This Is The Secret Behind The 644% Revenue Growth For Netguru

56% of the startups that started in 2014 made it to their 5th year (2018). In the end, 90% of all of these startups will eventually fail.

Why is that?

Long story short: no vision, not enough customer-centric, premature scaling, no product-market fit, missing the right team, lack of proper investment.

But what about the rest of 10%? What’s their Holy Grail?

For some: growth hacking.

Introducing Unconventional Marketing: Growth Hacking

Facebook, AirBnB, Dropbox or Udemy chose an outside-the-box marketing approach to get the maximum number of users without breaking the bank.

Well, but these disrupted the markets, you might say. But can these unorthodox marketing strategies apply for more traditional businesses?

Elementary, my dear Watson. Unconventional thinking, behavioral marketing while always pushing limits…all these can be applied in any company by the right growth team.

Building this growth team is the new obsession of almost every company (startup or not).

How is this done?

Well, it’s time to find out the answer from Radek Zaleski, the man in charge of growth at Netguru, the software consulting agency with a 644% revenue growth in the past three years.

Managing Growth Teams The Netguru Way

Over the course of only 10 months, Radek Zaleski helped Netguru close $250K in revenue from 2 new enterprise opportunities. Here’s what he has to say about building and scaling growth teams:

What is your definition of Growth teams?

The mission of our growth team is simple – to make sure every person on this planet knows Netguru and wants to work us – either as a client or as an employee.

In a more practical sense, the growth team at Netguru is responsible for all brand-related activities (PR, social media), demand generation, talent generation, events, and partnerships.

How is your team structured and why did you choose to structure it this way?

Currently, at Netguru we have four teams:

Content creation has to do with posts, emails, visuals, ads and all that sweet stuff that brings in engagement.

Demand generation and the marketing ops team takes care of the technical stuff, like SEO, SEM, all paid channels, making sure our integrations work fine. We also use partnerships and our ABM team to build/own relations with different third parties, like accelerators, open source platforms, key tech people in different regions.

Additionally, we focus on building awareness and develop vertical marketing campaigns – that’s our FinTech department.

Lastly, our recruitment marketing team makes sure we have an inspiring employer brand (best in the region) and we get enough CVs to fill our talent needs.

What is your team’s main goal?

To make sure we’re on track with revenue goals by attracting new projects and new people to Netguru. All other goals lead to this one KPI.

How should a minimum viable growth team look like in terms of people and their responsibilities?

An MVP growth team boils down to this: one person that is able to bring new business to the company, by any means necessary. Gary Vee, who is not my hero these days, was such an MVP growth team back in the day.

How do growth teams change depending on the phase of the business: from startup to mature?

During my three years at Netguru, the biggest changes I saw were professionalization and specialization. When I started, our growth team was small, it was an all hands on deck type-of-thing. This approach involved a lot of multitasking, a lot of experimenting.

During the expansion phase, when we discovered a given channel works well for us, we assigned a specialist or two just to make sure we were doing alright. We actually started out with zero SEO, now we’ve got a senior specialist and an entire agency involved.

Still, as we grow, we keep adding new features and learning as we go. In the maturity stage, which I don’t think we’ve reached just yet, the focus shifts mostly to optimizing channels and increasing ROI by making incremental changes.

Conclusion

Growth marketing is the new buzzword and Netguru is in the middle of this new culture. Moving beyond the old marketing stereotypes, Netguru built the A-team that put it in the 10% no-fail startups.

But Netguru is just a needle in the haystack, there are plenty of companies out there with inspiring growth stories. For more success stories, check our blog.

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