Growth Hacking Your Own Business - Vin Clancy - FHR #272

Why Dave Decided to talk to Vin Clancy:

Vin Clancy is known for his cutting-edge growth hacks and funnel optimisations. His growth hacking book raised over $100,000 in pre-orders, which he supported a 100-date speaking tour in ten countries around the world. He has been featured in publications like Fortune, Buzzfeed, The Daily Telegraph, and many more.

Tips and Tricks for You and Your Business:

• Incorporating growth hacking into your business: (7:28)
• Using your group to grow your list: (10:14)
• Ace the game growth hacking guide: (13:05)
• Content creation side of growth hacking: (18:25)

Quotable Moments:

"When your looking to grow your business, you are looking for a way to do it on a shoestring budget."

"There are two ways to grow business in this digital age, one is through content and the second is through paid ads."

"Ace the game is a collection of the best 35 growth hackers in the world right now."

Other Tidbits:

Vin teaches company founders, influencers, and marketing managers how to grow their companies through a combination of rapid social media growth, and guerrilla community management tactics, in his private coaching groups, and through consulting with Marketing executives.

Links: FunnelHackerRadio.com FunnelHackerRadio.com/freetrial FunnelHackerRadio.com/dreamcar

---Transcript---

Speaker 1:   00:00     Welcome to funnel hacker radio podcast, where we go behind the scenes and uncover the tactics and strategies top entrepreneurs are using to make more sales, dominate their markets, and how you can get those same results. Here's your host, Dave Woodward. Everybody. Welcome back to funnel hacker

Speaker 2:   00:18     radio. I'm your host, Dave Woodward. This is going to be a crazy, fun ride. A guy wanted to break out here. You will not believe this story. I first. I was like, you gotta be kidding me, but first of all, I want to welcome to the show Mr didn't clancy then. Welcome. Welcome. I'm glad to be here. I love clickfunnels, so everyday. I don't know vinny. He's a world famous growth hacker is literally had a world tour speaking and most importantly he's actually went basically in the UK where he was on welfare and ended up raising over half a million bucks. Is now coming over to the states. He's crushing it soon, I think. I actually, I think you're one of our two comma club. A winters are assumed close to be or something like that. Is that right? Seven figures, but yeah, we've used click funnels a lot.

Speaker 2:   01:09     We love it. Yeah. Well then I think the key to all this is there's a lot more to your story here. I want you to kind of fill in the gaps and we'll talk a lot about growth hacking here. Obviously it's a huge thing we spend a lot of time on, but I want you to kind of tell a little more about your story so people can connect with you on this. Sure. So five years ago I was on social welfare in the UK or living on a 71 in British pounds a week in a tiny apartment that had no. People in America say no AC, but in England it's basically saying that because he's in La and it's burning up, it's got to be 100 degrees out there or something right now. Yeah. So I decided, okay to start an online magazine. Never really had a job before.

Speaker 2:   01:54     I had no experience, had no right to do it, but decided to do anyway. Called up every university in the country, got them writing for me. Within six months we have 300,000 visitors a month. Within the year we had a million visitors a month and then I raised seed money and raised a quarter million dollars in the first round and went from being like $5,000 in debt to never being in my overdraft again, literally overnight when the money came in. So I built a team. We raised a second round, got into tech stars accelerator. Uh, I started public speaking one best speaker at South by Southwest v Two v, worked for the British royal family, did a world tour, released my first book on growth hacking $100,000 in pre orders. Um, I moved to United States on the extraordinary ability visa a, been a bit more quiet on the brand front this year because I've been building a company and it's difficult to do both.

Speaker 2:   02:49     But now I'm about to do a final speaking tour for my second growth hacking book the game. Uh, so I'm doing eight dates. Canada, North America, Europe, a it. So what the heck is growth hacking? Growth Hacking is getting a lot done with very little resources. Growth hacking came out of silicon valley when they couldn't afford to do traditional ad spend, they had to hack attention because we're all addicted to our screens. I, if we can get in front of people, you can do a lot with it. So growth hacks can be evergreen, like Uber's invite a friend to you get $20, they get $20 a grove. Facts can be a social media growth hacking, so following and liking people's posts on instagram. So they come back and look at your profile and then you begin a sales conversation that way. Um, so there's a lot in here to unpack.

