April 2013 Founders Drinks: great turnout with 21 growth hacking tips

Founders Drinks was a blast last night at Shuffle Bar with Jon Yongfook, founder of Pitchpigeon.

While the Japan Satellite was happening last night, the team here in Singapore wasn’t skiving. We held our monthly event, Founders Drinks, at Shuffle Bar, and saw numerous walk-ins even after the event was sold out on Eventbrite. The crowd listened intently to Jon Yongfook share about 21 growth hacking tips, which we thought were very useful, even for an editorial team.

Yongfook is now focusing on his latest startup, Pitchpigeon, which delivers press pitches to a whole pool of tech blogs and journalists. But prior to that, he was involved in a whole range of companies from e-commerce at Glamour Sales to recipe portals with Open Source Food.

5 top tips

Well, what are the tips, then? While you can find all the slides here, we thought we would highlight a few.

Tip 2: Blog blog blog

We cannot emphasize how important this is. As a tech blog, we are always looking to discover good content. Not only does having a blog give your site new content users and tech journalists can look out for easily, it gives your product or service a human voice.

Tip 3: Guest post elsewhere

Like what Yongfook shared in his slides, yes, tech blogs are constantly on the lookout for good guest posts. “Be proactive – write first, then offer it to a blog. If they decline, offer another blog. And so on – worst case? Put it on your own blog.”

Tip 8: Social campaigns

We remember a couple of social campaigns which made us do a double take. Burrple’s Tummy Race counts as one – they did a localized version of Dropbox’s Space Race. In this case, when users “like” Burpple’s Facebook page, invite a friend to the app, or getting people on their team, they get points which will put them up on a leaderboard. The prize? A year’s supply of Singapore’s Lao Ban Soya Beancurd.

With that in mind, it should also leverage on user curiosity or vanity. Just another “retweet to win” contest is no social campaign, but one which gives its users some kind of dynamic content is.

Tip 9: Seed supply

Every popular social application requires this: fake accounts. Yongfook shared that Reddit started out with tons of fake accounts to generate real accounts, but the technical folks should not overdo it. Why? Well, for the very simple reason that real accounts pay a lot better than fake accounts. “If you’re a marketplace or UGC site, seed it with as much content as possible. Nobody will stay loyal to an empty site.”

Tip 19: Be fast

Time is money – everyone knows this. Did you know that loading speeds actually directly affect your revenue? A report published by Tagman revealed that a mere one second delay in page-load can result in a seven percent loss in customer conversions. They explained, “Page-load time for non-converters, users who abandoned the page without converting, was 3-to-4 times higher than for converters. This indicates that visitors who aren’t taking any actions on your site may have abandoned because of the page delays.”

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