How to Tap into Explosive Growth

If you’re interested in growth marketing, then you have probably been to one of the growth hacking meetups in Sydney or Melbourne. There are over 4,000 active participants of the community who are always looking for ways to upskill, influence and leverage.

The term growth hacker was first coined back in 2010 by Sean Ellis, previous head of growth at Dropbox and founder of GrowthHackers.com. Since then, startups have been exploring and experimenting with ways to increase growth and scale.

Arguably, one of the most talked about growth marketing success stories comes from Airbnb. In 2010, Airbnb tapped into the user base of Craigslist: a user base of millions, which propelled the startup into a rapid growth stage.

Today, growth hackers and marketers are in popular demand. For entrepreneurs building new businesses, growing and scaling can prevent them from drowning in a sea of similar ideas.

For entrepreneur Rob Price, growth marketing was not his strong suit, however he knew he had to tap into the right markets and grow his idea before another popped up. In being a small startup and not having the capacity to hire a large team, Rob took it upon himself to learn the skills of growth marketing at Academy Xi.

“I could have just read a bunch of blogs and tried to have a play, but sitting with growth experts in a 10-week course, two nights a week, gave me a really solid foundation and a more targeted approach to [growth marketing],” Rob explains.

Rob entered the course at the same time he launched his startup: Mashay. The startup helps friends and work mates find and book group experiences. Mashay partners with companies like Young Henrys, Salt Meats Cheese and Cake Wines to curate the best group activities.

“A lot of group activities don’t happen because they get put into the too hard basket. Either it’s too hard to organise your mates, or it’s too hard to find the right experience for the group,” Rob explains.

Rob chose to work on Mashay during the day and learn the skills of growth marketing at night. Instead of going to growth hacking meetups, Rob extended his work day with the growth marketing part-time course.

“90 percent of what we covered was directly relevant to what Mashay was tackling at any point in time. As I was going through the course I was adding tickets on JIRA for what we should do, purely on the basis of what we were talking about,” says Rob.

The biggest challenge for Rob, wasn’t juggling his time, but juggling his skills.

“When you begin a startup there’s so many skill domains that it’s impossible for one person to be comfortable in all those domains,” he explains.

Through learning about growth marketing, Rob gained a better understanding of how other startups were building their marketing stack.

“Before I would have just jumped at the first person who came along with growth marketing experience, which would have potentially been bad for the business,” Rob admits.

Since launch Mashay has grown 15 percent week on week and is now starting to dive into more partnerships around Sydney, and will look to launch in Brisbane and Melbourne within the next 12 months.

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