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

Holstee Manifesto, an

Who are my ideal early adopters?

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

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.

BLOGS AND PERSONALITIES Andrew Chen’s essays http://andrewchen.co Noah Kagan’s blog http://okdork.com Patrick Vlaskovits http://vlaskovits.com/blog www.twitter.com/pv Jesse Farmer http://20bits.com Sean Ellis http://www.startup-marketing.com http://growthhackers.com Paul Graham’s essays http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html Aaron Ginn http://www.

I love the idea of Dropbox rewarding users with 250 megabytes of extra storage if they take a tour of the basics of Dropbox. The idea is to teach members how to use the service and motivate them to get past potential hurdles.

(A very common question: Where do I find the right people? If this isn’t immediately obvious to you, then you don’t know your own industry well enough to even consider launching a product yet. Period.)

All of which is to say a simple truth that we try to deny too often: if you want to go viral, it must be baked into your product. There must be a reason to share it and the means to do so.

Growth hacking at its core means putting aside the notion that marketing is some separate activity that begins toward the end of a company’s or a product’s development life cycle. It is, instead, a way of thinking and looking at your business.