How do you convert your users into evangelists, to push your product? The product in discussion is a map based product (both navigation & travel apps)

You can only solve a big problem that changes the world if you solve a problem that is deeply personal to you. Two great examples and why they worked: Roy Raymond was a sad pervert. He'd buy bras and panties at the department store and all the clerks thought their thoughts about him. Roy felt embarrassed. He wasn't really a pervert. He just wanted to buy lingerie for his girlfriend. So he solved this major problem he was having. He created a space where men could feel comfortable coming in and buying sexy lingerie for their partners. He called it Victoria's Secret. But Roy, by solving this important personal issue for himself, apparently solved the same issue for many other men. First year sales were over $500,000 and he quickly opened up three more stores. In 1982 he sold Victoria's Secret for one million dollars before trying multiple other businesses that ended up failing. One MILLION Dollars. A decade later Victoria's Secret was worth over a billion dollars but Roy Raymund was nearly bankrupt and had missed the huge run-up in it's value. -- Picture New York City in the late 1800s on a rainy day. It was disgusting beyond belief. 150,000 horses transported people up and down the busy streets. Each of those horses, according to Super Freakonomics, dropped down about 15-30 pounds of manure. That's up to 4.5 million pounds of manure A DAY on the streets of NYC. And now imagine it raining. Would you cross the street? How long could this last? How long would the city survive without being infested with crap and all the diseases brought with it. What would happen as population of both men and horses increased? Was someone working on inventing a gigantic manure scooper? How would this problem get solved? It never got solved. Instead, Henry Ford invented the assembly line to mass produce cars. Every horse lost their job. People began to drive cars. Manure problem solved. -- In both cases there is a common theme. Someone outside the industry solved a problem that was personal to them that then changed an industry forever. Roy Raymund wasn't a fashion designer or a retailer. He worked in the marketing department of Vicks, which makes over the counter medications. Henry Ford, I don't think, ever worked in the manure industry. Instead, each person focused on a problem that was important to them. A problem that excited them at that moment in time. Raymund wanted to avoid being embarrassed in the future. Ford wanted an efficient way to make cars. The ONLY way to change the world is to solve a problem that is important to YOU. They had to choose themselves for success before they could save the world. Raymund had to convince himself that he didn't belong in the marketing department of a division of Procter & Gamble. He borrowed $80,000 and took the big risk of starting a business. Ford had to survive numerous failures and bankruptcies in order to find a cheap way to make cars. He would abandon investors, people who supported him, and even companies named after him, in his quest to solve his problem in his own way. Nobody gave them permission. And neither of them set out to change the world. They only wanted to solve a problem that was personally important to them. It's unfortunate that often we forget that choosing ourselves is not something that happens once. It has to happen every single day. Else we lose track of that core inside of us that solves problems and is able to share them in a way that makes the world a better place. Ford forgot this and became obsessed with Jews. Ford is the only American that Hitler mentions in Mein Kampf: "only a single great man, Ford, [who], to [the Jews'] fury, still maintains full independence...[from] the controlling masters of the producers in a nation of one hundred and twenty millions." And what happened to our embarrassed marketing manager that has ignited the passions of men and women for the past 30 years? Roy Raymund saw the value of Victoria's Secret jump from the one million he sold it for in 1982 to over a billion dollars a decade later. He failed in business after business. He got divorced. Then at the age of 46, my age, he drove to Golden Gate Bridge, jumped off it and killed himself. Before you can save the world you have to save yourself. But you have to relentlessly do it every day. Sometimes the train wakes me up at night and I feel scared. What will the world be like for my children? I won't always be able to help them. I don't even know if I do enough to help them now. And then I remember. I'm alive for another day.

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.

2 different categories come to mind. H&R Block or other tax preparation services. The second is restaurants. This may seem like a product more than a service but I think it truly falls into the category of service, especially if you look at the national chains. Think Applebee's, TGI Fridays etc. The reason people go to these places is because of the experience they receive. The franchisors have created a system that generates nearly identical results nationwide. The first thing you need to do is figure out what makes your service superior to others out there, then you need to figure out how and why this is the case. From there you need to document it and make sure that you have a mechanism in place to ensure compliance. Granted that is a huge amount of work, but the basic premise is quite simple. You want all of the people you hire to do things more or less the way you would do them.

