Chasing Grasshoppers: A Simple Definition of Growth Hacking

An explanation of what growth hacking and catching grasshoppers has in common

A few minutes ago I was walking in a field next to a canal in Irving, Texas. (It’s the one off of MacArthur and 114 for anyone who knows the area.)

While walking and looking down into the canal I scared up grasshopper after grasshopper. Nearly each new step scared another and caused it to take off.

The sight brought me back to my childhood when I used to catch grasshoppers for fun and for bait. I’d run around a field and do my best to catch them with my bare hands. But whenever I happened to have a butterfly net on me, the odds were in my favor because butterfly nets make it much easier to catch grasshoppers (just in case you haven’t experienced that for yourself).

Then I had another thought: If I was actually fishing, it’d be even more efficient to bring my nephew and let him run around with a net catching grasshoppers while I fished. That would be the ultimate grasshopper catching hack

And then it dawned on me. Both of these observations can be applied to growth hacking. Here’s what I mean.

Using a net is a lot like using the right tool for marketing. If you know the best tools to use, it becomes a hack that makes what you’re doing more effective.

This can be compared to knowing when to use Facebook ads, Google ads, search engine optimization, copywriting, and conversion rate optimization. The more you know about each, the better you’ll be at using the right tool at the right time in order to get the results you want.

But there’s something even better than this. It’s called getting your customers to do your work for you. In the same way that getting my nephew to catch grasshoppers while I fish would be the ultimate hack, getting your customers to do your marketing for you is the ultimate hack.

Let’s look at some example.

One of the most classic growth hacking stories is that of Hotmail. They added a link to the bottom of the emails sent by users of their free email service which meant that every email that was sent out served as a free advertisement for their product. Getting your customers to do marketing for you, check.

Another example is that of Dropbox where they devised a system that rewarded people for sharing about Dropbox with their friends. If you convinced someone to sign up, you’d get free storage. This turned their users into an army of converts that went out of their way to get friends to sign up. I for one spammed nearly everyone connected to my Gmail inbox, and Dropbox took off because of the hack.

When it comes to growth hacking for startups, you need to know everything you can about the marketing options that will get the best results with the least amount of effort. This might mean using something like Buzzsumo to decide what articles to write about on your blog, a tool like SumoMe List Builder to collect more email subscribers, a pop-up survey software like Qualaroo to learn more about your customers and figure out why they’re not signing up, or a competitive keyword research tool like iSpionage to gain a shortcut for creating optimized PPC campaigns.

Those are all important hacks that come from using the right tools.

But the ultimate hack is to convince your customers to do your marketing for you, much like Harry’s did when they gathered 100,000 emails in a single week before selling their first product. If you’re able to get to this stage of growth hacking, you’ll be well on your way to scaleable growth and a substantial user base.

Hit me up on Twitter at @josephputnam if you’d like to discuss this essay. You can also reproduce and share in any way you like, so long as you link to this article and give proper credit.