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 McClure’s 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 web-based email system

...and so was born

They raised $300,000 from

investors

But Hotmail’s 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. ”“

July September

Within hours, Hotmail’s growth took the shape of a classic

hockey stick curve

July September

They started averaging 3,000 new users a day

July September November

Within 6 months, they were up to 1 million users

July September November January

Five weeks later, they hit the 2 million user mark

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

July September November January March May July September November

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)

This story is not an anomaly

Why did these companies succeed when everyone else failed?

Mattan GriffelFounder & CEO, The Front LabsPartner, Grow/Hack

THE FRONT LABS

I run the world’s 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.

What we’re going to cover today

What Is Growth Hacking?The Science of Growth HackingNotable 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)

July September November January March May July September November

Nothing like the tremendous viral growth you were anticipating

What do you do?

You’re in the trough of sorrow, my friend

TechCrunch of Initiation

Wearing Off of Novelty

Trough of Sorrow

Releases of Improvement

Crash of Ineptitude

Wiggles of False Hope

The Promised Land!

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

What the fuck is

GrowthHacking ?

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

Product management

Email marketing

Analytics

Behavioral economicsPR

Onboarding

UX

Most companies only track three things

Traffic

Revenue

Users

Phase 1 Phase 2 Phase 3 Phase 4 Phase 5

Get traffic ? Get

users ? Profit

Those metrics aren’t very helpful

Those metrics aren’t very helpful

(The magic is what happens in between)

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

SEO

PRSEM

Viral

BlogsEmail Contests

Partnerships

ACQUISITION

SEO

PRSEM

Viral

BlogsEmail Contests

Partnerships

ACQUISITION

Acquisition = getting people to come to your site

SEO

PRSEM

Viral

BlogsEmail Contests

Partnerships

ACQUISITION

ACTIVATION

SEO

PRSEM

Viral

BlogsEmail Contests

Partnerships

ACQUISITION

ACTIVATION

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

SEO

PRSEM

Viral

BlogsEmail Contests

Partnerships

ACQUISITION

ACTIVATION

RETENTION

SEO

PRSEM

Viral

BlogsEmail Contests

Partnerships

ACQUISITION

ACTIVATION

RETENTION

Retention = getting users to become active

SEO

PRSEM

Viral

BlogsEmail Contests

Partnerships

ACQUISITION

ACTIVATION

RETENTION

REVENUE

SEO

PRSEM

Viral

BlogsEmail Contests

Partnerships

ACQUISITION

ACTIVATION

RETENTION

REVENUE

Revenue = monetizing active users

SEO

PRSEM

Viral

BlogsEmail Contests

Partnerships

ACQUISITION

ACTIVATION

RETENTIONREFERRAL

REVENUE

SEO

PRSEM

Viral

BlogsEmail Contests

Partnerships

ACQUISITION

ACTIVATION

RETENTIONREFERRAL

REVENUE

Referral = getting active users to refer others

SEO

PRSEM

Viral

BlogsEmail Contests

Partnerships

ACQUISITION

ACTIVATION

RETENTIONREFERRAL

REVENUE

The lean marketing funnel

(It kind of looks like a teacup)

Let’s see it in action

You hear about Quora after your friend posts a question

from Quora to TwitterAcquisition

After reading the page you decide to create an

accountAcquisition

Activation

...a few days go by

Acquisition

Activation

You get a weekly digest email with questions and

links back to the siteAcquisition

Activation

Retention

Once you’re back, Quora encourages you to read

related questionsAcquisition

Activation

Retention

And share interesting questions through

Twitter and FacebookAcquisition

Activation

Retention

Referral

Quora doesn’t currently make money

Acquisition

Activation

Retention

Referral

Revenue

Each step of the LMF corresponds to a user state

The growth hacker’s 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

Acquisition Activation Retention Revenue

1752174

1744

10% 30% 30%

Dave McClure’s example conversion metrics

Mixpanel and KISSmetrics are great for analytics

At first your numbers will be really shitty

Acquisition Activation Retention Revenue

0317

1744

1% 18% 0%

Acquisition Activation Retention Revenue

0317

1744

At first your numbers will be really shitty

Focus here

1% 18% 0%

At first your numbers will be really shitty

Acquisition Activation Retention Revenue

017174

1744

10% 10% 0%

Don’t 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

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

Control Test

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

And ran an A/B test

Original Design Long-form Design

Homepage traffic

Can you guess the results?

Original Design Long-form Design

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

signups

37.5%

Original Design Long-form Design

Then they created a personal testimonial

page

Long-form Design

And ran another A/B test

Person Design

It performed even better than the long-

form pagePerson Design

102.5%

37.5%

Long-form Design

But the person design was shorter and had much less

information Person Design

102.5%

37.5%

Long-form Design

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 that’s 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

Acquisition Activation Retention Revenue

1752174

1744

10% 30% 30%

Version A 1744 (100%) 174 (10%) 52 (30%) 17 (30%)

Version B 1670 (100%) 100 (6%) 60 (60%) 18 (30%)

From Dave McClure’s Startup Metrics for Pirates

Most tests resultsare 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

AHAMOMENT

What’s the one core activity of your product?

What’s 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

Mint has a landing page or blog post for nearly every personal finance-

related topic

Acquisition:

OKCupid’s 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

Acquisition:

Groupon has two different pages for Google vs. Direct

traffic

Activation:

(Footers are good for SEO but reduce conversions)

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

Activation:

Eventbrite sends emails if you’ve been inactive for too long

Retention:

Path has your friends do it instead!

Retention:

Path has your friends do it instead!

Retention:

(Can have a 10x higher conversion rate)

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

Referral:

Growth Hacking Resources

Watch Dave McClure’s 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 you’re around NYC check out my new meetup

Thank you.

Mattan Griffelmattan@growhack.com@mattangriffel

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