Aaron Ginn's Thoughts

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Mon, 20 May 2013 15:34:30 -0700

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Usage is the only thing that matters

Sun, 12 May 2013 09:02:00 -0700

Usage is more important than design.

Usage is more important than architecture.

Usage is more important than marketing.

Usage is the only thing that matters.

A product dies from a lack of clarity, not for a lack of effort.

When I started building products, I started from the same blue sky mentality that plagues most entrepreneurs: we can build everything under the sun, instantly.

Resource scarcity always brings it back down to earth. In the real world, hard decisions have to be made on what projects should be funded and what will be left for another day.

How a team decides what to work determines a company’s life or death. Increasing usage should be the focus and the primary reason a project gets worked on.

The argument for framing all resource allocation under the lens of increasing usage is:

Without users, no one see your visual design.
Without users, no one will utilize your new feature.
Without users, there is no traffic for ops to manage.
Without users, there is no need for an API.

Usage is the currency for the life of a product. Increasing usage allows a team to continue to invest and grow. The above argument holds that a team should first invest in projects that move the needle. Anything that falls outside this paradigm is done when you have the time.

Focusing resources first on increasing usage does not mean design, infrastructure, operations, marketing, sales, etc are not important or should not be resourced. For example, your infrastructure needs to support the ability for a quick iteration cycle to improve usage. Down-time translates into zero active users.

Most product teams build feature after feature without going back and supporting the basics of what made the product successful in the first place. The most important point for a user is the pre-conversion experience (the visitor experience); however, these pages and product flows are often considered “boring” and “old news” by engineers, designers, and product managers. Despite the lack of enthusiasm, these projects tend to have the highest ROI.

All projects should be framed with the question, “How much will this increase usage?”. Usage should be translated into a metric, such as “number of new users” or “improving session length”.

Be very firm on quantifying the phrase ”moving the needle”. Predict what number will move and why. Compare the time horizon of each project and when you will see results. The longer you wait, the more users you are losing.

The primary motivating factor of everything you do should be to increase usage. If usage is low, you are doing the world a disservice. You are short-changing the world on the value you deliver.

6 company culture attitudes that kill growth

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 10:01:38 -0700

Company culture is the most undervalued strategy but significant dependency for success in developing a growth centric company. Technical talent and strategic focus are important to the success but skills and strategy can only take a company so far. A company must culturally reward growth.

When I meet with companies for growth advice, I like to ask the following questions and listen to what a company says and doesn’t say.

What do you value?

Typically: Growth.

Most companies say that they value growth. As Paul Graham says, “Startups = growth”. Growth is a tale-tell sign to spectators that what you are making is wanted. Growth shows signs of market opportunity and product-market fit.

How do you decide what to work on?

Typically: A mix of emotion, personal bias, and company lore.

Product planning is often driven by ego and lore rather than focusing on “mvp” driven development and predicting outcomes of iterations. Metrics should be known and adopted before any work gets started. The “why” needs to be set and smaller teams should figure out “how” and “what”.

What do you focus on?

Typically: “Product, marketing, infrastructure, data, customer service….”

Most companies focus on everything but growth. This outcome is caused by the fact that companies typically overcomplicate growth. Executives don’t believe that growth can be as simple as focusing on the registration page (as Andy Johns says, “growth is not sexy”). Companies tend to add unnecessary complexity to their product and strategy as they grow believing it contributes to their success.

How do you solve problems?

Typically: “The Founder tells the company and panic ensues.”

When there is a separation in vision between the top to the bottom of a company, problem solving, from bug fixes to product challenges, is driven by the top and creates a culture without personal responsibility. In this scenario, the bottom does not feel empowered to take action.

How do you hold people accountable?

Typically: “How the founder or executive feels about the person.”

One of the most undervalued drivers for growth is evaluating employee performance. How an employee performs is where culture and strategy meet. How leadership reacts to employee performance is a signal on what it values. Every good leader knows that the team is always watching and judging consciously and subconsciously.

How do you know if you are successful?

Typically: “Another round of funding or press.”

Companies often look to others to confirm their success. Funding rounds and press are easier ways to validate your work than looking at metrics. For evidence on how the press usually never has the whole story, take your neighborhood VC out for drinks and ask about their portfolio. You will be surprised to hear the difference between what is said in to the press and what is said in the board room.

Don’t by into the Silicon Valley false sense of security. The public square would like to make all of us believe that every other company other than our own is doing great. The press always reads as if “Everyone is doing awesome!”

If you find any of these growth inhibiting norms in your company, clean house and reset your company. Here are some resources that can help you build a good growth minded culture.

John Kotter - The Key To Changing Culture
Harvard Business School - The 10 Must Reads on Change Management
Michael Marquandt - Building the Learning Organization
Eric Ries - Lean Startup
How to Build a Growth Hacking Culture?

Facebook is losing ground to Google

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 17:32:40 -0700

As Facebook continues its expansion to be the largest internet service of all time, Facebook maybe losing the battle to Google in one of its core drivers of user growth, open standard for authentication or “OAuth”. From July 2012 to March 2013, Facebook Connect appears to be losing ground to Google Connect at an alarming rate due to losing user trust and preventing “spamming” a user’s Facebook friends.

A study done by Janrain, a third-party authentication service, shows Google Connect gaining ground over Facebook Connect as the preferred login and registration method.

As shown above, Google Connect is rising in popularity with users at the expense of Facebook Connect. Twitter and Yahoo are continuing on a downward trend, probably due to the low market share and unclear user benefit. Google Connect’s market share is growing, especially in media and consumer sites.

To add, I’ve heard in first-hand and second-hand accounts in the Valley that more startups are including both Facebook and Google Connect as a way to create an account. When these two options are given to a visitor, a majority choose Google over Facebook. The number one explanation I heard for this behavior was, “Users don’t want to spam their friends.”

Facebook has a rising problem with user trust. From a growth perspective, Google Connect has similar data benefits to Facebook, but Facebook still has superior value in the ability to post into the platform and actionable PDI.

The tide is shifting on public perception towards a Google strength: user trust.

Interview a Growth Hacker with Greg Tseng

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 09:02:00 -0700

When writing my TechCrunch series on growth hacking, I was very fortunate enough to chat with one of the legends on growth, Greg Tseng. Greg is the founder of Tagged, a social network for meeting new people. He has advised or worked at HomeRun, Flixster, Hi5, and LinkedIn. He has led numerous apps to over a million users.

Here is what Greg had to say about growth hacking.

What is growth hacking to you?

Growth hacking is a non-traditional approach to user acquisition, where you’re not focused on buying ads or other typical methods of marketing, but you’re instead examining ways to leverage your product and its technology to attract users.

How and where did you develop these skills?

During my junior year in college my co-founder Johann and I launched our first Web business, a price-comparison shopping engine for Harvard textbooks. During these days there wasn’t a lot of information available about user acquisition so we just learned as we went — and as two math-minded entrepreneurs, “growth hacking” came pretty naturally.

What type of questions would you ask yourself to determine if you are a growth hacker? (used)

Are you good with both sides of the brain (left with analytical, right with creative)? If you only have creative, you’ll never know how good your ideas are. If you only have analytical, then you’ll know precisely how bad your ideas are!

What are some of your favorite “tools” for growth hacking?

Each product/team requires a unique set of tools — and it usually makes the most sense to combine off-the-shelf external tools (e.g., Google Analytics, Web Site Optimizer, Kissmetrics, Kontagent and Mixpanel) with internal tools/data to get a deep understanding of what your users are doing.

Are growth hackers needed at all stages of a startup?

