59. What on Earth is growth hacking?

Why do some products go viral and others die a quiet death? The answer lies in growth hacking.

Growth hacking is a type of marketing that combines working on the product, which is an inside job, and working on promotion, which is an outside job. It is a new discipline born with the tech sector, and growing in popularity today.

Learning notes from this episode:

• The Dropbox growth hacking case study is still seen as the Holy Grail in the sector. The team created a double referral program to grow 3900% in just 15 months.

• A growth hacking effort is always done by a multi-disciplinary team, and will often involve a product manager, a designer, a community manager, engineers, someone with a marketing or PR background, and maybe a data scientist.

• Traditional marketing is outside facing: billboards, TV ads and articles in the press. Growth hacking is different because it looks at the inside of the product, and adjusts it to grow users and revenue.

• PR and growth hacking spur each other on: if something is going viral, journalists want to write about it. They write about it, which makes it go even more viral.
• Products very rarely go viral by themselves. Viral growth is almost always the result of investment and experimentation by the growth hacking team.

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