Growth Hacking

Growth HackingLean Marketing for Startups

How to get free traffic to your website

Put content up on Slideshare

Answer questions on Quora

Edit Wikipedia

Cheat your way onto the Hacker News homepage

Start a Meetup

Post on Craiglist

Teach on Skillshare and at General Assembly

Get on email newsletters (submit here and here)

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Dave McClure’s Marketing Channels

But none of that really matters...

“PS: I love you. Get your freee-mail at ??? ”

In 1996 co-workers Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith planned to start JavaSoft

They were afraidtheir boss mightread their emails

They were afraidtheir boss mightread their emails So they built a web- based email system

...and so was born

They raised$300,000 from investors

But Hotmail’s launch was unimpressiveJuly August

Their growth strategy was to buy billboards and radio ads

But investor Timothy Draperhad a better idea

“ Put ‘PS: I love you. Get your free e-mail at Hotmail’ at the bottom of each e-mail. ”

Within hours, Hotmail’s growth took the shape of a classic hockey stick curveJuly September

They started averaging 3,000 new users a dayJuly September

Within 6 months, they were up to 1 million usersJuly September November

Five weeks later, they hit the 2 million user markJuly September November January

In one case, Bhatia sent an email to a friend in India

In one case, Bhatia sent an email to a friend in India within 3 weeks Hotmail had 300,000 users there

When they sold to Microsoft 1.5 years after launch, Hotmail had 12 million usersJuly September November January March May July September November

When they sold to Microsoft 1.5 years after launch, Hotmail had 12 million users (There were only 70 million internet users at the time)July September November January March May July September November

This story is not an anomaly

Why did thesecompanies succeedwhen everyone elsefailed?

ONT L FRMattan Griffel A E TH BSFounder & CEO, The Front LabsPartner, Grow/HackI run the world’s first growth hacking agency basedout of New York City and have helped launchdozens of different products. Ive also spoken atvarious industry events – including at Bloomberg,Internet Week, and Social Media Week – and havebeen featured in Forbes, BusinessWeek, Mashableand The Next Web.

What we’re going to cover today What Is Growth Hacking? The Science of Growth Hacking Notable Growth Hacks

This is adapted from posts by Dave McClure,Andrew Chen, Noah Kagan and others, as well as from my own experience

Most startups find themselves facing the same problem

They build a product that no one ends up using

Say your startup has an idea

You assemble a teamand start building

Six months later, you have aproduct youre happy releasing

When that day finally comes, you launch and…

When that day finally comes, you launch and… nothing happens.

You get a writeup on TechCrunchand several thousand users

You get a writeup on TechCrunchand several thousand users (But most of them stop using it after a few days)

Nothing like the tremendous viral growth you were anticipatingJuly September November January March May July September November

What do you do?

You’re in the trough of sorrow, my friend Wearing OffTechCrunch of Noveltyof Initiation Wiggles of The Promised False Hope Land! Trough of Sorrow Releases of Crash of Improvement Ineptitude

Continuing to ship new features is the worst thing you can do

It compounds what the real problemwas in the first place, which is that you dont know whats wrong

Enter the growth hacker

?What the fuck isGrowthHacking

Growth hacking is a set oftactics and best practices fordealing with the problem ofuser growth

Viral growth

Viral growthLanding page optimization Product management SEO Analytics Onboarding Email marketing UX PR Behavioral economics

TrafficMost companies only Users track three things Revenue

Phase 1 Phase 2 Phase 3 Phase 4 Phase 5 Gettraffic ? Get users ? Profit

Those metricsaren’t very helpful

Those metricsaren’t very helpful (The magic is what happens in between)

The key is to map out the user lifecycle for your product

Viral SEO Partnerships SEM PR Blogs ContestsEmail

Viral SEO Partnerships SEM PR Blogs ContestsEmail ACQUISITION

Viral SEO Partnerships SEM PR Blogs ContestsEmail ACQUISITION Acquisition = getting people to come to your site

Viral SEO Partnerships SEM PR Blogs ContestsEmail ACQUISITION ACTIVATION

Viral SEO Partnerships SEM PR Blogs ContestsEmail ACQUISITION ACTIVATION Activation = getting people to sign up for anything that could lead to a repeat visit

Viral SEO Partnerships SEM PR Blogs ContestsEmail ACQUISITION ACTIVATION RETENTION

Viral SEO Partnerships SEM PR Blogs ContestsEmail ACQUISITION ACTIVATION RETENTION Retention = getting users to become active

Viral SEO Partnerships SEM PR Blogs ContestsEmail ACQUISITION ACTIVATION RETENTION REVENUE

Viral SEO Partnerships SEM PR Blogs ContestsEmail ACQUISITION ACTIVATION RETENTION REVENUE Revenue = monetizing active users

Viral SEO Partnerships SEM PR Blogs ContestsEmail ACQUISITION ACTIVATION REFERRAL RETENTION REVENUE

Viral SEO Partnerships SEM PR Blogs ContestsEmail ACQUISITION ACTIVATION REFERRAL RETENTION REVENUE Referral = getting active users to refer others

The lean marketing funnelACQUISITIONACTIVATION REFERRALRETENTION REVENUE

(It kind of looks like a teacup)

Let’s see it in action

You hear about Quora after your friend posts a questionAcquisition from Quora to Twitter

After reading the page you decide to create an accountAcquisitionActivation

AcquisitionActivation ...a few days go by

You get a weekly digest email with questions and links back to the siteAcquisitionActivationRetention

