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

by Sean Ellis

Digg

Digg

the engineering team worked out an ingenious way for members to painlessly upload and invite their email contacts stored in their Outlook address book, kicking network effects growth into high gear.

product’s must-have score.

disappointment was a much better gauge of product loyalty than satisfaction).

As all this was going on, this new approach to market growth and customer acquisition—one that discarded the old model of big marketing budgets and unscientific, unmeasurable tactics in favor of more cost-effective, consistent, and data-driven ones—was spreading across Silicon Valley.

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.

their success was driven by the methodical, rapidfire generation and testing of new ideas for product development and marketing, and the use of data on user behavior

to find the winning ideas that drove growth.

the creation of a cross-functional team, or a set of teams that break down the traditional silos of marketing and product development and combine talents; the use of qualitative research and quantitative data analysis to gain deep insights into user behavior and preferences; and the rapid generation and testing of ideas, and the use of rigorous metrics to evaluate—and then act on—those results.

barraged

pernicious

It’s about how to engage, activate, and win them over so they keep coming back for more.

“If you’re pushing code once every two weeks and your competitor is pushing code every week, just after two months that competitor will have done 10 times as many tests as you. That competitor will have learned 10 times, an order of magnitude more about their product [than you].”

Walmart’s growth team enlisted the engineers to build an app that could allow customers to upload their receipts from shopping at Walmart via their phone’s camera and automatically receive cash refunds from the company if another chain had advertised any of their purchases for less. In addition, the engineering team realized that it could marry the data Walmart was collecting as part of its price matching program with the ad campaigns being run by their paid search teams, leading to big savings in ad spend by only bidding aggressively on items where they were the clear price leader.

growth hacking is a team effort, that the greatest successes come from combining programming know-how with expertise in data analytics and strong marketing experience, and very few individuals are proficient in all of these skills.

They should also work on customer activation, meaning making those customers more active users and buyers, and figuring out how to turn them into evangelists. In addition, growth teams should work on

finding ways to retain and monetize customers—that is, both keeping them coming back and increasing the revenue generated from them—in order to sustain long-term growth.

a 2012 Econsultancy report revealed that for every $92 spent on acquiring more Web traffic, only $1 was spent on converting those visitors into actual paying customers.26 Customer disengagement and flight, known as bounces for website visitors, and churn for paying customers, are two of the biggest problems for start-ups and established firms

all companies should always be striving to spark strong word of mouth in order to reduce the expense of acquiring new customers.

the language you use must directly and persuasively connect with a need or desire they have in order to hook them—in eight seconds or less!—

Website copy can be swapped out and tested relatively easily with tools like Optimizely and Visual Website Optimizer, which install a small piece of code on your website or app that randomly displays different versions of copy to your visitors and then measures and compares their responses.

The change of one word, from “store” to “share,” completely altered users’ perceptions of what the product was and how they should use it.

the team pulled off a similar feat shortly thereafter with a dating app. The original app featured the tagline “Find a Date,” and once again, growth was sluggish. They thought that maybe they could once again ignite growth by positioning the app as a social product, not just for people to use simply to find a date, but as a hub for connecting singles to one another through their friends’ networks. So they changed the tagline to “Help People Find a Date,” and sure enough, users started sharing invites with their friends, even sending them to married people because, after all, they can help their single friends with finding dates, too. The service added 29 million users within 8 months of making the single change.

helpfully sorted leading channels into three basic categories: viral/word-of-mouth, organic, and paid. We’ve drawn on their categorizations to compile the following