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A growth hacker doesn’t see marketing as something one does but rather as something one builds into the product itself.
“So put ‘P.S.: I love you. Get your free e-mail at Hotmail’ at the bottom.”
This little feature changed everything. It meant every e-mail that Hotmail’s users sent would be an advertisement for the product.
Each user meant new users; each e-mail meant more e-mails and more happy customers.
But after adopting Draper’s suggestion—which the founders resisted for the first few months because it seemed so simple—growth was exponential: one million members within six months. Five weeks after that, membership had doubled again.
And in case you think Hotmail was some fluke of the tech bubble, let me remind you that a few years later, Google launched Gmail—now the dominant free e-mail service—with essentially the same growth hacking strategies. First
First Google built a superior product. Then it built excitement by making it invite-only.
A growth hacker is someone who has thrown out the playbook of traditional marketing and replaced it with only what is testable, trackable, and scalable. Their tools are e-mails, pay-per-click ads, blogs, and platform APIs instead of commercials, publicity, and money.
Growth hacking at its core means putting aside the notion that marketing is a self-contained act that begins toward the end of a company’s or a product’s development life cycle. It is, instead, a way of thinking and looking at your business.
The new marketing mindset begins not a few weeks before launch but, in fact, during the development and design phase.
You know what the single worst marketing decision you can make is? Starting with a product nobody wants or nobody needs.
They went from a good but fairly impractical idea to an explosive and practical idea, and then as a result, a billion-dollar valuation. This switch was undoubtedly the best marketing decision they ever could have made.
Instagram started as a location-based social network called Burbn (which had an optional photo feature).
“We sat down and said, ‘What are we going to work on next? How are we going to evolve this product into something millions of people will want to use? What is the one thing that makes this product unique and interesting?’”
Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, explains that the best way to get to Product Market Fit is by starting with a “minimum viable product” and improving it based on feedback—as opposed to what most of us do, which is to try to launch publicly with what we think is our final, perfected product.
Someone has to be the advocate for the potential market (customers), and the earlier their influence is felt in the process, the better.
Ian McAllister, general manager at Amazon, calls this approach “working backwards from the customer.”
For new initiatives, employees begin by creating an internal press release that announces this new potential project as though it was just finished. It’s addressed to the customers—whoever they happen to be—and explains how this new o...
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After hearing customers complain that their bosses were suspicious of employees using their laptops in meetings, the Evernote team produced stickers that said, “I’m not being rude. I’m taking notes in Evernote.” Thus, their most loyal customers were turning into billboards that went from meeting to meeting.
