Understand Growth Hacking

Knowledge Sharing:
1. Growth hackers build the product's potential growth, including user acquisition, on-boarding, monetization, retention, and virality, into the product itself.[
2. Fast Company[1] defined the problem facing most startups as 1) they don't have the money and 2) they don't have a traditional marketing background.[1] To combat this lack of money and experience, growth hackers approach marketing with a focus on innovation, scalability, and user connectivity
3. Fast Company used Twitter "Suggested Users List" as example: "This was Twitter's real secret: It built marketing into the product rather than building infrastructure to do a lot of marketing.
4. The heart of growth hacking is the relentless focus on growth as the only metric that truly matters.[19] Mark Zuckerberg, best known of the 5 co-founders of Facebook, is said to have had this mindset while growing Facebook
5. While the exact methods vary from company to company and from one industry to the next, the common denominator is always growth. Companies that have successfully "growth hacked" usually have a viral loop naturally built in to their onboarding process.[21] New customers typically hear about the product or service through their network and by using the product or service, share it with their connections in turn. This loop of awareness, use, and sharing can result in exponential growth for the company.
6. Besides Twitter, Facebook, Dropbox, Pinterest, YouTube, Groupon, Udemy, and Instagram are all companies that used and still use growth hacking techniques to build brands and improve profits
7. An early example of "growth hacking" was Hotmail's inclusion of "PS I Love You" with a link for others to get the free online mail service.[26] Another example was the offer of more storage by Dropbox to users who referred their friends.
8. The new job title of “Growth Hacker” is integrating itself into Silicon Valley’s culture, emphasizing that coding and technical chops are now an essential part of being a great marketer.
9. Growth hackers are a hybrid of marketer and coder, one who looks at the traditional question of “How do I get customers for my product?” and answers with A/B tests, landing pages, viral factor, email deliverability, and Open Graph.
10. On top of this, they layer the discipline of direct marketing, with its emphasis on quantitative measurement, scenario modeling via spreadsheets, and a lot of database queries. If a startup is pre-product/market fit, growth hackers can make sure virality is embedded at the core of a product. After product/market fit, they can help run up the score on what’s already working.
11. This isn’t just a single role – the entire marketing team is being disrupted. Rather than a VP of Marketing with a bunch of non-technical marketers reporting to them, instead growth hackers are engineers leading teams of engineers. The process of integrating and optimizing your product to a big platform requires a blurring of lines between marketing, product, and engineering, so that they work together to make the product market itself.
12.  Projects like email deliverability, page-load times, and Facebook sign-in are no longer technical or design decisions – instead they are offensive weapons to win in the market.
14. Great examples include Pinterest, Zynga, Groupon, Instagram, Dropbox. New products with incredible traction emerge every week. These products, with millions of users, are built on top of new, open platforms that in turn have hundreds of millions of users – Facebook and Apple in particular.
15.  Whereas the web in 1995 consisted of a mere 16 million users on dialup, today over 2 billion people access the internet. On top of these unprecedented numbers, consumers use super-viral communication platforms that rapidly speed up the proliferation of new products – not only is the market bigger, but it moves faster too.
16.  Before this era, the discipline of marketing relied on the only communication channels that could reach 10s of millions of people – newspaper, TV, conferences, and channels like retail stores. To talk to these communication channels, you used people – advertising agencies, PR, keynote speeches, and business development. Today, the traditional communication channels are fragmented and passe. The fastest way to spread your product is by distributing it on a platform using APIs, not MBAs. Business development is now API-centric, not people-centric.
17.  Airbnb does just this, with a remarkable Craigslist integration. They’ve picked a platform with 10s of millions of users where relatively few automated tools exist, and have created a great experience to share your Airbnb listing.It’s integrated simply and deeply into the product, and is one of the most impressive ad-hoc integrations I’ve seen in years. Certainly a traditional marketer would not have come up with this, or known it was even possible – instead it’d take a marketing-minded engineer to dissect the product and build an integration this smooth.
18.  Without an API, you have to write a script that can scrape Craigslist and interact with its forms, to pre-fill all the information you want.
19.  Long story short, this kind of integration is not trivial. There’s many little details to notice, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the initial integration took some very smart people a lot of time to perfect.
20.  Who knows how much value Airbnb is getting from this integration, but in my book, it’s damn impressive. It taps into a low-competition, huge-volume marketing channel, and builds a marketing function deeply into the product. Best of all, it’s a win-win for everyone involved – both the people renting out their places by tapping into pre-built demand, and for renters, who see much nicer listings with better photos and descriptions.
21.  This is just a case study, but with this type of integration, a new product is able to compete not just on features, but on distribution strategy as well. In this way, two identical products can have 100X different outcomes, just based on how well they integrate into Craigslist/Twitter/Facebook. It’s an amazing time, and a new breed of creative, technical marketers are emerging. Watch this trend.
22.  For the first time ever, superplatforms like Facebook and Apple uniquely provide access to 10s of millions of customers
23.  The discipline of marketing is shifting from people-centric to API-centric activities
24.  Growth hackers embody the hybrid between marketer and coder needed to thrive in the age of platforms
25. Airbnb has an amazing Craigslist integration