Growth Hacking

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Growth Hacking - A Path to Scale Your Business
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About Switchbold
At Switchold, our vision is to help atleast 1 Million Entrepreneurs and Business Owners
in stablising and scaling their business to the level they don’t even imagine with the help
of best quality educational content created from 15+ years of our combined experience
in Marketing and Business Growth.
About the Authors:
Deepak Singla
Cofounder of Switchbold, Founder - TheDigiScholars & ROASMachines
● Managed more than $1M ad budget in Paid Advertising.
● Generated more than $10M in revenue for his clients.
● Working with one of the biggest Ad Agencies in the United States.
● Managing $150k in monthly ad budget at the moment
● 7 years of experience in the Digital Marketing Industry
● Developed Business for Byjus - The Learning App
Contact: deepak@switchbold.com
Instagram: @deepaksingla.co
Linkedin: @singladeepak69
Aviral Srivastava
Cofounder of Switchbold, Founder & CEO - ADYCAVE
● Trained Thousands of People in the field of Digital Marketing.

● Successfully Mainitaing 10 Lakh+ of ad budget per Month in Facebook ads.
● Man Behind Multiple Multi-Million Product Based Digital Businesses.
● Featured On - Hindustan Times and 7 Others News Websites.
● Awarded as One of the Youngest Entrepreneurs of India.
Contact: ceo@adycave.com
Instagram: @Aviral._Srivastava._
Linkedin: @Aviral Srivastava
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Minal Garg
Co-Founder of SwitchBold, Campaign Optimisation Specialist at Online
Brandmakeover India
● Managed More than $80K ad budget in Paid Avertising.

● Generated more than $1M in revenue for the clients.
● 4 Years of experience in Digital Marketing Industry.
● Working with one of the biggest Ad Agencies in USA.
● Have helped various people Start their Own Business!
Contact: minal@switchbold.com
Instagram: @minal.garg
LinkedIn: @minal-garg-292880173
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Table of Contents
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Chapter 1: Introduction
There is a revolution taking place in the world of startup growth, and we wanted to help
people understand this new phenomenon. Those who understand growth hacking will
have a competitive advantage that is hard to overstate, and we wanted to provide a
robust framework for thinking about it. This guide is for entrepreneurs, founders, growth
leads, or anyone else who is trying to grow a startup.
If acquiring new customers (and retaining existing ones) is important to your business
then you should read this guide. If customers matter to you, then growth hacking should
matter to you. A High Performing Blog or Website is the foundation of Growth Hacking.
This concept of “growth hacking” according to Josh Helman, is made up of two

components. Marketing and technology.
He says “When you focus on understanding your users and how they adopt your
products, you can build features that help you acquire and retain more users, rather
than just spending marketing dollars”.
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Growth hacking examples he lists include Facebook, LinkedIn and AirBnB. Facebook
started by launching one college at a time till they had 20% of the students. LinkedIn
founder Reid Hoffman invited his professional network to join. AirBnB managed to build
technology that allowed them to access and post to Craigslist.
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Chapter 2: Short History of Growth

Hacking
The phrase “growth hacker” was coined by Sean Ellis in 2010. When I asked Sean why
he felt the need to coin a new phrase he said that it stemmed from his frustration when
hiring replacements for himself.
Sean had helped a number of internet companies achieve incredible growth, and a few
of them even had an IPO. Needless to say, Sean became the guy that the valley went
to when they needed to grow their user base, and he would take equity and payment in
exchange for his services.
He essentially became a one man growth shop, setting up systems, processes, and
mindsets that could be maintained after he left. Eventually, he would hand over the keys
to his growth machine to someone else, and he would ride off into the sunset. This is
where the problems started. While searching for his replacement he would often receive
resumes that were legit, but not relevant.
They had marketing degrees, and they had marketing experience, but they were still
missing something. Sean knew that the kind of strategies he employed did not
represent the typical playbook used by traditional marketers, and if he gave them the
reins it would not be a good fit. A traditional marketer has a very broad focus, and while
their skill set is extremely valuable, it is not as necessary early in a startup's life.
In the first phase of a startup you don’t need someone to “build and manage a
marketing team” or “manage outside vendors” or even “establish a strategic marketing
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plan to achieve corporate objectives” or many of the other things that marketers are
tasked with doing. Early in a startup you need one thing. Growth. Sean asked for
marketers. He got marketers. So Sean changed what he asked for. The title of his
watershed blog post was “Find a Growth Hacker for Your Startup” and the idea was
born
A growth hacker is not a replacement for a marketer. A growth hacker is not better than
a marketer. A growth hacker is just different from a marketer. To use the most succinct
definition from Sean’s post, “A growth hacker is a person whose true north is growth.”
Every decision that a growth hacker makes is informed by growth. Every strategy, every
tactic, and every initiative, is attempted in the hopes of growing.
Growth is the sun that a growth hacker revolves around.

