There’s a revolution taking place in the world of start-up growth, and it goes by the name of growth hacking.
The best way to understand growth hacking and what growth hackers do is to first understand what is meant by the term hacker.
A hacker is someone who’s more concerned with achieving an objective than following a prescribed process. In other words, hackers care more about what needs to get done than how it should get done. As a result, hackers often come up with innovative ways to get things done.
What is growth hacking?
At its most basic, growth hacking is guerrilla marketing on the web, by technologists. It’s a distinctive blend of coding and marketing skills – involving thinking outside the box and identifying innovative ways of capturing a target audience’s attention.
A growth hacker has one objective: to grow the number of users for a specific product. But instead of using traditional advertising to “buy” each new customer, growth hacks are used to acquire customers in ways that scale.
Who’s using it?
Dropbox is the most famous proponent of growth hacking. When the brand launched, it offered customers a great incentive to spread the word.
Every customer that referred a friend was given 250MB of extra storage, as was the friend. This is a pretty generous amount, considering its 10% of what you started off with in the free version of Dropbox.
There are two important traits that an incentive should have, and Dropbox nailed both of them. First, an incentive needs to be appealing to the user – we all love free stuff!
The second trait is that the user should start seeing the benefit after the first few invites. The average user will send invites out t o only 2 to 3 people. If it takes 5 or 10 invites to start seeing a benefit, many users will think it’s not worth the effort.
The clever thing about Dropbox’s growth hack, is giving users an invite incentive that appears to be very juicy, but in reality costs them nothing.
This is because no-one actually ends up using that additional free space. Storage limits are just numbers in a database. They don’t cost anything until people actually start using it up. Most users aren’t anywhere near 90-100% usage.
If you have the technical know-how and want to grow your business fast, take a leaf out of Dropbox’s book and growth hack your way to success.
Hotcow is a non-traditional creative agency that specialises in experiential marketing that goes viral. Our campaigns generate buzz through crowd participation, PR and content sharing. Contact us on 0207 5030442 or email us on info@hotcow.co.uk.
