself. No one likes that. And is often grounds to be kicked out of the community.

So instead, you want to be active in relevant convos and provide value. But constantly monitoring Slack communities, Reddits, and social media is a huge pain. 

Use these tricks to do it faster:

#1. Slack: Join communities that your target audience use.

Under Preferences, set up notifications for keywords related to your product—you'll get pinged whenever you should weigh in.

#2. Upwork: Use the paid tool Earlybrd.io to track job descriptions with keywords related to the problem your product solves, e.g., “custom Shopify site.”

Get alerts about relevant jobs as they’re posted—then apply and pitch your product.

#3. X/Twitter: Bookmarking search results is the move.

Go to the search page and enter “min_faves:200 [keyword]” then sort by Latest.

You’ll find tweets related to your keyword with at least 200 likes

(Use “min_retweets:200 [keyword]” for retweets instead.)

#4. Quora/Reddit: Use the paid tool Syften to track keywords.

It’ll send Slack or email notifications as these get mentioned. It'll also work for Slack, Upwork, Twitter, ProductHunt, and various others.

–––

Just remember: Being helpful and kind is the priority. Provide value first, and just make it known what you do and how you can help them more.

2. Do a 5-minute favor before cold emailing

Insight from Randy Ginsburg.

The average person gets ~120 emails per day. Founders and decision makers get even more thanks to being bombarded with cold emails.

Getting someone to read your cold email is an uphill climb—and not deleting it is Everest.

To do it right, you need to bait interest and then hook it.

↳ An enticing subject line = the bait

↳ A great opening line = the hook

Unless you're Elon Musk, launching into your experience and credentials aren't enough to get someone interested when they're desperately just trying to hit inbox zero.

It’s like someone walking up to you at a party and saying "yeah, I went to Harvard."

A much better hook: Start your cold email with a five-minute favor.

The five-minute favor is a concept introduced by Wharton psychologist Adam Grant in his book Give and Take. It's simple:

Spend five minutes every day doing something that helps others. Just five minutes. Don’t expect anything in return.

Examples:

• Share something they’re working on with your audience.

• Write a review of their book or podcast.
• Donate to a cause they support.

• Engage with their social posts.

• Fill out one of their surveys.
• Make an introduction.

Help them out, then casually mention the favor in your cold email opener. They'll be far more likely to respond—particularly in a positive manner.

Growth marketing is increasingly about community building, and less about clever hacks.

Apply a community mindset to your cold outreach, and it'll become much warmer.

3. 2 proven ways to turn visitors into subscribers 

Sure, we can all slap a form in our footer to get more newsletter subscribers.

In our experience, that doesn't do very much.

Neither does the one at the bottom of your 20-minute blog article.

Here are 2 that have worked for us:

#1. Pop-ups/Modals

Beware: Don't do this 👇. Especially not immediately.

Everything about that makes me sad.

Instead, have they on been the page for 5 minutes and have they made it 40%+ or more down the page?

Great, then they've gotten value—pop up a modal and pitch the value they'll get.

Better yet, use a lead magnet related to the piece of content they're reading.

#2. Gated content

Throwing a form in your blog's sidebar is unlikely to move the needle. Adding it into the middle of the content can definitely do better—but both feel like old banner ads.

So we gloss over them.

Instead, for long-form, in-depth articles, like our playbooks, we would gate the second half of the playbook. If they were invested, they'd subscribe.

Don't just add a form and assume people will use it.

We all get too many emails—give people a reason to add more to their inbox.

News and links

News you can use:

• Facebook has now also removed news for users in the UK, Germany, and France ahead of laws requiring them to pay for news content. It'll be interesting what happens to traditional media with social media outlets pulling them.
• The US is suing Google for unlawfully stifling competition by paying companies like Apple to make Google the default search option on phones and browsers.
• Meta is now working on a direct competitor to GPT-4 (as is Google), so expect to see a ton of alternatives to ChatGPT in the new year.
• Google Chrome keeps rolling out "Enhanced Ad Privacy" which allows websites to serve ads to users based on their browser histories—unless you disable it. It only keeps the data for three weeks and it's anonymized.

• TikTok is experimenting with a “Shop” tab that shows you a feed of products.

• Twitter/X Blue users on iOS can now hide their Likes tab—meaning people won't be able to peruse those embarrassing memes you liked.

Program we recommend*: Ortto's Startup Program

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• Customer data platform – integrate, unify, and segment your customer data across platforms.
• Reports & dashboards – understand & visualize your customer data.
• Talk – AI-powered live chat and omnichannel inbox for 1-on-1 conversations.

Apply to Ortto's Startup Program today and get $10K in free credits, valid for 2 years.

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Something fun

From @greg16676935420 

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And if you have any comments/question, I'd love to hear them. Just hit reply!

In case you're new: Who's Demand Curve?

We’re on a mission to help make it easier to start, build, and grow companies.

We share high-quality, vetted, and actionable growth content as we learn it from the top 1% of founders and marketers.

How we can help you grow:

• Read our free playbooks, blog articles, and teardowns—we break down the strategies and tactics that fast-growing startups use to grow.
• Enroll in the Growth Program, our marketing course that has helped 1,000+ founders get traction and scale revenue.

• Check out our Sprints: short video courses that are laser-focused on a topic in growth.

• Want to build an audience of buyers? Join the waitlist for the Un-ignorable Challenge.

• Are you an ambitious startup/scaleup looking to grow? Our agency, Bell Curve, can be your strategic growth partner.

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See you next week.

— Neal and Justin

Neal O'Grady

Justin Setzer