By ignoring almost everything, they can achieve the one task that matters most early
on. This absolute focus on growth has given rise to a number of methods, tools, and
best practices that simply didn’t exist in the traditional marketing repertoire, and as time
passes the chasm between the two disciplines deepens.
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Chapter 3: Skills Needed for a Growth

Hacker
The typical marketer in the past was creative. The digital landscape is changing the
profile and the skills and mindsets needed. Here are a few skills to consider to include in
your marketing team or outsourcing.
● Focused on growth
● Addicted to metrics
● Able to execute
● Open minded to new ideas and innovation
● Creative
● Able to pivot if something isn’t working
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Chapter 4: What Does a Growth Hacker

Do?
A growth hacker is someone who prioritizes growth over all other metrics.
Instead of focusing on specific metrics, the growth hacker attempts to achieve growth
across as many metrics as possible, often using low-cost marketing to achieve those
results.
A startup, for instance, could gain rapid growth through a barrage of paid advertising.
While growth hackers don’t consider cost per se in deciding how to proceed, they can’t
spend money they don’t have.
Growth hacking strategies might encompass content marketing, steep discounts on

products or services, major incentives, social media, and similar tactics. Their chief
asset is often their creativity.
GoPro, for instance, has built its entire company based on creativity. Specifically, it
solicits user-generated content to create virility and encourage word of mouth. Plus, it
creates giveaways like the recently launched $1 million challenge.
Examples of Growth Hacking
Take a look at these three growth hack ideas inspired by real companies.
1. Airbnb
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You might be familiar with the famous couch-surfing connection company now, but did
you know that Airbnb got its start on Craigslist? This is what I mean by chasing attention
like Gary Vee. Airbnb realized that most of its target audience was searching for places
to stay on Craigslist.
The company had already proved its ability to be creative, especially during the Obama-
McCain election, but it started to gain traction in a big way when it began to post its
listings on Craigslist.
Using the Craigslist hack, Airbnb scaled from 50,000 listings to 550,000 listings.
2. Google+
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While it’s true that Google+ isn’t the most popular social media platform out there, I
applaud its growth hacking strategy in the beginning. Instead of flinging open the doors,
Google only offered accounts to a select few.
In other words, it was invite only. And people were scrambling for invitations.
Exclusivity is a great growth hack when you can’t accommodate tons of customers
during your launch, or if you want to rev up the interest for a new product or service.
People tend to want something that’s only available in limited quantities or spots.
3. Dropbox
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Dropbox is my go-to example for growth hacking. The company used free storage
space to convince customers to spread the word about the service. If you want to get
the full scoop, check out the video I created about Dropbox’s amazing growth hack.
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Chapter 5: 8 Steps of Growth Hacking
● Step 1: Make sure you create a product people actually want

● Step 2: Don’t target everybody
● Step 3: Acquisition
● Step 4: Activation
● Step 5: Retention
● Step 6: Revenue
● Step 7: Referrals
● Step 8: Improve your product continuously
Step 1: Make sure you create a product people actually

want
Coca-Cola introduced lots of other soft drinks over the years like Sprite and Fanta.
Most of them didn’t taste as good as Coke.And, do any of you remember the new coke?
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But, through extensive (and expensive) advertising, they made them popular, and now
they litter the drink aisle at grocery stores alongside Coke itself.
Doing this today would be much harder, as word about a new product spreads
extremely quickly.
If your product is bad, the world will know it faster than you can imagine.
For example, when United Airlines workers were passing luggage to one another by
throwing it around in 2009, they ended up breaking a customer’s guitar.
They admitted to doing it, but they refused to compensate the guy for his loss.
And what was the result? Not one, but three songs, including videos, came out about
crappy United Airlines service.
The first one has gathered 15 million views so far:

That’s pretty bad PR for United. If your product sucks, it can disappear in less time than
it took you to build it.
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What’s the solution to this? It’s simple: Get feedback.

