NOT ALL PEOPLE—THE RIGHT PEOPLE

That’s where a growth hacker named Josh Elman came in. Poring over the stats, he and his team of twenty-five growth hackers (crazy, right?) noticed that when a user manually selected five to ten accounts to “follow” or “friend” on the first day, the user was significantly more likely to stick around.

Jonah Berger, a social scientist well known for his studies of virality, explains that “publicness” is one of the most crucial factors in driving something’s spread. As he writes in his book Contagious, “Making things more observable makes them easier to imitate, which makes them more likely to become popular. . . . We need to design products and i

even the best growth hacker cannot “grow a broken product.”

The end goal of every growth hacker is to build a self-perpetuating marketing machine that reaches millions by itself. —AARON GINN

According to Bain & Company, a 5 percent increase in customer retention can mean a 30 percent increase in profitability for the company.

Holstee Manifesto, an

Growth hackers’ main task is to build great marketing ideas into the product during the development process.

2. You can create hundreds of fake profiles to make your service look more popular and active than it actually is—nothing draws a crowd like a crowd (as reddit did in its early days).