Growth Hacking : Tips and tricks

What is Growth Hacking?

Wikipedia defines growth hacking as the art of using creativity and analytical thinking to sell products and gain exposure. In essence the goal is to acquire pertinent users at low costs.

What is KYC ?

The precursor to growth hacking would be the defining the attributes of the pertinent user before spending time/$$ on growth hacking. We have seen too many companies talk about ‘low hanging fruit’, which eventually is not the right user. I would recommend

1. Define your user segment (Sex / Income Group / Age Group.) based on current customers, competitor’s customers and company mission. There are multiple ways you can slice the data and I would recommend go as deep as possible by making a qualified customer profile value. For example, Exotel uses multiple parameters for scoring their customer:Does the client have a website.
2. Is the company owner buying the solution?
3. Number of people in the company.
4. Are they interested in an API….
5. Try defining the metric for active user. This data would come from current customers. An example would be Facebook, where the key metric was 7 friends within 10 days. In fact according to Chamath, this metric was identified by comparing cohorts of users that became engaged and cohorts of users that did not.
6. Try defining the conversion numbers for the top of your funnel (prospects to downloads) and downloads to active users.

What are the most common growth metrics?

I have a compiled a few growth metrics for different companies, as available on various answers on Quora.

1. LinkedIn: the user getting to X connections in Y days.
2. DropBox: At least one file in one Dropbox folder on one device.
3. Facebook: 7 friends within 10 days of signing up.
4. VSEE: Signed up 3 teammates in contact list & makes / receives 2 call in 24hrs/ has at least 10 teammates in contact list & made 1 call in 2 days.
5. Twitter: The user following a certain number of people, and a certain percentage of those people following the user back ~30 followers was active.
6. Zynga: if someone comes back a day after signing up for a game (DAU) he/she was an active user.
7. True caller: 5 successful searches or more than 5 contacts in upload contact list.

What are some of the companies that are focusing in this space?

1. Appsocial.ly: share with friends.
2. Appvirality: An SDK providing the followingShare with friends.
3. Customer retention (post order share & 6% off)
4. Friend use the service, you get a ride off (Uber)
5. Sweepstake (within the site)
6. Unlocking the different levels in the app

3. Justunfollow: The app allows one to check the status of your twitter account (no of followers / unfollowers/30,60 day activity etc). They have an interesting future roadmap of potentially becoming an app growth platform by focusing on specific issues using a differentiated app strategy.

1. Cloud Peeps: Marketplace for on-demand remote community managers.
2. Planb.cd: They allows for crowd sourced optimized suggestions for your A/B test based on growth hackers in their pool.
3. Dorevolution: It is a combination of a platform and a service for growth hacking & ROI

About the author

Adit is a Principal at Blume Ventures who focuses on mobile and SaaS space. He tweets at @aditparekh