What are some unusual proven growth hacks you saw to scale a startup?
Sharath Kuruganty
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Ollie Brooke@ollie_brooke
We used to manage a website for a company that distributed customized wristbands (used at events, prisons, various facilities and functions).
As a new business that has been built on eBay, they had no organic search presence.
One of the features we built allowed people to request a free sample which would be posted out.
One morning, the owner got on the phone with us super early, having been bombarded with thousands of requests for a free sample overnight.
Turned out someone had put their website onto a forum that focused on sharing information about free stuff/samples companies were giving away.
We froze the function and let users that had come from that site/referral URL know they were out of stock.
A few days later, we noticed they ranked #2 on Google for "wristbands".
Same thing happened again on a different forum a few weeks later and we saw the rankings go to #1.
Those free sample sites had huge da and massive user numbers. Those inbound links were priceless.
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One unusual tactic I've seen work is leveraging existing communities on platforms like Reddit to drive targeted traffic to a startup by providing genuine value and engaging content. Another is creating an exclusive beta user group that turns initial users into brand ambassadors, giving them a sense of ownership and spreading word-of-mouth.