Post on 18-Sep-2014
description
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