You have to get your product out there, as fast as possible, to start collecting feedback
and keep improving your product-market fit on a regular basis.
I learned this lesson the hard way. When we started Kissmetrics, we used all of our
funding to build the product.It took us a year to build it. And when we released it, we
learned that our customers were happy with the metrics their social networks were
already offering.
That’s not good
Two Secrets Steps to Ensure Your Product Hits the

Target
1. Start by asking and answering questions, not by developing a product that has
awesome product-market fit.
2. As soon as you have an idea, start getting feedback.
Let me give you another example of something which we all use daily for two hours a
day INSTAGRAM:
A company who definitely nailed the feedback part is Instagram.
Originally, the founders dabbled with a social network app called Burbn for whiskey
drinkers. They realized that the most-used feature of the app was their photo sharing
mechanism.
Only then did they begin looking at photography apps, which they thought was a
saturated market already.
Talking back and forth with users, they eventually realized that for all the apps out there,
sharing photos was either too complicated or not the main feature of the app.
They simply took the best parts of all the apps they knew, like Hipstamatic’s photo filters
and Burbn’s way of sharing, removed everything else, and voila! They produced a great
app that everyone already wanted.
Combine this with brilliant timing (Instagram launched at the same time as the iPhone
4), and you know how they got 25,000 installs on their first day, reaching a million users
within two months.
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Step 2: Don’t target everybody
Guess who Airbnb’s target customer was in the beginning?

It was everyone who traveled.
Just look at their initial three customers – the ones renting their air mattresses. They
were a 30-year-old Indian man, a 35-year-old woman from Boston, and a 45-year-old
father of four from Utah.
Where is the intersection? What connects these people? What do they share?
You see, there is a life cycle that every new and innovative product must live through.
It’s called the law of diffusion of innovation, and it looks like this:
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To reach the majority of people, your product must first successfully pass through
innovators and early adopters.
These are small groups and communities that you need to target explicitly. Geoffrey
Moore has written an entire book called “Crossing the Chasm” that talks about this
phenomenon.
Products either captivate the first 15% of the market or they go to die there.
If your target customer is “everyone,” there’s no way to growth hack through that first
15% because you don’t even know who to convince to buy.
And, how do you get this right?
How to Target the Small Minority of People Who Get the

Most Out of Your Product
You should create a customer profile. Consider all aspects of your product. Then ask yourself:
Who would get the maximum benefit from our product?
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Be specific. Describe a real person as best as possible

.
If Dropbox were to tell you about their ideal initial customer, they’d probably say something like:
A 22-year-old white male who is tech-savvy, lives in San Francisco or the Bay Area, is skinny,
has only a few really good friends, wears XYZ brand clothes, and spends most of his time
online.
That’s how detailed you should be.
And, in the beginning, you actually want to cater exclusively to those people’s needs.
Traditional products like books published by a traditional publisher have to create a lot of buzz
before they even launch to make sure that the launch is successful.
With a modern software product, what happens before the launch isn’t nearly as important as
what happens after the launch.
Dropbox didn’t throw a huge invite-only launch event. They were released to the public at
TechCrunch50 in 2008. Their much smarter move was to make the service invite-only after the
launch.
That’s clever, huh?
They launched it at an event where their ideal customers gathered every year and then created
an aura of exclusivity around the product.
People looking to join the service needed an invite from current users to get in. Since everyone
wanted to know what Dropbox was about and how it worked, the waiting list quickly blew up.
But, mystery almost always brings skepticism along with it. So, in order to give potential users
an idea of what Dropbox was about, they made a short demo video.
They custom-tailored that video to the users of Digg, a very popular social news network at the
time. Again, the users were all their ideal targets: Internet geeks, techies, and nerds.
Drew Houston, one of the founders, placed about 12 inside jokes throughout the presentation.
Within 24 hours, the video had 10,000 diggs (which are the equivalent of likes), the word spread
like wildfire, and their waiting list jumped from 5,000 to 75,000 users.
The PayPal Mafia is a group of entrepreneurs and investors who all hit it big with
PayPal and then went on to found other companies in Silicon Valley.
Dave McClure was a marketing director at PayPal who also started a few companies
after. But the most notable has been the tech incubator/accelerator 500 Startups. Dave
understood the critical differences between a growth hacking mindset and brand
marketing ideas.
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About a decade ago, Dave published his view on startup metrics. The idea was to
measure a few key growth-drivers and ignore everything else.
He outlined the metrics by funnel stages in the helpful acronym AARRR. Users then
affectionately nicknamed it “Pirate Metrics.”
The funnel stages outlined included:

