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How Less Annoying CRM Grew
User-friendly CRM designed for small businesses
How did Less Annoying CRM grow?
Summary of the sourced claims below
Less Annoying CRM grew primarily through word of mouth, which was driven by outstanding customer service. They also experimented with Google AdWords advertising to learn about the market, though it was not profitable and not primarily aimed at acquiring customers.
Channels
13 channels · grouped by how Less Annoying CRM grows
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Word of mouth
· 4 mentions · 4 sources“Eventually, we just did that for long enough that we were like, "Customers are signing up with us just for the customer service." That was not a plan, but all you have to do is pick up the phone. And that's more than most companies do. So we were like, "Well, I guess we should keep doing this bec...”
highShow 3 more quotes
“We honestly never really did figure anything else out except that word of mouth kicks in. So it's really hard to measure second order effects but if you pay $1,000 to get a customer and they're really happy and refer another customer, that just cut your customer acquisition costs in half.”
high“I’d say in a typical week, maybe one day was spent on marketing and the rest was spent on product. Um, but the thing is we, we’ve never really figured out marketing. Like th the natural question is w we have 25,000 users. How did we get them? And I can’t really tell you, like, ads started it, but...”
high“Word of mouth has been our most valuable source of growth from day one, and the primary driver of word of mouth for us is outstanding customer service. People talk to our support staff, they have a great experience, and they pass on the good word to their networks.”
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Organic social media
· 2 mentions · 2 sources“So I got more active on Twitter, start a podcast with Rick, the person I mentioned that I worked with at my last job...it’s been really nice having a little more community on the internet.”
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“Once you have a bunch of followers, it's easy to justify the work it takes to create great content, but it takes just as much work to make the content in the early days, and it's hard to justify that when you don't have an audience yet. This is a perfect example of a flywheel: It takes a lot of e...”
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Leveraging existing platforms
· 2 mentions · 2 sources“So this is since defunct, so I’m not sure who remembers this, but, uh, when the Chrome browser launched shortly after they started the Chrome web store, which is just like a direct, it was like an app store, but just the point into websites. ... But what did you do with it? You linked out to less...”
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“we had a brief period in time where the Chrome Web Store was driving almost all our growth...we were one of maybe the first CRM to list on it because it was free. We just got a ton of free traffic for like two years and then they shut it down or I don't know what happened, but all the traffic sto...”
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Pay Per Click Advertising
· 1 mention“We took the lazy route, which was just paid advertising. ... Ultimately, the only thing that really did was Google AdWords. Nowadays, we found a couple other ad channels like that, like pay-per-click stuff.”
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Email List Growth
· 1 mention“Speaking of which, want to become a part of my audience? Click the button below to join my newsletter so I can one day use you as a pawn to create my own community.”
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Search engine marketing
· 1 mention“our homepage is bad, our product's bad, we don't know how to use Google AdWords...Google AdWords was our main way of planting seeds”
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Online Community
· 1 mention“With a community, you don't have to. Your users will create the content themselves! It doesn't get any easier than that.”
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Podcasting
· 1 mention“So I got more active on Twitter, start a podcast with Rick, the person I mentioned that I worked with at my last job...it’s been really nice having a little more community on the internet.”
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Referrals
· 1 mention“word of mouth has always been our main channel beyond that...your channels for growing can disappear, but at the end of the day, your customers are still recommending less annoying CRM to other customers, and so you continue growing.”
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Advertising on social media
· 1 mention“You said that you bought ads. You were spending too much money. Eventually you kept tweaking and tweaking and tweaking until it did pay off that the ads were working.”
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Google Ads
· 1 mention“this is going to be a boring answer, just Google ad words. And it was cheaper back then to advertise on Google. Although I still think the strategy could have worked, which is we just way overpaid. I mean, it was not profitable what we were doing, but it wasn’t about getting customers. It was abo...”
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Direct sales
· 1 mention“So I think we were very much just off in our own little world talking to customers and no one else...I just put, I got a Google voice number for the business. They’re forwarded to my cell phone and put my email address up there ...the first time my phone rang it didn’t occur to me to check ...the...”
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Partnerships
· 1 mention“Multi-level marketing company was recommending you. Tyler: That was another growth channel where, uh, yeah, there’s, you know, 40,000 people in this MLM company, a few kind of, of the lower level people liked us and it started trickling up the chain ... we had been working with kind of the corpor...”
high
How 2,976 businesses grow
Of businesses with mapped growth channels, the share using each —
Less Annoying CRM’s highlighted.
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Referral/Word-of-mouth67% ◀
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Social media63% ◀
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Search/SEO58% ◀
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Email48% ◀
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Community37% ◀
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Content/Inbound35%
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Partnerships33% ◀
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Events25%
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Paid ads24% ◀
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Outbound/Sales19% ◀
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Press/PR18%
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Marketplaces/App stores11% ◀
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Podcasting4% ◀
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Building in public3%
