Stop Worrying About Growth: Focus On Building A Great Product

Your single most important job as a founder or employee is to build or create insanely great product or service. If you focus on delivering just that, you will spend less resources trying to convince prospective users about how great your product is. If you start shouting about your product, something is wrong.

–Stop chasing numbers you can’t sustain!

“Growth hacking” is an incredibly hot buzzword right now. Every startup is chasing numbers (sky rocketing growth). The truth is: you could get what you want right now, but the BIG question is-can you sustain that growth? Can you feed a hungry nation?

You could spend all your resources trying to get people to a supposed great party, what happens if you succeed at convincing hundreds of thousands of people to the party, but they turn up only to find out that everything else is wrong in the party house, except the people. They will begin to leave and will talk about it (all that went wrong).

–If advertisers spent the same amount of money on improving their products as they do on advertising then they wouldn’t have to advertise them.-Will Rogers

In a post on Techcrunch, Justin Caldbeck (@caldbeckj) writes:

Take what happened with Formspring as an example. In 2010, the Q&A site experienced the fastest growth of any site ever (as its top brass were quick to point out on Twitter when TechCrunch awarded that honor to Pinterest last year). But within a year that growth had trailed off and eventually the site traffic/usage began to decline.

Why? Because of its integration with social media sites, Formspring was able to generate rapid growth, but once visitors had taken a look at the site once or twice, they realized that there was very little value in the underlying product and, as a result, the vast majority of “users” that touched the site didn’t ever come back or engage in a meaningful way.

–Build products that can stand the test of time!

The point is, there is nothing wrong with chasing growth but what importance will that growth be to your business, if in the end it turns out your value proposition is even worth it. The problem is that right now, too many entrepreneurs are focused more on growth than on creating an amazing timeless product that can stand the test of time.

Think about how your users are using your product? Think retention rate! Do your users love your product right now? Do they come back and use it again? What are their biggest concerns and feedback right now? Concentrate on delivering an awesome product right now and overtime your users will stay and new ones will even love to be a part of it.

–If you create something amazing, people will recognize it. 

Just create. Make useful, creative, imaginative things. It doesn’t have to cure cancer but great enough to solve a real problem people have. If you create something meaningful, people will notice. Mailbox, the iPhone email productivity app scaled to one million users in six weeks after launch.

Now, that’s awesome. Mailbox was sold to Dropbox for a reported $100 million just a month after launch. If you are currently having trouble with your business growth, focus on making your product even better. A good product won’t always market itself, but it sure does make it easier.

–Growth doesn’t fix all!

If you go ahead to spend all that money hiring a growth hacker, you sure could get significant growth in a short while, you will even attract investors who will believe you have something going on. But remember when those customers or users don’t engage, or — worse — have bad experiences, they will leave and tell their friends about it, and guess what, that growth curve crashes ( and you are going down fast). Fix that crappy product or better still focus on building a better product you will be proud of even in the future.

–Growth hacking done right!

If you are ready to engage the services of a growth hacker for your startups, focus finding someone with a background in making products awesome and who really knows user experience and understands user value, not just someone who knows all the tricks to attract millions of users who may end up leaving after a few weeks or months. You want to focus attracting the right audience to a great product.

For  an overview of growth hacking, hiring growth hackers, resources on growth hacks, and additional helpful resources check out this link on Kissmetrics