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

by Sean Ellis

They had considered employing several growth hacks to drive more adoption. For example, they thought about requiring people to whom users sent photos to also sign up for the app in order to download the photos. But they decided against that because they were afraid it would annoy people. But remember that growth hacking involves more than picking from a menu of hacks; it is, rather, a process of continuous experimentation to ensure that those hacks are achieving the desired results. If they were truly practicing growth hacking, they would have run a test to determine whether or not their assumption was true. Instead they kept focusing on improving the product; for example, by offering a feature that sent users an email with photos they’d taken on the same day the prior year. That greatly increased the number of users who started to visit the app daily. But with their goal to generate more income, increasing daily active use wasn’t the metric they needed to be focusing on. Their urgent requirement was to increase the number of subscribing users, not to make the users they already had more active.