Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising

They rolled out a feature that gave the product away to users for free if they referred five friends who signed up.

a product doesn’t need to hit the front page of the New York Times to attract users. We need only to hit the New York Times of our scene.

With growth hacking, we begin by testing until we are confident we have a product worth marketing. Confident based on the evidence, not our ego or our fantasies. Only after securing this do we chase the big bang that kick-starts our growth engine. Because even the best-designed products and greatest ideas go nowhere without a jump.

A few years later, the email app Mailbox launched with a similar strategy. An incredibly compelling—albeit a tad more professional—demo video racked up one hundred thousand views in less than four hours. This one-minute video, combined with a very cool interface that showed users how many other users were in front of them on the app’s waiting list,

how do you get, maintain, and multiply attention in a scalable and efficient way?

When I bought my first Bitcoin through Coinbase.com, the checkout process prompted me to tweet “I just bought 1 Bitcoin @Coinbase! https://coinbase.com.” Though it seems to me that they could have easily coded a solution so the message included the price at which I’d bought it, which would have had the effect of advertising the rising (or falling)

That’s where a growth hacker named Josh Elman came in. Poring over the stats, he and his team of twenty-five growth hackers (crazy, right?) noticed that when a user manually selected five to ten accounts to “follow” or “friend” on the first day, the user was significantly more likely to stick around.

When I first joined the company, the suggested user list had 20 random people who were default selected to follow. Given this data insight, we reset the new user flow to encourage people to follow their first ~10 people and offer them a lot of choices, but no default selection. Then we later built a feature that continually suggested new users to f

The end goal of every growth hacker is to build a self-perpetuating marketing machine that reaches millions by itself. —AARON GINN