1. Acquisition: How you get people to know you by name.
2. Activation: How to give users a happy first experience.
3. Retention: How you keep them coming back for more.
4. Revenue: How you monetize them.
5. Referral: How you get them to tell other people.
You could pick out a few key metrics for each stage and get an accurate view of how
well your efforts (and ideas) are paying off.
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Then, based on that knowledge, you know whether the startup idea has traction or
whether you should pivot to something else. The first stage at the top of the funnel is
acquisition.
This measures exactly what it sounds like. You can look at new site or app traffic, or you
can even look at new eyeballs to get an estimate of your reach. How many people are
you exposing to your messaging? Here, you’re looking at the performance of paid
advertising, PR, SEO, and more.
For example, if you spend money on Facebook Ads but all of those visitors bounce
immediately, it was unqualified traffic to begin with. That means that you might be
targeting the wrong people
That’s an indication that you need to go back to flesh out those customer personas
again.
So you can add layers to your acquisition metrics, such as all site visitors who hit at
least two pages or stay at least ten seconds. That tells you these people were actually
interested in what you have to offer.
The second step is to look at activation, which is the number of people sticking around
after visiting your site or app. Dave McClure refers to this as a “Happy First Visit.”
Sometimes, that means a hard goal like an opt-in or sign-up. But otherwise, it can also
apply to quality visits where someone uses a key feature inside your app or spends
longer than a minute browsing site pages.This is also the reason why Crazy Egg was
created in the first place.
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Google Analytics might tell you that 100 people visited your homepage. That’s helpful if
you’re analyzing acquisition tactics like SEO.
But it’s not helpful if you’re trying to figure out what those 100 people were doing on
your site.
You literally have no idea if they found the page helpful, if it did a good job giving them
the information they were looking for, or if they were potentially interested in signing up.
And those things eventually dictate whether or not they become a paying customer.
That’s where Crazy Egg comes into play.
You can literally see based on their behavior and clicks whether they’re activating or
not.
Getting people to your site is easy with ads. Getting qualified people is a little tougher.
But what about actually getting those people to opt in or sign up? That’s another thing
entirely.
It tells you if people truly love your product concept or not.
After getting those activations, or happy first visits, the next step is to retain them over
the long haul.Think about mobile apps for a second.You’re excited and eager to
download that new app everyone is talking about. You head to the app store, click
download, and can barely contain your excitement.
We’re on our phones more than desktop computers today. And 84% of the time that
we’re on our phones, we’re inside mobile apps.
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And yet the average retention for apps is awful.
Check out this terrifying graph for app owners:
That’s telling you that almost 80% of users will leave and never return within just three
days of downloading. That number gets even worse within a few months, rising up to a
whopping 95%.
That’s why retention is so important. You spend money on ads or creating an awesome
first experience, but churn will kill most startups.
You’ll lose customers faster than you can get them, and you’ll be out of cash (and
business) in no time.
An old study published by the Harvard Business Review and Bain & Co showed that
most new customers are unprofitable for a period of time.
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We can debate the actual numbers today, but the same underlying principles still apply.
Many new customers are unprofitable at the beginning because you have to spend
money on ads, people, office space, etc.
To make matters worse, most SaaS companies only charge a tiny fraction of their value
each month. That means you need to keep a customer for anywhere from three to six
months (or maybe even a year) to get back in the black.
Most marketing blog posts focus on acquisition channels or tactics. They talk about how
the “money is in the list” to get email subscribers to buy their first products.
They’re right… to a certain degree.
But true growth hackers know that the money is in the customer list. You can often
increase revenue faster and easier by focusing on increasing customer retention rather
than focusing on new acquisitions.
So unless you’re in the mobile app business, people dropping out after their first or
second engagement is a bad, bad sign.
Not many companies will be able to build a viral referral loop like Dropbox or Facebook.
The truth is that it takes a few special things happening all at once. You need timing, an
amazing product, and network effects. That happens when the use of the product by
one person increases the value for another.
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The more customers who spread the news for you, the less you have to spend on
acquisition, which means the closer you are to profitability.
Your customers should be telling their friends and hyping your product. The Net
Promoter Score is one of my favorite techniques to measure this because it’s so
simple.But you’ll have to keep reading below to see how to use it properly.
Everything we’ve been doing so far has had one goal in mind: Revenue.
Ultimately, people giving you cold-hard cash is the best form of product validation. It
might take a while to get there. It might take a few iterations or pivots to hit upon a
winning combo.
But if you get the first four steps right, the revenue one should take care of itself.Now
you understand the framework for making growth hacking decisions. You saw how each
plays a different role in helping you define success.
Next up, let’s start to dig deeper.

