Growth Hack – Right Place at the Right Time

I have read several times that successful people are at the right place at the right time and have often wondered why I have never managed to do this. The answer is that this does not happen by chance and requires a mix of intuition, effort and luck. We need to constantly look out for new and emerging waves of growth and need to position ourselves at the right place to grow along.

Evernote followed this strategy and was able get really good early traction based on it. Around 2008-9, mobile apps, as we know them today, were beginning to really take off. App stores were emerging as new and potentially strong distribution channels. App stores will still in their early days and competition within them was quite limited.  Evernote took note of this and spent a lot of time, money and effort in ensuring that they were listed on all app store platforms and tried to get featured listings in as many as possible. This gave them good user traction and growth.

Growth Hack – Target the Right People

If you can identify and target the right user base, quick growth will follow. So what is the right user base? That is something you need to identify. Find those users who you think may be willing to join in, will be active and will attract other users to join.

Tinder this is perfectly in it’s early days. Dating apps did well if there were enough girls on it. Tinder realized this and decided to target sorority girls as it’s early adopters. As more girls joined, more guys were willing to download the app and find girls nearby for dates. Also since these girls were young and tech savvy, word of mouth began spreading for the app at a rapid pace.

The Best Growth Hack – Offer a Kick Ass Benefit to Users

If your product has some feature/usage outcome which proves extremely useful for your customers, it has a good chance of going viral. If users find something which totally amaze and delight them, they start spreading the word on their social media, blogs, websites and so on. This can start off a chain, resulting in growth at a low cost.

Linkedin was able to do this when it started allowing  it’s users to create public profiles. Search engines crawl through public profiles and index them, thereby ensuring that they show up in organic results. So now users could search their name and have their Linkedin profile showing in the top 5 results on search engines, which was not possible before this unless you were a big shot.

Growth Hack – Use Customer Usage to Get New Customers

If you can highlight your product in your existing customer’s usage of your product, it works like a referral and can give you good traction. You need to identify how to be part of the usage without hampering the customer experience.

Hotmail was able to do this wonderfully. They added a link at the end of every mail sent out by users which read PS – I love you. The link was directed to the homepage of Hotmail. A good percentage of people clicked on this link and Hotmail was able to generate good growth through this hack. 

Growth Hack – Showing Related Content

This is something which everyone’s doing now and is a great hack to increase user engagement. Showing content based on the user’s activity and interests (if any have been identified) is a great way to keep the user engaged with your startup. This can be done not only during the user’s visit, but should also form the basis of any other interaction you start with the user such as through e-mailers etc. This strategy is one which is used across startups, including e-commerce, networking, content websites and so on.

Youtube is the prime example of the success of this strategy. Time spent by users on the website has gone up significantly because of the videos, related to the one which the user is watching, are shown next to it.

Growth Hack – Keep Investing in the Product

Investment of time and money into the product should be continuous. Entrepreneurs tend to make a product ad focus their entire effort on marketing it. Continuous innovation and changes in the product are important in driving growth.

Twitter launched in 2006 and got a very good response at the outset itself. It got a lot of early traction and coverage early on. However, going forward, it was noticed that a lot of users were creating accounts and not logging in again thereafter. Instead of going the regular route of sending promotional mails and incentivising users to return, Twitter decided to analyse what may be going wrong. They realized that if a user were to follow atleast 5-10 users initially itself, the chances of the user returning were much higher. Twitter decided to invest in it’s user experience and made tweaks in order to show it’s users the true value of it, which stems from user interaction, and favorable results followed.

Growth Hack - Use the Existing to Promote the New

When thinking of a hack to grow your startup, first look at this one. Identify what your customers are doing presently (the existing). Use that to educate your customers about your product (the new) and get conversions.

Airbnb did this just right. Craiglist (online classifieds) was the platform which customers used at the time to find places for rent. Airbnb used this to platform and advertised on it to get customers onto it’s website.

Since the existing will realize the risk of losing it’s customers, the new has to think of innovative ways of capturing the existing’s customers.