Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success

The first step is a simple survey Sean designed, one that he has found again and again throughout his career in Silicon Valley to be a remarkably reliable means of measuring whether customers love a product or not. This Must-Have Survey begins with the question: How disappointed would you be if this product no longer existed tomorrow? a) Very disap

When PayPal first launched, the team noticed that some of its earliest regular adopters were people who bought and sold items on eBay and decided to set out to understand how exactly they were using PayPal and how to get it into the hands of more of these avid users. A request from a seller for permission to use the PayPal logo on their auction lis

By contrast, for eBay, one of the metrics that matters most is not daily users or new users but the number of items listed for sale. This is because the more items on the site, the more potential buyers will experience the aha moment of seeing exactly what they want to bid for; and in turn, the more sellers will experience the aha of making a sale.

The key mission at this stage is to look for the behaviors that differentiate those customers who find your product must-have—that is, those who use or buy repeatedly—from those who don’t.

Often, people have to use a product a certain amount of time before they truly have this experience with it, or perhaps they have to use a certain feature to really get the full-force aha hit. For example, Twitter struggled to sustain growth in its early days until it learned (from doing extensive analysis of its user data) that users who quickly s

By sending a team of people out to attend craft fairs all around the country and meet with prospective sellers to bring onto the site and with their customers, Etsy discovered the network power of “Stitch ’n Bitch” groups, comprised of feminist crafters who were a key force in the growth of the craft movement. Etsy smartly singled out influential a

And while the details of how it is implemented vary somewhat from company to company, the core elements of the method are: the creation of a cross-functional team, or a set of teams that break down the traditional silos of marketing and product development and combine talents; the use of qualitative research and quantitative data analysis to gain d

So when Drew Houston reached out to me to discuss how I could work with Dropbox, I couldn’t wait to implement the method that I’d developed. My first step was to get Houston’s buy-in to conduct a simple survey of the current users to calculate what I called (and what you’ll read about in more detail later in the book) the product’s must-have score.

it’s so valuable to take the time to create reports that vividly illustrate your progress as it relates to your growth levers and your North Star metric—using what are generally referred to as dashboards.

But if you follow the three steps we have outlined above, you will rapidly discover ideas and insights that will produce dramatic gains in activation for your product. To recap, those steps are: map all of the steps that get users to the aha moment; create a funnel report that profiles the conversion rates for each of the steps and segments users b