by Lauren Holliday Sep 24, ’15 in ahrefs blog
Ever wonder how startups with no marketing budgets pop up overnight?
Old people would tell you it’s through sales and marketing. Shane Snow would call it smartcutting, and Sean Ellis would say they growth hacked.
All of the above are correct, but growth hacking has become the popular term; therefore, we’ll stick with growth hacking.
Growth hacking is how startups like Tinder grew from 5,000 users to nearly 15,000 users virtually overnight. It’s how Product Hunt became, well, Product Hunt and how Airbnb became Airbnb.
The list of well-known startups that utilized hacks to rapidly grow their user base is endless.
From this post, you will learn how to leverage the 20 best known growth hacking concepts, tactics, strategies and scripts we’ve found to attract more users and earn more sales for your business.
But first, let’s go over the basics.
1. What is a growth hacker?
According to Andrew Chen,
Growth hackers are a hybrid of marketer and coder, one who looks at the traditional question of “How do I get customers for my product?” and answers with A/B tests, landing pages, viral factor, email deliverability, and Open Graph. On top of this, they layer the discipline of direct marketing, with its emphasis on quantitative measurement, scenario modeling via spreadsheets, and a lot of database queries.
2. How do you make someone think like a growth hacker?
Task an engineer to solve the problem of acquiring more users from x, y or z platform or community.
3. What can a growth hacker do for you?
Whether your startup or business is pre or post product/market fit (PMF), growth hackers will prove useful.
NOTE: According to Sean Ellis, achieving product/market fit requires at least 40 percent of users saying they would be “very disappointed” without your product.
If you’ve yet to reach this milestone, growth hackers can ensure virality is baked into your product. And for those of you who’ve already reached PMF, growth hackers can rev up the things you’re doing that’s working successfully.
4. Why is growth hacking so highly worshipped?
Thanks to “super-platforms,” like Apple and Facebook, startups now have access to more than 100 million consumers. This makes it very possible for new products to go from zero to tens of millions of users in a few short years.
Complete List of Famous Growth Hacks Every Startup Needs To Know
For your convenience, here’s a list of shortcuts if you would like to jump directly to any of these growth hacks: