the core, marketing is lead generation. Ads drive awareness . . . to drive sales. PR and publicity drive attention . . . to drive sales. Social media drives communication . . . to drive sales. Marketing, too many people forget, is not an end unto itself. It is simply getting customers. And by the transitive property, anything that gets customers is

Holstee Manifesto, an

BLOGS AND PERSONALITIES Andrew Chen’s essays http://andrewchen.co Noah Kagan’s blog http://okdork.com Patrick Vlaskovits http://vlaskovits.com/blog www.twitter.com/pv Jesse Farmer http://20bits.com Sean Ellis http://www.startup-marketing.com http://growthhackers.com Paul Graham’s essays http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html Aaron Ginn http://www.

Dropbox, for instance, offered its customers a 150-megabyte storage bonus if they linked their Dropbox account to their Facebook or Twitter account.

All of which is to say a simple fact: if you want to go viral, it must be baked into your product and the experience.

You don’t go out with your marketing to everyone. You go to where there is a captive or potential audience that might be interested in what you do.

7. You can bring on influential advisors and investors for their valuable audience and fame rather than their money (as About.me and Trippy did—a move that many start-ups have emulated).

You can use your own internal data to create captivating infographics and visualizations, like OkCupid did with its massive data set, launching OkTrends, which has been a marketing gold mine attracting visitors with its fascinating insights about dating.

Each one of the previously mentioned growth strategies was, in its own way, a bit like a Trojan horse. By doing one thing, something that often didn’t feel like marketing, a company was able to get access to users that it was then able to convert into customers, clients, or sign-ups. So, what’s your Trojan horse going to be?