I came across this particular tactic a few days ago & really fell in love with the mystery of it. Canva are a fellow Australian startup that makes designing a website super easy, it’s completely free – they make money from stock images inside your posts.

Canva’s signup page obscures their main UI which slowly reveals itself as you move your cursor around the page. It just makes me want to signup.

This one particularly impressed me, Baremetrics is a tool that connects to your Stripe account then instantly shows you key stats about the growth of your SaaS business.

What better way to show off how you product works than to show the actual growth of your own metrics to the public. Not only that, Josh managed to convince another popular startup Buffer to do the same. And as you can see above, this has had a huge effect on his own growth.

Slack is a relatively new competitor to HipChat, when you signup they instantly set the scene that this is a product you need to get your entire team onto.

They followup their messaging beautifully by making it easy for you to set your domain then invite team members to use Slack too. Smart.

This is possibly one of the most underused growth hacks that exist, you can use mailto: to precompose referral emails for users. Especially if you have an incentive on the other end to make it worth their while.

For example, we have a viral share action type allows users to gain contest entries for referring their friends. Our button will precompose an email that they can send to any friends that they think might increase their chances. This vastly improves conversion rates for our contests – as friends are much more likely to enter if they get a personal email from someone they know.

One of the primary reasons for writing blog posts or content is to drive subscribers. Brian from Backlinko recently posted some research that shows offering specific incentives at the end of posts can increase subscribers by up to 785%.

This is something I plan to test very very soon, it makes any content you write so much more valuable to your business.

Earlier this week we wrote a bit of an opinion piece on some of the challenges that Australian startups face.

This post generated over 13k extra visits to our blog, over 200 new businesses signed up for Gleam, we got to speak with lots of publications, we got contacted by agencies, venture capitalists & other entrepreneurs in a similar situation to us. All from one post.

Do not underestimate the power of tapping into things that people are passionate about (or that they have strong opionons about). One caveat here is that you must also be prepared to take criticism (or anger) directed towards your views.

We’re always trying to find new customers for Gleam, sometimes we feel like we’ve barely even made a tiny scratch on the surface of what is possible. But what if we got better at converting existing customers, or close variants of what existing customers look like?

Retargeting through a platform like Perfect Audience allows you to run campaigns on Facebook, Twitter & banner networks to people that have already interacted with your site in some way previously.

They have also recently released a feature that allows you to partner up with other sites so you can both retarget each others customers.

You can also do similar things on Facebook directly, for example you can upload your current email subscriber list, or your entire customer list then create a lookalike audience that exhibits similar features to the people that already pay for your product.

Retargeting existing visitors or using lookalike audiences is 80% cheaper for us to acquire signups than Google Ads.

This seems like a no brainer, but startups often overlook the major painpoint that they can fix to skyrocket their potential worth to clients. What are some things that your customers spend hours every week trying to do? Reports? Integrating data? Setting up campaigns.

If you can collect the data then build a solution that helps you solve this particular pain point then you instantly unlock hidden growth within your business (and an edge over competitors).

If you are a regular Facebook user then no doubt you have seen lots of viral sites taking over people’s feeds with their sensationalist headlines.

Whilst you don’t have to go to these extremes you should be ensuring that you optimise your Open Graph meta tags to give your posts the best chance of looking good.

One area in particular to look at is the og:image meta tag, Facebook recommends using an image that’s 1200 x 630 px to fit all their possible size combinations.

A lot of the growth hacks that we talk about directly correlate back to some sort of incentive that you give the user – just look at how successful Dropbox was at growing users via referrals when they knew they would get something in return.

To date Gleam as helped thousands of businesses drive over 7M actions across thousands of campaigns, we’ve seen companies quadruple their email lists, eclipse previous sales records & drive more engagement than they ever thought was possible.

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The demo above shows you just a small selection of the powerful actions you can incentivise by running a giveaway with Gleam.

So there you have it, the power of the right incentive can help you scale your business to new heights.