Growth Hacking Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Guide

Every wish you had a cheatsheet for growth hacking? Then read on.

In case you haven’t heard, Growth hacking is the buzzword for startups. Forget “pivoting” and “iterating.” It’s all about growth hacking.

That’s the thing.

It’s almost annoying for those who have heard about it thousands of times, and it’s confusing for those who don’t know what it is.

Like it or not, growth hacking is happening.

It’s the reason we get to see a few new startups each year with absolutely ridiculous growth rates.

Growth hacking has only been around for a few years, but it’s already catching fire. Every startup is looking for growth hackers.

The reason is obvious: everyone wants to grow ridiculously fast and acquire millions of users and dollars in revenue.

What does growth hacking even mean, though? The only thing you need to know right now is how to create a scalable and repeatable process so you can efficiently execute, test, and learn from these growth hacks. At least that’s what HubSpot’s former VP of Growth Brian Balfour would say.

It’s time to answer that question once and for all. I’ll even show you how to do it in this growth hacking guide.

I’m going to cover lots of information, but you can skip down to any section below:

• Definition
• Overview
• Step 1: Make sure you create a product people actually want
• Step 2: Don’t target everybody
• Step 3: Acquisition
• Step 4: Activation
• Step 5: Retention
• Step 6: Revenue
• Step 7: Referrals
• Step 8: Improve your product continuously

The Definition of Growth Hacking

Need a quick rundown of how growth hacking came to be as a concept?

The phrase is twelve years old.

Sean Ellis coined it in 2010 when trying to come up with a new job description. Sean is the OG (original growth hacker).

He helped lots of startups achieve accelerated growth (for example, Dropbox) as a consultant.

However, whenever he would leave a startup to pursue new ventures, he would have a tough time finding a replacement.

He needed someone to be in charge of growing the startup. He went through hundreds of applications each time, all outlining a job for marketers. However, pure marketers couldn’t do this job.

Why was this the case? Modern software products are entirely different from traditional products, and so is their distribution.

Marketers felt that they had to consider budgets, expenses, conversions, etc.

A growth hacker does not care about any of these things. Sean, in his own words, describes a growth hacker as “a person whose true north is growth.”

As growth is the make-or-break metric for startups (either they grow fast enough or they die), that’s the only metric that a growth hacker cares about.

An engineer can be a growth hacker just as much as a marketer can. What matters is their focus.

Due to the startup culture, they often have to use analytical, inexpensive, creative, and innovative methods to exponentially grow their company’s customer base.

That’s the only thing that a growth hacker does.

To really understand what growth hacking can achieve and what your mindset needs to be, I’ll show you a few examples of growth hacking done right. Then, you can apply the same principles to your business.

Overview

You can potentially do growth hacking offline. For example, you might count McDonald’s popping up at every interstate highway exit in the 1950s as growth hacking.

They realized that interstate highways were going to be big, so they showed up where they knew customers would be in large quantities.

Yet, this fairly new concept mostly applies in the world of startups. They don’t have big marketing budgets, so they can’t rely on Super Bowl ads or Times Square billboards.

That’s why they must find cheaper ways to market themselves.

What they often do have is a very scalable product.

Consider Dropbox, for example. What their cloud storage service provides is basically just disk space on servers that are accessible via the Internet.

They can always buy or rent more servers to provide more space for new users.

Or consider Uber. The taxi replacement service relies on regular people using their own cars to pick up others at location A and bring them safely to location B – and the payment goes through the app.

With over 289.5 million registered cars in the United States in 2021, you’re very likely to suggest it.

That’s how growth hacking uses word-of-mouth on a big scale to achieve the exponential growth rates that we’ve seen.

Alright, time to take a deeper look at some growth hacking successes. Today, though, I won’t just show you great examples. I’ll also give you a simple, eight-step process that you can follow to try and apply growth hacking in your own business.

Let’s go!

Step 1: For Successful Growth Hacking, Make Sure You Create a Product People Actually Want

You’d think this is obvious for any company, right?

Well, back in the day, you could sometimes get away with a mediocre product if you just marketed it enough.

For example, Coca-Cola introduced lots of other soft drinks over the years, like Sprite and Fanta, making it an easily scalable business. After a while, for some people, soda became synonymous with Coca-Cola. How many people do you know who ask for a Coke when they are eating out?

For the most part, Coca-Cola is a global success story, but it’s had its fair share of failures too. I mean, remember New Coke? It’s probably Coca-Cola’s biggest flop, and the company axed the product in less than three months.

That’s not to say New Coke didn’t have its fans, though, and it eventually made a brief comeback in 2019 to coincide with the Stranger Things TV series. That wasn’t enough to keep it afloat, though.

If your product sucks, it can disappear in less time than it took you to build it.

What’s the solution to this? It’s simple: Get feedback.

You have to get your product out there, as fast as possible, to start collecting feedback and keep improving your product-market fit on a regular basis.

I learned this lesson the hard way. When we started Kissmetrics, we used all of our funding to build the product.

It took us a year to build it; when we released it, we learned that our customers were happy with the metrics their social networks were already offering.

That’s not good.

Two Growth Hacking Steps to Ensure Your Product Hits the Target

Want to make sure you don’t end up in that situation? Here’s how to do it the right way:

1. Start by asking and answering questions, not by developing a product that has an awesome product-market fit.

We did this with Crazy Egg. People were coming to us with questions about customer behavior.

They said, “We’re spending all this money on advertising, but we don’t actually know what the customers are doing, where they are clicking, or what their behavior is.”

Only then did we start digging deeper into the topic and thinking about creating a product that solves that problem. We didn’t just develop a product that “felt like a great idea.”

2. As soon as you have an idea, start getting feedback.

Don’t hide in your basement, develop something for six months, and then come out with it. Present it and ask, “What do y’all think?”

Ask for feedback right away.

Imagine that a friend tells you about a problem with her company over dinner. Together, you sketch out a solution to it on a napkin.

The moment you have that sketch, you can show it to other people.

We pushed out the first version of Crazy Egg after only a month of development to start collecting feedback. Then, each month, we released an improved version.