No. You need to find product-market fit before you try to grow. Early on, it’s good to think about how you could grow down the line, but first and foremost you should focus on the product. If you’re lucky, you might even discover natural viral elements within your product during this early stage.

How is growth hacking different from normal marketing? (used)

Traditionally, marketing has focused on external methods to attract users and gain momentum around a product. Growth hacking takes a more internal approach by merging creative and technical abilities to create user-growth mechanisms within the product itself.

How much technical chops do you think a growth hacker needs?

You need to have a strong technical understanding, but it’s more important that you’re well-rounded than being a renowned engineer. And if you don’t have access to a generalist “growth hacker,” form a team of people that make up the various attributes of tech, creative, analytics and product.

How would a growth hacker interact within a company?

They would be involved with anything that touches the product — working very closely with product, design, engineering and so on.

Ecquire on Growth

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 08:01:15 -0700

Converting a visitor to an active user is a difficult task. Most product teams focus on the initial landing page but forget one of the top activation strategies is a well-designed tutorial that encourages new users to complete key tasks that leads to activation.

When I signed up for Ecquire a few days ago (a tool that fixes outdated contact information in CRMs through detecting and capturing relevant data sources from all across the web), I was very impressed with the attention to detail and creativity in their activation flow, so I reached out to the team to hear their inspiration.

When a visitor signs up for an Ecquire account, a new user will notice the lack of a typical registration form. To start using Ecquire, there is no need to submit your email, give username, or create a password. “We wanted to have the best privacy and security as possible while having no restrictions on the new user funnel,” said Paul DeJoe, co-founder and CEO. That is very bold. “Our team did a great job of finding the best sequence to deliver on the flow of least resistance: no username, password, or sign up. Since we launched this, we’ve never been below 25.0% conversion from a visitor to user on our landing page.

The Ecquire team built their product as a Chrome app to balance security with an easy registration process. Despite having a low friction sign up flow, Ecquire ran into a user experience challenge with their technology of choice. A drop down modal appears when a visitor wants to install Ecquire. This modal is standard on all Chrome app installs. For Ecquire, this modal intimidates a visitor due to the permission phrase of “access your data on websites you visit”. This jolts a visitor into bailing due to the phasing. To solve this problem, the Ecquire team tested different phrases that read less obtrusive.

“Privacy is very important to us and this drop down was very frustrating because this is a catch-all warning for all Chrome apps, but we have no retain no user information on our end,” said DeJoe. “We found a way to get around it by adding more language about being the most secure app on Chrome on the download page.” When DeJoe and his team reinforced Ecquire’s privacy policy and protections, they saw a 30.7% jump in conversion on the download page.

After installing Ecquire, a visitor officially becomes an Ecquire user; however, new users sometimes failed to connect their experience on Ecquire.com to using the product day-to-day. “The old flow just told new users how to use our product but people did not get it,” said DeJoe. In response, the Ecquire team invested heavily in product tutorials to educate new users while using the product.

Ecquire offers two tutorials, Gmail and LinkedIn, for two of their main sources of registrations: SalesForce AppExchange and Highrise. Each respective new user referrals found value in Ecquire for different reasons. SaleForce users wanted to use Ecquire for LinkedIn contact hunting and Highrise users wanted a better way to organize contacts in Gmail.

Selecting the Gmail tutorial opens a user’s Gmail account in a new tab with an injected modal to “Start the tour”. The first step in the tutorial educates a new user on the core experience and provides more information on the new user to Ecquire. A new email window pops open with pre-filled text and the email address of Toan Dang, Ecquire’s Chief Marketing Office. In this flow, a new user is learning a core product interaction and connecting their respective email address to a their account, which is not required to download Ecquire.

“The tradeoff is a higher number of users and a user relationship without asking for an email,” said DeJoe. “Sending an email as part of the tutorial shows how the product works and creates a relationship with us at the same time. Win, win.” The Ecquire team played their weakness (Chrome apps do not require email to register) into a strength. Since implementing this flow, sending email campaigns to their new user base has not been a problem.

After sending an email to the Ecquire team, the next step introduces the Ecquire bar with a step-by-step guide. Ecquire’s initial product was focused only the Ecquire bar (above), which appealed to Gmail and Highrise users. “We had thought that our core product was our Ecquire Bar, but we found 80.0% of our users utilized the Ecquire button on a regular basis,” said Dang.

Ecquire can collect contact information from almost any user profile on the web, from Zerply to Quora, with the Ecquire button, but the Ecquire button was secondary in the mind of the team to the Ecquire bar. This assumption was wrong and the Ecquire button was growing rapidly in popularity. “The crazy thing is that we never even told users about our Ecquire button. They discovered it themselves,” added Dang. This trend mattered to the bottom line.

“We saw that users were getting the most value from pulling contact info from LinkedIn via the Ecquire button,” said DeJoe. “Heavy LinkedIn utilization typically translates into a paying subscription.” The Ecquire team built a LinkedIn tutorial to increase the likelihood of a user upgrading to a paying account and using the Ecquire button.

Since implementation of the LinkedIn tutorial, the utilization of the Ecquire button has increased 75.0% over the course of a month. By understanding what their users really want, the Ecquire team saw an increase in the number of users upgrading accounts.“We only recently started optimizing for LinkedIn but the results are very promising,” said Dang.

After focusing on the new user experience for a several months, the Ecquire’s team investment is paying off. The number of new users who finish the tutorial is now 97.0%. Activation of new users improved from 48.0% to 58.0% and overall retention of new users improved by 81.3%. “Our team focuses on the entire funnel, from acquisition to revenue,” said DeJoe. “Reducing every constraint we could during the onboarding process has been critical to our growth.”

While focusing on priming new users on a landing page is crucial, heavily investing in activating users with product education will pay dividends in your long-run growth.

Benchmarking Mobile App Retention

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 03:01:22 -0800

Most of entrepreneurs haughtily think that their product is unique, but at the market level, undeniable trends emerge in how people use categorically similar products. It is important for a good growth strategy to understand how your retention and session frequency compares to your peers. Knowing this will highlight your product’s strengths and weaknesses.

Last week, Flurry released an updated benchmark for mobile app retention and session frequency based upon sampling of thousands of applications that can be used to baseline user behavior and focus a growth strategy.

Quadrant 1 - High retention, High usage

According to Flurry data, news and communication apps are the only two app categories that have high retention and weekly usage. Communication is the primary use case for a mobile phone. Though most of us forget, mobile phones were first invented to call people on the go. After communication, news apps fill the second most common use case in allowing users to remain up to date on the world around them.

One of the best growth strategies for communication apps is to utilize a mobile phone’s address book to send out invitations. News apps are typically single-player experiences and usually don’t require registration to use. News apps often grow based upon their market mindshare and user-to-user sharing.

Quadrant 2 - Low retention, High usage

This quadrant is marked by high initial usage and high churn. It is not surprising that social games fall into this quadrant; however, it is surprising that social networking apps lie in this quadrant. Social networking apps are essentially glorified communication platforms. Despite a social networking application’s additional product layers (think Facebook vs. Voxer), it seems that these enhancements do not retain a mobile user better than communication apps in the aggregate.

To grow an app in this quadrant requires a lot of new user thru-put. Companies in this category might build “thrown away” applications to pancake each app on top of each other to find growth. The game in this quadrant is to remain fresh in the mind of the market as stale translates into death. User’s fade away quickly but are eager to switch to the next new thing. Zynga ranks towards the top in implementing this type of growth strategy. Zynga burns through game after game to keep user engagement high.