We’ll go into each one of these with specific strategies, tips, and hacks that some of the
fastest-growing companies in history have used. We’ll start at the top of the funnel with
acquisition.
Step 3: Growth Hacking Acquisition

Sean Ellis may have created the concept of growth hacking.But Eric Ries helped
popularize it to the masses.Before Eric’s book, The Lean Startup, the tech and software
communities were some of the only places where people knew of many of the core
growth hacking ideas.
Eric helped put it on the map by formalizing how it could apply to companies of all sizes
and in every industry around the world.One of the most important topics in that book
was about the three engines of growth.These are the three most reliable paths
companies can take to scale customer acquisition. But doing more than one of them at
a time is next to impossible.
The trick is to figure out which kind works best for your own product type:
1. Viral: Think of Dropbox. You grow primarily through other people referring you to
their friends, family, or colleagues.
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2. Sticky: Think of Crazy Egg. You create an irresistible experience that keeps
people around as long as possible (and thus, paying you more and more).
3. Paid : Think of Groupon. You spend $50 to acquire a customer who will
eventually be worth $500 to your business.
Each of those three ‘engines’ works. However, the degree to which each performs
depends largely on your business.
Step 4: Activation With Growth Hacking

Do you want to increase conversions ASAP?
It’s really simple.All you have to do is eliminate a few form fields on your opt-in page.
I was able to increase my conversion rate by 26% by removing just one form field from
my sign-up page.But wait. It can’t be that simple, can it?
Unfortunately, it’s not.
You’ve only made it much easier to opt-in at this free step. Free conversions don’t pay
the bills. Only paying customers do.Here’s a perfect example from a few years back that
proves the point.
Asking people for a credit card when they sign up adds a lot of friction. They’re not sure
they want or need your product just yet.Removing that requirement makes it much
easier.
So it’s easy to guess how that affects conversions.
Here’s what a Totango study found:
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● They found that not requiring a credit card brought about a higher conversion
rate (~10%).
● Asking for the credit card brought about a lower conversion rate (~2%).
Your own scenario is unique. Repeating this study might give you different results.
However, the point still remains.It’s useless to get more people to convert if more of
them are just going to leave. That’s not a successful activation.
Instead, you want qualified people to stick around. Sign-ups or opt-ins are a good start.
But they don’t give you the full picture.Overlaying pages per view after sign-up might
give you the context you need.
Fraser Deans highlights three distinct phases for a successful acquisition:
1. Pre-Signup: This includes all of the ‘stuff’ that someone experiences before they
opt-in.
2. First User Experience: These are the guided onboarding steps that help
someone see the value of your product.
3. Post-Signup: This is all the stuff that comes after to make sure they don’t have
buyer’s remorse.
The first phase outlines all of the steps someone takes to reach your signup page.
For example, maybe they Googled a pain point, found a blog post, and hit that page.
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Maybe they saw an ad first that directed them to a landing page.Or maybe they just
typed in your brand name directly.
The trick here is to optimize the user flows to speed each one up.
For example, a lot of my sites will feature a tool opt-in feature front and center.
In this previous example of the Crazy Egg homepage, and all you’ll see is a URL bar to
get an instant heatmap:
Why do we do that?
We’re ‘shaping’ the user flow. Someone can come in on a blog post and read about
common website mistakes.Then, once they start browsing around the site to get more
information, we can literally show them how to fix their site
.
That’s incredibly powerful. It gives someone immediate value for free.
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And it’s also one of the best ways I’ve seen to get people to instantly understand how
your product can benefit them.They have an ‘aha moment’ the minute they see the
heatmap in action.
So from there, it’s an easy sell.
Getting someone to convert is only half the battle, though.