Thanks to our quick release and constant collection of feedback, we had a decent product that customers were happy to pay for after only six months.

Not only that, but the press and buzz created from releasing the updates publicly also helped us create a waiting list of 10,000 people by the time we launched Crazy Egg.

The customer acquisition cost for these 10,000 paying customers? Zero.

Another example of a company that definitely nailed the feedback part is Instagram.

Instagram’s growth at the beginning of the 2010s was insane.

Originally, the founders dabbled with a social network app called Burbn for whiskey drinkers. They realized that the most-used feature of the app was their photo-sharing mechanism.

Only then did they begin looking at photography apps, which they thought was a saturated market already.

Talking back and forth with users, they eventually realized that for all the apps out there, sharing photos was either too complicated or not the main feature of the app.

They simply took the best parts of all the apps they knew, like Hipstamatic’s photo filters and Burbn’s way of sharing, removed everything else, and voila! They produced a great app that everyone already wanted.

Combine this with brilliant timing (Instagram launched at the same time as the iPhone 4), and you know how they got 25,000 installs on their first day, reaching a million users within two months.

Validate Your Idea So it Doesn’t Completely Fall Flat

Another part of making a great product is validating your product idea.

Do you want a surefire way to know that people want your idea?

Ask them to pay for it.

If you want to create an app that shows people the best tea spots in town and you know it’ll cost you $1000 to develop, getting $20 from 50 friends (or $50 from 20 friends) would solve that development cost problem for you.

And, you would be 100% sure that:

1. Your friends want you to make the app (and so potentially other people are interested in it as well).
2. You’re not wasting a lot of your own money if it doesn’t pan out.

It might seem counterintuitive to ask for money before you have a product.

However, if you think about it, you’re paying in advance for things all the time: movie tickets, flights, concerts, events, gym memberships, and all kinds of things.

You pay for all these things whether you end up going or not.

Validating your product is even better. In some cases, you can just give back the money if you don’t end up building it.

Author Ryan Holiday sold over 2,000 copies of his book “The Obstacle is The Way” in advance, paying for his oatmeal during the time he wrote the book and making sure that it would be a success once he released it.

Do you want another example of a successful product-market fit validation? Look at Airbnb.

Here’s a great infographic about Airbnb’s history.

The idea was born out of necessity. The founders, Joe and Brian, couldn’t pay their rent. So, they thought they’d rent out three air mattresses on the floor of their apartment to make money.

When three people showed up, each of whom paid them $80 for a single night, they thought; “Hm, this might be worth exploring more.”

Once they launched at South by Southwest (SXSW), they kept getting bookings. But they only got a few bookings that made them about $200 per week.

Nevertheless, they knew the interest was there. All they had to do was improve the product.

Growth Hack by Putting Out Free Content if You Don’t Have an Idea

If you don’t have an idea, just start for free.

Create a blog or YouTube channel and provide content around the niche where you want to build your business. Share your content on social media.

This is the simplest way to learn what people like and dislike and what they want and need. It’s a great channel to get feedback on your ideas.

What’s more, as you’ve seen, if you collect email addresses, you can even build an audience of eager and loyal followers who can’t wait until you actually launch a product.

You can do so by giving away an e-book, developing a quiz, or coming up with an email series or a set of cool videos. Making videos is easier than ever now with smartphones and access to seamless video editing apps.

Give people the chance to get access to some of your best content in exchange for their email addresses, and you’ll instantly start building an audience.

This is by far the easiest way to start a business today, and it’s absolutely risk-free.

Okay, let’s assume you have an idea and you’ve already validated it.

Next, we’ll look at how you can avoid some of the mistakes that Airbnb made that stalled its initial growth.

Step 2: Don’t Target Everybody With Growth Hacking

Guess who Airbnb’s target customer was in the beginning?

Just look at their initial three customers – the ones renting their air mattresses. They were a 30-year-old Indian man, a 35-year-old woman from Boston, and a 45-year-old father of four from Utah.

It was everyone who traveled.

When iterating on your product you need to ask yourself three questions:

1. Where is the intersection?
2. What connects these people?
3. What do they share?

There are probably more, but you get the idea.

You see, there is a life cycle that every new and innovative product must live through. It’s called the law of innovation and diffusion, and it looks like this:

To reach the majority of people, your product must first successfully pass through innovators and early adopters.

These are small groups and communities that you need to target explicitly. Geoffrey Moore has written an entire book called “Crossing the Chasm” that talks about this phenomenon.

Products either captivate the first 15% of the market or they go to die there.

If your target customer is “everyone,” there’s no way of growth hacking through that first 15% because you don’t even know who to convince to buy.

How do you get this right?

How to Target the Small Minority of People Who Get the Most Out of Your Product

There’s a simple way to find your ideal customer: you create a customer profile. Consider all aspects of your product. Then ask yourself:

Who would get the maximum benefit from our product?

Be specific. Describe a real person as best as possible.

For instance, if Dropbox were to tell you about their ideal initial customer, they’d probably say something like:

A 22-year-old white male who is tech-savvy, lives in San Francisco or the Bay Area, is skinny, has only a few really good friends, wears XYZ brand clothes, and spends most of his time online.

That’s how detailed you should be.

In the beginning, you actually want to cater exclusively to those people’s needs.

Traditional products like books published by a traditional publisher have to create a lot of buzz before they even launch to make sure that the launch is successful.

With a modern software product, what happens before the launch isn’t nearly as important as what happens after the launch.

Dropbox didn’t throw a huge invite-only launch event. They released to the public at TechCrunch50 in 2008.

Their much smarter move was to make the service invite-only after the launch.

That’s clever, huh?

They launched it at an event where their ideal customers gathered every year and then created an aura of exclusivity around the product.

People looking to join the service needed an invite from current users to get in. Since everyone wanted to know what Dropbox was about and how it worked, the waiting list quickly blew up.

However, mystery almost always brings skepticism along with it; to give potential users an idea of what Dropbox was about, they made a short demo video.

They custom-tailored that video to the users of Digg, a very popular social news network at the time. Again, the users were all their ideal targets: Internet geeks, techies, and nerds.

