Week 3

This week’s sharing was great! We had a growth hacking lesson by Bjorn and an idea validation walk-through by Chris. I was fascinated by Bjorn’s sharing because growth hacking is a skill set that I can contribute and it is also an area that I’m working on; to grow from 0 to 25000 users in the shortest possible time. That led me to constantly think on how I could apply the techniques to our assignment 1: ExchangeBuddy. The learning process is much more effective when we relate it to something. We’re fortunate to have an experience growth hacker sharing genuine techniques with us and here are some pointers that I’ve learned from the sharing.

1. Move in early, dominate easier
2. Make ads your drones
3. Everyone is lazy, YouTube
4. Be a great artist.
5. Associate with brands cheaply. Hire with freelancers smartly
6. Positioning for Media & Mainstream: frame your message in “x for y” terms
7. “80-20” Rule of Cold Emails
8. Fake it till you make it
9. Plant seeds in forums
10. Paying for traffic

Of course, not all of these techniques will work and it depends on the solution of the problem we are trying to solve! Following which, it’s back to assignment work. This week is more challenging than the others because we have 2 assignments going on simultaneously. Assignment 1 and 2. Assignment 2 is on application critic and we were introduced to a new presentation style: Pecha Kucha. It sounds kind of cute and I seriously do not know what language it is in but it is presentation style wherein there will be 20 slides and each slide auto advances every 20 seconds. It is a rather interesting presentation method because we will not have control over our slides. Still rather shaky after rehearsing for a few times but yeah, looking forward to the presentation tomorrow! The sad thing is that I only realized that the slides do not auto advance every 20 seconds after adding in animations to EVERY slide of our PowerPoint. Thus, I went to clarified if some slides could be less than 20 seconds and unfortunately, it is not possible and I had to delete all the animations……. Man I should’ve been smarter and tested it for a few slides first before going all in but it’s OK! I guess that’s part and parcel of the start-up life! Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose.

This week is going to be exciting with lots of submissions from the various modules but ya let’s go!

P.S; I fulfilled a duty and bought coffee for my team during their work for assignment 1 so Prof Ben can’t say that we can’t contribute much. HAHA. See you guys next week!