Speaker 2:   03:39     Um, and a lot of it works well on top of a click funnel. Needless to say, I love it. Well, I want you to kind of talk a little bit about, you've done some pretty crazy growth hacks. Uh, and so if you don't mind, give some like dia as far as what are some of the crazy growth hacks that you've done to get the celebrity status that is now literally putting you in a situation to where a soon to basically walk off into the sunset and retire, enjoy the rest of your life. Okay. So firstly I was asked by a company to help them launch an APP at South by southwest and given zero money as many marketers. So I set about creating multiple twitter accounts, reaching out to everyone who was at south by southwest saying, Hey, sign up the guest list for this competition to win free beers or free food.

Speaker 2:   04:28     And then we hit all the influences on south by South West. Got retweeted by official south by southwest and hour before it launched we had like over 1500 people through the door. We're the busiest by southwest and that was the only promotion just through twitter. So without paying anything, I just had four interns replying to people because everyone was saying, okay. So I realized yeah, twitter was the place for south by southwest. So I did that a second one that's, um, less explosive, but like, uh, I went to a million as a retreat in Utah, Utah, you know, anyone, luckily the event had an APP. So this is a great hack. You're going to any event or conference that has an APP, Ukiah, your intern to message every single person attending going, hey, I looked at your profile. Everyone has a profile on the APP. I googled you and you look interesting.

Speaker 2:   05:21     I'd love you to meet at the conference. I'll be wearing this outfit. It is. And so that, this whole weekends where otherwise networking's awkward, you've got to speak to someone. They ended up being in finance and they're really boring. But this whole week people coming to me. Um, and uh, yeah, so that's another hack that I did. Um, what was your outfit? A multicolored coat. And I'll give one final hack and then I'll get into more usable hacks. Anyone can use it a little bit, but one final hack, my friend had a company where it's a baseball cap of a chalkboard. A how on it. Uh, and uh, we went to comic con and the idea was to get backstage and give them to all the people who are about to go onstage, so game of thrones cast with them and stuff like that. But for some reason we were there 10 minutes for a launch, but they were somewhere else maybe in Conan's room or something. So we couldn't get the hats on. The people who were about to go on stage, it was filmed live like Conan O'brien show and it last minute I realized if we wrote team Coco on the hats and we went to the front rows and implied that we will, we've Conan's team and I could keep the rows are wearing these hats, the millions of impressions we got for free. The produce, the realize as they went live what we did. And he knew my friend. He was furious.

Speaker 2:   06:44     So yeah. So I think the part that we talked about funnel hacking all the time and it's been kind of the culture that we built out as far as funnel hackers and this whole idea of hacking things. And a lot of people think, oh gosh, it's kind of negative, but there's obviously a huge positive connotation to, especially from the growth hacking standpoint, when you're looking to grow your business and you're trying to find a way of, of really doing it on a shoestring budget, how do you actually go ahead and do this? And I know you've got this book coming out. It's built on click funnel saw east the game.com. Yup. So tell people, give people a little more ideas for us. What is this book about? And more importantly, they really, I'm sure my audience here is going to, what are some things I actually can do in my business to grow that?

Speaker 2:   07:32     Sure. So there's two ways really to grow a business in this digital age. One is through content, second is through paid ads. Some people would say affiliates fad. I found it to be very difficult. So the first is you build a community somewhere. I still think in the business niche, a facebook group as best I think next year or maybe more difficult, but for now it's still a very hot space. So everyday you put content in that group, you get people into that group, you invite them at your talks, you cold email, you send linkedin messages and your great content in that group every day, and then you don't put links to a blog, but you post into the facebook group. Then once every five or six weeks you do a launch to a click funnels page. And that's how I built my internet marketing business this past two years.

Speaker 2:   08:17     It has been the easiest six figure business. I have a belt. So that's the first way. The second way is facebook paid ads and you have your glorious leader, Dan Henry for any of your facebook ad stuff. You can walk you through that. But yeah, I've always gone about organic traffic, getting it for free. So through all those methods, building a facebook group of getting in front of people on twitter and instagram through cold email, through linkedin connections and messages and through public speaking, there's so much you can do. So are you taking your, uh, when you're on like public speaking or other places, are you driving them to your facebook group or what's your call to action? Typically. So while I was doing 100 date world tour, like the community, I was saying I wanted to go to west traffic and copy my facebook group and that's that, that's still is my main community that are post into pretty much every day because it's a bit different when there's a community rather than you just posting on a profile because you're just one voice versus many other people.