Drew Houston, one of the founders, placed about 12 inside jokes throughout the presentation. Within 24 hours, the video had 10,000 diggs (the equivalent of likes), the word spread like wildfire, and their waiting list jumped from 5,000 to 75,000 users.

Compared to spending $300 per acquisition for a $99 product on Google Ads, this seemed to be the better strategy for them, and they now have 500 million users.

These types of growth jumps are crucial in the early days of a startup to push through the 15% market share boundary that a product needs to take off.

Here’s another great example of spreading the word in your community: Outlook.

If you’re a Gmail user, you’ve probably long forgotten Hotmail. However, since Microsoft acquired it and rebranded it as Outlook, they have grown to over 400 million users. They were ahead of Gmail until around 2012.

What did they do that caused Microsoft to buy them out in the first place? They grew fast.

When debating marketing options, such as billboards, their investor had an idea. Why not just put a note at the end of each email that their users send that says, “PS: I love you. Get your free email at Hotmail”?

It was definitely worth a try, and it increased sign-ups to 3,000 per day, doubling its user base within six months – from 500,000 to 1 million.

After that, growth became even faster. Just five weeks later, they counted 2 million users.

12 million users is pretty good – especially when that meant every 5th person on the Internet.

By keeping the ‘ask to share’ within their system, they made sure that they hit the right target group.

Hotmail email users sent emails to their friends who were likely to be similar to them and therefore also ideal customers.

Uber did the same thing. They waited a full year for the popular festival South by Southwest (SXSW) to give out free rides to hipsters and techies, promoting their service instead of relying on ads.

However, all of these success stories bring up an important point:

How can you spot a raging success waiting to happen? What’s the difference between a brilliant idea and a bad one? I have a process that you can model your future planning on.

My Growth Hacking Framework

Behind everything you do online there has to be a plan. A strategy or a growth hacking framework that you can use as a guide along the way.

Here’s what my growth hacking framework looks like:

1. Define Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)

OKRs, or objectives and key results, are a popular goal-setting framework used by many companies to measure progress. By using OKRs, teams can set ambitious goals for themselves and track their progress toward those goals.

You can group your growth hacking framework down to:

• Objectives: What do you hope to accomplish? Choose three-to-five goals and focus on those.
• Key results: these are the specific numbers, based on objectives, you aim to meet in a specific period of time.
• Set your OKRs

2. Brainstorm Ideas

The next step is pondering the different avenues you have to get to a given objective. For example, if Uber plans to increase its driver base in each region by 20 percent, then it needs to brainstorm ways to reach that point

Record a backlog of your ideas. Use Trello or a spreadsheet for this part.

3. Prioritize

The next step is choosing which ideas you’ll focus on and test. Here are some things to think about while doing this.

• What’s the probability that it will work?
• What’s the potential impact?
• How much (and what) resources will this require?

4. Test

This is where your experience doc is essential in creating a hypothesis.

Think of this as any statement that can be tested through scientific methods.

Make sure to justify your assumptions with quantitative data (white papers, case studies, research, etc.)

5. Implement

Execute your experiments between 30 and 90 days, and measure weekly results.

6. Analyze

What did you learn? Here are a few questions to help you analyze your experiment.

• What was the impact of this experiment?
• How accurate were your predictions?
• Why did you see the results you saw?

Crazy Egg is the perfect tool for this, as you can determine, based on their behavior and clicks, whether they’re activating or not.

Getting The Right Customers For You In The Beginning

Getting people to your site is easy with ads. Getting qualified people is a little tougher.

Getting those people to opt-in or sign up? That’s another thing entirely.

It tells you if people truly love your product concept or not.

After getting those activations, or happy first visits, the next step is to retain them over the long haul.

Think about mobile apps for a second.

You’re excited and eager to download that new app everyone is talking about. You head to the app store, click download, and can barely contain your excitement.

You use it for a few hours, and it was fun, but then stuff comes up. Then you put it away and you never log in again!

You’re not alone. Seriously, everyone does this.

More than 63 percent of domestic internet visits come from mobile phones. Additionally, mobile users spend seven out of ten minutes on social, photo, and video apps.

However, the average retention for apps varies considerably depending on the category. For instance, comic apps fall from 33.8 percent on the day of installation to 9.3 percent on day 30.

That’s why retention is so important. You spend money on ads or creating an awesome first experience, but churn will kill most startups.

You’ll lose customers faster than you can get them, and you’ll be out of cash (and business) in no time.

In fact, making profit as a start up isn’t as easy as some might believe. Typically:

• 90 percent of startups fail
• Startups take up to four years to become profitable
• 29 percent fail due to funding issues
• Only 40 percent become profitable

We can debate the actual numbers today, but the same underlying principles still apply. Many new companies are unprofitable at the beginning because you have to spend money on ads, people, office space, etc.

To make matters worse, most SaaS companies only charge a tiny fraction of their value each month. That means you need to keep a customer for anywhere from three to six months (or maybe even a year) to get back in the black.

Most marketing blog posts focus on acquisition channels or tactics. They talk about how the “money is in the list” to get email subscribers to buy their first products.

They’re right… to a certain degree.

With growth hacking, the money is in the customer list. You can often increase revenue faster and easier by focusing on increasing customer retention rather than focusing on new acquisitions.

That said, unless you’re in the mobile app business, people dropping out after their first or second engagement is a bad, bad sign.

Not many companies can build a viral referral loop like Dropbox or Facebook. The truth is that it takes a few special things to happen all at once.

You need timing, an amazing product, and network effects. That happens when the use of the product by one person increases the value for another.

It’s like 1 + 1 = 3.

Either way, though, you still want to drive as many referrals as possible. Again, these are happy paying customers recommending you to their family, friends, and colleagues; once again, if you do it right, this should be easy money.

The more customers spread the news for you, the less you have to spend on acquisition, which means the closer you are to profitability.

Your customers should be telling their friends and hyping your product. The Net Promoter Score is one of my favorite techniques to measure this because it’s so simple; keep reading below to see how to use it properly.

Everything we’ve been doing so far has had one goal in mind: Revenue.

