⚡📈The Growth Levers That Nobody Talks About

Hey there,

Welcome back to another edition of Bootstrapped Growth. 👋 

Today, let’s dive into overlooked growth strategies beyond paid acquisition and viral loops.

Table of Contents

• 🚀 Strategy

• ⭐️ Extra Tips

• 🛠️ Resources

Thanks for reading. Let’s jump in!

🚀 Going Beyond Costly Conventional Growth Channels

The most powerful growth levers are embedded within product experiences, customer journeys and building communities.

1) ‘Powered by’ Attribution

Typeform (online form builder) built a simple but powerful growth engine. Free users could remove Typeform branding by upgrading to paid plans. However, very few did. Millions of respondents see the Typeform brand through forms created by others. This has seen over 60% of new users who clicked through to create their own forms at virtually zero cost!

Takeaway ➡️ Make your attribution or recognizable watermarking a feature. Turn free users into a distribution channel.

2) Systematic Downgrade Sequences

Superhuman (email client) created a personalized ‘downgrade flow’ to minimize churn. Superhuman presented a series of alternatives including pausing and discounted plans, when users wanted to cancel subscriptions.

Making downgrades feel like a supported option with special offers based on selection (vs mere cancellation) helped maintain relationships with users with financial concerns. This saw Superhuman’s revenue increase by 42%.

Takeaway ➡️ Carefully design your downgrade experience as you would with your product upgrade path.  

3) Employee Ecosystems

Stripe encouraged staff to build tools and products that integrate with Stripe. These employee side projects were like a distributed ‘R&D network’. This ecosystem drove over $400 million in annual processing volume back to the main Stripe platform.

Takeaway ➡️ Expand your business’ ecosystem through the efforts of those who know your product the best: your employees.

⭐️ Tips for Implementing Niche Growth Strategies

1. Examine customer touchpoints Consider every interaction point in your customer journey for untapped distribution potential.

2. Embrace niches and counter-positioning Think about strategies that would be difficult or counterintuitive for larger competitors to copy.

3. Start with small experiments Test unconventional approaches in controlled environments before scaling.

🛠 Useful Resources

• Testing out Google Labs’ Whisk is a lot of creative fun for image generation. Instead of using long, detailed text prompts, simply drag in images and words.