Speaker 2:   09:23     But once you have a community that's known for something, people go to it when they're looking for motivation or actionable stuff. So I still don't think there's a better place. Some people are arguing linkedin is getting good for business and it is. I just think firstly linkedin has an image problem or it's just not cool and you'd really have to have very little going on in your life to browse the linkedin feed. You know, basically all sorts of control, mercy and the business stuff all mixed together. You know, like I knew my audience was on facebook or days that, that was the obvious choice for me. I love it. So like on your traffic trafficking and copy group have got 11,000, 12,000 members or whatever. And as you try to go in there, you've a very first thing you're asking for three different, uh, contact thesis. So tell people kind of how you're using your group to grow your list.

Speaker 2:   10:18     So, um, so yeah, we start by doing lead magnets. So we do the Jeff Jeff Walker formula number one, we're thinking of doing this lead magnet. Should we do it? Second one is, okay, great. So here's why we're launching this third message the next day after is, is what it is. Fourth is, here's how you can get it in the fifties. Okay, it's live now on this link. And then the hype from that causes enough people to like and comment on it to drive a lot of traffic. One we did a couple of times was um, share this, if I'm sharing this and we'll send it to you. And now they got 100 shares, which is very, very powerful in the business to business space because what's great about being in the business, the business space is only a few people can mean a lot of money, millions of followers.

Speaker 2:   11:09     So yeah, we have $11,000 per bear in mind. We've deleted about 35,000 people over the course of the group. If they're not active, we, we killed them off. Um, because they drag your page rank down if you have a lot of, there's a lot of marketing groups with 50,000 people and everything gets zero, zero, zero. One comment, because they haven't deleted it, inactive people, they let anyone in. It's not good community management. It's like I've been the experts in the space also save your email list. You should delete inactive people that never going to buy from you anyway. Yeah, we've looked at that from an email deliverability in actionetics. One of the things we've put in there is not sending people who haven't responded or engaged with you in the last 30 days just to increase as deliverability, it engagement, all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 2:   11:55     So as far as group management, uh, what are some of the things you're doing to manage that as far as identifying who's active and who's not, as you'd mentioned, you deleted 35,000 people, how do you manage that? We had first mover advantage and uh, I actually calms how if it's still working, but there's a software called great sex and that shows you the most active members in the group. I'm just not sure if it's still working since that algorithm change. But, um, we did that and then we deleted about four months ago. We delete 10,000 in one go and we are not going to let it sit. Um, but, uh, yeah, so that's simple and you can tell people, please leave this group if you're not x and you'll get a few people to leave, but I'm going to be showing up every day and your post generally have to be getting engagement.

Speaker 2:   12:46     If you get that part right, you can actually get all the other little hack, um, like people look for the magic bullet, but a lot that phrase, when you hear hooves outside, expect horses. Not Unicorns is normally the right one. Alright, so tell. So what exactly is ace ace the game. The game is a collection of the hundred best growth hacks in the world. If you're looking to grow your business, if you need more clients, if you want to blow up on social media, this is the best guide ever made for that. Now most books are normally, hey, here's some anecdotes about my life. Here's something that worked five years ago, and then I'm going to tell it in a story which goes out over 40 pages for some reason. I like most books are just like, here's my way it works for me. Maybe it will work for you and it won't work for them.

Speaker 2:   13:40     My own hacks in this book, it's a collection of the best 35 growth hackers in the world right now. People who have spent $60, million dollars in ads, people who have raised $50,000,000 on a token sale, ICO, people who have built massive communities, people who do marketing for the biggest brands in the world. So I've collected all these growth hacks from them so that there's just no way that anyone buying this book and course isn't going to get a ton of value out of it because there's so many different growth hacks and people have already started to book new clients and do a lot with it and it's been amazing. So what are some of a me, a couple that I want you to basically to whet the appetite of our app or our listeners here. So they're going to go to ace the game.com and buy the book.

Speaker 2:   14:25     So what are some of the, what are some of the best ones in there, but as one which connects free pieces of software. Uh, and what it does is every visitor who lands on the website, it finds out who they are, email address, finds their company, and then puts them in an email drip sequence every single visitor on your website that, that's an incredible sequence. If you imagine all the people you lose who your website and then never come back. So that's a hack I really liked. Um, so where do they get that software? Lead feeder is the top one that will find all your business. Uh, I forget the name of the second and third one, not many people use, but he's one of the biggest indie game is using a software called linked helper. So linked helper you put in your search. So I want to meet programmers in Chicago if that's who you're targeting.