Ultimately, people giving you cold-hard cash is the best form of product validation.

It might take a while to get there. It might take a few iterations or pivots to hit upon a winning combo. However, if you get the growth hacking framework right, the revenue should take care of itself.

Now you understand the framework for making growth hacking decisions. You saw how each plays a different role in helping you define success.

Next up, let’s start to dig deeper.

We’ll go into each one of these with specific strategies, tips, and hacks that some of the fastest-growing companies in history have used.

We’ll start at the top of the funnel with acquisition.

Step 3: Growth Hacking Acquisition

Sean Ellis may have created the concept of growth hacking.

But Eric Ries helped popularize it to the masses.

Before Eric’s book, The Lean Startup, the tech and software communities were some of the only places where people knew of many of the core growth hacking ideas.

Eric helped put it on the map by formalizing how it could apply to companies of all sizes and in every industry around the world.

One of the most important topics in that book was about the three engines of growth.

These are the three most reliable paths companies can take to scale customer acquisition; doing more than one of them at a time is next to impossible, though.

The trick is to figure out which kind works best for your own product type:

1. Viral: Think of Dropbox. You grow primarily through other people referring you to their friends, family, or colleagues.
2. Sticky: Think of Crazy Egg. You create an irresistible experience that keeps people around as long as possible (and thus, paying you more and more).
3. Paid: Think of Groupon. You spend $50 to acquire a customer who will eventually be worth $500 to your business.

Each of those three ‘engines’ works. However, the degree to which each performs depends largely on your business.

Let’s go into each one now to see how and when each works best.

1. Go Viral With Growth Hacking Marketing

It’s time to pull out the big guns. Going viral is different than targeting everyone, though.

This step just means tapping into bigger systems and bigger user bases and leveraging the reach of fellow products to really penetrate the majority of the market.

You’re still targeting your ideal customers, but you’re expanding to platforms where everyone is present.

Dropbox has killed it with the viral referral strategy.

Giving people free storage to recommend the product to their friends was genius because it did two things:

1. It incentivized the Dropbox user to share documents with their service more frequently, and
2. It introduced more people to the brand, giving people who’d never heard of them a little free sample.

It’s a tactic that Dropbox still uses today.

When this refer-a-friend strategy started paying dividends, they took it to the extreme.

This was another key difference with Dropbox.

Many companies diversify too much. They put $100 here and another $100 there, seeing meager 1% returns on their investments.

All startups are cash-strapped, even the ones that raise a ton of money.

The reason is that you’re often competing against massive conglomerates who have billions to your millions.

Small companies can’t diversify, then. They need to put all of their eggs in one basket to generate the biggest returns possible.

If something’s not working, you change directions ASAP and try something else.

Dropbox cycled through a few different ideas until they landed on the viral refer-a-friend one. And when they saw it was working, they doubled down by giving users even more space.

This sounds a lot like the Referral metric that should come further down the funnel, and it is to a certain degree.

However, you should make no mistake: Back in 2010, this was Dropbox’s leading acquisition growth lever as subscriptions increased by 60%.

Adding other actions, like connecting your social accounts for more storage, was like adding fuel to the fire.

However, it took them a while to figure out that this tactic would work so well.

For example, before hitting on this tactic, they tried a paid strategy with both ad campaigns and PR.

None of it worked, according to founder Drew Houston; they kept iterating until they landed on something that did.

Incentives for each user to get more people on the platform are a good way to kickstart your growth marketing campaign, but letting your product market itself is even better.

Apple did so, and they made good use of this strategy in their advertisements. Remember the popular iPod ads with the black silhouettes and white headphones?

These ads were everywhere from 2004-2008.

By making their headphones white, Apple made sure that everyone would recognize them. Headphones were usually black, so by tweaking this feature, they turned all of their customers into walking advertisements.

Do you want another example?

WordPress powers 43 percent of websites, but its free version has a catch: Your web address always show up as yourdomain.wordpress.org, unless you buy a domain or use the paid version.

Everyone who visits your free WordPress blog instantly knows that it’s a WordPress website.

However, let’s talk about an even more powerful growth hack.

Back in the mid-2000s, MySpace ruled the scene before Facebook took it over for good. They were one of the biggest platforms available.

They were so big, in fact, that YouTube piggybacked on their success to skyrocket traffic.

YouTube’s insight was to make videos easy to share. They freely created embed codes, encouraging users to add their videos to other sites like MySpace.

That move put YouTube content in front of everyone.

First, they got brand recognition. People started becoming familiar with who they were and what they did.

It also helped create backlinks and referral traffic by siphoning off the authorities of other sites.

Now, YouTube attracts around 122 million daily active users, making it one of the largest search engines online.

Facebook used embeds as an early growth hacking method to make sure that they hit their target of acquiring 200 million new users in one year.

They gave users the option to show that they’re on Facebook in other places, like their blogs, websites, and forums, by creating different badges for them to embed.

Here’s a look at the original badge options:

This created billions of impressions, hundreds of millions of clicks, and millions of sign-ups each month.

However, this isn’t the only giant using this strategy. Have you ever tried to share a YouTube video on your blog?

They make embedding videos super easy, so lots of people still do it for their pages. They create the entire code and highlight it for you so that you just have to press Cmd+C (or Ctrl+C if you’re on Windows) and then paste it into your editor.

That’s not the only reason it’s so popular, though. It’s also because YouTube videos are very shareable.

We also wanted people to embed their data from Crazy Egg; not a good idea.

Why?

What company wants to show its traffic, clicks, revenue numbers, and conversions?

No one, but guess who wants to share the latest funny cat video they found? Everyone!

Pro tip: Give people a reason to dig deeper into your embeds. The YouTube player automatically plays the next video or gives you a selection of related videos at the end of each video. That makes it highly likely you’ll switch to YouTube after watching an embedded video.

When you decide on whether to make your product embeddable or not, give your customers a reason to embed, that it’s easy to do, and that you entice them to dig deeper into your embed.

There is something that’s even more powerful than embeds, though, especially if you get it right: integrations.

Did you know that you can increase sign-ups by simply allowing people to sign up for your service using one of their already-existing accounts on Facebook, Twitter, or Google?