The next step is to make sure that “happy first experience” takes place.This is the
onboarding phase where you can use tutorials to help people learn how to get the most
out of your product.
Claire Suellentrop outlines three distinct methods including:
1. Self-service
2. Group demos
3. One-on-one calls
The level of service and attention also depends largely on the product type.For
example, simple products like Canva are fairly straightforward.
Step 5: Retention Through Growth Hacking

Two sections ago, we did a deep dive on churn.
We saw what it is, how it works, and how it affects your bottom line.
Why’d we spend so much time on it?
Because retaining existing customers is the quickest path to success.
According to Adobe, repeat customers are more likely to convert and spend more
money.
It’s basically the same story everywhere you look.
Repeat customers are more likely to purchase.
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Your best customers also spend the most.
So what’s the problem with this? Well, most companies get it completely wrong.
They allocate the lion’s share of their budgets not to retaining existing customers but
trying to find new ones.We should simply call that less effective and less profitable
marketing.
The secret to retention-based marketing is to avoid getting tunnel vision on any one
channel. Here’s why.
Today, consumers go around from channel to channel and device to device before
eventually buying.
Google calls this the Zero Moment of Truth, which describes how customers interact
with your brand before you even realize it.
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They’re visiting different sites and consulting different sources.

That’s why it often takes at least five ‘touches’ before customers will give you the time of
day.
The trick is to mix those touches up to be everywhere at all times.
A Facebook and Salesforce study proved that when you combine tactics, such as email
and Facebook Ads, ROI shoots through the roof.
Think about what Facebook does.

If you don’t log in for a few days, what happens next?
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They email you with information about what you’re missing out on.
This friend is doing that. Your sibling went to this new place.
Each email packs social proof to bring you back to their app.
Why?
Why does a social network invest so heavily in using email?

Because they know it still works.
The good news is that you can combine a few tricks to copy their approach.
Facebook Ads recently announced a native integration with MailChimp.
That means you can publish ads based on your email campaigns directly from inside
their app.
But even better, you can create custom audiences from your MailChimp lists, too.
Sync your account on Facebook, create a new custom audience, select the list option,
and you’ll see a new MailChimp option at the bottom.
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You can even use your MailChimp lists for interest audiences, too.
You can boost posts or even create a lookalike audience based on the people on each
list.
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You can also connect the platforms so remarketing campaign messaging can coincide
with marketing automation emails on platforms like Zapier.
And you can run these remarketing campaigns across Google AdWords, LinkedIn, and
Twitter.
Don’t just stop with connecting to email, though.
In-app messages give you a proactive way to get your message across the moment
someone hits your site.
Customers love live chat because it helps them resolve issues in just a few minutes as
opposed to emails that can take days. In fact, you can resolve most problems with live
chat in only 42 seconds.
Step 6: Revenue With Growth hacking

Money is always tight in a new SaaS company.That’s why they require such heavy
investment to scale.
You need a team and an infrastructure that will one day be capable of processing
millions of orders.
And charging $10/mo often doesn’t cut it.
35 Switchbold.com
This puts you in the red the first few months. You’re stuck in negative cash flow, trying
to hang on long enough to recoup your investment.That’s why the hosting company
WPEngine has raised $41.2 million in 2015.And that’s also why they created a special
email campaign to front-load annual purchases.
First, they use a Speed Tool as an opt-in (or activation). This is perfect for people who
know that their website is slow but don’t yet know the value in switching over to
WPEngine.
After submitting their info, WPEngine will send them a series of emails over the next few
days to provide more information and build the value of their product.
36 Switchbold.com
One of the final emails in that sequence is a hard-sell.

By now, people have had a chance to get warmed up. They have properly activated and
retained them.So the goal switches to revenue.
The final email is relatively simple because they have already done the hard work.
It’s mostly text with a good offer to buy an annual plan now to save two months
37 Switchbold.com
Jason Cohen, WPEngine’s CEO, said that these emails “permanently moved the needle
on signups after just a week of work. And it’s easy to measure and therefore to
improve.”The annual plan helps WP Engine get their money up-front to smooth out that
negative cash flow issue.So refining a simple process like this is a huge win. It helps
them significantly impact the health of the company.And it also shows why growth
hackers spend so much time down here toward the bottom of the funnel.
You can often find bigger, faster ROI jumps.
Another perfect example is an abandon cart sequence.Users abandon almost 70% of e-

commerce carts.These people are ready to purchase, and then they leave your site
forever.Or worse, they buy the same stuff for a few bucks less from a competitor.
So once again, dropping this number even a little can have a massive impact on new
revenue.
This one is a no-brainer. Simply test free shipping vs. no free shipping.Then, track total
sales and the average order value during the period to see which one results in a better
ROI even if you’re eating the cost of shipping.Let’s say free shipping pays off. So now,
test it again. Try free shipping on orders over $20 vs. free shipping on orders over $100.
Compare the revenue with a decrease in costs to see which one works best.
Rinse and repeat.
See?
Growth hacking isn’t completely difficult.

