"Actually, What is Growth?" - The Question I Should Have Asked a Year Ago
WHAT is organic growth?
After spending a year failing to grow my company's website organically (links to post #1), I now realise that daring to ask this one simple question would have helped me so much, "What actually is growth?".
Organic growth means using internal resources and capabilities to grow, rather than paying for external services or acquisitions; 'inorganic growth'.
In my case, had I asked this simple question and came to this understanding, I would have not made the mistake of focusing on "engineering" (even though that is my job scope). Instead, I would have created an even better opportunity for myself to GROW in terms of my status and standing within the company had I proactively engaged my marketing team to work on a strategy that we could have implemented in order to start experimenting around "organic growth".
The possibilities were myriad: starting a blog; creating a newsroom to aggregate news articles about our industry; creating simple engagement tools to craft a unique experience, and so on. Each one could have given us at least SOME growth had I taken time to actually understand what was truly being asked of me, and this was just (new term I've just learned) the "top-of-the-funnel". There are even more strategies, after getting attention from people on the internet to get them "down the funnel" towards an intended product where users are then retained through more interactive content or engagement loops like feedback, or community building!
WHY organic growth?
It's probably the more sustainable strategy for the long-term. If an internal team builds a product from scratch and writes their own articles (in contrast to paying an external content creator), there is more ownership in both the creative process and the response to feedback that leads to healthy iterations!
A logical extension would also signal to possible collaborators and investors that such a company is worth trusting if they are able to internally produce value that people want.
The main downside is that this is a much slower version of growth and requires a lot of patience just to iterate, test, and continually fail in search of the right "thing". And that is the main thing I'm attempting to do now, so any feedback at all (even if this article is not helpful) would be amazing if you come across this somehow!
How to implement organic growth?
Honestly, with much fear and trepidation! But here is my first experiment: just create more content. Sure, that sounds obvious and may not even prove anything, but "if you want to get good, you'll have to embrace the suck. You'll have to choose to keep sucking until you've done so much volume of work that you can't help but get good." Paraphrasing Alex Hormozi here and it's something I've taken great inspiration from and will continue to do so.
I want to get good at growing organically and one of the simpler and proven ways is through a blog. Sure, I may need to consider a lot of bigger strategies that may grow me faster, but I'm just a newbie and I'm not in a rush. So I should just learn how to blatantly suck at doing something first, at least I will try my hardest to get right at one thing first.
So I will say this with complete confidence that this will not go well until it does: thank you for reading, thank you even more for sharing your thoughts and feedback. May this journey be a good example of growing organically through "being bad" be either a great example eventually, or an even more helpful negative demonstration!