Integrating your service to work seamlessly with another can give you very easy access to millions of potential customers.

PayPal was struggling to get a foot in the door with the majority of the market. Few retailers actually offered them as an option.

However, once they landed a deal with eBay and they offered PayPal as an option right next to Visa and Mastercard, the floodgates opened.

Eventually, eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion in 2002.

That’s a steal considering that PayPal is now worth much more than eBay. Having one powerful integration was enough for them.

However, PayPal and Facebook are established now. What about some more recent startups?

Integrations work just as well today. Only now, companies like Facebook and PayPal are the ones you want to integrate with.

Spotify is a company that did this.

Spotify

Here’s what Spotify looked like at the beginning of its integration with Facebook.

Integrating with Facebook was a very targeted move. Facebook was already a platform for sharing interests, especially music (in the form of videos, for example).

Spotify just made the experience better. By showing what your friends listened to in the app and the Facebook stream, people started to discover the app.

Tom’s listening to Jay-Z on Spotify.

Hmm, I wonder what that is. Let me check it out. Oh, it’s free streaming. Awesome!

And boom – Spotify got another use. And by the way, that’s exactly how they got me.

As with embeds, make sure that your integration makes sense for the users and that your onboard process is smooth so that both parties benefit.

Airbnb

Airbnb didn’t have the smoothest process with integration, which is why their growth hack eventually stopped working. Lucky for them, they didn’t need it anymore at that point.

When they started creating their listings, they really wanted to tap into Craigslist’s huge network.

But Craigslist didn’t make their API public, so the Airbnb guys had to create a very difficult technical solution.

Eventually, they made it work and people could cross-post their Airbnb listings with one simple click:

At the time, around 50 million unique users used Craigslist each month.

The listings went on to get massive exposure, leading to a huge period of user growth for Airbnb.

There was one big problem. Let’s just say that it wasn’t a very endorsed procedure and not at all sanctioned by Craigslist. Eventually, they had to discontinue the integration.

Another concept similar to embeds and integrations would be “Powered by badges.”

These require a lot of testing and optimizing, though, since it’s impossible to know what works right away.

For example, with Kissmetrics we found that “Analytics by…” worked much better than “Powered by…”

Integrations, embeds, and badges are certainly among your best bets for going viral and getting a big enough chunk of the market for your product to become a hit.

Nevertheless, these examples are more ideas than “copy this” schemes.

You see, growth hacks usually stop working fairly quickly as more and more companies start exploiting them; instead of trying to copy each of these examples, try to get into the right mindset to see untapped opportunities and new ways for you to use similar tactics to market your products.

You don’t need to be fancy. You can simply test already working tactics out to see how well they work. If you get a good ROI, then double down and scale it!

2. Sticky Growth Hacking

Facebook also has network effects with virality built-in. But they pursued new user growth in almost the exact opposite way.

Instead of trying to give access to the most people possible, they did the reverse.

Facebook started out only targeting specific Ivy League schools. You had to have an email address at each one to get access.

From there, they slowly expanded to other high-profile schools. This restricted supply, fueling demand.

Facebook had virality, increasing the value for each user as more of their friends joined.

However, the platform is incredibly sticky. There’s virtually nothing else out there that compares.

The average person spends an average of 33 minutes on Facebook each day.

Facebook knows exactly what its users like and don’t like. Then, they manipulate those things like a master puppeteer to get people to continue logging in multiple times each day.

That means they have conquered the magic formula for a sticky product:

High retention + low churn + network effects.

Churn can (and will) often start to erode new customer acquisition if you let it:

And he cites a simple rule of thumb for sticky products from Eric Ries:

The rules that govern the sticky engine of growth are pretty simple: if the rate of new customer acquisition exceeds the churn rate, the product grows.

As for averages, it varies from sector to sector. For the SaaS sector, it’s five to seven percent annually, and under one percent monthly.

However, many factors can influence churn rate, including:

• Company size
• Whether the product is essential
• Your target market (B2B vs B2C)

Negative Churn

Negative churn can also be a game-changer. This is when the gain from existing customers outpaces the lost revenue from old ones leaving.

David Skok outlines two ways to increase this:

1. The first is to align pricing with product usage. That way, the more a customer uses your product, the higher price they pay. For example, charge based on the number of emails they send.
2. Another option is to upsell or cross-sell more/bigger versions of your product. That’s especially helpful in B2B, where you can add a big, customizable “Enterprise” product.

Admittedly, this was kind of a deep dive on a nerdy topic.

But it’s absolutely essential to sticky products.

Churn can (and will) dictate how successful your product success will ultimately be.

3. Paid Growth Hacking

Viral, sticky businesses are common in software. However, they’re less common outside of it.

The problem is that many other types of companies don’t benefit as much from online growth.

Hardware companies like Nespresso coffee makers can’t ‘go viral’ as easily or grow through simply creating a sticky product.

How do these companies grow instead? They use commercials.

Groupon pursued a similar strategy when they went public through paid growth.

They were selling hard goods and services.

The trick was to grow as quickly as possible before any competitors could keep up so they could hit scale, go public, and dominate the coupons space.

You can say all you want about their stock price or performance.

But what you can’t argue with is their growth strategy.

As the records show, Groupon scaled 228% in a single year.

How?

Just before going public, Groupon had to disclose its financials to the SEC. One of the most illuminating line items was the fact that they spent $179 million to acquire 33 million new subscribers in one quarter!

The “online marketing” line item was the biggest expense adjustment by far; Groupon was directly paying to acquire new users.

Its business model shows that spending money on ads was a positive investment. They were able to make a certain margin on each sign-up.

The growth math was simple: Spend as much money as possible!

You have the customer’s lifetime value (LTV) on one side of the equation. This is the average value of each client over time. That means if someone pays you $100 a month for two years, that’s an LTV of $2,400.

You can and should do what you can to increase that number. Retention-based strategies below can help.

Otherwise, you compare that number to the cost of customer acquisition (CAC).

Add up all it takes to acquire a single customer. Chances are, you have the equipment, salespeople, marketers, ad campaigns, and more.

