Growth Hacking at a Fruits & Vegetables Firm

Or how we grow 10x in revenues in a span of less than 8 months at www.gourmetgarden.in

Retention is the key to any business model — You don’t grow by getting higher and higher number of new people to buy your product. You grow by making your existing base buy more and more from you. This is true for a SaaS firm. Surprisingly, this is true for a business such as selling patented, Naturoponic and organic vegetables, spices and fruits as well!

While discussing marketing and making our products visible to our target market, there has been a lot of discussions around the “best” way to do it, including the traditional splash and pray methods. Physical sampling, online emailer lists using the current customer lists and referrals and overall, there has been some revelations and questions that we try to answer. I try to list some of them here –

1. Product is your number one marketing tool!

2. Customer Success is much more important than any marketing you can think of — more so in a business which is low value, high repeat. We derive 70% of our revenues from our repeat customers and we are yet to celebrate our 1st B’day!

3. Your early adopters are your influencers — And keeping the influencer cycle ON is what keeps the snowball getting bigger and bigger.

4. Cohort analysis must be using as many cuts as one can do — You have to feed in what’s working and cut out what’s not working in every communication you do

5. Cohort specific targeting is the most ROI efficient marketing one can do. Understand what set of customers want what from you.

6. For any new products, sampling with the existing set of customers yields significantly better results (higher reach, lesser costs, much higher conversions, and much more sustainably growing revenues)

7. You have got to keep tweaking your value proposition as per what’s working — Track every promotion you are doing, every sampling, every post and then double down on what’s working. For us, it was the Freshness, Safety and Nutrition of the product which worked better than anything else. We harped on it and still do it.

8. Every customer of yours is a marketing agency for you — How do you make them bring 5 more customers for you? Can you ask them for straight away referrals? Or can you get them to distribute your products to their neighbours? Understanding the power of networks is super important in any startup.

9. How can you be on top of the mind of your existing customers? What are the top 3 things that you can do so that your users think of you when they need the product you sell? Both consciously and sub-consciously.

10. Anyone can grow at any rate it if the capital is unlimited. How do you grow while the economics make sense? What are the tactics and the strategies for the same? Surprisingly things such as free samples, free product boxes work better at conversions than digital marketing and are MUCH cheaper.

11. For the product one is selling, what appeals to your set of customers is what you should be telling them. Repeatedly. Now, this sounds simple but this is exactly what most startup miss in their quest to reach the maximum number of people. Cohort specific targeting — One set might like fruits, another exotics while yet another only staples is what results in most bang for your bucks. Spend the time and effort to understand this.

12. Track, measure and repeat what works and discard what doesn’t. Discard what you can’t measure — Which will lead to discarding most the traditional marketing shenanigans.

13. More is not good. A little more of what matters is significantly better.

Do reach out to me at abhishek@ekamultrafarms.com in case you want to discuss more of growth strategies!