Growth Hacking Asia helps startups optimize marketing

Anna Rehermann, founder of Growth Hacking Asia.

There’s no doubt about it: 2014 was a year of growth and record-breaking deals for Asia’s startup ecosystem. And things are continuing to look up. Takeshi Ebihara, founding general partner of Rebright Partners, an early stage venture capital firm focused on Southeast Asia, predicts that Asia’s tech industry is about to enter a golden age.

With money entering the ecosystem, it’s not surprising to see new services spring up that cater to the needs of young entrepreneurs and their companies. Growth Hacking Asia (GHA), an agency that specializes in consulting with startups on how to optimize their marketing, is one of them.

Growth hacking has become the buzzword used to describe a set of strategies and techniques that help a tech company attract and retain users. It requires a combination of skills in engineering, design, and marketing and includes finding ways to optimize how a user interacts with the product. Beyond that, it also extends to discovering new channels and communities to reach out to.

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Anna Rehermann founded GHA in August 2014 with the plan to offer these techniques as a service to startup founders who lacked digital marketing experience. Before founding GHA, Rehermann worked as a digital marketer for startups like Wimdu and Delivery Hero in Australia and with Mother Goose Venture Developers in Kuala Lumpur. GHA is based in Kuala Lumpur, but the company has branched out with representative offices in Singapore and Indonesia.

Part of its strategy is to propagate growth hacking itself as a specific skillset. GHA accomplishes this by hosting monthly events, each focusing on one aspect of the growth hacking funnel. In Jakarta, GHA hosts monthly meetups with experts and hands-on exercises at Comma co-working space.

Later this month, the consultancy will launch a new call-in service, Growth Hacking Hub. For a minute-based fee and starting at US$20 per call, startups can dial up a hotline to receive direct advice from growth hacking experts via the phone at any time.

So far, GHA is bootstrapped and lives off of its income from consulting and events, Rehermann says. She adds that the team is looking into partnering with VCs and incubators across Asia so that expert growth hacking advice can be offered to startups at an early stage.

“Having just started in August, we now have 12 clients,” says Rehermann. “They are all at an early, pre-launch state. We help them to get the product ready before user acquisition begins. The plan is to stay with one startup no longer than six to 12 months, and in that time to train them so they become independent and can continue without us.”

GHA’s next event in Jakarta will be held at Comma on March 31 and is going to be all about user retention. What do you as entrepreneurs think about GHA’s service? Let us know in the comments below.