When starting an online market place, do you think you need to make it completely free to get some momentum?

There is quite a bit of information available online about eCommerce conversions rates. According to a ton of sources, average visitor-to-sale conversion rates vary from 1-3%. This does not mean the Furniture conversions will be the same. The bigger problem is that visitor-to-sale conversions are not a good data point to use to measure or tune your eCommerce business. All business have some unique friction factors that will affect your final conversion rate. It's very important to understand each of these factors and how to overcome them. The best way to measure and optimize is to take a conversion funnel approach. Once you have defined your funnel you can optimize each conversion rate to better the total effect. For example: Top of the funnel: - All web site visitors, 100,000 / month First conversion: View a product page, 50% of all visitors Second Conversion: Add to Cart, 10% of people who view products Final Conversion: Complete Checkout, 80% of people who put items in a cart In this example we see that only 10% of people who actually view products put them in to a cart, but 80% of those people purchase. If you can figure out why visitors are not adding items to their cart and fix the issue to increase the conversion rate, revenue should increase significantly because of the high checkout rate. You can use free tools like Google Analytics to give you a wealth of information about your site visitor and their behavior or there are some great paid tools as well.

For the sake of getting your question answered here it would help to simplify but that aside without firm stats on engagement and sharing it would be difficult to say however with the paid expansion of game like Flappy Bird, Angry Birds I would say viral apps come close to if not over a k-factor of 1.

Hello, I myself do not have much hands on experience with growth hacking , but I can offer some thoughts on the subject. I'm not quite sure what you're looking for in terms of your question though? Are you looking for ideas or methods for growth using the growth hacker mentality for local brick and mortar businesses? Are you looking to bring these brick and mortar businesses online and increasing their lead captures? If I were to take a local photography service and try to increase growth in a local area there would be a couple of things I would focus on when it comes to growth hacking. The first thing I would look at is the actual product that is being offered. Then I would see if I could use the product itself to increase growth for itself. Make sense? What is the product of the photographer? I would think that the product would be the photos produced. So I would then figure out how I could use the photos to increase the photo shoots done with my photography studio. One way to do this may be to offer some sort of deal to people that share the photos on social media and get their friends and family to sign up. If I were the photographer I would tell my customers that if their friends and family like and comment on my Facebook page about their photos I would give their friends and family a free 8x10 photo on their first shoot. If 10 of their friends sign up for a shoot I would then give my original customer some sort of thank you in the form of free prints or something similar that makes sense for the business. Use the product to market itself. Another thing I would be looking at is the distribution of my product. In the local scene I feel that online directories, live events, local media, and forming business partnerships are critical. If I were a local photographer I would be at as many local events as possible taking photos. I would then place these photos online where they could be viewed and purchased. I do offer consulting in the area of local marketing and would love to chat with you in more detail about what you are looking to achieve. Schedule a time to talk. I'm sure we can come up with some great actionable ideas that can help with lead generation.

Retention - if you build something people want/use AND come back and use often, then you can usually figure out a business model to make it work (if there's a big enough market).

Obviously, they do the fundamentals well. Good brand. Good experience. Good word of mouth. Good PR. Etc. Etc. But after my interview with Ryan Graves, the head of Global Operations at Uber (https://www.growthhacker.tv/ryan-graves), it became clear that they are operationally advanced and this is a huge part of their success. I'll explain. Uber isn't just a single startup, it's essentially dozens of startups rolled into one because every time they enter a new city they have to establish themselves from essentially nothing (except whatever brand equity has reached the city ahead of them). This means finding/training drivers, marketing to consumers, and building out local staff to manage operations for that city. This is where Ryan Graves comes in. He has a protocol of everything that must be done, and in what order, and by who, to ensure the best chance of success in a new city. So how has Uber grown so fast? Essentially, they figured out how to grow in one locale and were relentless about refining their launch process to recreate that initial success over and over in new cities. No plan works for every city, and they've had to adapt in many situations, but it is still a driving factor for their success.