This document summarizes seven growth hacking techniques used on the Facebook platform: 1) Sorting friend invites based on closeness of friendship rather than alphabetically to increase acceptance rates. 2) Using artificial scarcity by limiting actions like sending gifts to encourage more sharing. 3) Personalizing actions by replacing generic targets with "you" to appeal to human ego. 4) Creating multiple applications for similar content to increase discovery. 5) Encouraging user-generated content to multiply applications without extra work. 6) Rewarding people for referrals to try unconventional experiments like a replica Pac-Man prize. 7) Blacklisting competitors' employees on a "blacklist" to block potential growth

1. Hacking the Facebook Platform:
My 7 Favorite Growth Hacks

2. A talk by
@ankurnagpal

3. I built everything you
probably hated on the
Facebook platform.

4. Here are my seven favorite hacks.

5. Want to hear my video
analysis for $1?
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6. Let’s get started.

7. 1"
Friends with Benefits

8. How many Facebook friends do
you have?

9. How many Facebook friends do
you care about?

10. Yet most friend inviters sort
friends alphabetically

11. We can do better

12. We can sort by proximity of
friendship
(most number of common photo tags, profile
interaction, NOT number of mutual friends)

13. Or the target demographic for
your product?

14. Or by the smartphone they use?
(A beer if you figure this out)

15. How well does it work?

16. Increased the percentage of
invitations accepted 3x by targeting
gifts only to friends with lots of
shared photos.

17. Isn’t that easier (and less spammy)
than getting people to send 3x as
many requests?

18. 2"
Artificial Scarcity

19. Want to increase the value of
anything?

20. Want to increase the value of
anything?
Make it scarce.

21. Send All Your Friends a Hug!

22. Send All Your Friends a Hug!
vs.
You Can Send 12 More Hugs Today.

23. What if they still don’t believe you?

24. Progress bar it.

25. You have sent 75% of your
available gifts for the day.

26. Making the number of friend
invites scarce led to more invites
being sent.

27. What else can artificial scarcity be
applied to?
(other than economic monopolies)

28. You can only spend $10 today.

29. You have spent 75% of your budget
today.

30. The best (and fucked up) part?

31. You do not have to enforce the
limit.

32. OMG I FOUND A GLITCH THE
GAME LETS ME SPEND ALL MY
MONEY

33. Want to hear my video
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34. 3"
You

35. This works on platforms that have
a profile page and home page that
aggregates profile updates.

36. My Profile: Before
Ankur sent Jamie a flying kiss.
Send a Flying Kiss

37. My Ex GFs Newsfeed: Before
Ankur sent Jamie a flying kiss.
Send a Flying Kiss

38. Replace the target with “you” and
let the human ego do the rest.

39. My Profile: After
Ankur sent you a flying kiss.
Send a Flying Kiss

40. My Ex GFs Newsfeed: After
Ankur sent you a flying kiss.
Send a Flying Kiss

41. Inability to understand social media
+
The human ego
=

42. 4"
Multiple Points of Entry

43. The Story of Brainfall

44. “Brainfall Personality Quizzes” was
the first quiz app on Facebook....
and they had better content.

45. Yet we had 10x the traffic that
Brainfall did in a matter of days.
Why?

46. We broke our quizzes into their
own independent applications.

47. Examples:
How Good a Lover Are You?
What Color Are You?
Dr. Phil’s Personality Test*
* Hello lawyers, No affiliation with Dr. Phil

48. Not just personality quizzes.

49. Free Gifts
versus
Send Your Friends a Hug
Send Your Friends Bible Verses
Send Your Friends Diwali Cracker*

50. Works even better on mobile
because of search-based discovery.

51. TV Show Quote Game
versus
Seinfeld Quote Trivia Game
Family Guy Quote Game
Breaking Bad TV Show Quotes

52. 5"
Now With UserGenerated Content

53. Multiple points of entry is super
powerful but tedious to maintain.

54. Solution:
Have users generate your multiple
points of entry.

55. Example: Udemy

56. Example: Meetup.com

57. Example: CrowdTilt

58. Now back to silly Facebook gifts.

59. My Solution:
Gift Application Creator.

60. Each user could create an
independent gift application with
no more than a gift name and
image.

61. Results:
+10,000+ applications created
+ More traffic than Linkedin, New York
Times and Yelp for a month.
+ Viral applications that I would not
have dreamt about.

62. The most popular applications
were an unidentifiable Russian
word, friendship bracelets, blessings
from God and flaming bags of
poop.

63. The downside?

64. The downside?
Penises.

65. The downside?
Penises. Lots of penises.

66. 6"
A Pac-Man Story

67. Everyone in growth talks about the
importance of data.

68. Test. Measure. Optimize. Rinse.
Repeat.

69. Except data no longer distinguishes
you from the competition.
Everyone measures everything.

70. The Data Trap:
A tendency to optimize towards
the local maxima.

71. Solution:
Try weird shit. Often.

72. After getting bored of optimizing
feed stories, I decided to reward
whoever brought in the most new
people to my Pac-Man game....

73. Turns out gamers LOVED the idea
of a $2,000 replica Pac-Man
machine:

74. Result
Thousands of new users.

75. Result
Top two users ended up in an adbuying battle against their referral
link.

76. Takeaway
Replicating this probably won’t
work. Trying crazy shit will...
sometimes.

77. 7"
The Blacklist of Doom

78. OH:
Don’t worry about your
competition.

79. Sadly
That does NOT apply to growth.
Growth channels saturate.

80. My 30-Minute Solution
Find the Facebook user ID of 2-3
employees at every company you
are concerned about.

81. Step 2
Add them to a “blacklist”

82. Now follow the pseudocode:
If (Current User is a Friend of
Anyone on the Blacklist)
<hide growth feature>

83. BOOM.
Thousands of potential
competitors blocked.

84. Want to get video analysis
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85. Talk to me
@ankurnagpal