The highest-impact growth marketing tactics for a B2B SaaS startup with zero customers is often direct outreach. When you're at a point where you don't have customer validation, it's incredibly hard to get useful data from very small amounts of traffic. So in a zero customer state, your highest-impact effort is direct outreach. Signing-up customers one-by-one is the best way to get customer validation and you'll learn a ton of valuable data along the way. Once your customer validation is complete and you have at least a handful of customers *actively* using the product, then you have the rationale to start spending and experimenting with growth marketing tactics. Happy to discuss the customer development process with you and share with you what has been successful for me in doing direct-outreach to enterprise customers.

There are three ways to grow any business: 1. Increase number of clients 2. Increase average sale amount 3. Increase frequency of sales If your company is already fully booked, I suggest that you start by simply raising your prices. You might lose some clients, but usually when a business raises prices, the clients they lose are the most troublesome ones. Refocus sales & marketing efforts on attracting higher-end clients or doing more work for your best existing clients. You can also typically boost your short-term bookings by pre-announcing the price hike and get some potential clients "off the fence" with an offer to sign now at the old rate. To avoid adding unnecessary overhead as the company grows, dedicate some time to building strong, repeatable systems and to automating processes where possible. The most important place to do this is in your sales systems, so that your revenues become predictable and you can scale them at-will by adjusting your sales & marketing expenditure. If your sales systems are already pretty solid and you want to boost your production capacity to keep up, again look to systematize and automate as much as possible. Break the whole production process down into steps: sale, concept, script, taping, editing, post-production, review, delivery, collecting payment, and so on. Write down each logical step, and then write down all of the physical actions that need to take place to get the desired result. Who can perform each of those actions? Is it something that could be partially or fully automated with software (e.g. project planning)? Something that you could outsource (e.g. video editing, bookkeeping)? Or is it something that is your "secret sauce" or otherwise requires specialized in-house talent (e.g. creative work, executive management)? By really getting down to exactly what roles must be performed by your employees, you can calculate how many employees you're going to need in a given role, for a given workload. Now you have a hiring plan. A highly-scalable organization will focus on doing what they do best, while automating, outsourcing, or eliminating as much as possible of the other work involved in performing their business. OK, last topic: Culture. People much smarter than me have written entire books on this topic. The best advice in regards to culture and employees largely boils down to: 1) Be *intentional* about creating the company culture. Decide up front what you will value as a company, and communicate this throughout the organization. 2) People REspect what you INspect. Trust your people, but verify. For example, if your organization is highly customer-service oriented, then make darned sure that your clients feel like they were treated just as you expected that they would be treated. Call them up personally. Make sure your employees are aware that you're doing this. 3) A new hire's indoctrination into the company culture begins the moment they first enter your world, and first impressions matter. Do your website, interview and hiring process, and new-hire orientation all reflect your intended company culture perfectly? Or does a new-hire get mixed messages because current standard practices or employee behavior is inconsistent with your stated values? 4) Hire people based on whether they are a cultural fit. Have each candidate interviewed independently by multiple people, all of whom are evaluating that person on cultural fit. If you're small enough, have the entire company interview them. If you hire someone who doesn't fit your culture, you have just eroded it. 5) People who share your company values almost certainly associate with other people who share those values. Leverage their networks to find great candidates. Even if they're not looking to make a move, or you're not hiring, or not hiring for a position they could fill, make the connection anyway, and keep in touch. The easiest way to fill a job in the future is when you already have a list of pre-qualified people who'd love to work for you. 6) The only way someone should be able to get fired is by violating the norms of your company culture. And if someone does commit a serious violation, they need to be let go--immediately. And here's one last strategy that can increase your profits without taking on much of any extra overhead at all: Think about what else your clients need—even things that you can't offer them directly. You already have a relationship with them, and if you're doing things right, it's a *trusted* relationship. Figure out what they need, find a partner who can deliver that for them, and then make an arrangement where you sell those products or services to your client and have them fulfilled by your joint-venture partner. They do all the work, your client gets what they need, and you and the JV partner split the revenue. For example, are your clients hiring you to produce videos for marketing purposes on the web? Maybe they need help with their website? Or with getting traffic to the videos on YouTube? Partner with a web marketing agency. You can even work this both ways, so that they send their high-end clients to you when they need a video produced. I hope I covered that as best I could without knowing the specifics of your business. If you have questions that I could answer for you on these topics, I'm happy to set up a call.