Scaling Your Product

This article is written by Milambo Kabeleka, a Contributor Author at Startup Istanbul.

Eamonn Carey, now the Managing Director at Techstars London, and Venture partner at Zeroth, an AI machine learning accelerator program in Hong Kong, has been a fan of programming with experience in writing code that goes as far back as 30 years ago. As a kid, he would write code to impress girls. While this may not have yielded him results in the past, it still set him up for his career in Tech.  

Over the years,with his love of the internet, Eamonn has started and  succeeded running a number of startups including Farmvillain - an application which was the villain version of a Facebook application called FarmVille. The application grew from a thousand users to millions of users and was eventually sold.

Having been a mentor, advisor and angel investor in for years now, Eamonn Carey  has acquired a lot of knowledge on how to grow a company in the technology industry.  He shared some of this knowledge in the presentation on scaling a startup company he made at the Startup Istanbul event.

SCALING

One way to scale a tech company is to buy users, thousands or even millions of users can be bought depending on how much money you are willing to spend. However it is not the best method because the users may not always stay engaged. You will need to balance between customer acquisition cost and lifetime value. Always making sure you get the ratio right.

As a startup, you will have better results when you figure out how you can organically grow your users. As much as that’s where the hardship is, that’s also where the fun is. When you understand your target market and that one unique thing you can do differently for your market, then you can actively plan for organic growth.

Manufacture scarcity of your product

Create demand by making your product slightly more difficult to get.  It doesn’t have to be impossible or unattainable for your target users, it has to be designed to require a bit more effort than usual to be acquired.

Turn users to marketers

This is a method that is very common in the world of tech. Most applications offer their users rewards for sharing the application with other people. You can also t urn people into billboards through distributing branded merchandise like t-shirts at events like conferences or festivals.

Don’t ignore your retention

As much as scaling your company is very valuable, don’t forget your already existing customers. Customer retention is sometimes underestimated. Statistics show that a 5% increase in customer retention can mean a 30% increase in profitability for a company

While the profitability of selling something to a customer can be  60/70% and only 5%-20% for new customers. It is much easier to sell to someone who has already bought into your company.

Stand out

It is really important to do things that are interesting. For various positive reasons such as; people knowing who you are, people will also engage more with your product,

The more you stand out the more you will that you will get noticed by Google or Apple. Applications like Duolingo got its 200 million users by engaging with Apple and getting featured.

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