Finding Your Growth Hack
To be successful and grow your business and revenues, you must match the way you market your products with the way your prospects learn about and shop for your products.
—Brian Halligan, founder of Hubspot
With growth hacking, we begin by testing until we can be confident we have a product worth marketing. Only then do we chase the big bang that kick-starts our growth engine. Without this jump, even the best-designed products and greatest ideas go nowhere.
For instance, many people don’t know that the late Aaron Swartz, the genius hacker responsible for Reddit, also invented two other services. In 1999, he started a collaborative encyclopedia before Wikipedia. He started another site called Watchdog.net that was very similar to the wildly popular Change.org. Both were clearly fantastic ideas, predating the actual services we all use today. But Aaron’s services never attracted their initial group of users and thus failed.
As Larissa Macfarquhar wrote in her New Yorker profile of him, “[Aaron] had previously believed that if you came up with a great idea people would use it. But he realized now that you couldn’t expect people to come to you; you had to pull them in.”9
The growth hacker’s job—like we marketers have always done—is to do that pulling.
But how? Certainly not with the inefficient and expensive methods of old.
With product market fit, we don’t need to hit the front page of the New York Times to announce our launch. We need only to hit the New York Times of our scene. We’re trying to hit a few hundred or a thousand key people—not millions. That’s a relief, right? Better still, it actually works.
In other words, launching does not need to be an enormous campaign we’re expected (too often) to produce out of thin air so much as an initial boost or a shot in the arm. Not a blowout grand opening, but a strategic opening or a stunt that catches the attention of our core audience.
So, yes, like the old model, growth hacking still requires pulling your customers in. Except you seek to do it in a cheap, effective, and usually unique and new way. Whereas all traditional marketing starts the same way—with a news story or an advertising campaign—start-ups can launch in a multitude of ways.
Take Dropbox. Today it has more than 100 million users, but when the file-sharing service began it was not even open to the public. New users had to sign up to a waiting list to be invited to join. In an effort to drive these sign-ups, the founders crafted a demo video that walked potential users through the service.
They didn’t hire some production company to produce an expensive or elaborate video that they jammed down people’s throats through widespread ads. They made the video themselves and they made the right one for the right place. Knowing the outlets where they intended to post the video (Digg, Slashdot, and Reddit), they filled it with all sorts of allusions and references that those communities would love.
As a result, this homemade video was enormously popular with these potential users. It immediately made the respective front pages, it drove hundreds of thousands of new visitors to the special page Dropbox had set up for this purpose (GetDropbox.com), and the waiting list went from 5,000 users to 75,000 users nearly overnight. It was all trackable, all visible, and highly effective.
This was all Dropbox really needed. After sending a highly targeted burst of traffic to the site, the team didn’t turn around and say: “Okay, how can we get on the news for this tonight?” They didn’t need it. Within just a short amount of time, those initial 75,000 users became nearly 4 million, which, in turn, grew to the more than 100 million people they have today.
A few years later, the e-mail app Mailbox launched with a similar strategy. An incredibly compelling demo video racked up 100,000 views in less than four hours. This one-minute video, combined with a very cool interface that showed users how many other users were in front of them on the app’s waiting list, created a spectacle that drove an enormous amount of social chatter and blog attention. Within six weeks, Mailbox had a million users signed up and eagerly waiting for the service.
Would it work again for another company? Maybe; or maybe that growth hack is now played out. The point is, you’ve got to find something new and exciting and channel that energy toward exploding on the market with your product.
Not All People—the Right People
The old mind-set says go out and get everyone you conceivably can—like a movie that opens at the number-one spot. This pressure comes from our clients, and many marketers have internalized these self-destructively ambitious goals. I know the feeling: I want to be everywhere. I want millions of video views. I want to become a trending Twitter topic. They try to go everywhere and end up going nowhere.
What’s the point? Most of those people never become your customers.
Growth hackers resist this temptation (or, more appropriately, this delusion). They opt, deliberately, to attract only the early adopters who make or break new tech services and seek to do it as cheaply as possible. In fact, part of the reason the scrappy start-ups, services, and apps in this book might not always be well-known or topics of daily conversation is because their founders have focused their energies on product development with an eye toward growth—they’re now millions of members strong without any superfluous “buzz.” They got to mass market by ignoring the urge to appeal to the mass market, at least to start with.
This means that our outward-facing marketing and PR efforts are needed simply to reach out to and capture, at the beginning, a group of highly interested, loyal, and fanatical users. Then we grow with and because of them.
If they are geeks, they are at TechCrunch or Hacker News or Reddit or attending a handful of conferences every year.
If they are fashionistas, they are regularly checking a handful of fashion blogs like Lookbook.nu or Hypebeast.
If they are _______________, like you and your founders are, they are reading and doing the same things you do every day.
Catch their attention and pull them in. It’s as simple as that.
Uber, a car service start-up founded by Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp, has been giving out free rides during Austin’s SXSW Conference for several years. During a single week, thousands of potential Uber customers—tech-obsessed, high-income young adults who cannot find a cab—are motivated to try out this service. One year Uber offered free rides. Another year, it offered BBQ delivery. Instead of spending millions on advertising or countless resources trying to reach these potential users in their respective cities, Uber just waited for the one week a year when they were all in one place and did something special.
