Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising

by Ryan Holiday

I’ll give you another example. In 2011 or 2012, I was invited to be an early user of Uber in Los Angeles. I signed up but for some reason never ended up using it other than that first night. To use the technical term, I “bounced” out of the service. So I knew of the service, but I was not a user. Flash forward to a year later, when I was traveling internationally to attend a conference and the event organizers gave all of the speakers a $50 Uber gift card. (In other words, a viral referral feature.) I couldn’t find a cab, so I ended up logging into the app for the first time in many, many months and hailed a black car. As it turned out, the service was seamless and enjoyable. After my ride, Uber kept me engaged by asking me to rate my driver, and then it sent me a coupon via email. Back in the United States a few days later and stranded in Brooklyn, my first thought was “Let’s pull up Uber.” I had officially been transformed from a lost customer to an active user. That is retention and optimization. It is marketing to someone who is a lot more likely to convert than some busy stranger you might otherwise try flashing an online banner ad to.