Organiser profile: Nordic Growth Hackers

SimpleSite helps people set up effective websites, serving 400,000 new users every month. To get where they are, SimpleSite team tried lots and lots of interesting growth hacks. Realising that there's great potential in stimulating discussions between themselves and other Copenhagen startups, SimpleSite kicked-off an event series called "Nordic Growth Hackers." They use Billetto to promote their events and sell tickets.


We talked to SimpleSite CEO Morten Elk about his experience.

What’s Nordic Growth Hackers all about?

It's an event we do every 3 months. We get very interesting entrepreneurs from Copenhagen that have done cool things in growth to come here and do ultra-short presentations with specific content. Then we do a panel and have an audience that’s just dying to ask lots of questions.


So, it’s really a way to have a structured dialogue in Copenhagen about growth. We think it’s a lot of fun.

How did you decide to use Billetto for your events?

That story ties in to a precursor of Nordic Growth Hackers: We were a group of founders, 5-6 of us, who would meet regularly and talk about growth and growth hacks. Anders from Billetto was one of the guys, so I knew of Billetto. So when we decided to take that discussion about growth and make it larger, the natural choice was to test out Billetto. We used it for the first event...now we’re on event number 7 and still using it.

What do you think is the best thing about Billetto?

Number one is that it just works. Which is really important. It’s all about having a good event and not about fighting a ticketing system. It works very nicely. It’s easy to put a link up on the web. It’s easy for people to get their tickets. It’s easy for us to see how many people actually register, which is important because we have about a hundred seats; it’s important that we can hand out the exact number of tickets so that with the statistical model that we have for how many people don’t turn up, we actually get exactly a hundred.


The simple story is that it just does the job well.

What do you focus on the most when you create the Nordic Growth Hackers events?

We really focus on getting people with an interesting story. If you think about this as a product, the key driver in this product is that you get interesting people telling concrete, engaging stories. There is no end to the number of startups you can go to where you get the usual story: the pain, the problem, the customer, the disruption, etc. It’s the same 10 slides every time. And it’s fine, because it tells a story. But we’ve seen this so many times, it’s like a song on repeat.


Whereas here, we’re trying to get down to the engine room and get a specific story about how exactly does this company solve this particular problem. So, if we just line up people to talk about that, it’s going to be super interesting to others. It’s an alternative to the startup pitches you can find everywhere, and that’s sort of the key point here.


Another key point from me - since we’re kind of a mature company - is to tell the young founders that it’s not just about the product. It is really about the sales model. If you’re not selling anything, you don’t have a company. And we’ve tried to drive that point home every single time.

Check out Nordic Growth Hackers and their future events

Nordic Growth Hackers on Billetto