what on earth is Growth Hacking and why is it so important for internet companies

A growth hacker is a person whose true north is growth.

– Sean Ellis
(Founder/CEO of Qualaroo and ordained Godfather of Growth Hacking,)

Isn't a GH a Marketer?
Isn't a GH a Product guy?
No!

A Growth hacker is a hybrid of Marketer, Product Manager, IT/CS Engineer, and an Analytics guy who based on data and endless tests, uses different marketing and product approaches to grow his business rapidly.

Unlike a Marketer who comes in the product show around the time when the product is launch-ready, the Growth guy on-boards the product journey as soon as it starts to get ideated - Growth Hacker focuses on understanding users and how they will discover, adopt, and engage with the product, and then builds features accordingly. If a startup is pre-product/market fit, growth hackers can make sure virality is embedded at the core of a product. After product/market fit, they can help run up the score on what’s already working.

Before the Growth Hack era, the discipline of marketing relied on the only communication channels that could reach 10s of millions of people – newspaper, TV, conferences, and channels like retail stores. To talk to these communication channels, you used people – advertising agencies, PR, keynote speeches, and business development. Today, when the traditional communication channels are fragmented and passe, the fastest way to spread your product is by distributing it on a platform using APIs (Business development is now API-centric, not people-centric).

Whereas the web in 1995 consisted of a mere 16 million users on dialup, today over 2 billion people access the internet. Now it’s possible for new products to go from zero to 10s of Millions users in just a few years. New products with incredible traction emerge every week. These products, with millions of users, are built on top of new, open super-viral communication platforms; which give you direct access to a bigger market that allows you to grow at super-sonic speed; that in turn have hundreds of millions of users – Facebook and Apple and Google in particular.

Both Digital Marketing & Growth Hacking have 3 core principles: experimentation, creativity, & measurement. Both also share the same 3 core metrics: increased engagement, increased conversion, increased retention. 

The only difference between a Digital Marketer & a Growth Hacker  is that the former one can have broad goals like Brand-Awareness while the later one only has 1 specific goal of Growth. ” but answers it using A/B tests, landing pages, viral factor, email deliverability, and Open Graph - And on top of this, they use the fundamentals of direct marketing, with its emphasis on quantitative measurement, scenario modeling via spreadsheets, and a lot of database queries.

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Following are few notable examples of growth hacking in the Product industry:

1. Hotmail‘s “Get Free Email” Signature Link
Hotmail added phrases like “Get Free Email with Hotmail” to the bottom of every email sent through their service. This was a move recommended by the company’s very first investor, and it wound up igniting word of mouth around the product at a time when email and the Internet were just gaining widespread commercial recognition.

2. YouTube‘s Embed Feature
One of the reasons why YouTube was able to spread around the web so quickly was its embed feature introduced in 2005, which has gone down as one of the most popular growth hacks of all time. This simple hack made it possible for users to embed any YouTube video onto any web page with a few clicks and a simple copy and paste of an automatically generated embed code.

3. Spotify‘s Facebook Integration
In 2011, Spotify pulled a landmark growth hack by partnering with Facebook to become the social megasite’s default music service. The company has since attracted more than 50 million users, more than 25 percent of whom are paying for the premium version of the service.

4. LinkedIn‘s Public Profile Feature
LinkedIn was able to become the most popular professional social networking site by using the concept of peer pressure and transparency to coerce users into inviting and interacting with their coworkers, former employers, and clients in order to have a more complete and convincing public profile.

5. Dropbox Gives Extra Storage for Referrals
After determining that paid advertising was costing more than the value of each new customer, Dropbox hacked growth by offering 500MB of free storage for every referral. As a result, the company went from having about 100,000 users to having more than 4 million in about 15 months.

6. Facebook‘s Initial Exclusivity
While Facebook has been the platform of choice for many growth hackers, it is worth noting that the social site used a few nifty tricks of its own to get ahead in the beginning, including starting out as a closed network that was only available to college students. This perceived exclusivity helped to generate a sizable following of students that desperately yearned to be “part of the club.”

7. Airbnb‘s Post to Craigslist Feature

In a brilliant move, Airbnb made it possible for users to post their rentals directly to Craigslist from the Airbnb website with a “Post to Craigslist” feature.