You need to realize the number you spend on marketing and sales is almost always higher than you think.

Somewhere in the middle is your payback period. This is the time it takes for you to recoup those initial costs. You can then funnel everything after that point back into overhead or profit.

Amazon Prime Members spend over $1,400 each year. That’s double what non-Prime customers spend.

That extra margin allows Amazon to reinvest back into future growth.

For example, Amazon notoriously makes a lower margin on product sales. However, it went on to introduce and distribute its own products, and now has multiple private label lines.

Back in 2016, Rachel Greer, a former Amazon employee, divulged how Amazon used its new private label to increase their profit per unit sold:

Amazon has the ability to track both what people are buying as well as what they search for and can’t find, giving the e-retailer a huge edge over smaller sellers.

They’re looking at what commoditized products are already performing well and then simply undercutting the competition:

Paid growth starts with something basic like advertising or PR.

However, as you can see, it also involves decreasing costs while increasing profit to further exploit a position of power.

Generating more attention and interest is always the first step. However, without getting that attention to stick around, you are always facing an uphill battle.

Here’s how to activate new site visits and app installers to keep them around for the long term.

Step 4: Activation With Growth Hacking

Do you want to increase conversions ASAP?

All you have to do is eliminate a few form fields on your opt-in page. With a few tweaks, you could find yourself increasing your form field conversion rates by up to 672 percent.

Can it really be that simple, though? Unfortunately, it’s not.

You’ve only made it much easier to opt in at this free step. Free conversions don’t pay the bills. Only paying customers do.

Here’s a perfect example from a few years back that proves the point.

Asking people for a credit card when they sign up adds a lot of friction. They’re not sure they want or need your product just yet.

Removing that requirement makes it much easier, so it’s easy to guess how that affects conversions. From its experience working with SaaS brands, Sixteen Ventures states that asking for a credit card upfront ‘does little to help conversions’ and that they see ‘SaaS vendors with < 20% conversion rates that ask for a credit card upfront.’

Your own scenario is unique. Repeating this study might give you different results.

However, the point still remains.

It’s useless to get more people to convert if more of them are just going to leave. That’s not a successful activation.

Instead, you want qualified people to stick around. Sign-ups or opt-ins are a good start. But they don’t give you the full picture.

Overlaying pages per view after sign-up might give you the context you need.

In 2016, Digital Product Designer Fraser Deans highlighted three distinct phases for a successful acquisition:

1. Pre-Sign-up: This includes all of the ‘stuff’ that someone experiences before they opt-in.
2. First User Experience: These are the guided onboarding steps that help someone see the value of your product.
3. Post-Sign-up: This is all the stuff that comes after to make sure they don’t have buyer’s remorse.

The first phase outlines all of the steps someone takes to reach your sign-up page.

For example, maybe they Googled a pain point, found a blog post, and hit that page.

Maybe they saw an ad first that directed them to a landing page.

Or maybe they just typed in your brand name directly.

The trick here is to optimize the user flows to speed each one up.

For example, a lot of my sites will feature a tool opt-in feature front and center.

In this previous example of the Crazy Egg homepage, all you’ll see is a URL bar to get an instant heatmap:

Why did we do that?

We’re ‘shaping’ the user flow. Someone can come in on a blog post and read about common website mistakes.

Then, once they start browsing around the site to get more information, we can literally show them how to fix their site.

That’s incredibly powerful. It gives someone immediate value for free. It’s also one of the best ways I’ve seen to get people to instantly understand how your product can benefit them.

They have an ‘aha moment’ the minute they see the heatmap in action. From there, it’s an easy sell.

Getting someone to convert is only half the battle, though.

The next step is to make sure that the ‘happy first experience’ takes place.

This is the onboarding phase, where you can use tutorials to help people learn how to get the most out of your product.

In a post on the Autopilot blog, Peter Sharkey outlines three distinct methods including:

1. Self-service
2. Group demos
3. One-on-one calls

The level of service and attention also depends largely on the product type.

For example, simple products like Canva are fairly straightforward.

Cropping a photo by dragging and dropping a little box is incredibly intuitive.

They can probably afford to use a self-service tutorial that uses callouts and tooltips to show users where to click next.

The more complex the product, the more hand-holding you’ll need to do initially.

The problem isn’t people understanding the features of your product. Those are easy to see.

The problem is getting people to understand how to benefit from those things. And that can often take a while to sink in.

As shown below, really complex products like HubSpot and Infusionsoft even require you to do formal training before they set you loose on the product.

Obviously, a required $3,000 one-time fee for onboarding is overkill for most products. However, it narrows down the number of people who sign up to only the qualified.

HubSpot is willing to bet that by the time you do go through this process, you can use their product more effectively. As a result, you’ll stick around to be a paying customer much longer.

Looking at your onboarding sequence as its own funnel can help you spot the problem areas.

For example, take a look at the following conversions along each step for a Bingo Card Creator:

The number of people going from the sign-in dashboard to create a list looks good!

But the next step (from creating a list to customizing it) isn’t nearly as good.

That shows you where conversion roadblocks are hiding in plain sight. The transition from one feature to another might seem simple to you.

However, the customer data paints another picture.

LinkedIn does another variation of this same tactic by showing how ‘complete’ your profile is on a scale of zero to 100.

As always, the only way to see what works is to test. That’s why the growth hacking mindset is critical to success.

You need to hypothesize potential solutions, test, measure the impact, and continue to iterate until you find the answer.

For example, Buffer’s Leo Widrich told Chargify about how they counterintuitively found more success by not forcing users to share something during the onboarding process.

That runs completely counter to what you’d think because the entire idea behind Buffer is to improve how people share content. Sometimes, you simply can’t know what will work until you test out different approaches.

Next, align your messaging across the entire experience.

Marketing automation, for example, can help you custom-tailor messages.

So you can see if someone has used a specific feature, and if not, send them a completely different reminder email to nudge them along.

Most automation platforms will allow you to set events for the actions you want.

Then, you can change the follow-up messaging depending on whether the user took that action or not.