Quadrant 3 - Low retention, Low usage

In quadrant three, growth is the hardest. The most common user behavior in this quadrant “one then done”. This is a crowded quadrant with popular app categories such as health and fitness, personalization, media apps, and daily deals. Apps in this quadrant typically only need one or two sessions to solve the primary use case. For example, looking up information on a virus or purchasing a daily deal takes only one session. These apps struggle at delivering continuous value to a user.

These apps require loads of thru-put to grow. Since retention is so low, these apps are not afraid of burning a user relationship to keep thru-put high. These apps don’t expect a large level of user loyalty.

Quadrant 4 - High retention, Low usage

Quadrant four applications are utilities. These apps typically lack a social layer and are designed for a single-player experience. User retention is very high because these apps solve a particular problem very, very well. They have a high level of user trust and are known as the go-to destination to solve a specific problem.

Quadrant four applications typically have a flattish growth curve due to a low viral coefficient and a low session frequency. Despite this disadvantage, their growth trajectory is stable and predictable.

User behavior is changing. Mobile app sessions typically reflect a “snacking” behavior. Sessions are short but frequent. On the web, a user is typically engrossed with a full screen with the only distraction being another opened tab (and Facebook). In mobile, it is a two sided coin: a user can lose focus quickly due to external events but are more forgiving in delayed gratification.

Be mindful of how your mobile users behave. They probably desire something very different than your web users.

Two ways to look at growth

Sun, 17 Feb 2013 19:34:11 -0800

“Growth hacking” is reaching into the mainstream mindset. Recently, Seth Godin wrote a post on the renewed focus of growth and cited one of my TechCrunch articles. As more and more companies are looking to recruit and form a growth team, it is essential to understand the needs of each company and to spend time on strategies that will have a significant impact on the numbers. Growth strategies fall into two meta-categories: pouring traffic into the funnel and optimizing the flow of traffic inside the funnel.

The most talked about element of growth is virality and new user acquisition. Both of these elements focus on thru-put in the funnel and less on the funnel itself.

Traffic comes into the top of the funnel (the curve represented above) and flows through. As time passes, users gradually drop off, due to product friction and user interest. The most common strategies to get people to the door is through open social networks, SEO, and user-to-user invites. Increasing the number of visitors coming to the front of the door has a direct impact on the bottom line.

The second meta-category relates to new user activation and retention. The focus is on bending the curve outward and creating a more efficient funnel.

As visitors pass through the funnel, a majority will leave. Optimizing landing pages, registration forms, and new user experiences improves the likelihood a visitor will covert or user will retain. This has a compound effect on growth. Successful iterations found inside the funnel translates into more users with the same amount of work.

Optimizing inside the funnel tends to have a lower bang for the buck than pouring more traffic into the funnel. Finding a new spicket for growth on the top of the funnel does run the risk of acquiring low quality new users, but at the very least you have a new user’s email. On the flip side, pouring traffic in the top typically lowers overall retention.

The goal of growth is to spread the word on a product and get out of the way of a user trying to fall in love with your product. Focusing on both pouring in more traffic and optimizing inside the funnel is very difficult. Sometimes a win in one camp translates into a loss in another camp. Focusing on the curve or the number of people flowing through the curve defines what a growth hacker or growth team will do day-to-day.

Everyone should be replaceable

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 07:01:00 -0800

Startup founders are required by an unspoken law to repeat the mantra, “I only hire A-players”. The desire to find and employ the best talent is grounded in minimizing team risk and fostering the best environment for growth. The wrong team can destroy a startup’s fragile culture and slow the team down, which threatens the life of a startup.

No company should hire the wrong team willfully; however, like Moneyball, what matters is how your team interacts with each other and rather than the individual talent of each team member. Don’t hire A-players blinding but hire for your culture, the needs of your team, and the long-run health of your company.

My mother once told me, “Everyone in your company should be replaceable, even yourself. Otherwise, you are not doing your job right.” Most of children dismiss parental advice but when your mom is an executive at a 1000+ company valued in the billions, a wise child would take their parent’s advice quite seriously.

From the CEO down to a junior analyst, it is unhealthy for an organization to depend on a single individual to succeed, whether its a cultural or execution dependency. It is not scalable and bottle necks forward momentum. No one employee should be irreplaceable as it sets a company up for failure. It is an unnecessary risk and holds a company’s future hostage.

When Chamath Palihapitiya left Facebook’s growth team, he said, “my team did not miss a beat.” Top talent tries to work themselves out of a job because they are in the business of solving problems and creating value for their team, not their ego.

Another risk of A-players is ego. A-players can function either like a guiding light or like a vampire that takes life from their co-workers. Vampire star employees are dangerous. They are hostile to challenges to their ego and have a win at all costs attitude towards the world. Being an A-player is not just driving for results but executing in a sustainable way that gels with the team’s culture.

Vampire star employees feel threatened by making their team less dependent on their skills, so they often create cliques and every decision is contentious. These type of A-players may solve skill based problems but create new culture-based problems.

The best way to hire top talent is to put culture first, not skills. All companies are built upon social interaction. Vampire employees consume social capital and create toxic environments, while the best employees create it and share it freely.

Take a cure from Billy Beane, the main subject of Moneyball. Recruit talent that will create a greater competitive advantage when they work together. Focusing just on individual skills will not be a winning strategy. Don’t rely on single individuals for the life or death of your company. Startups cannot afford this type of risk. Higher smart and people of good character, but realize that life happens. People come and go for various reasons. Don’t look for A-players to ~~save~~ grow your company, look towards your team.

Interview a growth hacker with Mike Greenfield

Sat, 02 Feb 2013 07:01:00 -0800

Practically understanding and implementing growth can be a real challenge. I sat down recently in sunny Palo Alto with Mike Greenfield, Growth Hacker-In-Residence at 500 Startups and co-founder of Circle of Moms, to talk about living a growth minded culture and his work experience at some of the fastest growing companies in the valley. Here is what he had to say.

Tell me about your past and how you came to be a growth hacker.

I wouldn’t necessarily call myself a growth hacker, but I’ve certainly come to appreciate the importance of growth, and I understand a number of the dynamics that make it happen.

LinkedIn hired me when they had 250,000 users and the scale of their data was becoming interesting. Reid and company knew that virality and growth were important and that data would be valuable, and they brought me on to help formalize that. At the time, there were no cleanly defined terms like “growth hacker” or “data scientist”, so I was figuring things out as I went along (and going back and forth between being growth-y and scientist-y).

LinkedIn was where I really started to understand the dynamics of growth. I spent a lot of time figuring out what was convincing users to sign up for the product and what channels were effective at bringing them back. I became a big advocate of A/B testing within the company, and I tried to encourage others to focus on the little non-flashy pieces of a product that can facilitate growth. I reluctantly wrote copy that I thought could make emails more effective, but I never took that on full force.

I left LinkedIn in 2007 and started a company that initially built a Facebook app called Circle of Friends (similar to what Google would later launch as Google Circles) and then morphed into Circle of Moms. As co-founder and CTO for Circle of Friends and Circle of Moms, I was writing code and writing copy, and thus directly structuring products so that they could grow. I came to deeply understand many aspects of growth: how to structure a signup flow, what people will and won’t click on, how to build an A/B testing system, and lots more.

How would you describe growth hacking?

To me, growth hacking means doing what it takes to drive product usage and distribution. Product marketing is part of it, but it also requires a facility with data, an understanding of underlying technology, and an intuition around how to get people to use a product more. To be good at growth, it helps to be metrics-driven and iterative.

How does a growth hacker fit into a team?

It depends the makeup of the team and their needs. It’s important that the person or people who are focused on growth are encouraged by the company leaders to make changes and take intelligent risks. That’s easier if one of the founders understands growth him or herself.

Does a growth hacker need technical chops?

