Welcome to the first-ever Nordic Growth Hackers event here in Copenhagen!
My name is Morten Elk. I’m the Founder and CEO of SimpleSite, and we and a couple of sponsors felt that it would be nice to have such an event in Copenhagen. Basically, today you’re going to meet six speakers who are going to tell you specific and actionable things about growth hacking, about tools, about the grit of it all, and I hope you’re going to go home inspired from all these. Before we start, I’m going to say just a few things that are embarrassingly simple that present my way of understanding why growth hacking is important to me.
Look at two companies that have different business models. The first company is a company that grows virally. Now look at two situations: it has 2% weekly growth or has 4% weekly growth. If you look at those two companies two years later, one will have grown by eight times, the other one will grow by a whopping 59 times. So company number 1 is nice; company number 2 is just incredibly magnificent and fantastic, and they should be buying Death Stars by now. The only difference is a factor of 2 in one key metric. Looking at another type of company, one that is by paid acquisition, or certain. I know something about that because that’s how SimpleSite grows.
Now, a company like that lives by basically making lifetime value out of clicks that they pay for. If you pay for clicks, in Google Adwords for instance, you might be able to pay 1 krone or you might be able to pay 2 kroner per click. That will typically be a difference of being on page three and get no volume at all, or being at the top of page one and getting millions and millions of clicks every single day. Again, that’s the difference between a no company and a fantastic company.
Basically, not looking at the value proposition or the customers or the segment or the beauty of the product, just a factor of two of those two companies makes the difference between being not a company at all, or being one of the world’s greatest companies. To actually increase something by 100%, if it’s the right metric in the company, it can really make a huge difference.
Now, to increase the key KPI by a factor of 2 or by 100% is not easy, but it is doable. In particular, it’s doable if you’r a young company; it’s much harder if you’re old and mature. For a young company, all those optimizations haven’t been done yet, and there are ways of getting from one to two. 10% of the time, or 15% of the time, or 5% of the time, those ways are what growth hacking is all about. Basically, in every single company there’s going to be one key metric that really makes the difference between make or break.
Growth hacking is about finding ways of making that better, whether it’s organic traffic or viral coefficient, or the conversion rate, or the lifetime, or the engagement there’s something that really drives your company and you want to make that better. Growth hacking is basically a toolbox of how to increase that.
Growth hacking is about finding ways of making the difference between make or break better, whether it’s organic traffic or viral coefficient, or the conversion rate, or the lifetime, or the engagement. Growth hacking is basically a toolbox of how to increase that.
Morton Elk, CEO SimpleSite
Growth hacking encompasses typically all aspects of your business. There’s going to be PR; there’s going to be marketing; there’s going to be product; there’s going to be customer support involved in it. But basically finding out how to make the connections and increasing that is very valuable. Very often, in my opinion, more valuable than how or whether you found the exact market. There are a lot of optimizations that can make a lot of difference. As I’ve said and as the Germans would say, we have ways of improving things.
What we’re going to talk about today is, basically:
- Those things that worked.
- Things that didn’t work.
- Nice tricks, intelligent tricks, or just blind luck.
We’re going to talk about it all. Typically, a lot of us are doing this already. We’re all reading blogs coming out of Silicon Valley and we’re following Shawn Elliot or whatever. It’s just much more fun if we would stop talking to them in Copenhagen and start sharing those stories with each other.
So we meet at all kinds of events, all of us, and we have fine-tuned our pitches, so we can talk about the value proposition, the beauty of the product and the marketing and all that, but very infrequently, we meet up and talk about the mechanics down in the machine room. That’s what it’s all about today. That’s what the six speakers that are coming will tell you about.
The program is that we have three speakers, to begin with, 15 minutes each, then we’re going to do a panel with some questions, whatever you feel like asking—and please be active because that’s what’s going to make it fun. Then we take a break, we take three more talks, do a panel again, and then there’s beer and pizza.
Basically, what you’d bring home today will depend a lot on whether you’re active on the panels and a lot on whether you spend the pizza time not just eating pizza but talking to people, grabbing hold of the speakers or each other, or those who have actually interesting questions, find out who they are and start discussing and sharing. The good news is that we’re going to do this again in a few months so if we’ll miss something today, we’ll do it next time.
I think that basically rounds up thee introduction and we are ready to go to our speakers.