It does require a few technical skills to know how you’re going to implement these
changes and track them accordingly.But the key is in the mindset.
You need to constantly hypothesize new ideas, test, measure, and repeat until you hit a
point of diminishing returns.
Step 7: Referrals With Growth Hacking
Frederick F. Reichheld published “The One Number You Need to Know to Grow” in the
December 2003 issue of Harvard Business Review.His point was simple but profound:
Most companies measure the wrong things.They spend all this time, energy, effort, and
money creating complex systems to measure customer happiness.
And yet, a single question can often give them a better indication of performance.
38 Switchbold.com
Even more, this one simple question is often a much better predictor of top-line growth:
“Would you recommend this company to a friend?”
Sounds too easy, right?
But Frederick spent years developing this research, validating it, and refining it.
He applied it to a variety of industries and found similarly-strong results across the

board.
Today, most product companies use the Net Promoter Score because it’s the easiest
way to predict referrals.
All you have to do is ask people one simple question to gauge your product:
How likely are you to refer this [product/company] to a friend or colleague?
You give them a simple scale of one to ten and measure responses based on their point
total.
Here’s how they break down:

● Promoters (score 9-10): These are the people who will recommend you to others
as proof of your product concept.
● Passives (score 7-8): These people are fine with your product but would switch to
another alternative if it presented itself.
● Detractors (score 0-6): These are the unhappy people who will not only churn
soon but will also talk badly about your product
.
You want to pay attention to the middle group for retention. Ideally, you want to get in
touch and try to save them before they leave for someone else.However, for Net
Promoter purposes, ignore them completely.
Instead, you subtract the percentage of people at the bottom (Detractors) from people at
the top (Promoters) to arrive at a score.
39 Switchbold.com
Now, this score is somewhat arbitrary. The point is to track this number over time to see
which direction you’re heading.Fortunately, there are a few simple benchmark numbers
to begin with if you’re starting from scratch
.
These can tell you how the product experience compares with the wider industry.The
bigger the gap between you and the competition, the better chance of success you
have. The closer you are, the more likely your product idea doesn’t stand out enough
just yet. People will leave you if something easier or cheaper comes along.Products
with strong network effects like Facebook and Dropbox also pay close attention to their
viral coefficient.
This ratio tells you the “number of new customers that each existing customer is able to
successfully convert,” according to David Skok.
All you have to do is multiply the number of invitations by the conversion rate.
“Invitations” refer to messages sent out from a referral program, for example.
You create a simple viral loop like Dropbox does that offers an incentive to share.
40 Switchbold.com
Then you can use a platform like ReferralCandy to track the results back to each
individual.
41 Switchbold.com
While the ratio itself is simple, it takes more work to analyze in real time.
You have to track this number by cohort over time. It’s essentially a moving target.
Step 8: Improve Your Product Continuously
You must iterate, iterate, iterate.

Why?
Because even with millions of users, it takes most startups years to become profitable.
This is either because their product is not that expensive or because they wait too long
to charge customers.Anomalies like Birchbox, who were quickly making $125 million in
revenues annually with only $12 million in funding in 2014, are really just that –
anomalies.
It’s shocking that 44% of companies have a greater focus on acquiring new customers
while only 18% focus on retention. Yet, studies show that selling to existing customers
is much easier.
The likelihood of getting a sale from existing customers is 60%-70%, but it’s only 5%-
20% for new customers.
Twitter faced this problem early on. They got millions of users very quickly, but they
weren’t actually using the service.This is because the perceived value of your product
rises and falls with the onboarding process.
42 Switchbold.com
Imagine signing up for a service, getting a welcome email, but receiving no instructions
on how to use it and then never hearing from them again.
That’d be a pretty bad experience, right?
I wouldn’t come back either.
Twitter learned this from experience. At one time, Twitter would leave new users alone
in the dark after they first signed up. When Twitter changed this, engagement went up
immensely.
This is how it happened:
When signing up, Twitter prompted users to follow 5-10 people on their own.
If you spend 10 minutes finding a few friends or celebrities on Twitter and you start to
follow them, you’ve already invested time into the product, which makes it much more
likely that you’ll return.
43 Switchbold.com
It’s only natural that if you “follow” someone, you actually want to check up on them and
see what’s new.
here’s a good quote about this idea of constant improvement:
Never stop learning because life never stops teaching.
So, don’t just take a “one and done” approach to growth hacking. What comes after the
growth is just as important if you want to create a sustainable business.
How to Use Growth Hacking, In Summary
1. Make sure you create a product people actually want