The ideal small company growth hacker is someone who can build product, implement A/B tests, and iterate independently. That person can iterate quickly and not be slowed down by other parts of the team.

In a larger company, it may make sense to have a growth team of people with complementary skills.

What is the most essential tool to a growth hacker?

Anything that will allow depth of understanding of how people are using a product and how/where they’re coming in. I’m not one for fancy tools, so for me that’s often a MySQL command line.

Are growth hackers needed at all stages of a startup?

It’s important that consumer-focused companies understand the dynamics of growth at all stages. Early on, it’s most important to get the big stuff right, but you don’t necessarily need to be as sophisticated about measuring and tweaking. If and when you start to get scale, the little stuff becomes more important and it’s useful to have someone who can tweak and optimize well.

How is growth hacking different from normal marketing?

To me, marketing is about applying a certain set of techniques — describing and telling people about a product — for a variety of reasons (growth, branding, etc.). Marketing is becoming more metrics driven in response to the amount of data available and resourcefulness of entrepreneurs, and there’s a subset of marketing that’s also a subset of growth hacking.

However, growth hacking is about the end goal (the metric), not about a specific skill set. And the best growth hackers are those who can figure out and apply the right techniques to meet a business goal. That might entail building out optimization technology, digging into data, or redesigning a signup flow, and I’d argue that none of those things would typically fall under the realm of a marketing team.

What advice to you have for startups who want to growth?

If you’re a small team, focus on one or two metrics at most. For example, spend the next couple of months trying to keep new users engaged. That’s a more manageable problem than increasing the number of monthly uniques, and it’s more likely to lead to something sustainable.

Second, discipline is a big piece of growth. The term “growth hacking” seems to imply that there’s some magic elixir that will make you grow. There have been one or two cases where this was true for a company, but more often it was lots of little things that led to a good product that had the right dynamics for bringing on and retaining users.

Interview a growth hacker with Matt Humphrey

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 10:31:00 -0800

I sat down with Matt Humphrey, co-founder of HomeRun and now VP of Merchandise at Rearden Commerce, to talk about growth hacking and how to keep a growth-focused culture in a rapidly expanding company. Matt team’s growth strategy ultimately led to a viral product and a strong exit. His complete interview is below.

What is growth hacking?

Growth hacking is acquiring, retaining, and monetizing users more effectively. A growth hacker is an individual who can, from end-to-end, collect data, ideate, plan, execute, and deploy the necessary tactics and strategies to hit goals.

How did you develop these skills?

I developed these skills tuning interesting and novel viral loops with Andrew Chen back in 2008, building on the Facebook platform from 2009-2010, and engineering email list growth in 2011 at my company Homerun.

What type of questions would you ask yourself to determine if you are a growth hacker?

Here are some questions I would ask myself.

Do I know how to measure viral loops, customer retention, engagement, and expected user LTV?
Do I pull data for myself right out of the database and/or build my own dashboards?
Can I design (actually produce HTML of) a landing page that converts 2x my current one?
Can I look at ABtests.com score myself well with reasonable intuition on conversion tactics?
Are you obsessed with getting a viral coefficient over 1.0?
Are you lobbying for distribution-focused features getting on the product roadmap?
Are you operating at the CEO/CTO level or do you have direct access to them as needed?
Do you get the urge to do “grey” or “black”-hat type of tactics to boost growth?
Do you actually know where the threshold of aggression of tactics should be that you don’t cross?
Have you ever gotten into trouble and/or has users complain for growing too aggressively?
Are you constantly checking for changes in FB/Twitter/Email/Pinterest/Tumblr… “platform rules”?
Can you recite the ToS’s of said platforms in your sleep?
Do you get upset when people don’t solve product disputes with data?
Do you zealously push a culture of metrics, improvement, and accountability?

What are some of your favorite “tools” for growth hacking?

Some of my favorite tools for growth allow me to quickly gather data or quickly test ideas.

Facebook (or any other platform) developer APIs
MySQL (or any other database) console
An A/B testing framework (usually homegrown) for measuring impact
Rails/Django or something that let’s you build and iterate fast as can be
Protovis or similar visualization libraries
Nuanced platform tactics toolbox (ie: pull FB photos to determine best friends

Are growth hackers needed at all stages of a startup?

I would break out the growth needs by headcount.

0-3 headcount: A growth hacker designs the early product around inherent distribution models. A growth hacker knows you “can’t just add growth later” and sets data-focused culture. This phase is probably the most important phase to get right. Growth comes from a solid culture.

4-9 headcount: A growth hacker gets a company to the first hundred thousand of users using scrappy tactics. It is difficult to find fast growth in this stage without scrappy growth hacks. This tactic allows a company to validate the idea and the company’s go-to-market strategy, raise a round of funding, and begin to scale.

10-24 headcount: A growth hacker understands how to achieve business goals and focuses on metrics that matter. In this stage, a growth hacker focuses on acquisition cost, retention, and lifetime value to turn a profit. A growth hacker will aggressively pursue month-to-month progress on core business metrics. His goal is to get a company to a “rocket-ship” or “just-add-water” type of growth and unit-economics.

25-99 headcount: At this stage of growth, a growth hacker ensures a culture of data and scales the growth strategy. At this level of growth, a growth hacker probably should form a team around himself to protect those ideals. A growth hacker/ growth team operationalizes growth into all aspects of company’s operations. This phase is about “adding water” to grow the business.

100+ headcount: This stage of growth has a lot of strategy. A growth hacker and growth team prevents growth from slowing on the micro and macro levels. They consider channel-specific limitations and burnout. They stays ahead of the curve with new channels and explores new features to hedge bets. At this stage, a growth hacker and growth team would consider internationalization and outside the initial target market.

How is growth hacking different from normal marketing?

The easiest way to answer this question is if you only do one of the following, you are not a growth hacker:

Manage an AdWords account
Do “social media” and manage a FB/Twitter/Pinterest/Tumblr page
Design banner ads
Create a company’s branding or logo
Generates ideas for consumer value propositions
Builds landing pages
Pulls data from MySQL for the CEO when asked
Engineer user-facing features
Generate weekly email campaigns in MailChimp
Put a “share this” button on your homepage
Add alt tags to images for a tiny SEO boost

Growth hacking is a holistic approach to engineer distribution from idea to planning, to execution, to measurement, and to iteration. Growth hackers need to have end-to-end control and be tweaking on a daily, if not hourly, basis. It’s not just one or two of the traditional 5-10 marketing “roles” put together with a little coding ability. This is short sighted and misses the real benefits of a growth hacker. Growth hackers optimize the entire business from end-to-end. They know what drives consumers continually to the product and into their wallets.

The best growth hackers are engineers smart enough to understand data but normal enough to understand basic psychological triggers of what makes people tick. They are aggressive enough to exploit these triggers to the extreme for growth.

How much technical chops do you think a growth hacker needs?

Most growth hackers that I know actively code backend and front. At a bare minimum is a moderate understanding of technical limitations and requirements.

In testing, everything is a tradeoff. It’s critically important to know the timing and cost of anything you want to build. There are a lot of wrinkles in platforms or under-exploited features that require intimate knowledge of a platform. Building something that is high cost with low reward slows growth and misses opportunities.

Furthermore, if someone is non-technical, the number of handoffs increases and the process slows down. It most effective when someone can take end-to-end control and be trusted by the CEO/CTO (or be the CEO/CTO) to do a good job.

How would a growth hacker interact within a company on a day-to-day basis?