If someone on LinkedIn uploads a photo but doesn’t fill out their Skills, Expertise, or Previous Employment, guess which message they’re about to receive?

Drip emails like these aren’t just for aiding activation.

In fact, you can often get more value out of them during the retention phase to keep bringing people back again and again and again.

Step 5: Retention Through Growth Hacking

Two sections ago, we did a deep dive on churn.

We saw what it is, how it works, and how it affects your bottom line.

Why’d we spend so much time on it? It’s basically the same story everywhere you look.

Retaining existing customers is the quickest path to success. Research shows that repeat customers spend 67 percent more.

Repeat customers are more likely to purchase.

Your best customers also spend the most.

What’s the problem with this? Well, most companies get it completely wrong.

They allocate the lion’s share of their budgets not to retaining existing customers, but trying to find new ones.

We should simply call that less effective and less profitable marketing.

The secret to retention-based marketing is to avoid getting tunnel vision on any one channel. Here’s why.

Today, consumers go around from channel to channel and device to device before eventually buying.

Google calls this the Zero Moment of Truth, which describes how customers interact with your brand before you even realize it.

They’re visiting different sites and consulting different sources.

That’s why it often takes at least five ‘touches’ before customers will give you the time of day.

The trick is to mix those touches up to be everywhere at all times.

A Facebook and Salesforce study proved that when you combine tactics, such as email and Facebook Ads, ROI shoots through the roof.

Think about what Facebook does.

If you don’t log in for a few days, what happens next?

They email you with information about what you’re missing out on.

This friend is doing that. Your sibling went to this new place.

Each email packs social proof to bring you back to their app.

Why?

Why does a social network invest so heavily in using email?

Because they know it still works.

The good news is that you can combine a few tricks to copy their approach.

Facebook Ads recently announced a native integration with MailChimp. When you use the tool, you:

• Define your target audience
• Design your ad
• Review and submit

The tool also lets you connect your store so you can see what sells and implement retargeting.

Even better, you can create custom audiences from your MailChimp lists, too.

Sync your account on Facebook, create a new custom audience, select the list option, and you’ll see a new MailChimp option at the bottom.

You can even use your MailChimp lists for interest audiences, too.

You can boost posts or even create a lookalike audience based on the people on each list.

You can also connect the platforms so remarketing campaign messaging can coincide with email marketing automation on platforms like Zapier.

Then you can run these remarketing campaigns across Google AdWords, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Don’t just stop with connecting to email, though.

In-app messages give you a proactive way to get your message across the moment someone hits your site.

Customers love live chat because it helps them resolve issues in just a few minutes, as opposed to emails that can take days. There are some huge advantages to chat, too:

According to Chat Metrics, live chat can enhance:

• booked demos and sales qualified leads by over 35 percent
• conversions by up to 100 percent
• Lead to sale conversions by 28 percent

Best of all, these new messaging platforms allow you to mimic the retention campaigns you’re already running.

You can automate new messages based on someone’s previous site or app behavior.

You can change the messaging based on feature interactions or onboarding process.

You can even target locations or switch up languages automatically. All you have to do is edit the criteria for when users trigger certain campaigns.

Think about the possibilities of all these sequences. You can:

• create fallback campaigns for people when they don’t move through your app.
• isolate those tricky onboarding roadblocks people hit during activation earlier; messages can go out before to warn them, during to aid them through, and after to prompt the next action to take.
• choreograph entire campaigns in advance based on real user behavior. Then, you can automate the entire thing to run seamlessly without you.

That allows you to take a step back and focus on the big picture.

You can spend time on things like driving new revenue from people who are now stuck like glue.

For more information, read my article about retaining customers through growth hacking.

Step 6: Revenue With Growth Hacking

Money is always tight in a new SaaS company.

That’s why they require such heavy investment to scale.

You need a team and an infrastructure that will one day be capable of processing millions of orders, and charging $10/mo often doesn’t cut it.

This puts you in the red for the first few months. You’re stuck in negative cash flow, trying to hang on long enough to recoup your investment.

If you want your startup to survive, that may mean attracting significant funding like fraud prevention platform SEON recently achieved. So far, it’s gained 94 billion in Series B funding.

Its Series A funding efforts were massively successful, too, raising 10 million Euros (approximately $10,537,500.00 USD).

How? Well, it took a product-led approach. The startup considered things like:

• if it could develop solutions people need
• which technology would transform the world of fraud prevention
• what a true SaaS model should look like

From there, SEON started building its tool around specific needs. For instance, it:

• created essential tools for fraud managers
• offered easy integration
• provided transparent pricing
• offered a 14-day trial

On the digital marketing side, SEON lists multiple case studies where it highlights the significant fraud reductions all made possible with its tool.

If you were working in fraud detection and saw an easy-to-use solution that could reduce fraudulent transactions by up to 99 percent, wouldn’t you want to give it a go?

It’s simple: refining a simple process like this is a huge win. It helps them significantly impact the health of the company; it also shows why growth hackers spend so much time down here toward the bottom of the funnel.

You can often find bigger, faster ROI jumps.

Another perfect example is an abandon cart sequence.

Users abandon almost 70% of e-commerce carts.

These people are ready to purchase, and then they leave your site forever.

Or worse, they buy the same stuff for a few bucks less from a competitor, so once again, dropping this number even a little can have a massive impact on new revenue.

This one is a no-brainer. Simply test free shipping vs. no free shipping.

Then, track total sales and the average order value during the period to see which one results in a better ROI even if you’re eating the cost of shipping.

Let’s say free shipping pays off. So now, test it again.

Try free shipping on orders over $20 vs. free shipping on orders over $100.

Compare the revenue with a decrease in costs to see which one works best.

Rinse and repeat.

See?

Growth hacking isn’t completely difficult.

It does require a few technical skills to know how you’re going to implement these changes and track them accordingly.

But the key is in the mindset.

You need to constantly hypothesize new ideas, test, measure, and repeat until you hit a point of diminishing returns.

Step 7: Referrals With Growth Hacking

Frederick F. Reichheld published “The One Number You Need to Know to Grow” in the December 2003 issue of Harvard Business Review.

His point was simple but profound:

Most companies measure the wrong things.

