Growth Hacking

The term growth hacking was used in 2010 by Sean Ellis, who worked for companies such as Dropbox and Eventbrite. The approach is particularly popular with start-ups, in order to also increase the growth of the company by increasing virality. It works particularly well for digital products and services.

Growth hacking is a marketing tool and is used to attract and retain customers, particularly through the following objectives:

– Acquisition: Bringing people to the website

– Activation: Getting visitors to register

– Engagement: Getting visitors to take action

– Monetization: persuade active users to purchase

– Recommendation: motivate active users for recommendation

So-called growth hacks are often used, in particular, to publish or test the Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Especially startups that start with limited funds and want to grow quickly apply these techniques. The focus is usually on search engine optimization, content marketing and website analysis.

Meanwhile, there is also the job description of the Growth Hacker as someone on the team who uses little tricks and hacks to increase the growth of the company.

Well-known examples of growth hacks include:

– Hotmail: When it launched in 1998, the email provider Hotmail added a sentence to the bottom of every email sent using Hotmail: “This email was sent using Hotmail. Get your email account for free now”. This simple growth hack helped Hotmail gain 11 million new accounts in a short period of time.

– Twitter: Twitter found that new users only become active when they follow more than 30 people. So Twitter started suggesting new people for users to follow on an ongoing basis.

– Dropbox: Dropbox users receive additional free storage for recommending the service. As a result, the number of users has grown from 100,000 to 4 million within 15 months.