Are you an employee hoping to grow the business quickly, or a founder looking for the skill that will take the company to its next breakthrough? If so, that skill is growth hacking.
If you have ever played a computer game, you will know that every game has its own set of cheat codes. Punch in a few command codes and you can easily rack up a stockpile of resources or funds, or give your squad a massive boost in strength. Pulling off these commands is what we call a hack.
What is growth hacking?
Growth hacking works on much the same principle: you probe how the commercial world operates, work out the rules that govern it, and put them to use to make a business or a personal venture grow quickly. Many Silicon Valley companies have seen their business achieve explosive growth after adopting growth hacking.
Someone with the skills of growth hacking is called a growth hacker, and it is hardly surprising that a talent this rare and this effective should become highly sought after — the kind of person every major company is scrambling to recruit.
So what techniques does growth hacking actually involve?
A well-known growth hacker once observed that growth hacking can be broken down roughly into three technical layers: marketing, psychology, and some applied IT know-how.
Growth hacking success stories
By now, cloud storage is something most of us take for granted; the author relies heavily on Google Drive to collaborate with various teams. Dropbox, one of the earlier companies to capture this market, did exactly that — it used growth hacking to help its business grow fast. In October 2008 Dropbox had roughly 100,000 users; by leaning on growth hacking techniques, it grew that figure 40-fold to 4 million in little more than a year, securing Dropbox a firm place in the cloud storage field.
Dropbox used viral marketing as its promotional strategy. Users who signed up for the first time received 2GB of cloud storage for free. Wanted more free storage? Use their referral link to invite a friend to sign up as a user, and you would enjoy an extra 500MB of storage.
What this marketing decision was really tackling was a single problem: how do you get new customers to trust your brand and be willing to try out the product (or service)? What lay behind it was, in fact, a piece of psychological manoeuvring.
Ten years ago the concept of cloud storage was not yet widespread, and users' awareness of such products was still very limited. Dropbox cleverly deployed social proof: when you need more storage, you actively invite your friends to come on board as users. In everyday life it is not hard to notice that we place more confidence in the brands or products our friends recommend, and are more inclined to try them ourselves.
Through recommendations passed between friends, and by drawing on the trust friends share, Dropbox quietly built up confidence in its brand and product — and so created its record of explosive user growth.
The three elements of growth hacking
Dropbox's marketing strategy brought together two important elements. First, most users want more storage. Second, when the product was being recommended, the principle of social proof came into play, driving the company's business to grow quickly. For a psychology-based strategy like the one mentioned above to come good, however, IT technology is indispensable. Effective growth hacking is not just about writing code; a growth hacker must understand how to measure whether a product, or the marketing strategy being used, is genuinely bringing growth to the business. That means putting the relevant IT tools to work — Google Analytics, for instance, or even more advanced A/B testing — to keep strengthening how the whole system runs and to improve efficiency.
In fact, combining the three elements above lets any company offer a comprehensive plan for growth, grounded in a keen read of human nature. That is why growth hacking has become the new darling of the modern commercial world, and there is good reason that companies of every kind are chasing after it. Recognising this, readers who toil away in business development or marketing would do well to absorb plenty of knowledge about growth hacking; it is sure to bring enormous benefit to your personal growth and to your business's development.
Growth hacking is, in fact, not so hard to get to grips with. As a start-up, the Treehole team is constantly turning over the same question: how do we make our outreach fit human nature more closely, while making good use of technology to deliver a smooth user experience? Ultimately, if you want to build solutions that sit close to human needs and help customers solve their problems — starting from a keen read of human nature, using the right IT technology as your tool, and tailoring a fitting plan step by step — then you can certainly add value to your business.
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