Growth HackingBy: Chirag Sharma, Guru99http://www.guru99.com

Guru99

Growth hacking 

Growth hacking? Growth Hacking?

What is Growth Hacking?

What is Growth Hacker? Growth hacker  - one who’s passion and focus is pushing a

metric through use of a testable and scalable methodology.

"Growth hacker" is a new word for most but a long held practice among the best internet marketers and product managers in Silicon Valley.

A growth hacker finds a strategy within the parameters of a scalable and repeatable method for growth, driven by product and inspired by data.

Growth hacking’s goal are based in marketing but driven by product instincts. A growth hacker lives at the intersection of data, product, and marketing.

A growth hacker lives within the product team and has a technical vocabulary to implement what he or she wants. 

What is Growth Hacking? Growth Hacking Is A New Thing Growth hacking has marketing goals but

different tactics. Growth hacking is not done overnight and

cannot solve systemic product issues. Growth Hacking Is A Cheat Sheet Of Secrets

On Growth

IN SHORT Growth hacking is

a marketing technique developed by technology startups which uses creativity, analytical thinking, and social metrics to sell products

What is “Growth Hacking” really?

Define a Growth hacking in three Common Characteristic Data

Creativity

Curiosity

1st Data Growth hackers have a passion for tracking and

moving a metric. Without metrics or data, a growth hacker can feel

out of place and uncomfortably exposed. Data and metrics are paramount to the scientific

way a growth.

This scientific approach to growth is called engineering distribution by Jesse Farmer, co-founder of Everlane.

“The best growth hackers take a rigorous, empirical approach to growth and distribution,” says Jesse.

2nd Creativity

Greg Tseng, co-founder of Tagged, says data and creativity of a growth hacker go hand-in-hand.

If you are only creative, you’ll never know how good your ideas are.

If you only have an analytical mindset, then you’ll know precisely how bad your ideas are!”

3rd Curiosity

Growth hackers are constantly curious and have an insatiable desire to learn.

Jesse Farmer says, “Good growth hackers have a deep understanding and curiosity of the how internet works

This curiosity leads to a grasp of product and user experience way beyond the surface. see possible growth hacks.”

In Short Growth Hacking Growth hackers are a rare breed and a

highly unlikely mash up of data, creativity, and curiosity.

The 7 Ways Dropbox Hacked Growth to Become a $4 Billion Company

Here are some stats regarding Dropbox’s scale:

Revenue hit about $240 million in 2011 1 billion files are saved to Dropbox

every 48 hours Over 50 million users Over 100 employees Installed on 250 million devices

Homepage

The 2 minute above-the-fold video gives an explanation of the Dropbox product, something that Dropbox has had on their website from the very beginning.

1-A video on the homepage demoing the product.2-Gauge the interest in the business by seeing how many request an invite.

2. Easy Signup Process

3. Refer a Friend

4. Social Media

We’ve all seen the stores with a “Like us on Facebook” or the “Follow us on Twitter” decals on front doors. It’s becoming all too common-something that people mindlessly see. Some companies offer an incentive to Like them, such as announcing specials for Facebook fans only.

Dropbox did something a little different. With each Follow on Twitter, Connect with Facebook or Twitter, Dropbox gives the user a 125MB increase:

Sharing with Simplicity

Sharing folders: When a user wants to share a folder

with a friend on Dropbox, anyone unregistered will have to register for Dropbox. This creates a strong viral coefficient for Dropbox.

Sharing links to files: Remember when everyone used to download files using Megaupload,

Rapidshare, Hotfile, and many other file hosting sites? These services were often plump full of ads, “premium accounts” with faster download speeds and no wait time for downloads, and many other money making tactics that took away from the core objective for the user: getting a file downloaded without having to jump through a million hoops!

