Social Growth Hacking

Strategies and ideas for startups to CRUSH IT on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram

without spending a ton of money
Hi, I’m Dan
Business history Fun facts about me:

● 4x Exits
● I barely graduated high school with a 1.8 GPA and
○ dkAds (was CEO) - 2001 - 2002
○ midPhase (was CEO) - 2003 - 2007 dropped out of college. I’ve held only held 1 “real
○ Concurra (was CEO) - 2015 - 2018 job” in my life: selling VCRs at Best Buy in High
○ SingleHop (was CMO) - 2006 - 2018
School.
● 2x Active Businesses
○ TrendSpider - 2017 - beyond ● I have over 40 tattoos, including 1 for every
■ MVP built in 6 months
■ Launched paid product March 2018 company I have started.
■ Profitable after 1.5 years
■ 35 employees and growing at 3-5/mo
● Two pets: a German Shepard is named Rosie after
■ Almost 10,000 paying customers
■ Primary marketing method: Social Growth Hacking the robot in the Jetsons and a cat is named
○ SignalStack - 2022 Snowball after the cat in the Simpsons.
Investor history

● HPA and on my own

○ Over 2 dozen investments in various startups
● LP in numerous early-stage VC funds
● Lots of other things :)
What makes a good business for this strategy?

Solve for:

● Common pains
● Manual and error prone tasks
● Tedious and repetitive processes
● Time consuming busy work
Build It And They Will Come is BS
● That’s just not how it works in the internet age. It’s just
too crowded and competitive.
● I’ve watched amazing people with brilliant ideas and
solid product execution fall flat on their faces because
they didn’t invest time into social media, growth
hacking, marketing or sales until it was too late for it to
make a difference. That sucks.
● Traditional advertising is expensive and ineffective. It’s
easy to burn every penny you have buying ads, often
well before you even get close to making your return.
● Social media is one of the few effective growth hacking
tools remaining for startups, but it’s not free… being
successful is expensive in terms of time and effort.
● Just because your idea is solid and your product is
great does NOT guarantee success in the
marketplace.
● Marketing - especially clever, social, digital
marketing - is absolutely critical to getting any
business (other than perhaps laundromats) off the
ground in 2021
● Like happiness, good marketing is not something
you can usually buy. You have to create it for
yourself by intimately knowing what you are selling
and to who and why they will be interested in it.
● The good news is that anyone can do it who is
willing to learn and put the work in
Meet Social Growth Hacking
● Social Growth Hacking is using social
● Make social media the pinnacle of
media to build a large organic following by
your marketing strategy. The being clever and strategic and making the
right partnerships.
leading function, not the
supporting one.

● You don’t have to spend a lot of

money on this strategy, but you
have to put the planning and
execution work in.
Define Metrics & Goals Upfront
How do you know you are reaching your Examples:
goals?
● Marketing Cost/New MRR
● At first, keep your KPIs “tactical” and
ignore longer term metrics like LTV.
● Web-to-Trial CR
There will be time to focus on this ● Trial-to-Paid CR
later.

● Focus on top line first and work your

way down. You can start with your
visitor-to-signup conversion rate, or
any other key, top-of-funnel metric
you are focused on.
Who?
● Don’t get caught up with marketing major TrendSpider example:
BS, such as building detailed “customer ● Retail Traders who started trading
personas” and giving them names like within the last year and are starting to
“Suzi”, just be practical. Focus on get serious about trading as a possible
interests, not demographics. Make a list: career, but are struggling to identify and
refine their personal trading edge and
○ Who are you selling to? are looking for tools that might help
○ What are they into? them
○ What are their pains?
○ Where do they hang out?
○ Who do they look up to?
○ What do they currently spend their $ on?
○ Why do they buy the products they buy?
Where?
Examples:
● This is one of the tricky parts… but it
● Retail Traders hang out on Twitter,
is critical.
StockTwits, and a plethora of private
Discord Chat Rooms run by Trading
● You have to do your homework and Group Leaders (who often are also
Twitter influencers.)
figure out WHERE your “WHO”
hangs out online.
Why?
Examples:
● Now you know the WHO and the
WHERE. What’s next is critical.
● WHY do they hang out where they
hang out online?
● Retail Traders hang out on Twitter
because it is a place for them to
interact with other traders, learn new
trading techniques and strategies, seek
additional opinions on their existing
traders, and, arguably most importantly,
find new ideas
● Another key use case for Twitter is for
them to share their ideas with others,
often using a $ hashtag in order to
make it easier to find.
Take Me To Your Leader
● Now you know a lot about your users. You know WHO they are,
WHERE they hang out, and WHY they hang out there.

