Are you hungry for growth?

Growth is sexy. It’s the most sought after thing in the startup landscape. It defines the success of your product. Your chances of getting funded mostly depend on ‘growth’. For something so vital, it’s a surprise that there is no standard formula.

We set out to find one.

At Newton, we obsess over everything. Whether it’s a new feature or a marketing campaign, everything goes through a strenuous process. Most of the marketing campaigns we do are creative and backed by numbers. We obsess over numbers, all day long. Our marketing team members have all the metrics at the fingertips; downloads, signups, store ranking, App Store page views to download ratio, sales estimate, website visits, retention rate, you name it!

You find a similar obsession with a designer or a support agent in the team. This approach has helped us over the years. Growth happened because it’s all that we had on our minds.

I believed that we found a formula for Growth — “Growth comes to those who obsess.”

Based on our numerous successful campaigns, it’s true that growth comes to those who obsess. But, soon I realized that obsession (constructive) is not everything. The missing piece of the puzzle was persistence. Let me give you a couple of examples -

1. A tough product decision

A few months ago, we introduced a subscription model and naturally our users were upset. Lots of negative reviews poured in. Giving in to the pressure and reverting seemed inevitable. But, we persisted with our decision. Fought our way through the tough times and now we are reaping the rewards.

2. Social Branding Campaign

We’ve delivered a solid email app, and our users love us for it. They say great things about the product on the App Stores. But, these wonderful reviews were only seen by those who visit the App Store. My idea is to post them on social media so that they receive a larger audience. We decided to post a review every day, even if the tweet doesn’t get any likes or retweets. We just stuck to the task. The campaign positively impacted the branding.

3. Inculcating a writing culture

Creating a culture in any organization is a tricky thing. It requires a lot of things to fall in place. After a several failed attempts, I came up with an idea — The 4 O’clock Club; where a few members of the team gather at a place, every day, and just write. Persistence paid off. We now publish almost every day. The articles help us reach many potential customers, along with serving as an effective platform to engage with the existing users.

As for today, I believe the formula will be something like — “Growth comes to those who obsess and are persistent.”

“Nothing in this world can take the place of good old persistence. Talent won’t. Nothing’s more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius won’t. Unrecognized genius is practically a cliche. Education won’t. Why the world is full of educated fools. Persistence and determination alone are all powerful.”

— Calvin Coolidge

I’m sure there’ll be many dimensions to the formula for growth. But, persistence and determination will remain the nucleus. Do you have your own formula for growth? Let me know in the comments.