Once you’re back, Quora encourages you to read related questionsAcquisitionActivationRetention

And share interesting questions through Twitter and FacebookAcquisitionActivation ReferralRetention

Quora doesn’t currently make moneyAcquisitionActivation ReferralRetention Revenue

Each step of the LMFcorresponds to a user state

The growth hacker’s job is to figure out how to move users from one state to the next ??? Creates an account Visits again later

You need to measure conversions at each step 1744 10% 30% 30% 174 52 17 Acquisition Activation Retention Revenue

Dave McClure’s example conversion metrics

Mixpanel and KISSmetrics are great for analytics

At first your numbers will be really shitty 1744 1% 18% 0% 17 3 0 Acquisition Activation Retention Revenue

At first your numbers will be really shitty 1744 Focus here 1% 18% 0% 17 3 0 Acquisition Activation Retention Revenue

At first your numbers will be really shitty 1744 10% 10% 0% 174 17 0 Acquisition Activation Retention Revenue

Don’t focus onacquisition if youractivation rate is 1%

Growth hackers have developedtactics for optimizing the funnel

Measure the quality of traffic sources

Design landing pages to convert better

Tweak onboarding to improve activation and retention

Get people to come back using email

Social integration to get people to share

Identify companies that focus onoptimizing and try to learn from them

Not every growth hack willwork for your company

How do you run a properexperiment?

Divide users into a control and a test group

Divide users into a control and a test groupControl Test

Control TestRun your change on the test group and measure the difference between the two groups

This is often called an A/B test

Growth hackersexperiment a lot

Highrise wanted to test out differenthomepages to see ifthey could increase account signups

So they created a“long-form sales letter” page

Homepage trafficAnd ran an A/B test Original Design Long-form Design

Can you guess the results? Original Design Long-form Design

The long-formdesign saw a 37.5%increase in account signups Original Design Long-form Design 37.5%

Then they created apersonal testimonial page

And ran another A/B test Person Design Long-form Design

It performed evenbetter than the long- form page Person Design 102.5% Long-form Design 37.5%

But the persondesign was shorterand had much less information Person Design 102.5% Long-form Design 37.5%

So they added more information to the bottom

And ran another A/B test Person Design Long Form Person Design

It turned out that adding moreinformation made it perform worse than Person Designthe original design! 102.5% Long Form Person Design 22.7%

But that’s not where testing ends...

Unbounce is an amazing tool for easily creating and testing landing pages Use promo code mattanfree3 for 3 months free

Testing applies toproduct features too

Vanity and A/Bingo are testing frameworks for Ruby on Rails

Measure the lifetime effect of a change 1744 10% 30% 30% 174 52 17 Acquisition Activation Retention RevenueVersion A 1744 (100%) 174 (10%) 52 (30%) 17 (30%)Version B 1670 (100%) 100 (6%) 60 (60%) 18 (30%)

From Dave McClure’s Startup Metrics for Pirates

Most tests results are not as conclusiveas the ones by Highrise

Growth hackers often need toperform 15-20 tests per week to find 1-2 improvements

Getting users to theAHAMOMENT

What’s the one core activityof your product?

What’s the one core activityof your product? How can you get people there as fast as possible?

Keep refining and iterating until you get tothe problem definition that resonates withthe most people, most easily, and mostemotionally powerful. - Josh Elman, ex-Product Lead at Twitter

Our AHA moment at Twitter was ‘Once auser follows 30 people, theyre more orless active forever.’ - Josh Elman, ex-Product Lead at Twitter

Notable Growth Hacks

Acquisition:Mint has a landingpage or blog post for nearly everypersonal finance- related topic

Acquisition:OKCupid’s OKTrendsBlog created viralstories by “trading up the chain”

Acquisition: BrandYourself kepttheir Mashable article trending for 2 days by promoting it on StumbleUpon

Activation: Groupon has twodifferent pages for Google vs. Direct traffic (Footers are good for SEO but reduce conversions)

Activation:Path texts the app to your phone

Activation:OKCupid has a “tourguide” that interactswith you during the signup process

Activation: Dropbox sends an email when a user signs up but neverinstalls the software

Retention: Eventbrite sendsemails if you’ve beeninactive for too long

Retention:Path has your friends do it instead!

Retention:Path has your friends do it instead! (Can have a 10x higher conversion rate)

Referral:Facebook integrationmakes it really easy to get people to share

Referral: Dropbox,LivingSocial, and Appsumo know incentivization works well too

Referral: Quora forces peopleto sign up before they can read answers

Growth HackingResources

Watch Dave McClure’s Startup Metrics for Pirates

Quora has boards on GrowthHacks and Growth Hacking

Andrew Chen hasposted a list of notable growth hackers:

Check out ourposts atgrowhack.com

If you’re around NYCcheck out my new meetup

Thank you. Get more growth hacking case studies at growhack.com/case-studiesMattan Griffelmattan@growhack.com@mattangriffel

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http://www.growhack.com	9112
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http://www.22michaels.com	1465
http://cofounderinc.com	1259
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http://www.scoop.it	702
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http://blog.growthhacker.tv	378
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http://www.growthhacking.me	79
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http://2634119554563877032_ae2b04799f95fe3c0b69727d38332dbd5286b603.blogspot.com	38
http://www.bravenewtalent.com	38
http://www.fandrop.com	29
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http://growthhacker.tv	11
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Growth Hacking

by Mattan Griffel on Aug 22, 2012

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