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

The first step in hacking activation is to identify each point in your customers’ journey toward the aha moment. We are assuming that you have already determined, in the process of making the product must-have, what constitutes this magical moment. To

First we’ll look at how to hone your marketing language to best communicate what is not just valuable, but special, about what you have to offer.

Peep Laja, a renowned expert in conversion rate optimization—the science of getting more visitors to a website or app to become customers—loves to point out that a 5 percent improvement in conversion rate every month nets an 80 percent improvement in a year due to the compounding nature of wins.

But it’s also important to experiment with offering rewards that are not about money or savings, but instead about the experience customers have with your product.

What was the secret? I worked with the engineers to utilize technology for what was, to them, an unconventional purpose: to craft novel methods for finding, reaching, and learning from customers in order to hone our targeting, grow our customer base, and get more value from our marketing dollars.

First, you need to choose how invites will be delivered. In the best viral loops, the delivery is a natural result of using the product, as was the case for Hotmail, where users didn’t have to do anything in addition to sending their emails; the invitation to join was embedded in the email itself so the referrals were completely passive. Asking so

One final misconception must be addressed. Growth hacking is often characterized as being specifically about bringing in new users or customers. But in fact, growth teams are, and should be, tasked with much broader responsibilities. They should also work on customer activation, meaning making those customers more active users and buyers, and figur

Elman made an initial discovery by doing what’s called cohort analysis, which is dividing your customers or users into distinctive groups by a common trait.

Amazon, in contrast, is perhaps the gold standard example of retention prowess. The company’s subscription program, Amazon Prime, has been a particular triumph in retaining customers, largely due to the two-day free shipping included on thousands of items, but also many ancillary benefits that have been added to the program, such as its video and m

At Slack, a team chat and messaging product designed to eliminate internal corporate email threads (and one of the fastest-growing business applications of all time), data showed that once team members had sent and received 2,000 messages to one another, the team became far more likely to make Slack a core part of their communication workflow and u