Dropbox solved that problem. If a user wants to share a file, they simply use the ‘Get Link’ function

found on either the desktop or web. Users who want to download the file will see an image similar to this:

Compare this with a Megaupload download page:

Dropquest

Dropquest is a contest run by Dropbox that makes users go through different puzzles and scavenger hunts. Those who complete and place in the top 176 get free space and/or free swag.

The announcement on their blog generated quite a lot of Likes and Tweets.

Dropquest has gotten Dropbox lots of publicity in the tech world for this (just Google dropquest).

Availability on Multiple Devices & Platforms

Dropbox has maintained Blackberry support despite their shrinking market share. It’s also supported on even the least popular devices such as the Symbian.

Support to Linux, Ubountu

13 Critically Important Lessons from Over 50 Growth Hackers

Retention trumps acquisition It’s a rookie mistake to focus on customer acquisition

instead of customer retention, especially early in a startup’s life.

It’s exciting to get new traffic and acquire new users, but the primary purpose of your first visitors is to inform you of the holes in your funnel.

Customer development is cheating

A large part of lean methodology is customer development: the activity of talking to your market and your users before you actually build something. If you do this well, it will feel like cheating, because people will disclose the path to their heart.

Data-informed is better than data-driven

Data is good. But there’s a catch.

Data should inform our decisions.

It shouldn’t be our master, dictating our every move.

When people are “driven” by data, they begin thinking like machines and making decisions that do not appeal to carbon-based organisms.

Deep growth can’t be hacked You can do things to drive traffic. You can do things to

retain users.

You can do things to hack growth at a surface level, but deep growth cannot be manipulated.

Twitter-esque, Facebook-esque, and LinkedIn-esque growth cannot be hacked. There is something deeper at play.

There is one metric(Measure) that matters Now that we can track everything, we have to focus on

nextthing.

But for any startup, there usually is one metric that matters at any given time.

The problem is that this metric is different depending on what your startup does and the stage of development it’s in.

Growth is not rocket science

Growth is a mixture of good people, good data , the good decisions they make, and the good advice they receive.

Growth is part common sense, part creativity, part hustle, and sometimes, part luck. Growth is improbable, but always possible.

Language is everything

Play with words. Rearrange them. Change them. Make them sell, make them express, make them do the work they must do.

Language is possibly the best, growth hack. The right words, in the right order, at the right time, can do wonders.

Correlation(connection between two or more things) is good, but causality(relationship) is better.

Metrics don’t tell you what to do

21 Actionable Growth Hacking Tactics

A good growth hacker needs to focus on two types of growth. Steady and rapid. Slow steady growth will come from areas like SEO and social sharing. Rapid unsustainable growth will come from campaigns, exploits (damage) and other temporary tactics.

What are some decisions taken by the "Growth team" at Facebook that helped Facebook reach 500 million

users?

There are decisions around Tactics

Strategy

Hiring

Priorities and culture.

Tactics

Internet marketing. One to One Test optimize. Rinse and repeat.

Hiring Who is hired to work on growth hacking

is arguably the most important decision made.

Strategy Use a Strategy which is Unique Growth is Directly depend on your Strategy

For example, you could say that growth is broken down into a few fundamental questions:

1. How do I increase the rate of people to get more signups?

2. What can I do to activate as many users as quickly as possible in their first 'N' days?

3. What are the levers for engagement and how can I pull them?

You want to add more stacks to that chart because each stack represents a new source of acquisition. For example:

Affiliate marketing

Paid search via Adwords and/or Facebook ads themselves

Buying mobile installs via mobile ad platforms like Flurry and MdotM

etc

What 300 Years of Growth Hacking Can Teach Us

Dive into growing markets as early as possible. Own it. Quit forcing your customers jump through hoops Partner ecosystems enhance distribution Don’t be afraid… To scale three companies to their first 100k users. Much of these tips

involve:connecting with prospects 1:1writing guest postsdoing lots of manual outreachThese are processes that you can automate as your initiatives start to scale, but when you’re first starting out, guerilla is your best option.

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