A growth hacker is running experiments on a daily basis. They are syncing with the product team to ensure that the product is built with distribution in mind. They are syncing with management to understand larger company goals, company values they cannot compromise and to attain buy-in for the strategies. They are syncing with the engineering team to ensure they have the resources needed and are following protocol without too much red tape. In general, a growth hacker should spend 25% of time ideating, 50% of time building, and 25% of time measuring.

Grow like Tumblr: mobile registration flow

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 07:01:00 -0800

With approximately 20 billion page views a month and 30% page view growth year-over-year, Tumblr is growing and vibrant content community (this blog is hosted on Tumblr). Tumblr has invested heavily in its mobile product to drive this growth.

In the following post, I will be detailing Tumblr’s mobile registration strategy which is at the heart of its recent page view growth.

Mobile Landing Page

Opening a freshly downloaded Tumblr app presents a welcoming, clean stream of images. From the title, Tumblr communicates to a new visitor that its a community about creativity. The stream of images also includes a handful of gifs, which gives the stream a low-cost, vivid feel. The landing page is infinitely scrollable and explorable in a visitor experience.

Despite a explorable stream, the preeminence of the main two call-to-actions (“CTAs”), “Log in” and “Sign up”, probably drives most visitors into the logged-in user experience over exploring in the logged-out visitor experience. Both of these CTAs are close to the right thumb, the most typically used finger for mobile navigation.

There are some risks with a dynamic landing page. When the images fail to load quickly, a new visitor can have a sub-par first experience.

Select Interests

The first ask in the registration flow is selecting your interests. Tumblr avoids starting out with a high effort ask. Instead, it builds up several low effort asks as means of developing user investment to minimize drop off in the final steps. By starting with interest selection, more visitors are willing to go down the registration flow.

Suggested interests seem to be ordered randomly. Two interests tiles at the top are auto-selected, but at this point in the flow, Tumblr has no data about me to accurately select these interests. These are shots in the dark. Most likely, Tumblr is using this technique to demonstrate how to select interests and leveraging a user’s “sense of justice” to engage in the flow.

The title of the page frames selecting interests as means of finding Tumblr users rather than for personal edification (like a recommendation engine). Interest selection in Tumblr is designed to setup an interest/social network graph. As a mode of insurance, Tumblr auto-selects interests to try to assure that the next step in on-boarding (Following Tumblr users) is relevant and launches. Otherwise, selecting no interests skips this key step.

Suggested Tumblr Users

After selecting interests, Tumblr suggests relevant users to follow. These suggested users are probably very active Tumblers. Promoting active Tumblers to follow opens two opportunities: user-to-user notifications and priming desirable community social norms to a new user.

User-to-user notifications are deemed higher quality to a user over a message from the webmaster. These notifications are deemed authentic and relevant. You can only send so many product updates and weekly recommendations. By following active users, the number of possible email notifications is far greater.

Promoting active Tumblr users also primes a new user of the quality of the community and allows a new user to consume content. Most new users consume and don’t want to contribute to the community at sign up. They want to see how the party is going before they jump in.

In the header of the page, the CTA “Follow” efficiently includes the number of selected users (auto-followed of course!) that will be followed.

Interestingly, the progress bar/dots have not progressed even though one page has already passed. Obviously, there are more than three pages in Tumblr’s registration flow. Instead the progress bar is divided into three stages: follow interests, find friends, and high effort submission. This is an interesting technique to make the flow feel shorter.

Find Friends

Tumblr combines finding friends via address book and Facebook into one step. Most find friend flows separate these two data sources into different paths. In other mobile apps, finding friends from multiple data sources typically requires going back a step and repeating the process again and again. This is a nice simplification.

After connecting either your address book or Facebook account, Tumblr finds your contacts that are Tumblr users and auto-selects them to follow.

Registration

After Tumblr’s find friends flow, a modal appears over the landing page with the high effort ask of email and password. There is no header and the phrase “sign up” is minimized to the grey out completion button. The progress bar UI also disappears (I assume I am in the final step?).

Entering information is rather painless. The mobile keyboard automatically appears to fill in the space beneath the modal, so the modal feels supported. A new user’s username auto attaches their personalized Tumblr URL.

“Next” is dropped from the completion CTA. Intriguingly selecting “Close” dumps a registering visitor back to step one and the information invested into the new user profile is lost.

Age and Terms of Service

Submitting your age is painless and quite creative. Most apps use Apple’s native date picker UI. Tumblr only asks you to enter your age (the information that really matters to them for legal reason), not your birthday.

The “Next” success CTA rears its head again, but the “Sign up” success CTA disappears.

Profile Picture

Uploading a profile picture is one of the most challenging aspects of completing a user profile. Drop offs are usually very high (50-70% are not uncommon); however, user generated profile photos are correlated with higher engagement and higher retention. For moving metrics, a user generated profile photo really makes a difference.

The profile picture UI is slightly intrusive but having a real photo is critical for quality user investment. No one wants to see a bunch of Tumblr avatar profile photos in their stream. It makes a user profile feel shallow and empty. Imagine seeing a LinkedIn profile with no user generated profile photo; you automatically question its authenticity.

Home Feed

Once new users finish the registration process, they land in their home feed.

After a minimum of 15 clicks, a visitor can turn into a new Tumblr user.

Tumblr’s registration flow is medium to high in terms of effort. There is a lot of up front investment. Rather than trying to leverage behavior later in the new user experience, Tumblr’s heavier upfront investment is more likely to produce a retained user. The opposite strategy would be to minimize the number of steps it takes to move a visitor to a new user. This strategy works well if your magic moment is not highly dependent on information unique to a user. Tumblr needs data from a user to create the magic moment.

Tumblr’s overall experience is slick but not ground breaking. There are some pitfalls: there is a lack of standards in button placement and CTA language. There is no activation flow after registration. My hunch is that Tumblr’s mobile app is most likely a retention play. Since Tumblr has position its product messaging as a creative, inspiration social network with a blogging spice over just a blogging platform, content consumption is a higher priority activity on mobile than contribution, though some brave ones fearless write posts on their mobile phone.

If you would like your product to be featured and reviewed, please send me an email with the details of your product to aginnt @ gmail.

Grow like Facebook: onboarding and activation

Mon, 10 Dec 2012 06:01:00 -0800

Facebook is one of the best at turning new users into active users. With 1/6th of the world a Facebook user, Facebook has set a high bar for activation and its team is rapidly spreading the gospel of growth (here are some notes on Facebook’s overall growth strategy from the Growth Hacker’s Conference).

Every good activation strategy optimizes the new user experience (“NUX”) to reach the “magic moment” as fast as possible. The “magic moment” is a point in the NUX when a user surpasses a metric and is far more likely to be retained. This metric varies from product to product. For Facebook, the magic moment is seven friends in ten days for a new user.

In the following paragraphs, I will break out Facebook’s on-boarding and activation strategy to see how they motivate new users to reach the magic moment as fast as possible.

The signup Facebook landing page is straight forward and contains a naked long signup form. Most inbound marketers and product gurus would probably revolt if this was their landing page. The form feels long. There is no compelling call-to-action and the design is uninspiring.

Despite the landing page’s rough appearance, Facebook has an advantage that other startups do not have: a household name. Most likely, the majority of Facebook’s new users are converting through a user-to-user action and not through the above landing page. Any visitor that stumbles onto this landing page has already been primed by Facebook’s billion active user base.

The focus of this landing page is the login form via top-right of the page. When a visitor lands on this page, the cursor moves to the email submission field in the login form. This cursor movement denotes that this landing page is designed to convert users not visitors to a action (to log in not to signup).

If a visitor does convert into a new user from this landing page, they will enter a robust on-boarding flow. After a visitor fills out the naked form, the next ask in the funnel is to search your address book to find email addresses that matches a Facebook user’s email address.

