July 14, 2017

The #1 Startup Growth Hack

One of the toughest challenges for new startup owners is building a loyal customer base. At such an early stage it is difficult to amass a sizeable market share with limited resources such as a lack of funding or lack of access to top talent to build your product. You cannot survive very long if you keep opting for traditional ways to grow your company, you must get creative in order to achieve fast and effective growth.

This necessity for early stage startups to reach their target audiences has given rise to growth hacking, an unconventional strategy that allows them to grow rapidly, even with a limited amount of resources. Startups operate in a very vast set of industries ranging from software-as-a-service (SaaS) products for business use, to consumer startups focused on social networking, fashion, and carpooling applications among others. Due to this large scale market diversity, many growth hacks may not work for every kind of business venture. However, there are some strategies that are universal, and in this post I’m going to discuss one such growth hacking strategy, which if applied creatively, can be the number one growth hack for your startup. And this #1 startup growth hack is:

Finding a reliable offshore talent staffing partner

Now you may be thinking, what has offshoring staffing got to do with growth hacking? My answer to that is: everything! Having the right offshore partner is a great growth hack to launch your startup to infinite success.

Hacking Your Product Growth and Scalability

Say you are building a niche social networking application, what are some of the development aspects that your product will require?

You will definitely require a strong full-stack software engineer to build the code structure
You may need a database developer at some point to build and maintain your backend database
An engaging product design is a must, so you will definitely need a UI/UX specialist to design the best possible product interface and user experience that attracts your audience
Mobile usage far outweighs desktop use nowadays, so you will need mobile app developers to create iOS/Android/Windows Phone apps for your product

But how do you simultaneously afford so many technical resources at such an early stage, especially with a shortfall of top technical talent in the U.S. and a talent preference to work at startup hubs? You take your product development offshore, but with a carefully selected hybrid staffing partner. That way you can scale your team up and down as needed, only paying for the talent that is working on a product aspect at a certain point in time. By finding the right offshore partner you can hack your way to awesome product development with a creative talent pool at a low cost.

Make sure that your offshore partner has a U.S. presence and management team, because that will go a long way in ensuring that your offshore team understands your product vision. U.S. management will also allow for confidentiality and code security, and the ability to train your offshore developers to understand your startup culture. All these amazing benefits together can make offshoring the number one growth hack for early stage startups!

Do you agree or disagree? Leave me a comment below or tweet me @agee77 or @allshore

Offshore Talent Acquisition Guide for Startups

Let us show you how to build a remote software development team that drives your business forward!