You’ve never heard about growth hacking? Well it’s time to update your old marketing books!

Aziz Morley

Growth hacking is not a new science, but instead it’s a new way of seeing growth for tech companies. It differs from the traditional marketing by using all the marketing resources available and make them collaborate instead of working individually.

Traditional digital marketing focuses on three metrics: traffic, number of users and revenue. But these three metrics are almost useless if you don’t know what path leads from one to the other. This is where growth hacking comes in: it helps you map out the user life cycle for your product.

Let’s have a look at the first example of growth hacking: Hotmail! Hotmail was one of the first web mail (launched in 1996 by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith) but had a very slow growth. After a few weeks the founders noticed that 80% of the subscriptions were coming from referrals. Thus Tim Draper, one of the early investors, had the brilliant idea to add at the end of each email: “P.S. I love you. Get your free email at Hotmail”.

After six months, Hotmail reached one million of users, and after eighteen months, it could count more than twelve million of users (and for the record, only seventy million people were using internet at that time… I know this makes us very old…). Eventually the company was sold to Microsoft for 400M$ only one year and a half after its creation.

Growth hacking doesn’t care much about the fancy “building awareness” but simply focuses on the growth of the company from user bases to revenues.

As Rob Moffat pointed out in a great article, growth hacking is also related to costs and can be defined by “finding innovative mechanisms that acquire new users at a cost that is low enough to be irrelevant”.

Another example that illustrates well this definition is the possibility for some bands to offer free music download if the user likes their Facebook page. It doesn’t cost anything, it keeps the user in the loop for further updates and it indicates to his friends that the band exists. Simple and efficient.

There are thousands of other examples (Dropbox giving you free storage if you invite friends, Airbnb that systematically inserted their new offers on Craigslist and hence reached millions of people, Youtube’s “embed” function that helped them growth the number of views and the number of uploaded videos for free,…).