A Growth-Hacking Journey
7 short stories on how I risked my life, I created intentional bugs and planned unconventional tricks to multiply our audience by 20!
We can be hundred to hike the same mountain…we will all have our own story…
Here is my #GrowthHackingJourney…
Back to 2007, when I’ve been hired by We Are Talented (Wat.tv), a video+photo+music sharing website launched as a startup by the Leader TV Group in France, TF1. Before that, as the Head of Music at SFR (Vodafone group) I used to spend my days trying to increase the number of people who download millions of ringtones and music on their mobile. At this time, I was only 23 and was responsible to deal with a 5M€ budget per year (kind of crazy!). To give you an overview, it means enough money to produce an exclusive album with David Guetta, to have the biggest booth at all the major french festivals, to rebrand one of the coolest Paris concert hall and to buy as much web/print/radio and TV ads as needed to promote it!
At this time my definition of growth-hacking was close to “Buy ads to grow”
August 7th 2007, first day at Wat/TF1.
Here is the picture: 1 great team of 3 talented guys (Axelle, Benjamin, Cyril) 2 inspiring managers, nothing in our pocket… solid competitors (Youtube, Dailymotion, Myspace…) and ambitious objectives!
Our daily audience was :
- 60K Visits / day (Google Analytics)
- 800K Unique Visitors / month (Nielsen panel)
At this time I would never expected that, 3 years and a half later, Wat.tv will be:
- 1.2 Millions visits / day (+1900%)
- 8 Millions Unique Visitors / month (+900%)
- Top50 most visited websites in France!
What we’ve done to reach it? No secret; except an obsession, new ideas, several failures, several wins and… no budget at all.
Below are 7 short stories and lessons we’ve learned on our path to growth:
1-The Data breakfast:
- Insight: You better hack yourself first! Indeed, Growth Hacking must be a team mindset. When you think about working on it, the first rule is to make sure that everybody in the team share your obsession.
- Story : During my previous job I used to have a daily excel sheet with key figures of the previous day and I think that we’ve implemented this routine because my manager used to work this way at L’Oréal. You might think it is pretty basic but it remains important to keep it in mind (sometimes “the best wine comes out of an old vessel…”). So my 1st decision at WAT.tv, since I had to start from scratch, was to create this daily email to involve the whole team in this concern.
- Hack: Since that day, we sent this email everyday before 9.30am to all the people of the company. By all, I mean from the Intern, to the CEO. I wanted this email to become a “must have” routine! I am convinced that this tip must be served as « breakfast » in all companies.
- Result: This tip has deeply influenced the team spirit! Indeed, you know it works when you hear your colleagues talking about daily metrics while drinking their first coffee of the day. As when, first hour in the morning, your developer is waiting for you in your office and tells you “I was surprised to notice a decrease in our daily metrics this morning. I did further research, I found a bug and just fixed it. We are ready to start the day then.”
- Learning: Find ways to spread #GHMindset among your team. You don’t have to justify your actions to the PR or Sales team. But you have to ask yourself how you can help the other teams to prioritize and quantify their actions based on how it helps the project to grow.
2- I risked my life!
- Insight: If you think having a bold decision, but no pain… call it a bad compromise.
- Story: Back to 2008, my one-year anniversary at Wat.tv and we almost doubled the audience. At this point, we were experiencing the following truth: more high objectives you reach, more difficult it is to progress. To give you an idea, “We Are Talented” was a Myspace x Youtube targeting « creators ». For such content, there was only a few video creators in France and not much public. But even if we could think the job was done, we were already thinking about the next step. More.
- Hack: We decided to focus only on video (video was becoming Big…) and to target videos users, in addition to videos creators… “We are Talented” became Wat… It was a tough decision because we had to put on side some contents and members. That’s why I decided to send a personal email to all of our members to explain them this decision.
- unexpected Result: These changes were so difficult to accept for some of our members that one of them replied to threaten me with death. I received email from him on my Facebook account and more… (but nothing more than threats though.. I’m fine, thanks!)
- expected Result: 1y after launching Wat new version, we’ve reached 3M Uniques / months = +100% (Nielsen). Few months later then, we were bigger than MySpace (in France).
- Learning: Be aware of the pulse of your community. Specific feedbacks and results help you to analyse trends. I trust that it’s easier to accelerate a positive trend than to reverse a bad one. That’s why, you have to be attentive to trends to take decisions. Of course, some people might be pieced of, but trends insure you that the majority will be satisfied. Be bold and Act before it’s too late…
3-The “Perez Hilton » effect:
- Insight: You must know what makes your team unique and to take the best advantage from it. At this time, we were some of the best video content experts in France. This position leads us to work closely with partners and providers, which makes things more easier to identify a video which will make the buzz.
- Story: Benjamin was one of the amazing guys of our team! He knows so much about pop culture sport, art and so on. Thus, when we received Tony Parker’s music video on Wat.tv (yes the NBA Finals MVP Tony Parker … was as rap singer!) he immediately thought about sending it to Perez Hilton.
“Hello Perez, did you watch Tony Parker music video called “Premier love” ? He dedicated it to his ex. Feel free to embed it on your blog ! Cheers”
For the record, Perez was still a big guy with pink hair… and his blog was more and more successful… After a few hours, the servers went down. 300K in 3 days was the best growth ever for a video on WAT!
