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

by Sean Ellis

At GrowthHackers, we once ran a simple experiment that involved moving the location of a sign-up form to receive our weekly “Top Posts” email newsletter. We had originally put the form at the bottom of our home page because we thought that users would want to evaluate the content on the site—i.e., scroll through the feed of trending posts that we feature on the home page—before they could decide whether they wanted to sign up to get the newsletter. Then Morgan had the humble idea to move the invite from the bottom to the top, giving it more visibility. Truth be told, he wasn’t sold on the impact the change would have, assigning it a score of 4 out of 10. But we decided to test it nonetheless because he gave the experiment a 9 for ease based on feedback from the engineering team, who said it was relatively easy to implement, and on his confidence that it would improve email sign-ups to some degree by being more visible, giving it a confidence rating of 8 that it would do so. The results were staggering. Much to our surprise, we saw a 700 percent jump in sign-ups, far exceeding our humble assumptions about the experiment’s potential impact on our growth.