Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success

by Sean Ellis

I worked with the engineers to utilize technology for what was, to them, an unconventional purpose: to craft novel methods for finding, reaching, and learning from customers in order to hone our targeting, grow our customer base, and get more value from our marketing dollars.

Hotmail, for example, was one of the first to tap into the viral quality of Web products—and their ability to “sell themselves”—when it added the simple tagline “P.S.: Get Your Free Email at Hotmail” at the bottom of every email that users sent, with a link to a landing page to set up an account.

Using some sophisticated programming, and lots of experimentation to get it right, the team figured out a seamless way to cross-publish Airbnb listings on Craigslist, free of cost, so that whenever someone searched the popular classifieds site for a vacation rental, listings for properties on Airbnb popped up. The cleverness of this hack cannot be understated. Because Craigslist did not offer any sanctioned way for Airbnb (or anyone) to post new listings, the team had to reverse engineer how Craigslist managed new listings, and then re-create those steps with their own program. This meant understanding how the Craigslist posting system worked, which categories vacation rentals were posted in in different cities, figuring out the limitations of what could be posted on Craigslist, such as rules around images and formatting the listings, and much more. As Andrew Chen, who leads rider growth at Uber, commented when analyzing the hack, “Long story short, this kind of integration is not trivial.