In a clever UX move, Facebook passes the email address from the previous step and places the address in the relevant email hosting service. For example, I signed up with GMail thus, Facebook placed my email in the GMail address book search. All it takes is one click to search. The call-to-action to search uses the phrase “Find Friends” which is mentally in-line with the purpose of the page.

As a tidbit, take a look at the use of the phrase “Save and Continue” as the progress button. In the far right, the normal Facebook avatar appears as if you were an active user. This word choice and the avatar sends a sense of ownership in the NUX.

If the search fails, an infographic appears that explains how to manually upload a file of emails.

Since the GMail account I was using to register did not have any contacts, Facebook did not pull in a list of suggested friends in the following step of the flow. If I did have an address book full of contacts, Facebook would immediately suggest possible friends to ask to be their friend.

Rather than displaying “No friends on Facebook” (because that just sounds lame and lonely), Facebook moves on to the next step to recommend friends based upon more targeted data.

Based upon a new user’s networks and general demographic information, Facebook suggests possible friends in the following flow. In example below, I submitted Princeton as my school network and received the following friend results.

As opposed to shooting from the hip with the cheap data from the landing page, Facebook gathers more information from a new user who does not have an address book to produce relevant suggestions. The most pressing goal in activation is to form connections on Facebook as fast as possible. Irrelavant or zero friend suggestions sends negative feedback to a new user. A new user will probably think in their mind, “None of my friends are on here. Why should I be on here then?”.

After adding a profile photo (which is very important for retention), the on-boarding process places a new user in Facebook’s core product with some growth tweaks. Facebook alters the experience to drive home to the magic moment: seven friends in ten days.

The step-by-step guide proceeding the on-boarding flow walks a new user through the privacy settings on posting and adding friends. On the top right bar next to the user’s avatar, a “Find Friends” call-to-action is added. The inherently distracting chat screen and mini-facebook are minimized.

By selecting “Home”, Facebook’s ad bar is removed and replaced with a “People You May Know” suggestion box. The UI has a larger than normal call-to-action and user photo when compared to a retained Facebook user’s friend suggestions UI. It is more important for a new user to add friends now, rather than later.

Facebook also uses feature call outs to educate a new user. These features also have a retention focus. For example, Facebook called out a Princeton Facebook group and auto opted me into the group. I identified Princeton as my university in on-boarding. I guess Facebook has not strayed far away from the importance of college connections in activation.

The “Find Friends” button in the top bar links to an in-product email address book search that is similar to the one found in the on-boarding process.

Facebook expands the number of channels a new user can search for existing friend on Facebook, even including Skype as an option to search. In this flow, the right side bar is removed and replaced with motivational text to reduce distractions.

When a new user returns to Facebook, the newsfeed is re-structured with friend suggestions, probably until that magic number is reached. At this point in the screenshot below, “Becca” (my new user) is several weeks old with three friends in non-concentric networks. Notice the additional motivational text of using my existing friend network to form connections. Facebook is using social recollection to encourage you to connect by narrowing the possibilities.

Timeline also includes a “People You May Know” box at the top.

Despite the number of scenarios, the on-boarding and activation flow have a single focus: get you to form connections on Facebook as fast as possible. Once those connections are formed on Facebook, Facebook uses email notifications and social exhaust from your friend network to pull you back into the service. Their strategy is thoughtful and very detailed. This is what it takes to get to a billion users in less than a decade.

What iteration means for your organization

Fri, 23 Nov 2012 15:25:00 -0800

“Iterative” is a regularly used term for those that follow the agile and lean development philosophy. The base meaning of iterative is to simply do repeatedly, over and over. Though iterative is a colloquial word in the Valley, the tactical application is often forgotten. Iterative tactically means to efficiently learn and make better decisions with a low cost when mistakes are made.

To iterate means to learn faster.

As iterations build, organizations learn faster and have a stronger foundation in data. Teams that don’t use data in making product decisions usually have two reasons: it requires more work and more introspection into an individual’s intuition (self-analysis).

As Mark Suster writes, entrepreneurs have a habit of doing rather than thinking + doing. Ironically, teams that do not have an iterative mindset still value speed; they just don’t realize that they are their own worse enemy. Not using an iterative mindset causes the following problems:

Resource waste: no one wants what you are building; thus you miss company goals.
Energy waste: mentally, employees only have so many iterations in them before they lose hope.
Time waste: it takes longer to build product that is not iterative (aka feature creep).
Overtly risky: large releases put too many eggs in one basket; thus it can be hard to tell why a product did not work.
Team bickering: Without small iterations, people see only a few opportunities to get their amazing ideas built; thus more energy is spent on political power maneuvering than focusing on real objectives.

When working in a team with a low coefficient of learning, the best strategy is to push the team to do more with instrumentation. By pushing for faster deployments, the organization will start breaking down projects into minimum builds. This will naturally result in a testing and data mindset. A team will start to ask themselves the right questions to scrub out unnecessary features. Feature creep is easier to spot.

Egos become less of a problem. Egos are deflated with two tactics based in an iterative mindset:

“Our previous iterations did not/ did validate your {fill in the blank}.”
“We can test {fill in the blank} in the next iteration.”

The reality is that egos prefer not to ship. Shipping requires execution (which is hard) and exposure to failure (which feels uncomfortable). The riskiest thing to do as a team is to not ship. “Ship often. Ship lousy stuff, but ship. Ship constantly,” said Seth Godin.

“Shipping” is a synonym of “iterative”. Failures with a slow moving, data-less product are big. Failures with an iterative team are small and doesn’t hurt the underlying business. With each shipment/ iteration, a team can learn from successes and failures and apply them to the next round, which spans days not weeks.

Everyone is embarrassed by their first product. If you are not embarrassed, you are not doing something right. To be pixel perfect is for those who have market share and make millions in revenue a year. Being a quick and iterative team is the single greatest advantage every startup has over the establishment.

Own this advantage. Iterate. Otherwise, you will lose the battle and the war.

4 reasons why growth hackers came to be

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 06:00:42 -0700

The buzz on “growth hacking” has spread all across the world. Classes on growth hacking are being taught in Singapore. Companies from San Francisco to London are recruiting growth hackers. The first Growth Hacking Conference popped up a few weeks ago. This rapid craze beseeches an explanation. Why has growth hacking so strongly resonated with the startup community?

One explanation is that “growth hacking” is just a catchy way to rebrand marketers, but this begs the question as to why “growth hacking” went viral in the first place. The real answer is that the phrase “growth hacking” caught fire because of its particular emphasis on growth, which determines the life and death of every startup.

Startups are facing growth challenges that were not apparent a few years ago. The platitude “build it and they will come”—made popular by the movie Field of Dreams—has since died and is now an antique of the dot-com era. Growth hacking has resonated in the startup community due to today’s growth challenges: new channel creation, channel saturation, the “best product” fallacy and “product-growth” fit.

Channel Instability

The creation and destruction of channels is a common occurrence today. In early 2012, Pinterest became an overnight sensation and is now a major source of traffic for women-focused sites. This month, Facebook released a new site-wide paid promotion feature. On the other end of the spectrum, MySpace, Delicious, Digg, Friendster and numerous others are all hallmarks of how quickly growth can unravel.

Deloitte’s Shift Index, which tracks economic competitiveness, has shown a long-run decline in a firm’s ability to retain market leadership. Over the course of the past decade, a firm’s lifespan as a market leader has fallen by an average of between five and seven years. This shift occurred due to the rapid pace of innovation with the onset of the Internet, the proliferation of information and the empowerment of consumers with a mind-numbing number of choices.

