What You Need To Know About Growth Hacking

One of the biggest buzzwords in the tech startup scene right now is “growth hacking.” The best way to think about growth hacking is that it is a smart form of bootstrapping, in which you get a vast 10x boost for your business from a relatively small marketing investment. It’s a way to generate momentum for your company very quickly, without taking on a lot of financial risks.

Thus, while your competitors are investing in expensive, splashy marketing campaigns, you are looking for low-cost (or, even better, no cost) marketing ideas that will put you in front of a lot of potential customers in a very short period. The very best growth hacking campaigns are inexpensive, creative and innovative. Unlike traditional marketing campaigns that can run for weeks, months or even years, a growth hacking campaign can run for less than a week, and sometimes, just for a single weekend.

There are several reasons why startup founders love to talk about growth hacking. (Other than the fact that they are insanely cheap to pull off, of course) For one, as the term “growth hacking” would imply, it’s all about growth. This could be growth in your page views, growth in your customer base, growth in your revenue streams, or growth in your overall profitability. And it’s not just dull, incremental growth they are looking for, either — it’s significant, blow-your-socks-off, this startup-is-about-to-explode growth.

Secondly, the inclusion of the term “hacking” implies that you are doing an end-around the system by putting your superior digital marketing savvy to work. Think about it as gaming the system. Instead of using the same old traditional forms of marketing that billion-dollar companies use, the growth hackers are the ones who are getting things done by exploiting all the little loopholes in the system to find new customers. (For example, Silicon Valley unicorn Airbnb exploited one of the biggest loopholes ever — all the people placing their apartment ads on Craigslist — and turned that to their advantage by inviting all those people to advertise their posh pads on Airbnb instead.)

And, finally, the whole term “growth hacking” implies an iterative approach to coming up with growth hypotheses, setting up some short-term experiments to test those hypotheses, and then continually iterating until you find the optimal solution. If you’ve ever used simple A/B testing to see which landing page is better, or which email subject headline is better, or which title of a blog post does better, then you have a good idea of how growth hacking is supposed to work.

Once you’ve mastered these three basic concepts of growth hacking, it’s time to put your digital savvy to work coming up with new ideas that will work for your business. For example, think about all the ways that you could use video as part of any growth hack. Instead of a boring, traditional marketing webinar, why not do a live stream event and post it all over social media? Instead of waiting around for venture capital investors to fund your business, why not reach out to “the crowd” and run a clever crowdfunding campaign to get your product to market? Just remember, you’re not looking for a 10 percent boost in your business, you’re looking for a 10x boost to your business — so don’t be afraid to think way out of the box.

Hey! I’m Tomer, an entrepreneur, and maker. You might know me from Mevee, Crane, and Shots, and now Slides among other products I’ve launched! This article is a part of a more extensive series I’m writing mostly based on my experiences and is mainly made of me and my team’s opinions.

I hope this helps you to avoid making the same mistakes I did, and remember to keep shipping!

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