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Some common Hacks

The Content Skyscraper Method
Some growth hacks don’t involve coding at all and are instead based on adjustments in content strategy. The content skyscraper technique revolves around the principle that “most people don’t want to know about the second-tallest skyscraper, they’re only interested in the tallest.” With this technique, you find an incredible piece of content (a guide, tutorial, resource) in your niche and treat it as the “skyscraper” you’re trying to outdo. Then simply expound and improve upon it to make your new skyscraper even taller, thus ensuring that your content piece is positioned to become the most authoritative on that topic.

YouTube Video Ads
You’re about to watch a video on YouTube when suddenly an ad starts playing and it sidetracks you because, surprisingly, it’s just as interesting as the video you were about to watch. Next thing you know you’ve discovered a whole new product, event, YouTube channel, or brand. This is a common scenario on YouTube and it’s one of the keys to the site’s success as an advertising platform.

Remarketing with Facebook Ads
Facebook ads are already a great way to appeal to targeted audiences based on a wide range of criteria. One way to further fine-tune your campaign and improve conversion rate is to remarket your Facebook ads to users who have already visited your website. Taking this follow-up based approach ensures that you’re making the most out of all potential leads who have previously expressed interest in your ad content.

Offer Something for Free
People love free, which is why giving something away to new users is a quick and easy way to increase your fan base. Take a business like Hotmail for example. When Hotmail launched its browser-based email service in 1996, it leveraged a free account to entice its existing 20,000 users to sign up. The company used the tagline “Get Your Free Email at Hotmail” at the end of each existing user’s outgoing mail to help spread the word, and soon after the campaign, Hotmail’s user base climbed to an astronomical 1 million users in the first six months.

Set Up a Referral Program
There are a handful of companies that take advantage of a referral program to grow their business, and for one reason: it works! Businesses ranging in form and function from local yoga classes to the online storage startup Dropbox have used referral programs in the past, and to much success. When Dropbox was in its earliest days, for example, it offered upgraded storage amounts to each referral party pending their sign up with the service. Once both users signed up for Dropbox, they received an extra 500MB of storage, free of charge. Just by offering this, Dropbox’s user base went from 100,000 to over 4 million in just 15 months.

Go with Exclusivity
People always want to feel like they’re a part of something that’s special, which is why exclusive invitations or offers work extraordinarily well as growth hacking strategy. Look at Pinterest, for example. When Pinterest was first getting started, it was invitation-only, but allowed users to request an invitation if they wanted to join. After requesting an invitation, Pinterest sent out an email to prospective users explaining that the waiting list was quite long, but that eventually, they would be accepted to join. This helped the budding social network generate buzz and made users feel like they needed to be a part of the brand. From August 2010 to October 2013, Pinterest grew from 100,00 users to over 70 million, proving that exclusivity is an incredibly effective way to drive growth.

Try Platform Hacking
Capitalizing on the success of another platform or business is a great way to grow your own. Try to find a way to work with other relevant platforms, businesses, products, or services. That’s one way that YouTube got so big, so quickly. In 2005, YouTube looked to “platform hack” MySpace and tap into their growing user base and gain more views and users for themselves and guess what; it worked. At the time, MySpace had 25 million unique users and was at the top of the social media totem pole, but sharing videos was a huge pain point, both for their users and their advertisers. So, YouTube set out to solve that problem by allowing MySpace to embed their videos without having to pay for the service. YouTube took on the costs of hosting in exchange for increased brand recognition and ended up winning out. Today, YouTube enjoys traffic from over one billion users and is without a doubt one of the largest, most successful startups of our time.

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Growth hacking process in steps:

1. Generating ideas (everything that can help to increase growth),
2. Organizing (estimating potential impact and resources required),
3. Testing (working in quick iterations, testing everything they can),
4. Analyzing (comparing results to hypothesis and asking “why”),
5. Optimizing (using learnings to correct processes),
6. Repeat.

Andrew Chen - One of the best Growth guys in the Industry

Credit:

Blog.upgrowth.in/growth-hacking-tools-strategies-process-and-case-studies

Andrewchen.co/how-to-be-a-growth-hacker-an-airbnbcraigslist-case-study

Hackisition.com/the-100-golden-nuggets-of-growthhacker-tv

Hackisition.com/the-must-reads

Medium.com/thiken/why-is-growth-hacking-important-for-a-startup-9f2abeff0f73