Firms across industries have struggled to keep pace with this instability, as new channels usually result in market encroachment. A new channel presents both opportunities and dangers to market leaders. Growth opportunities are large with new channels but doors can open and close very quickly. Market leaders maybe left behind.

Channel Saturation

For every one successful company, there are several other bright and savvy startups trying to solve the same market problem but in a different way. With the cost of starting and running a startup at all time lows, it is now easier than ever to attempt to take market share.

From this competitive market, existing channels tend to go through cycles from newness—rapid, cheap growth—to saturation—slow, expensive growth. For example, Viddy’s and SocialCam’s integration with the newly released Facebook OpenGraph explains the majority of their rapid growth.

But this door quickly closed: Facebook changed the OpenGraph’s parameters due to, in its view, a bad user experience with over-optimized and aggressive video posting. Since this change in the OpenGraph, both products have seen their traffic decline.

Paid advertising channels follow the same pattern. Andrew Chen said CTRs have fallen from a high of 78 percent in 1994 (via HotWire) to .05 percent CTR on Facebook in 2011. Whether free or paid, a successful distribution channel typically becomes saturated quickly as competitors jump in. These channels will eventually run their courses and flat line, producing diminishing returns, until a market player rethinks how the channel is utilized for greater arbitrage.

The best product fallacy

The once-iconic perspective that products “sell themselves” online has died. The best products do not always win. The inception of the distracted, self-interested and overloaded online consumer ended this rouse. “If anyone tells you products sell themselves, they probably want you to fail”, said Phil Libin, co-founder and CEO of Evernote.

Tech companies naturally lean and rely on technologists to create value for their firm; however, the market has a long history of ignoring technology in favor of products that understand people. The list of the top ten best selling automobiles in the U.S. has little to do with high quality and more to do with marketing, customer satisfaction and customer service. The classic Betamax and VHS battle had little to do with a superior product than a superior distribution strategy.

Today, a stronger distribution strategy can beat a superior product. Go-to-market strategy is just as important as a good product roadmap. “The number one reason that we pass on entrepreneurs we’d otherwise like to back is focusing on product to the exclusion of everything else,” Marc Andreessen said. “Many entrepreneurs who build great products simply don’t have a good distribution strategy. Even worse is when they insist that they don’t need one, or call no distribution strategy a ‘viral marketing strategy.’”

Product-growth fit

Startup advisers and successful entrepreneurs regularly evangelize that product-market fit as the number one challenge of a startup. Even after product-market fit is discovered, startups will still struggle to find the right channel to leverage to grow. Typically, startups think distribution or “marketing” will be the easy part. Thus, their growth strategy is often scattered with numerous possible channels.

Speaking on distribution and marketing Simon Rothman, founder of Glyde and former head of Ebay motors, said on Ethan Austin’s blog, “Startups don’t fail for a lack for ideas, they fail for a lack of focus and prioritization.”

After discovering product-market fit, finding “product-growth fit” is the second most daunting challenge for a startup. Product-growth fit is finding the most effective and efficient means to distribute your product or service. With hundreds of possible channels, a startup’s challenge is to move quickly to find the right method to acquire a customer and monetize that customer. The most effective methods today may change tomorrow by channel saturation and the appearance of new channels.

Growth hacking as a response

Growth hacking started to spread as a market-driven response to the above challenges. Long before Sean Ellis first wrote about growth hacking two years ago, smart marketers and product people were growth hacking without the phrase or the title. Over time these growth challenges have become nearly universal and the “growth hacking” term appeared.

In response to channel instability and channel saturation, growth hackers quickly test and scale to be the first mover in a new channel and to rethink established channels to create new opportunities. A core element of growth hacking is testing new distribution paradigms. The “hacker” element of “growth hacker” refers to the ability of an individual to solve growth-related problems, not coding ability (see Design for Hackers). A growth hacker looks for opportunity creatively and is not satisfied with what is known to work for growth today.

In response to the best product fallacy and product-growth fit, growth hackers seek to leverage product as way to scale a growth strategy and “bake-in” growth concepts that are organic to usage. The primary goal with product for a growth hacker is to utilize the user base to create sustainable growth, also called an “engine for growth” by Eric Ries. A warning sign is a “leaky bucket”, which is a massive hole in the gas tank for the growth engine. This reflects superficial growth and bad product-market fit.

Growth hackers appeared on the startup scene out of a need. It is much harder to grow today than in the past. When you build it, users won’t come. A growth hacker understands this challenge and lives to convince users to try something and to stick with it.

I wrote this post for The Next Web and it was published Sunday, 28, 2012.

What is Path's user acquisition strategy?

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 05:00:17 -0700

This post was originally answered by myself on Quora. I have edited it for this post.

Path is different from other social networking products in that Path is designed for specific individuals in your network, aka those closest to you. Most social networks focus on broad access and wide distribution in a user’s circles. Path takes a different approach and focuses on depth over breath.

The challenge of adding specific people over anyone in your network is steep and complex. This core meta-product concept narrows the width of the funnel. The number of possible options is small thus conversion rates must be strong and re-engagement messaging is essential for growth. As a funnel narrows, the number of points of contact and the life-time viral cycle lengthens.

Path’s core acquisition strategy is using users to propel both engagement and acquisition.

Invites - In Path 2.5, Path focused a lot of effort on personalizing invites like we have never seen before in other mobile applications. Path utilizes a contextual based friend listing system to organize invitees (which I previously wrote about). A user’s invite listing is also based upon their address book, placing a higher ranking common family names like “mom” and “dad”, and Facebook lists. Invites to Path are sent via email, text message, and Facebook.

Path invites can be highly personalized with a voice recording or a written message.

Below is the invite landing page.
Tagging (“I’m with”) - A Path user can tag the people he or she in the real world regardless if they are a Path user. Path utilizes Facebook friends and address book to pull in this list. Tagging a non-Path user sends a notification via email or text once the moment is shared in a user’s Path.

The following landing page is created. If you tag a non-user, they will see this page in their web browser or email.
Platform Posting - Path users can post on a third party social network simultaneously as posting on their Path. This feature is somewhat discouraged as Path requires users to check each social network every time they want to post externally. These external posts contain links back to Path’s home page.
Path.com - Path’s home page has some interesting conversion flows. Signups to Path are sent via text-message over email. Email adds an extra step in the funnel. The Path homepage is optimized for design. It is not optimized for growth.
Paid Ads - Path has experiment with some paid ads on design social networks, such as Dribbble. This is not a highly leveraged channel.
PR - Path also uses the press as a channel with stories about Dave Morin and Path’s incredible design (see Google News search https://www.google.com/search?q=…)

It should be noted, that the bullet points above only mention trackable channels. Path relies heavily on word of mouth. Mobile virality has taken a “step back” from web virality regarding the ability to track user behavior. Path assumes that since you are around the people who should be on Path on a regular basis that the word will spread.

The growth hacking mafia comes to life via KISSmetrics.

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 12:37:00 -0700

The growth hacking mafia comes to life via KISSmetrics.

Defining a growth hacker: 3 common characteristics

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 07:52:29 -0700

This post originally appeared on TechCrunch

In this series titled “Defining a growth hacker”, I will be exploring the meaning and practical application of growth hacking through a number of interviews with prominent growth hackers. This is the first post the series and will outline the common characteristics of a growth hacker.

Growth hackers are making their mark in technology. Job postings are popping up all over the web looking for a growth hacker. Companies at all stages are itching to find these professors of growth and often recruiting as aggressively as UX and CS candidates. Sean Ellis was right when he first coined the title growth hacker in 2010 when he wrote, “Where are all of the growth hackers?” The demand for growth hackers became widespread when Andrew Chen wrote “How to be a growth hacker” that went viral.