- Hack: How do you take more advantage from this trick ? You just have to think about the people who would be the most interested to spread this information, then to create a way to keep them updated. We created handpicked mailing lists of journalists in order to send them personal emails with videos directly related to their articles topic. Let me tell you something, those things don’t scale!
- Result: A few weeks later, journalists started to send us their articles before publication to ask for videos. A few month later, embedded videos on Blogs and Articles were providing 10 to 25% of our audience!
4-The “Perez Hilton” game:
- Insight : cf. Story #1
- Hack: To make it fun, the “Perez Hilton effect” became a Challenge for all the team : « Who will beat Perez Hilton ? » I personally had my glorious days… One time, I had a video from WAT at the top of AOL french website Homepage!. But I must admit, at this game, Benjamin won more than anyone else!
- Learnings: Make your work fun! If you want your company to grow, you have to be prepare to a succession of small victories. Each one is a potential game and an opportunity to celebrate! And even if I love pizza and drinks, I love even more pizza, drinks and an excuse to celebrate. I believe in everyone involved in the company growth and concerned to celebrate each of these small victories.
5-How I became a “Naruto” expert:
- Story: Cyril was a huge fan of Manga. He could speak during hours about his favorites shows. He explained to me how manga was becoming a huge trends for french kids. He was so enthusiastic that we decided to work on it and we quickly figured out that a Manga community was already active on Wat.tv but non targeted (neither on DM or YT)
- Insight: Always keep an open mind, especially when it’s about your users. Cyril helped us to understand our community better than anyone : Who they are? What do they like? what are their favorite shows? What are their favorite sites/blogs?…
- Hack: One thing became clear: They were huge fans of Naruto and they wanted to easily find the latest promo footage of their favorite animes a few minutes after its release in Japan. Since then, Cyril worked specifically on Manga to recruit the best content partners and to promote videos on the most popular sites/blogs.
- Result: Manga fans appeared as one of the fastest growing community of video users. After a few month this community became more and more large to reach +2M uniques/month on Wat.tv i.e 30/35% of our audience.
- Learning: Spend time to know your users habits and needs: what would make them happy? What prevent them to be more happy? And find the best way to answer.
6-Set up a weekly lunch with your CLO…
- Insight: If you don’t have hidden stories; the kind of story that you won’t be comfortable with sharing (as i do…) it probably means that you didn’t go far enough to growth-hack!
- Story: When you work on Growth Hacking, an important part of your job is to think about unexpected and relevant ways to drive more traffic. That is why I worked very closely with our Legal Advisor. My role was to push the legal borders as far as possible with disruptives ideas and his role was to be sure I know the limits. My respect for his word helped me to earn his trust and, as I reached our goals, he accepted that, together, we push the limits. Without ever crossing them. I’m proud to say that our trustful professional relationship helped Wat.tv to earn and to protect a significative audience…without having any legal issue.
- Hacks: (…) hidden by the author.
- Learning: I strongly think that, to grow fast, we have to find shortcuts and to try unknown roads… and some of these roads could be borderline. An objective reached use to validate the way you did it. Our job is to define how we can push limits outside of the “regular zone” by taking the best advantages of our actions, with the less negative impact if it don’t succeed the expected way. To find this perfect balance is our job. Keep in mind that every actions has effects. You are the dealer of these effects.
7-How I intentionally bugged our site to drive more traffic…
- Story: Sometimes things fall apart… Like April, 12th 2009 when our website went down during 30 hours because of a domain issue. We solved the problem, we explained it and apologized to our community.
- Insight: Unexpected situations shows atypical results… thus key learnings. Failures learn you at least as much as success. Don’t ignore them. Work on it. By analyzing our metrics of that day I found some very interesting results showing how our audience reacted during the first hours.
- Hack: This gave me the idea to take advantage of a specific (and small) platform bug to drive more traffic…by causing it.
Our CTO reaction when I told him I wanted to intentionally bug Wat:
- Result: I finally convinced our team to use that trick and we did it once a week, for months. Every week, the result was the same : +20% on our key daily metrics!
“Growth Hacking is more of a mindset than a toolkit”
I would say: a mindset + an obsession. I’m not a coder, no more than I am a designer or a sales guy. I’m just a guy obsessed by getting traction.
Think Goal, Not Tactic: Soon, we will be surrounded by Growth Hacking tools and this is great. But let’s think about what are the similarities between the “greatest GH examples” such as Hotmail, Airbnb, Youtube…? They didn’t use any existing tool. They were so focus on 1 objective i.e. to grow…that they literally created their own tricks. They didn’t started focused on tools or tactics, but on Goals.
That’s why I decided to write… Each of my “handmade” stories aren’t related to any GH tools, but to a mindset.
Growth Hacking is a state of mind: getting out of the conventional roads but looking for shortcuts, taking advantage of everything, disrupt to succeed… to attract always more than expected.
At the beginning, there is a state of mind… Which we also called: THE CULTURE.
The next story: UBQT, a Flipboard x Steller x “Coachella”! Stay tuned for our next #GHJourney!
