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

by Sean Ellis

START SMALL Often it’s the smallest changes in language that can have the most outsize impact on bringing in customers, which is why the most efficient experimentation process is one that lets you quickly test many different iterations. Consider how Tickle, a start-up James Currier founded in 1999, achieved two breakthroughs by experimenting with small changes to the language describing its social networking and photo-sharing products. When the response to the original webpage language that described the photo service as a way to “store your photos online” was “anemic,” Currier hypothesized that users weren’t spreading the word because they didn’t see a storage vault of images as a particularly share-worthy product. So Currier and his team experimented with a small change in language, to “Share Your Photos Online.” The test took almost no time to implement and the results were instant and staggering. The change of one word, from “store” to “share,” completely altered users’ perceptions of what the product was and how they should use it. Suddenly they were uploading and sharing photos like crazy, and in just 6 months, Tickle added 53 million users to the service.