Viral Growth
In 1996, Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith built a side project: a web-based email system called Hotmail, so they could send and receive email around the company firewall without their boss finding out. The famous venture capitalist Tim Draper saw huge potential in the product and invested $300,000. On the question of how to get this great product to more people, they disagreed. The two founders wanted to promote it through traditional channels like billboards or radio ads, but for a completely free product, that was far too expensive. Draper suggested adding a line at the bottom of every email: "PS: I Love You. Get Your Free Email at Hotmail"
Draper's suggestion changed everything. It meant every Hotmail email was an ad for the product. The effect was enormous: every user meant new users, and every email meant more emails. More importantly, this approach was trackable and measurable, which helped bring in even more users.
Six months later, Hotmail had more than a million users. One example shows Hotmail's viral growth: Bhatia sent an email to a friend in India, and within three weeks Hotmail had 300,000 users in India. In the end, Hotmail was sold to Microsoft for $400 million.
What Is a Growth Hacker
Hotmail's viral growth has long been a favorite story, and the growth hacker role that emerged later is tasked with exactly this.
The biggest difference between a growth hacker and traditional marketing is thinking about user growth starting at the product development level, such as using landing pages and A/B testing to decide which page to use, improving conversion rates, and iterating quickly.
Andrew Chen's definition of a growth hacker is spot on
A growth hacker is a hybrid of marketer and coder, someone who answers "How do I get more users for my product?" with A/B tests, landing pages, email deliverability, and the Open Graph.
Most importantly, they layer on top of the concept of direct marketing, with a much stronger focus on quantitative measurement, scenario modeling, and lots of database access. If a startup is in the early stage of product/market fit, a growth hacker can help confirm whether the product's core positioning is right; after fit is reached, a growth hacker can help scale the user base.
How the Giants Do Growth Hacking
To improve conversion, Twitter drastically simplified its homepage and put signup and login front and center. During signup, it recommended that new users follow at least 10 accounts first, and once they did, return and retention rates jumped. Twitter's data showed that once you follow more than 30 people, retention increases sharply, so it encourages following more people in all sorts of ways, such as recommendations and "people you follow also follow."
Airbnb
Airbnb's huge valuation today is closely tied to its early integration with the big Craigslist platform. Airbnb let users share listings to Craigslist in one click. Unlike the familiar "share to Weibo or WeChat," this feature didn't use a public Craigslist API; instead it automatically filled in the listing details and made the Craigslist posts look nicer. This posting strategy was brilliant and brought Airbnb a huge number of early users.
Dropbox
Like PayPal's referral system, Dropbox encouraged users to invite friends to sign up, rewarding each inviter with more storage space. This helped Dropbox grow from 100,000 users to 4 million in two years. Mailbox, another Dropbox product, used a very compelling launch video combined with a cool waitlist screen showing how many people were ahead of you in line for the app. Mailbox grabbed huge attention and had 1 million signups in just two weeks, all eagerly waiting for the launch.
Growth Hacking Best Practices
Every startup hopes its product goes viral as soon as it launches. Thanks to the growth hacker craze, there's now a lean startup marketing framework: AARRR.
Using Quora as a model, let's apply this framework
Acquisition: you see a tweet on Twitter saying a friend answered a question on Quora
Activation: after reading the answers on the page, you decide to sign up too
Retention: days later, you get an email from Quora with the week's hot questions
Referral: Quora encourages you to read related questions and share them on social networks
Revenue: Quora isn't profitable yet
Each step of this lean marketing framework corresponds to a user state, and the growth hacker's job is to figure out how to move users from one state to the next. That means watching the conversion at each step. If activation is only 1%, don't focus on acquiring potential users yet; think hard about how to improve activation first, then move on to the next step.
Growth Hackers in Practice
Some think it's just a hyped Silicon Valley buzzword. Similar roles have always existed in China, such as product managers or product operations people responsible for marketing, or it's simply what grassroots webmasters have always done, nothing new. Others say growth hacking has limits: companies that achieved viral growth through growth hacking have strong media and social characteristics, so it doesn't apply universally. But as Aaron Ginn said
growth hacking is a mindset more than a toolset.
Whether this role, so popular with Silicon Valley startups, can take root in China remains to be seen. Some companies are already hiring growth hackers, such as nice, Xiaohongshu, and MAKA. I believe that as China's internet develops and roles become more specialized, there will be demand for similar roles in the future. After all, the purpose of building products is to deliver value to more users.