They spend all this time, energy, effort, and money creating complex systems to measure customer happiness.

And yet, a single question can often give them a better indication of performance.

Even more, this one simple question is often a much better predictor of top-line growth:

“Would you recommend this company to a friend?”

Sounds too easy, right?

But Frederick spent years developing this research, validating it, and refining it.

He applied it to a variety of industries and found similarly-strong results across the board.

Today, most product companies use the Net Promoter Score because it’s the easiest way to predict referrals.

All you have to do is ask people one simple question to gauge your product:

How likely are you to refer this [product/company] to a friend or colleague?

You give them a simple scale of one to ten and measure responses based on their point total.

Here’s how they break down:

• Promoters (score 9-10): These are the people who will recommend you to others as proof of your product concept.
• Passives (score 7-8): These people are fine with your product but would switch to another alternative if it presented itself.
• Detractors (score 0-6): These are the unhappy people who will not only churn soon but will also talk badly about your product.

You want to pay attention to the middle group for retention. Ideally, you want to get in touch and try to save them before they leave for someone else.

However, for Net Promoter purposes, ignore them completely.

Instead, you subtract the percentage of people at the bottom (Detractors) from people at the top (Promoters) to arrive at a score.

Now, this score is somewhat arbitrary. The point is to track this number over time to see which direction you’re heading.

Fortunately, there are a few simple benchmark numbers to begin with if you’re starting from scratch.

These can tell you how the product experience compares with the wider industry.

The bigger the gap between you and the competition, the better chance of success you have. The closer you are, the more likely your product idea doesn’t stand out enough just yet.

People leave you if something easier or cheaper comes along.

Products with strong network effects like Facebook and Dropbox also pay close attention to their viral coefficient, or the number of new members an existing user introduces.

To calculate this, all you have to do is multiply the number of invitations by the conversion rate.

“Invitations” refer to messages sent out from a referral program, for example.

You create a simple viral loop like Dropbox does that offers an incentive to share.

Then you can use a platform like ReferralCandy to track the results back to each individual.

While the ratio itself is simple, it takes more work to analyze in real-time.

You have to track this number by cohort over time. It’s essentially a moving target.

Viral products need a viral coefficient of greater than one to grow on their own; it’s a good rule of thumb to look for that when validating product ideas.

If your model relies on virality but can’t produce a viral coefficient over one, then you might need a new growth model.

Step 8: Improve Your Product Continuously

You must iterate, iterate, iterate.

Why?

Because even with millions of users, it takes most startups years to become profitable.

This is either because their product is not that expensive or because they wait too long to charge customers.

It’s generally accepted that it costs less to retain customers than it is to acquire them. One of the problems is that companies struggle to remain relevant to their audience.

However, relevance is vital to a both a successful business and for growth hacking.

As Rachel Barton, lead of Accenture Strategy’s business in Europe, states:

‘Instead of seeing customers as just a pair of hands that decide when to reach for the wallet, they should be viewed as ever-changing, ever-evolving individuals deeply affected by a variety of external influences.

‘…Only by understanding these contexts will businesses have the right strategy to offer the most relevant solutions and help drive growth.’

This is because the perceived value of your product rises and falls with the onboarding process.

Imagine signing up for a service, getting a welcome email, but receiving no instructions on how to use it and then never hearing from them again.

That’d be a pretty bad experience, right?

I wouldn’t come back either.

Twitter learned this from experience. At one time, Twitter would leave new users alone in the dark after they first signed up. When Twitter changed this, engagement went up immensely.

This is how it happened:

When signing up, Twitter prompted users to follow 5-10 people on their own.

If you spend 10 minutes finding a few friends or celebrities on Twitter and you start to follow them, you’ve already invested time into the product, which makes it much more likely that you’ll return.

It’s only natural that if you “follow” someone, you actually want to check up on them and see what’s new.

Uber constantly improves its service as well. Some of its offerings include:

• Uber Green, which provides sustainable rides for environmentally conscious travelers.
• Uber Rent, for people looking to save money on car rental. This service helps drivers save on rental at top firms like Avis.
• Uber Reserve allows travelers to plan better and book a car thirty days in advance
• Uber X is for the budget conscious traveler and provides the cheapest rides
• Uber X Saver, for people that want to save money and don’t mind waiting longer

Once you’ve gotten big, the user experience is a huge part of your product’s success. That’s why companies like Apple and Facebook spend hours discussing fonts, colors, and button sizes.

Never stop improving.

Otherwise, nature (or the market in this case) will teach you that lesson the hard way.

There’s a good quote about this idea of constant improvement:

Never stop learning because life never stops teaching.

Don’t just take a “one and done” approach to growth hacking. What comes after the growth is just as important if you want to create a sustainable business.

Tools to Fuel Growth Hacking

If you’re looking for tools and tips to help organize your growth hacking marketing strategy, I’ve included a short round-up below.

Growthhackers.com

What better tool to work with than one made by Sean Ellis himself, the first person to use the term ‘growth hacking?’

Growthhackers.com is a platform for marketers and product developers to learn more about growth hacking strategies and tactics. It also helps users connect with peers in the industry, share experiences and get feedback on their own product development efforts.

Trello + Google Docs

There’s a lot of Trello growth hacking templates you can copy, such as this one.

Growth with Ward

This site offers growth hacking templates, worksheets, canvases, and a growth hacking framework.

Hello Bar

Take growth hacking to new heights and convert 83 percent more visitors into leads, subscribers, and buyers. The Hello Bar offers a ton of tools, including features to analyze, test and optimize, and create custom reports.

FAQs

Conclusion

It only took Facebook eight years to reach a $50 billion valuation. That kind of growth was unprecedented. It was historical at the time.

However, Uber reached the same valuation in 5 years.

I can already hear you making excuses.

“These growth hacks won’t work anymore.”

“This doesn’t apply to my industry.”

I don’t want to hear it.

Growth hacking isn’t a fixed strategy.

It’s a mindset.

I hope this guide helped you to acquire it. I want you to start thinking like I do and like other growth hackers do.

Where are you in the growth hacking process right now?