Growth Hacking

Lean Marketing for Startups

How to get free traffic to your website

Put content up on Slideshare

Answer questions on Quora

Answer questions on Quora

Edit Wikipedia

Cheat your way onto the Hacker News homepage

Cheat your way onto the Hacker News homepage

Start a Meetup

Post on Craiglist

Teach on Skillshare and at General Assembly

Get on email newsletters (submit here and here)

Go to events

Update your email signature

Dave McClures Marketing Channels

But none of that really matters...

PS: I love you. Get your free e-mail at ???

In 1996 co-workers Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith planned to start JavaSoft

They were afraid their boss might read their emails

They were afraid their boss might read their emails So they built a webbased email system

...and so

was born

They raised $300,000 from investors

But Hotmails launch was unimpressive

July August

Their growth strategy was to buy billboards and radio ads

But investor Timothy Draper

had a better idea

Put PS: I love you. Get your free e-mail at Hotmail at the bottom of each e-mail.

Within hours, Hotmails growth took the shape of a classic hockey stick curve
July September

They started averaging 3,000 new users a day

July

September

Within 6 months, they were up to 1 million users

July

September

November

Five weeks later, they hit the 2 million user mark

July

September

November

January

In one case, Bhatia sent an email to a friend in India

In one case, Bhatia sent an email to a friend in India

within 3 weeks Hotmail had 300,000 users there

When they sold to Microsoft 1.5 years after launch, Hotmail had 12 million users

July

September

November

January

March

May

July

September

November

When they sold to Microsoft 1.5 years after launch, Hotmail had 12 million users
(There were only 70 million internet users at the time)

July

September

November

January

March

May

July

September

November

This story is not an anomaly

Why did these companies succeed when everyone else failed?

Mattan Griffel Founder & CEO, The Front Labs Partner, Grow/Hack
I run the worlds first growth hacking agency based out of New York City and have helped launch dozens of different products. I've also spoken at various industry events including at Bloomberg, Internet Week,!and Social Media Week and have been featured in Forbes, BusinessWeek,!Mashable and The Next Web.

TH

FR

ONT L
A
BS

What were going to cover today

What Is Growth Hacking? The Science of Growth Hacking Notable Growth Hacks

This is adapted from posts by Dave McClure, Andrew Chen, Noah Kagan and others, as well as from my own experience

Most startups find themselves facing the

same problem

They build a product that no one ends up using

Say your startup has

an idea

You assemble a team and start building

Six months later, you have a product you're happy releasing

When that day finally comes, you launch and

When that day finally comes, you launch and nothing happens.

You get a writeup on TechCrunch and several thousand users

You get a writeup on TechCrunch and several thousand users

(But most of them stop using it after a few days)

Nothing like the tremendous viral growth you were anticipating

July

September

November

January

March

May

July

September

November

What do you do?

Youre in the trough of sorrow, my friend

Wearing Off TechCrunch of Initiation of Novelty Wiggles of False Hope Trough of Sorrow The Promised Land!

Releases of Improvement

Crash of Ineptitude

Continuing to ship new features is the worst thing you can do

It compounds what the real problem was in the first place, which is that you don't know what's wrong

Enter the growth hacker

Growth
Hacking

What the fuck is

Growth hacking is a set of tactics and best practices for dealing with the problem of user growth

Viral growth

Viral growth

Landing page optimization SEO Email marketing PR

Product management Onboarding UX Behavioral economics

Analytics

Traffic

Most companies only track three things

Users

Revenue

Phase 1 Phase 2 Phase 3 Phase 4 Phase 5 Get traffic

Get users

Profit

Those metrics arent very helpful

Those metrics arent very helpful

(The magic is what happens in between)

The key is to map out the user lifecycle for your product

SEO Email

Viral PR

SEM Blogs

Partnerships Contests

SEO Email

Viral PR

SEM Blogs

Partnerships Contests

ACQUISITION

SEO Email

Viral PR

SEM Blogs

Partnerships Contests

ACQUISITION

Acquisition = getting people to come to your site

SEO Email

Viral PR

SEM Blogs

Partnerships Contests

ACQUISITION ACTIVATION

SEO Email

Viral PR

SEM Blogs

Partnerships Contests

ACQUISITION ACTIVATION

Activation = getting people to sign up for anything that could lead to a repeat visit

SEO Email

Viral PR

SEM Blogs

Partnerships Contests

ACQUISITION ACTIVATION RETENTION

SEO Email

Viral PR

SEM Blogs

Partnerships Contests

ACQUISITION ACTIVATION RETENTION

Retention = getting users to become active

SEO Email

Viral PR

SEM Blogs

Partnerships Contests

ACQUISITION ACTIVATION RETENTION REVENUE

SEO Email

Viral PR

SEM Blogs

Partnerships Contests

ACQUISITION ACTIVATION RETENTION REVENUE

Revenue = monetizing active users

SEO Email

Viral PR

SEM Blogs

Partnerships Contests

ACQUISITION ACTIVATION REFERRAL RETENTION REVENUE

SEO Email

Viral PR

SEM Blogs

Partnerships Contests

ACQUISITION ACTIVATION REFERRAL RETENTION REVENUE

Referral = getting active users to refer others

The lean marketing funnel

ACQUISITION ACTIVATION REFERRAL RETENTION REVENUE

(It kind of looks like a teacup)