● All that’s left is to find who the leaders are. By leaders, I mean
“Social Media Influencers”... a term that is popularly used for
Instagram models but really applies to every space. There is
always someone to look up to. Who are those people in your
industry that the newbees look up to?

● Build a large database of them and categorize them by the size of

their following.
Content / Posting Strategy
Examples:
● Tailor this to your audience in every
way you can. Be utilitarian about it.
● This is where understanding WHY
your target audience hangs where
they hang is important. You need to
understand this to be relevant. If you
fulfil their “Why” in some way or help
them in their pursuit of it, they will be
interested in hearing more from you.
● Become relevant in the Twitter
trading community by posting a large
number of charts covering a wide
range of assets with regularity,
utilizing the Twitter $ hashtag feature
to tag each post with a symbol to
make it easy to find
● Identify key influencers and offer
them free access to the software in
hopes that they will also do the
same
Engagement Strategy
● Besides just posting your own content, you also Examples:

have to get involved in the discussion other ● Interact with charts other people
people are having somehow.
post, and praise their work.
● So, just start participating. Jump into other
peoples threads and comment. Don’t argue ● Retweet the work of others that is
about politics. :) Just support their views and be interesting and useful.
friendly. Add value where you can.

● Good to do this with some wit or personality

when doing this. You want to be likable. Like a
fun buddy who moved away years ago, but is
back now. They should want to engage with you
because you’re entertaining to engage with.
Influencer Assault
● Now how do you get the big accounts on your side? Make it worth their while!
Don’t. Start at the bottom. Go after the smallest
● In order to win influencers over early for
influencers in your list first, and scale up from there.
TrendSpider, we created a YouTube series called
The Trading Pit and invited many of them on for
● Engage with influencers in public. Comment and interviews.
share their content. Build rapport with them over time
and some name familiarity by just being in their This served several purposes, including
notifications a ton. Be patient!
○ Building relationships with them
● Have a plan for how engaging with you will benefit
them! ○ Building our audience from their audiences

● Once you have SOME following, and have done the ○ Making them more familiar with the product
above for some time, reach out and ask them if they and its use cases
would take a look at your product and give you
their honest opinion. Do NOT ask them to shill your
product yet.
Influencer Assault
● If they take you up on a demo, give it to them and ask their honest advice.

● Don’t ask them for anything yet either. Repeat this again in some time. You want to have had
multiple conversations with them before you ask them for anything.

● Finally, ASK for the support with the wind of a relationship at your back. “It would mean a lot if you
would retweet this post, I’m trying to spread the word...would you help?”

● This is a long term process, and part of the idea is to build up to larger influencers by first
galvanizing the smaller ones.

● Some influencers will require an affiliate deal or a revenue share arrangement in order to work
with you. I am always OK with this, as it aligns interests and generally leads to better performance
and motivation over time. This depends of course on your business model.
Measure and Track Performance
● Now that you’re off to the races, you have to “You can't manage what you can't
make sure to keep score - on the regular. measure.”

● My projects always involve a tracking -- Peter Drucker

spreadsheet from the day we go live and
updated at least weekly.

● As it relates to influencers, we track them each

individually… down to how often they mention
the product in public.

● In other words: TRACK EVERYTHING so you

can make better informed decisions later.
Refine
Tips:
● Once you’ve collected some data
and have a decent sample size, it’s
time to step back, take inventory,
and review how you’re doing.
● Don’t be afraid to make changes
and tweaks, just don’t make too
many at one time or make them too
frequently. Think of it as an
experiment that is evolving as you
learn more over time.
● Incremental change > sweeping change
● Don’t change too much at one time
● Only make drastic changes if you sense
that the strategy is flawed and is not
working at all
● Do not hesitate to experiment and try new
things… being creative is a big part of it.
● Do not feel constrained by doing it the way
others have done it before. Do your own
thing.
● Ignore competition.
How to Crush it in Social Media in 10 “Easy” Steps :)
1. Define KPIs
2. Identify “WHO”
3. Identify “WHERE”
4. Identify “WHY”
5. Identify “the Leader(s)”
6. Develop Posting Strategy
7. Develop Engagement Strategy
8. Develop Influencer Strategy & Assault
9. Measure
10. Refine
That’s all folks