Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising

Remember, raw growth is great, but at the end of the day, we’re running businesses here. We want to turn stats into dollars.

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

“Retention trumps acquisition.”

I also think it’s important that Uber was thinking less about how to get new users and more about how to drive revenue from customers who had already signed up.

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).

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

Growth hackers are pros at hypothesizing, testing, and iterating different versions of their products to create hockey stick growth for their companies.

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.

This means that our outward-facing marketing and PR efforts are needed simply to reach out to and capture, at the beginning, a group of highly interested, loyal, and fanatical users. Then we grow with and because of them.