Growth Hacking

San Francisco startup Optimizely has had a lot of success in making A/B testing much more accessible to the masses. And along the way, Optimizely’s co-founders Dan Siroker and Pete Koomen say that they’ve learned quite a bit more themselves about the practice of A/B testing, and what it can do for websites and software products — and they recently decided to write a book about it called A/B Testing: The Most Powerful Way to Turn Clicks Into Customers.

There is a lot of buzz around the new term "Growth Hacking", and many companies I know or have met recently are looking for a "Growth Hacker". I worry sometimes that this feels like a fad and people think"ooh, I will grow much faster if I can just find a magical unicorn growth hacker" or start to believe that you really can hack sustainable growth in any way.

Seven startups will come together with expert "growth hackers" to address challenges in distribution and acquisition.

SaaS productsaren’t viral**usually... But it doesn't matter.

A user experience designer wants to help the user meet their needs and accomplish their goals but creating a delightful product and experience seems fruitless if no one knows about. Once they do know about it, it’s not enough to just get them to sign up; users need to be engaged with the product. What good is having a million users if none of them are using it? It’s a huge problem that all startups face. Enter the growth hacker.

The proverbial chicken and egg problem of building a new social product is well understood among tech startups, and it’s been commonplace to follow two contrasting mechanisms for getting traction.

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).

Interesting post on the origin of growth hacking focus in the startup area, when "the platitude "build it and they will come" (...) has since died and is now an antique of the dot-com era."

"I admit it, I was wrong. When I first imagined building Airtasker, I thought that from the start, marketing would be the most significant factor in building a successful marketplace for services.

After a few months of pushing our developers to build lots of stuff to support online marketing campaigns, Jono (Airtasker COO and co-founder) and I started looking at the data and realized that whilst we had a pretty good net promoter score, we were spending some of our money on acquiring customers who weren’t going to be die-hard advocates of our service."

Love that conclusion: "a disciplined product focus is often going to be a better investment in the long run."