When I bought my first Bitcoin through Coinbase.com, the checkout process prompted me to tweet “I just bought 1 Bitcoin @Coinbase! https://coinbase.com.” Though it seems to me that they could have easily coded a solution so the message included the price at which I’d bought it, which would have had the effect of advertising the rising (or falling)

When I first joined the company, the suggested user list had 20 random people who were default selected to follow. Given this data insight, we reset the new user flow to encourage people to follow their first ~10 people and offer them a lot of choices, but no default selection. Then we later built a feature that continually suggested new users to

marketing as we know it is a waste of time without PMF.

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.

A few years later, the email app Mailbox launched with a similar strategy. An incredibly compelling—albeit a tad more professional—demo video racked up one hundred thousand views in less than four hours. This one-minute video, combined with a very cool interface that showed users how many other users were in front of them on the app’s waiting list,

“Making things more observable makes them easier to imitate, which makes them more likely to become popular. . . . We need to design products and initiatives that advertise themselves and create behavioral residue that sticks around even after people have bought the product or espoused the idea.”

“Retention trumps acquisition.”

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

Growth hacking at its core means putting aside the notion that marketing is some separate activity that begins toward the end of a company’s or a product’s development life cycle. It is, instead, a way of thinking and looking at your business.