Lets see it in action

Acquisition

You hear about Quora after your friend posts a question from Quora to Twitter

After reading the page you decide to create an account

Acquisition Activation

Acquisition Activation

...a few days go by

You get a weekly digest email with questions and links back to the site
Acquisition Activation Retention

Once youre back, Quora encourages you to read related questions

Acquisition Activation Retention

And share interesting questions through Twitter and Facebook

Acquisition Activation Retention Referral

Quora doesnt currently make money

Acquisition Activation Retention Revenue Referral

Each step of the LMF corresponds to a user state

The growth hackers job is to figure out how to move users from one state to the next

??? Creates an account Visits again later

You need to measure conversions at each step

1744

10%

174
Activation

30%

30%

52
Retention

17
Revenue

Acquisition

Dave McClures example conversion metrics

Mixpanel and KISSmetrics are great for analytics

At first your numbers will be really shitty

1744

1%

18%

0%

17
Acquisition Activation

3
Retention

0
Revenue

At first your numbers will be really shitty

1744 Focus here

1%

18%

0%

17
Acquisition Activation

3
Retention

0
Revenue

At first your numbers will be really shitty

1744

10%

174
Activation

10%

0%

17
Retention

0
Revenue

Acquisition

Dont focus on acquisition if your activation rate is 1%

Growth hackers have developed tactics for optimizing the funnel

Measure the quality of traffic sources

Design landing pages to convert better

Tweak onboarding to improve activation and retention

Get people to come back using email

Social integration to get people to share

Identify companies that focus on optimizing and try to learn from them

Not every growth hack will work for your company

How do you run a proper experiment?

Divide users into a control and a test group

Divide users into a control and a test group

Control

Test

Control

Test

Run your change on the test group and measure the difference between the two groups

This is often called an A/B test

Growth hackers experiment a lot

Highrise wanted to test out different homepages to see if they could increase account signups

So they created a long-form sales letter page

Homepage traffic

And ran an A/B test

Original Design

Long-form Design

Can you guess the results?

Original Design

Long-form Design

The long-form design saw a 37.5% increase in account signups

Original Design Long-form Design

37.5%

Then they created a personal testimonial page

And ran another A/B test

Person Design Long-form Design

It performed even better than the longform page

Long-form Design

Person Design

102.5%

37.5%

But the person design was shorter and had much less information
Long-form Design

Person Design

102.5%

37.5%

So they added more information to the bottom

And ran another A/B test

Person Design

Long Form Person Design

It turned out that adding more information made it perform worse than the original design!

Person Design

102.5%
Long Form Person Design

22.7%

But thats not where testing ends...

Unbounce is an amazing tool for easily creating and testing landing pages

Use promo code mattanfree3 for 3 months free

Testing applies to product features too

Vanity and A/Bingo are testing frameworks for Ruby on Rails

Measure the lifetime effect of a change

1744

10%

174
Activation

30%

30%

52
Retention

17
Revenue

Acquisition

Version A Version B

1744 (100%) 1670 (100%)

174 (10%) 100 (6%)

52 (30%) 60 (60%)

17 (30%) 18 (30%)

From Dave McClures Startup Metrics for Pirates

Most tests results are not as conclusive as the ones by Highrise

Growth hackers often need to perform 15-20 tests per week to find 1-2 improvements

Getting users to the

AHA MOMENT

Whats the one core activity of your product?

Whats the one core activity of your product? How can you get people there as fast as possible?

Keep refining and iterating until you get to the problem definition that resonates with the most people, most easily, and most emotionally powerful.
- Josh Elman, ex-Product Lead at Twitter

Our AHA moment at Twitter was Once a user follows 30 people, they're more or less active forever.
- Josh Elman, ex-Product Lead at Twitter

Notable Growth Hacks

Acquisition:
Mint has a landing page or blog post for nearly every personal financerelated topic

Acquisition:
OKCupids OKTrends Blog created viral stories by trading up the chain

Acquisition:
BrandYourself kept their Mashable article trending for 2 days by promoting it on StumbleUpon

Activation:
Groupon has two different pages for Google vs. Direct traffic

(Footers are good for SEO but reduce conversions)

Activation:
Path texts the app to your phone

Activation:
OKCupid has a tour guide that interacts with you during the signup process

Activation:
Dropbox sends an email when a user signs up but never installs the software

Retention:
Eventbrite sends emails if youve been inactive for too long

Retention:
Path has your friends do it instead!

Retention:
Path has your friends do it instead!

(Can have a 10x higher conversion rate)

Referral:
Facebook integration makes it really easy to get people to share

Referral:
Dropbox, LivingSocial, and Appsumo know incentivization works well too

Referral:
Quora forces people to sign up before they can read answers

Growth Hacking Resources

Watch Dave McClures Startup Metrics for Pirates

Quora has boards on Growth Hacks and Growth Hacking

Andrew Chen has posted a list of notable growth hackers:

Check out our posts at growhack.com

If youre around NYC check out my new meetup

Thank you.

Get more growth hacking case studies at growhack.com/case-studies

Mattan Griffel mattan@growhack.com @mattangriffel