Speaker 2:   15:20     And then it will automatically connect with all of those people. If they accept that connection request, it automatically sends them the first message to begin a conversation. And you can do this at scale, like a tendency to connect with 100, 200, 250 people a day. So you're going to get connections back and you're going to have conversations happening completely on auto pilot and you just pop in every day and reply to the people who have got back to you. So that's a major one. A lot of people still aren't doing cold email, which is a huge opportunity area. There's software, um, we talk about in the guide, like I find that lead which will basically find anyone's email address in the world. And then there's various in the game for how to smoothly put them in their transition, put them in a drip sequence based on we make all of this a formula rather than something random and cold email as it scales really well.

Speaker 2:   16:15     But once you get it right, it's easy to scale up. I love it. So when you take a look at ace, the game.com, the free plus shipping offer is. I'm taking a look at it right now. Um, so you go in two step order form, what? Where's it gonna take them to next. I'm giving the secret sauce away for the people who were going to buy it. It's meant to be a surprise, right. You know what I'm real good about transparency and my listeners are totally take the transcript. I'm actually going in and right now to buy it myself. So, uh, yeah. So you buy it for $97. There was a order bump for five weeks. Group coaching. We took that off last week because I'm retiring, but that did really well. So, um, then there is a never say die. That's a continuity membership club face the game is all the best growth hacks in the world right now, but going forward they're going to be new ones and they're updated in our private membership club face $7 per month, then you have all of my courses.

Speaker 2:   17:17     So, uh, I've been doing this for about two years. There's over $6,000 worth of courses and Ebooks I've put out so you can get all of those in one package for $300. Uh, and then, uh, the next product in it is the sma, the social media automation course for $97. And then there's the thank you page. Um, I, I don't think people should send them a thank you page. I think it's a bit excessive, um, and it takes away the magic of the one click upsells. So then we take them to join our, the updates and the private community so you can connect to other growth factors. I love it. That's fantastic. So as you're taking a look, um, um, so some of the things as you're taking a look at what I'm does, the other hacks and things that, uh, what would, if a person is a lot of your stuff that you were talking about, it's kind of business to business, but person's kind of getting started and they're trying to get their own business up and running from, whether it's social media.

Speaker 2:   18:19     You mentioned you, it's content and paid ads, so either either have money, you're spending money or else you're creating content. So what are some growth hacks on the content creation side that you've used? So, on the content creation side, I'm like, one thing I do, the main problem is I don't know what to write about. I can't keep consistent content. And if you might talk about it, it's, it's, it's know, it's an obvious hack, but it's just evergreen always worked. You guys read it, you type in your niche in the top right in the search bar. So whether it's programming or knitting or electronic music, there is a subreddit for everything on earth, good and evil on reddit. And then you're going to find ideas, update every single day that you can get inspiration from or make talking points. I just saw this on reddit. What does, everyone was staying committed. It's a controversial post, but you will never run out of content if you go to read it everyday, defined it.

Speaker 2:   19:19     Do you know what I mean? It's strange that there's no money for journalists, but we're at a time of more press than for online. It's because all journalists that on reddit all day and find stories. That's kind of how we used to do at Planet Ivy when we're getting 2 million visitors a month. Um, but yeah, that's, that's how, that's how the biggest, when you say all, but I should come up with original ideas should you. The rest of the world. It's The Washington Post. Everyone sits on reddit. I love it. Well, I again, then I totally appreciate your time. My audience always loves her growth hacks, things they can do to improve things in especially growing your audience, growing their business. In the last minute remarks before I let you go. Um, yeah. Uh, yeah, I, I do believe in the power of growth hacking. It changed my life. It changed the game. Everyone will find facts. They can use it. All right, but thanks so much Ben. I appreciate it. We'll talk soon. Thank you. Bye.

Speaker 3:   20:16     Hey everybody. Thank you so much for taking the time to listen to podcasts. If you don't mind, could you please share this with others, rate and review this podcast on itunes. It means the world to me where I'm trying to get to as a million downloads here in the next few months and just crush through over $650,000 and I just want to get the next few hundred thousand so we can get to a million downloads and see really what I can do to help improve and, and get this out to more people. At the same time, if there's a topic, there's something you'd like me to share or someone you'd like me to interview, why only just reach out to me on you can pm me and I'll be more than happy to take any of your feedback as well as if people you'd like me to interview more than happy to reach out and have that conversation with you. So again, go to Itunes, rate and review this, share this podcast with others and let me know how else I can improve this or what I can do to make this better for you guys. Thanks.