That’s thinking like a growth hacker—it’s how you get the most bang for your buck and how you get it from the right people.
(A very common question: Where do I find the right people? If this isn’t immediately obvious to you, then you don’t know your own industry well enough to even consider launching a product yet. Period.)
To kick off and reach your first group of users, you have many options:
1. You can reach out to the sites you know your potential customers read with a pitch e-mail: “This is who we are, this is what we’re doing, and this is why you should write about us.”*
2. You can upload a post to Hacker News, Quora, or Reddit yourself.
3. You can start writing blog posts about popular topics that get traffic and indirectly pimp your product.
4. You can use the Kickstarter platform for exposure and bribe your first users with cool prizes (and get some online chatter at the same time).
5. You can use a service like Help a Reporter Out (www.helpareporter.com) to find reporters who are looking for people to include in stories they are already writing about your space.
6. You can literally find your potential customers one by one and invite them to your service for free or with some special incentive (that’s how small we’re talking).
Getting on one or two of these outlets is as simple as sending them a quick e-mail—after all, if your product really is specially designed for these people, they want to feature it.
The point is: do whatever it takes to pull in a small contingent of initial users from your particular space.
Sometimes “stunts” are a great way to do that. It’s often about exploiting systems or platforms that others have not yet fully appreciated.
Patrick Vlaskovits, who was part of the initial conversation that the term “growth hacker” came out of, put it well: “The more innovative your product is, the more likely you will have to find new and novel ways to get at your customers.”10
For example:
1. You can create the aura of exclusivity with an invite-only feature (as Mailbox did).
2. You can create hundreds of fake profiles to make your service look more popular and active than it actually is—nothing draws a crowd like a crowd (as Reddit did in its early days).
3. You can target a single service or platform and cater to it exclusively—essentially piggybacking off or even stealing someone else’s growth (as PayPal did with eBay).
4. You can host cool events and drive your first users through the system manually (as Myspace, Yelp, and Udemy all did).
5. You can bring on influential advisers and investors for their valuable audience and fame rather than their money (as About.me and Trippy did—a move that many startups have emulated).
6. You can try to name a Planned Parenthood clinic after your client or pay D-list celebrities to say offensive things about themselves to promote your book (OK, those two were me).
All of these types of outreach are done with a very specific mind-set, with a very specific goal. We are not “spreading the word”; we’re not throwing up a billboard in Times Square and hoping in six months someone will spot our product in a grocery store and decide to pick it up. Instead, we are intensely focused on driving an initial set of new user sign-ups and customers, right now.
It doesn’t matter how many people know about you or how they find out about you. It matters how many sign up. If handing out flyers on the street corner accomplishes that, then consider it growth hacking.
Let’s Get Technical
The movie marketing paradigm says throw an expensive premiere and hope that translates into ticket sales come opening weekend. A growth hacker says it’s 2013 and we can be a lot more technical about how we acquire and capture new customers.
The start-up world is full of companies taking clever hacks to drive their first set of customers into their funnel. The necessity of that jolt—needing to get it any way they can—has made start-ups get very creative.
Let’s look at Airbnb again. The company’s most effective marketing tactic (besides making a great product) would never have been conceived or attempted by a pure marketing team. Instead, the engineers coded a set of tools that made it possible for every member to seamlessly cross-post his or her Airbnb listing on craigslist (because craigslist does not technically “allow” this, it was a fairly ingenious work-around). As a result, Airbnb—a tiny site—suddenly had free distribution on one of the most popular websites in the world.
As Andrew Chen wrote in a case study of this tactic:
Let’s be honest, a traditional marketer would not even be close to imagining the integration above—there’s too many technical details needed for it to happen. As a result, it could only have come out of the mind of an engineer tasked with the problem of acquiring more users from Craigslist.11
It’s a different approach. Today, as a marketer, our task isn’t necessarily to “build a brand” or even to maintain a pre-existing one. We’re better off building an army of immensely loyal and passionate users. Which is easier to track, define, and grow? Which of these is real and which is simply an idea? And when you get that right—a brand will come naturally.
As Sean Ellis, one of the first growth hackers—he coined the term with Patrick Vlaskovits—puts it: “Focusing on customer acquisition over ‘awareness’ takes discipline. . . . At a certain scale, awareness/brand building makes sense. But for the first year or two it’s a total waste of money.”12
The most insidious part of the traditional marketing model is that “big blowout launch” mythology. Of course, equally seductive is the “build it and they will come” assumption that too many people associate with the web. Both are too simple and rarely effective.
Remember what Aaron Swartz realized. Users have to be pulled in. A good idea is not enough. Your customers, in fact, have to be “acquired.” But the way to do that isn’t with a bombardment. It’s with a targeted offensive in the right places aimed at the right people.
Your start-up is designed to be a growth engine—and at some point early on that engine has to be kick-started. The good news is that we only have to do that once. Because the next step isn’t about getting more attention or publicity. The endless promotional cycle of traditional marketing is not our destiny. Because once we bring our first customers in, our next move is to set about turning them into an army.
* As I wrote in my first book, Trust Me, I’m Lying, the economics of the media have fundamentally changed. Instead of being an environment of scarcity, like a newspaper, where the editors can publish only a limited amount of stories, the inventory online is infinite. Meaning: bloggers are happy to write about anything that will appeal to their audience.