I studied 34 of the fastest-growing online businesses. Here is their growth formula (and how you can it to 5x your business)

For context, I am an entrepreneur who writes breakdowns of online businesses. I've looked at hundreds of companies and discovered a few patterns present in the fastest-growing businesses.

here's their growth formula.

1. the gold mine of growth right now: micro-influencers

Influencers allow you to get viral scale without having to create a lot of content. It follows what I said earlier about posting more, because you have other people posting for you.

If you have a marketing budget, contact as many influencers as you can. Pay them to make content for you and get in front of their audience.

This can be higher leverage than creating your own ads or content, and you will build positive associations with your brand.

2. an absurd amount of content

These creators and businesses are at another level content creation.

People like alex hormozi and dave ramsey make hours of content every single day. And they have been doing this for years upon years.

The top facebook ad creators make 10-20x the number of ads as everyone else and constantly A/B test and improve their ads.

To compete with any business or creator, you need to increase the amount of content. Period.

3. the passive-income version of growth - Recommendations

Partner with other businesses and refer customers to one another.

For my newsletter, I gained 150+ subscribers from recommendations from other subscribers. It took 5 minutes of work to set up, and I still get subscribers today.

If you have a product or service that works well with another business, work together and form a partnership where you help each other.

4. Affiliates (tricky but high potential if you do well)

Set up an affiliate program with a clear incentive to refer (make money, unlock a reward, get a discount etc.)

The key here is to get high-quality affiliates and give them more value than they give you.

If you create an affiliate offer so good that it refers more than 1 person on average, you have basically unlocked unlimited growth.

5. A crazy valuable magnet

create a lead magnet that solves a specific problem but opens up additional pains that your business solves.

A great lead magnet increased my conversion by 2-3x and brought me hundreds of subscribers.

the best businesses I've seen build and market lead magnets every few weeks.

final thoughts

All the businesses I've studied and built used a combination of these strategies to hack growth and constantly get more customers.

btw, if you liked this post, I analyze growth strategies and write about advice for entrepreneurs in my free newsletter, Business Deconstructed.