Despite the buzz and increasing commercialization, most companies are unaware of the true meaning of growth hacking other than the simplistic acknowledgement that “they grow stuff” or “get users”. Unlike most professions in technology, a growth hacker isn’t a set of skills or a stock of knowledge. Dan Martell, founder of Clarity, says, “Growth hacking is a mindset more than a toolset.” It is a set of disciplines learned through doing and out of necessity. Growth hackers have a common attitude, internal investigation process, and mentality unique among technologists and marketers. This mindset of data, creativity, and curiosity allows a growth hacker to accomplish the feet of growing a user base into the millions.

Data

Growth hackers have a passion for tracking and moving a metric. Without metrics or data, a growth hacker can feel out of place and uncomfortably exposed. This strong bias towards data drives a growth hacker away from vanity metrics towards metrics that will make or break the business. Data and metrics are paramount to the scientific way a growth hacker discovers a path to growth. Rather than looking at metrics as strictly a reporting mechanism or data as a way to geek out, growth hackers view both as inspiration for a better product through a process of theorizing and testing. This scientific approach to growth is called engineering distribution by Jesse Farmer, co-founder ofEverlane. “The best growth hackers take a rigorous, empirical approach to growth and distribution,” says Jesse. A growth hacker’s focus is to attain growth through moving specific metrics with iterations. These metrics can be anything from a sign up conversion rate to a viral coefficient. Data inspires new product and actionable segmentation.

Creativity

Michael Birch, one of the first growth hackers and co-founder of Bebo, says, “growth hacking is both an art and a science.” While driven by data and moving metrics, growth hackers are also creative problem solvers. A growth hacker has a vibrant mental dexterity to think of new ways to acquire and loop in users. Growth hackers do not stop at data but build into new and unknown frontiers to find growth. Greg Tseng, co-founder of Tagged, says data and creativity of a growth hacker go hand-in-hand, “Are you good with both sides of the brain? If you are only creative, you’ll never know how good your ideas are. If you only have an analytical mindset, then you’ll know precisely how bad your ideas are!”

This creative and analytical mashup is the defining characteristic of growth hackers. “The creative folks intuitively design what’s best for the user, while data folks provide great insights. The true unicorns are those who can go end-to-end designing, building, measuring, analyzing, and iterating with a combination of user intuition and deep analytics,” says Matt Humphrey, co-founder ofHomeRun. Growth hackers operate across disciplines and functions, involved with UI/UX to metric decisions. The combination of both a creative and analytical mindset allows a growth hacker to have a cohesive and systematic picture of product.

Curiosity

A growth hacker has a fascination at why visitors choose to be users and engage and why some products fall flat on their face. With today’s distracted users, growth hackers are habitually exploring to find new ways to push metrics up and to the right. “Growth hacking has a subtle message of ’what have you done for me today?’. You never stop as a growth hacker. Facebook still has a growth team and they have a billion users”, says Blake Commagere founder MediaSpike and a pioneer of social games. Growth hackers are constantly curious and have an insatiable desire to learn. They look deeply into user behavior and explore the edges of behavioral economics. Jesse Farmer says, “Good growth hackers have a deep understanding and curiosity of the how internet works. A good growth hacker will read Nudge and Predictably Irrationality and see possible growth hacks.” This curiosity leads to a grasp of product and user experience way beyond the surface. A growth hacker does not so much care that growth occurs but desires to understand the user mindset and product flow to replicate the method over and over. Growth hackers are just “geeks who are human”, saysJim Young, co-founder of Hot or Not and founder of Perceptual Networks.

Growth hackers are a rare breed and a highly unlikely mashup of data, creativity, and curiosity. As it is a fairly newly defined field, some would argue that today there only a few hundred growth hackers in Silicon Valley. Although a small number now, there is no glass ceiling and the door is open for all. “I hope when people read this article, they will want to learn our methods and want to become a growth hacker. Come one, come all!” says Danielle Morrill, co-founder of Refer.ly and former growth hacker at Twillio.

Most growth hackers say they learned out of necessity from starting a company with a zero marketing budget. The next post in this series will explore the practical applications of growth hacking and how marketing is reinventing itself.

A special thanks to Jared Kopf, Matt Humphrey, Jesse Farmer, Danielle Morrill, and Zak Holdsworth for helping me structure, interview, and form this series.

For a productive weekend

Fri, 31 Aug 2012 08:23:58 -0700

What a hacker learns after a year of marketing - by Rob Spectre

Why you should read this - A hacker becomes a marketer for a year and learns the challenges of adoption and engagement. A great post for hackers to understand marketing and appreciate the skill-set. Build it and they will come is dead.

Lean Startup - by Steve Blank and Eric Ries

Why you should read this - Back to the basics. Blank and Ries walk through lean development and lean marketing. If you don’t practice lean, your startup is wasting time and money.

How moving fast doubled our engagement - by KISSMetrics Team

Why you should read this - KISSMetrics walks through a step-by-step of a redesign of a new release. KISS provides great tips on how to take in data and customer feedback to improve a product.

Zynga’s fall and Facebook as a viral platform - by Sangeet Choudary

Why you should read this - Sangeet outlines why he thinks Zynga and similar Facebook apps are falling out a flavor on Facebook. Basically, he postulates that these apps seek to interrupt the core social value of Facebook.

New blogs to follow

Dan Ariely - Dan is a well-known behavioral economist who specializes in applying human motivation and thought processes to technology. In his blog, he discusses subjective rationality and user engagement tactics.

The magic of a growth hacker

Wed, 29 Aug 2012 11:25:00 -0700

“People think that I have a book of magic tricks. Often, it is quite basic and simple to begin with.” - Jesse Farmer

Today, its cool to be a growth hacker. Startups are wide-eyed and mystified at any opportunity to chat with a growth hacker (hopefully, to add them to their ranks). Founders expect growth hackers to bring a bag of tricks and disclose a secret black book of hacks to make them rich. While well intentioned, I have to burst this illusion. Growth hackers don’t have secret tricks or hidden mystic knowledge for growth. Growth hackers aren’t magicians.

Growth hackers understand that startups face a universal acquisition challenge: it is super hard to grow. Michael Birch, co-founder of Bebo, said, “If you want to start growing, you should probably hire a growth hacker.” Thus, a growth hacker is a quite attractive hire to startups at all stages. A growth hacker appears like an “easy fix” to a startup’s problems; however, growth is far more complicated than filling a single position.

The truth that growth hackers understand is that product decisions are usually based on intuition and vanity metrics, without significant consideration for growth. Startups regularly look to growth hackers to have brilliant new product ideas but fail to see improving what a startup does now has a higher ROI. They are often surprised when a growth hacker suggests quite well-known methods to capture low hanging fruit. The reality is startups passover the most basic elements of growth: trigger emails, personalization, data analysis, funnel analysis, etc. A growth hacker usually starts here and moves up in the value change. While this seems logical, it is very hard to implement and practice on day-to-day basis at a fast-moving startup.

However, if you REALLY, REALLY want to know the secret of growth hacking, here it is:

Do something but be smart about it.

Growth hackers are not magicians. They are just methodical and clever. For example, product is never built in a vacuum and everything is measured and actionable. To the press and outsiders, the prestige of incredible growth is awe inspiring but don’t be fooled like Robert was with Alfred’s transported man trick. A growth hack is often simple and right in front of you. It is never overnight. A growth hacker knows the intimate and boring details: how long it took to build, to test, and to engineer a growth curve. Its never as glamorous as what the audience thinks.

Pictures pulled from the movie Prestige