GROWTH HACKING 101Chapter 1 Introduction to Growth Hacking

WHAT IS GROWTH HACKING?Growth hacking is a fairly new term, coined just in 2010 by Sean Ellis, Silicon Valley’s first growth hacker. Defining growth hacking is best done by contrasting it with marketing.

Marketers are great at drafting marketing plans to achieve corporate objectives, managing external vendors, etc. Big corporations need marketers.

What a startup needs is a growth hacker. Early stage startups need only one thing - growth.

With a limited budget, growth hackers are tasked with achieving high growth through the most affordable means. Startups don’t have the budget for an expensive TV commercial, or a radio spot. Growth hackers have to be more creative in achieving their growth targets.

To this end, growth hackers have to tap into two things - making the product market itself, and taking advantage of new distributions.

#GrowthHackWe need to think like a start up and hack (break rules)

HACKING THE PRODUCT

MAKING THE PRODUCT MARKET ITSELFProducts used to be concrete items e.g. shampoo, cars, etc. But now we’re seeing more & more products in the form of software or online platforms. And software is a lot more flexible than hard products. You get an update every so often for your iOS or Android systems but it takes years of R&D to develop a tweak on a physical product.

And because it’s software and you can tweak it easily, you can also tweak the software to make it optimized for marketing itself. For the first time ever, a product can play a role in its own growth.

A growth hacker doesn’t just rely on marketing but can also manipulate the product so it organically markets itself.

CASE STUDY

During the 1990’s, the emails being sent by Hotmail from any user contained a line at the end which read, PS – I love you, and contained a link back to the homepage of Hotmail.

This crazy idea led them to acquire 12M users after 1.5 years!

CASE STUDY

Uber amplified word of mouth by letting users recruit other users in

exchange for a P200 discount code that both the recruiter & the new user would get upon signing

up.

CASE STUDY

TackThis lets you open an account with one button by

signing up with your Facebook account, skipping dozens of fields the user would have had to fill up,

or ignore altogether.

CASE STUDY

Grab’s GrabRewards gamifies your loyalty by giving you

discounts when you continue riding with them.

HACKING DISTRIBUTION

TAKING ADVANTAGE OF DISTRIBUTIONGrowth hacking is inherently tied to digital marketing. With digital,

your distribution channel is also your promotion channel. A billboard,

or TVC, or radio spot can’t let you buy a product then and there. With

the rise of digital channels came what we call direct response

marketing. When you see an ad on Facebook, or find something on

Google, you can immediately make a purchase after just a few clicks.

If you understand how consumers use Facebook, YouTube, Google

Search, BuzzFeed, and all of the other websites that they frequent,

then you can come up with an online “distribution” strategy that takes

advantage of this behavior.

CASE STUDY

Back in 2015, people were sharing beautiful and rare words all over Facebook. The 175 Apparel launched a collection of deep Filipino words featured on shirts, and captioned their first campaign with “3 of the most beautiful Filipino words”.

The photos featured the words on shirts. People did as they usually did and shared these photos but having the words on shirts also communicated that the shirts were for sale.

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THAT’S IT!Wait for Chapter 2 in your inbox.If you have questions, please shoot me an email. growthhacking@carloisles.com