What was your greatest growth hack? | Hacker News Reader

What was your greatest growth hack?

44 pointsmadreader12125 comments

What hack did you create that helped increase engagement and visitors to your platform?

We were selling a product to outbound telemarketers. So I bought a bunch of secondary phones for our sales guys, and pumped those numbers into every data list we could find... prize draws... surveys... etc.

They were flooded with telemarketers. And if they spotted an issue (bad quality audio... big gaps at the beginning of call.. and so on) they would open up and insist the telemarketer help them get in touch with a manager so they could help improve things.

We had a spike of sales during that period, before the chaos of managing these phones meant we had to stop. :)

Make something good that people want to use? If your product/service is that hard to sell to begin with your time would probably be better spent on development than growth hacking.

That's a really naive response because it assumes the product is already in people's hands. Distribution is one of the biggest challenges that startups face. Also you can't create something that people love with an MVP for every idea. The original iPhone took $2b to develop. Think they could have made something people love with $10m? Probably not. Some problems are hard, and if you're bootstrapping with an MVP you need to iterate toward product market fit which means you need feedback which comes back to distribution.

And how much did Apple have to spend marketing the iPhone? The iPhone was useful. It sold itself. Nobody had to be convinced. Good products and services don't depend on marketing to be successful. If it's that hard of a sell there's probably a reason.

>And how much did Apple have to spend marketing the iPhone?

You're joking, right? Even after 10 years they're STILL spending a lot on advertising it.

Was it successful because of all the "growth hacking"? Just make something good.

Ok I think we're talking past each other. I was busy earlier so I didn't get a chance to fully respond. The point I was trying to make about the iPhone and marketing was the bulk of money and time invested was in the product itself. You said Apple spent 2 billion in R&D. Now how does that cost compare to the marketing campaign that followed? I found this article talking about advertising for the iPhone 6:

http://www.campaignlive.com/article/apple-ad-spend-rises-50-...

"The company reported record profits of $53.4 billion on turnover of $233.7 billion, thanks to the iPhone6 and iPhone6s sales. Advertising still represents less than 1% of turnover."

Do they spend a crapton on marketing? Well compared to how much me and you make, yes. But compared to what Apple makes off iPhones, it isn't. The point I was trying to make was the iPhone successful because of a slick marketing campaign or was it the quality of the product itself? I would say it's the product in this case. Look at high-traffic sites like reddit and imgur that barely market themselves but are still wildly popular. Why? People like it and want to use it because they're good sites. That was the point I was trying to make. A good product or service is worth it's weight in marketing gold. In my opinion you should be spending the bulk of your resources on R&D improving your product than growth hacking. Your chances of success are much higher with a solid product/service. The tech industry has an abysmal failure rate compared to literally any other industry and I feel this trend of rushing through a MVP and marketing the hell out of what's essentially an unfinished product is the cause. How do you even know if the market for your product or service is even there to begin with if your MVP isn't fully functional yet. Concentrate on the product/service and beta test. Get feedback and listen to what people are telling you. Grow organically. Maybe people likes how your product does X but but starts asking if it could do Y also. The addition of that feature could be what pushes your product over the top. That's all I was saying.

Not a growth hacker, so not sure if this is an idea/insight you'd be looking for.

Here's mine:

Asking right people the right questions help. I asked my favorite game-designer about Buddhist meditation (I noticed she's into that as am I), she retweeted it to her 100000 followers.

My Twitter account has 0 followers (or 1) and back then it didn't even have a profile picture.

So asking the right questions :)

Not mine, but my wife signed up for Nextdoor several years ago. They send a postcard verification of address like Google Maps does for businesses.

She found out that all of our neighbors got a postcard inviting them to Nextdoor and it said something like "[So and So] just joined Nextdoor and invites you to join!"

She never opted into this knowingly but I'm assuming it was in the terms somewhere. I thought it was brilliant for acquisition; maybe one of the best strategies I've seen.

I think the users privacy should count for something. This is a betrayal in my book.

It was probably somewhere in the terms. Not ideal, but at the same time - the product IS a social network for the neighborhood, so the user gets value from having their neighbors on. And they expect to have their neighbors on.

I'd prefer a checkbox with one line of text saying they would use my name though.

Not mine, but I know that one of the main bottled water sellers in Chile dropped lots of empty bottles regularly at different kinds of trash containers in places where people that looked at it could associate the brand with "successful" people. It worked very well.

I released my ebook about Bootstrap 3 for complete beginners on 2013/09

Being an ebook, it peaked in the first 5 days and by December it was bombing as expected.

I did a "holiday sale" with discounted prices as planned, and announced it for 12/24 till 12/31. Sales immediately went up and right like there was no tomorrow.

Then I purposely forgot to restore the original prices until 01/20 and people just kept buying it, thinking they were oh-so-smart for taking advantage of me.

On 01/21 I restored the original prices and went back to close to no-sales at all.

