Growth Hacking: best ecosystem for marketing

What is the basic, main difference between growth hacker and a marketer? Well, the principal aim of the first one is growth. At the early stage of a startup you don't need a team leader to manager big marketing team or a professional for successful business communication. You need a specialist whose main focus is going to be on growth: user acquisition and optimization. Growth hackers see only, and only, this. Sometimes it can be tricky, but on the early stage, this is what companies are looking for.



Not a product any more?

Internet has changed the way we see the product. It came from strictly physical good to pieces of software the customer can’t hold. It is the product itself that plays the main role in its adoption, and understanding this fact requires a completely new way of thinking implemented in managing these strategies. In Linkedin, the user wants to have all his contacts in one place, wants to make the networks as huge as possible to get recommendations and aptitude validations. He can get additional storage upon inviting a friend in Dropbox, and 10 EUR off the next dinner if recommends Just-Eat to a friend.


Product placement

The exact time and place is important. The product needs to be placed where can be potentially seen as best. Mastering SEO can help, a lot, in being widely seen in a XXI century highways: the search engines (I will be writing a lot about good SEO strategies). New online infrastructures are creating incredible potential for product placement and distribution,

Internet has changed the way we see the product. It came from strictly physical good to pieces of software the customer can’t hold. It is the product itself that plays the main role in its adoption, and understanding this fact requires a completely new way of thinking implemented in managing these strategies. In Linkedin, the user wants to have all his contacts in one place, wants to make the networks as huge as possible to get recommendations and aptitude validations. He can get additional storage upon inviting a friend in Dropbox, and 10 EUR off the next dinner if recommends Just-Eat to a friend.

Who is growth hacker then?


If I had to make a profile of growth hacker it would be an awesome hybrid of tech awareness, analytics and marketing capabilities in one professional who is creative, innovative, always up to dated and focused on growth. I would also say that it is someone who observes a lot, but then innovates in applied solutions that might, or might not, work. The top example for Growth Hacking is AirBnB’s use of Craigslist in order to automatically post AirBnb’s listings to Craigslist. It was clever and ingenious, since Craigslist provided no API and there had to be some tough reverse engineering applied in order to execute it. The move brought massive traffic and recognition, and although Craig surely wasn’t particularly happy about it and now the integration is no longer possible, it was a great advantage that brought many users to the site. Worked well.

How to do that?


By observation, action and a bit of wit! You don’t have to be a programmer to be a growth hacker, but the understanding of technology is important in the process of envisioning and implementing strategies. Know what good funnel is, how to get customers and analyse every single step in terms of costs and revenue (we’re all StartUps here, we don’t want to spend thousands daily on Adwords. Well, maybe we do want it, but we can’t), know how to generate and try new ideas and has a big support of all the company behind them. This is quite important, since it is not the 1st, nor 2nd, nor 9th idea that will probably work, but rather the 99th. The guts to write ridiculous (or not) ideas, like:

• And if we change prices for a day?
  
  
• And if we make people tweet what they eat every Monday?
  
  
• And if we announce a nacional burrito day and invite 100 followers for burritos?
  
  
• And if we make people take actions in order to maintain their accounts?
  
  
• And if we say that unless 3 new referrals found, their accounts would be desactivated?
  
  
• And if we change the system and match people that do not match at all and see what happens?
  
  
• And if we set a clock for people to buy any other product upon purchase in 76 seconds with 76% of discount? Why 76? And why not?
  
  

My UX centered soul is shaking, but then again, why not? Not all of these are good and some are very bad, but being in between brilliant and evil is something every growth hacker should have. This is also why it is so important to have similar vision within the company on certain issues. Cutting the wings in here is cutting the potential for growth. And also, as Neil teaches us, many paper cuts can kill the competition, so it is not about one massive attack, but small battles being constantly won and summing up.