Growth Hacking Magic?

Sean Ellis September 17, 2014

CEO of Qualaroo, GrowthHackers.com

Twitter @seanellis

Going Beyond the Hype to Take Your Business to the Next Level

About Me

• Founder/CEO of Qualaroo & GrowthHackers.com

• Previously VP Marketing for customer zero to NASDAQ IPO filing at LogMeIn and Uproar.com

• Then interim marketing exec roles at Dropbox, Lookout and Eventbrite

Extreme Competition for Attention

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Rapidly Evolving Channels

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WOM Email

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James Currier@seanellis

Yet Some Huge Startup Successes

Little or no traditional marketing…

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GROWTH HACKING MAGIC?

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No – Rigorous Process of Experimentation

1. Ideas

2.Prioritize

3.Test4.Analyze

5.Optimize

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The Dropbox Growth Story

• Freemium reduced allowable CPA

• Natural advantages to grow with collaboration and sharing

• Catalyze sharing with double sided referral program

• Optimize conversions on sharing loops

• 300 million users with no traditional marketing

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Desperation Drove Startups to Innovate

• Aggressive targets, tight resources

• Traditional approach not realistic

• Had to think rethink growth…

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The Growth Hacking Playbook

• Experiment with all available growth levers

• Understand what’s driving growth, test to improve it

• Heavy focus on product and optimization

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B2B or B2C?

• Growth hacking isn’t just for consumer-focused companies.

• B2B often requires integration with sales process.

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HubSpot’s Growth Hack – Free Tools

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Yammer – Engineered User-Get-User

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LinkedIn - Engineered User-Get-User

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PUTTING GROWTH HACKING TO WORK FOR YOUR BUSINESS

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Finding Your Own Growth Hacks

• Areas of exploration

• Process, team and tools

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Some Areas of Exploration

• Platform integrations

• Engineered user-get-user

• Free tools

Examples

25+ M users

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Areas of Exploration (Cont)

• Powered by

• Reverse engineer success

Examples

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Success Data: Airbnb’s Pro Photos

• Airbnb discovered that listings with high-quality photos received 2-3x bookings

• Airbnb invested in professional photography

• Booking activity explodes as desire increases

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Other Growth Studies for Inspiration

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Experimentation is Key to Success

• Generate many ideas for experiments

• Prioritize by impact, confidence & effort

• Balance high impact & high probability tests

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GOAL:INCREASED UNITS OF GRATIFICATION

Double Down on Success

• Challenge is not finding many channels that work, but rather finding one.

• Often your best growth opportunity is to double down what’s already working.

Growth Team Often Needed

• Multi-disciplinary

• Cross functional

• Evangelize experimentationculture

“Growth team” complements existing marketing team

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Some Helpful Tools• Analytics — Identify drop-off points and under-

performing pages (e.g. Google Analytics, KISSMetrics)

• Qualitative Insights — Uncover the why behind the numbers (e.g. Qualaroo, SurveyMonkey)

• A/B Test — Find better performing combinations to drive conversion rate (e.g. Hubspot, Optimizely)

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Relentless Execution of Growth Process

1. Ideas

2.Prioritize

3.Test4.Analyze

5.Optimize

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Key Takeaways

• Emerging marketing challenges require all to rethink growth

• Growth hacking is based experimentation, not silver bullets

• Add process/team to maximize number of experiments

• Get inspiration from data, VOC and what’s working for others

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Questions?

THANK YOU.Sean Ellis

CEO of Qualaroo & GrowthHackers.com

Twitter: @seanellis