Given the cost to produce another copy of what I was selling is zero, I'd say that was a very big win.

> On 01/21 I restored the original prices and went back to close to no-sales at all.

How come you didn't continue with the discount then? Seems like you just put the nail in the coffin right then and there.

I had another deal with a third-party site coming in March and was afraid to completely burn the thing :)

Would you say it was worth your time to create and publish an ebook product?

Yes, absolutely. I gained visibility, connections, experience, new skills (marketing), and some money.

You have to be committed for months, though. So your life at that moment must be compatible with such a commitment.

I did it in 3 months, working on it monday to friday 1 hour at lunch and 2 hours at night, and almost all weekends. My wife's support was a key factor in keeping me healthy and focused.

Not mine. But it's hard to top "Hiding $10k in fake vaginas buried on the beach" for quick and dirty PR...

http://www.myviralsecrets.com/

- Had a trivia game. You would be able to play only 4 turns a day. If you wanted to continue, you would need to invite your friends or ask turns from your friends. We would receive more than a thousand requests each day and it went viral.

- Had a chat website. It would let you create a profile and let your friends ask you questions anonymously. You needed to share your profile on social media to let people know that you are online. They did and it went viral.

At Vinty (drivevinty.com) we work very hard to provide excellent service. This tends to have the effect of people referring us to their friends.

My friend was working on admin theme for themeforest for 6 month but admins didn't aprove his theme. What he did?

He made it opensource! And got 2000+ stars on github in one month. 6 month leter he has 7000 stars on github that turn into 2 big clients and a lot of $$$

Take for example Buffer. They created 2 Free relevant products for their field to create buzz around Buffer, ex pablo.buffer.com

Back story. We launched www.agfunder.com as an angellist for ag tech startups with the vision of later including any company in the sector of any maturity. At the time there was no ecosystem and when you said the word 'agtech' everyone assumed you said 'adtech'. When we first launched we hired PR and worked with them to get converse along the usual channels: TechCrunch, WSJ, NYT, and doezens of other tech and ag blogs. The result: crickets. Good luck launching a two-sided marketplace without distribution. Today we have over 30,000 members and subscribers including 4,000 investors, we've have helped companies raise over $35m, and we've become one of the central entities in the emerging agrifood tech ecosystem. Later this year we'll be announcing a $20m investment vehicle we've raised almost entirely from our network of institutional and individual investors. This is how we did it:

(1) Started aggregating and rebroadcasting relevant news and media with our Twitter account. We also addded thousands of people who we thought would be relevant as about 10-20% of people at that time would follow back.

(2) Admittedly a bit of a dark pattern even in 2013 (and certainly has been done independsntly), but when we launched our site we needed distribution. So in desperation I did domain targeted keyword searches on LinkedIn and added about 5,000 people (with about a 30% accept rate). I was shocked to find that LinkedIn didn't really rate limit (I had one warning, but upgraddd my account which seemed to placate them). I then exported this list for our first email distribution list (We were getting a respectable 20% open rate).

(2.1) I then repeated, adding speakers from relevant conferences.

(2.2) Realizing that I couldn't add many more people to LinkedIn without getting flagged and worrying about the hygiene of our domain name to spam filters, we went to the library to use their Reuters accounts and combed financial databases for investor emails, parsed those lists. Rather than uploading the raw list to our email list we instead added this list to my contact list and then synced with LinkedIn, using LinkedIn as a filter to identify people who might be interested in what we were doing. LinkedIn will not flag you if you mport a contact list if those people do not accept the request.

(3) Next we produced a great easy-to-scan weekly newsletter, originally just aggregating top content we were retweeting. Today we have a 30-35% open rate with 60% opening in the last month and 90% in the last year.

(4) That same year we started publishing www.agfundernews.com which we dubbed the TechCrunch for food and ag. Since then we've published over 1,000 articles and have had over 100 expert contributors. At this point all roads lead to AgFunder.

(4.1) We decided to give this a unique URL because we were hoping we could get into Google News (never accepted after multiple attempts and all the while becoming the industries main news blog) and also because it was easier to get interviews when we pitched it as AgFunderNews.com rather than AgFunder.com/news which feels more like a blog. If you spend 15 minutes searching for ag/foodtech you're bound to come across us.

(5) As interviews started to trickle in, each time I would faithfully update my LinkedIn profile knowing that journalists are going to respond to social proof as they're looking for sources. I've been interviewed for TechCrunch, Bloomberg TV, CNBC, WSJ, Forbes and more. Lot's of people discover us from the media.

(6) In 2014 we did a short investment overview of the sector and then in 2015 we spent a month aggregating and curating data for a full 60 page industry report. This report has been a magnet for startups, investors, and media. It's a proof of work quality that builds trust over time. Our research pages are the second most visited pages on our site (top of the funnel).

(7) In 2015 we also added a pop up email newsletter subscription form. Say what you like, but top of the funnel registrations quadrupled in a week and have been growing ever since.

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