Putting out free content in your niche and sharing it on social media
Asking and answering questions to get good ideas
Instantly collecting feedback on your ideas
Validating your ideas by getting customers before fully building the solution
2. Don’t Target Everybody and Narrow Your Focus
Make it an exclusive experience for them
Help them spread the word within their community
3. Growth Hacking Through Customer Acquisition
Go viral through incentivizing the sharing of your product (it should become
better with more users)
Retain users over the long haul with sticky features
Or increase the lifetime value of each customer so you can profitably buy new
customers
4. Growth Hacking Through Customer Activation
Streamline user flows to get people into the product quickly
Create product tutorials to seamlessly onboard customers
5. Increase Customer Retention With Irresistable Offers
Add paid remarketing campaigns to your triggered emails
Plan them in advance to switch messaging based on whether people do or don’t
stick around
6. Increase Revenue Through Growth Hacking
Big revenue increases can be as simple as getting customers to prepay
This smoothes out cash flow problems notorious with product companies
Focus on low hanging fruit like abandon cart emails for e-commerce to save
people who might leave without buying
44 Switchbold.com
7. Get More Referrals

Net Promoter Score predicts if people will recommend you to their friends or
colleagues
Compare that number over time or against industry benchmarks
Viral products need a viral coefficient greater than one to grow
8. Improve Your Product Continuously
Constantly iterating and releasing updates
Testing every detail
Optimizing the onboarding process
Conclusion
It only took Facebook eight years to reach a $50 billion valuation. That kind of growth
was unprecedented. It was historical at the time
.
But Uber reached the same valuation in 5 years.
I can already hear you making excuses.

“These growth hacks won’t work anymore.”
“This doesn’t apply to my industry.”
I don’t want to hear it
.
Growth hacking isn’t a fixed strategy.
It’s a mindset.
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Chapter 6: 12 Best Growth Hack

Techniques and Tips to Boost
Conversions
If you’re ready to try growth hacking tactics and strategies now, I’m going to give you 12
places to start. Use these techniques to boost conversions, but also to build growth in
all other areas of your business.
Growth is often linked to sales, but other metrics matter too. For instance, if you’re
getting more social media followers, collecting more email addresses, and getting more
comments on your blog, your business is growing in different ways.You can start any
one of them today.
1. Find social media platforms your competitors aren’t

using
46 Switchbold.com
If you’re in a competitive industry, you might not be able to dominate Twitter or

Facebook. Consider looking for smaller social networks, such as Profit.ly for stock
traders or The Dots for creatives.
When you can dominate a social media platform over your competitors, you have
unfettered access to your audience. Additionally, you can funnel traffic from your
website to the social platform and vice versa, creating a nice environment for making
good use of your audience.
There are lots of ways to approach this growth hack. Maybe you’ve heard your
audience members talking about a site, so you investigate it. Then you start posting.
Before you know it, you have a rabid fan base.
2. Partner with another company to share audiences

Speaking of audiences, partnerships are the unsung heroes of the growth hacking
world. If you have an audience of 50,000 members and another entrepreneur in a
related field has an audience of 50,000 members, you can work together to reach
100,000 people.
You’re not looking for a direct competitor. Instead, focus on finding a business that
complements your own. For instance, maybe you sell homemade pet food. You could
partner with a business that sells pet toys or personalized collars.
Reach out to prospective partners with an email or phone call.

Come ready with ideas for ways to blend your audiences in organic ways, such as by
tagging one another on social media, offering product bundles that combine your
products, or even something as simple as cross-posting on each others’ sites.
3. Give something away for free

There’s a reason people shop at Costco. It’s not for the 52-roll pack of toilet paper. It’s
for the free snacks.
I’m kidding, of course, but freebies are a tried-and-true way to get people interested in
your brand — and fast.
A well-advertised social media giveaway is one option. Hype it in as many places as
possible to garner participation. You can also reward people for sharing your giveaway
with their friends.
Or maybe you offer something special with every product your customers buy. I
mentioned homemade pet food earlier. Maybe each new customer gets a free special
treat for his or her furry companion.
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4. Conduct constant A/B testing
I can’t tell you how much A/B testing matters when it comes to growth hacking. If
something isn’t working, you won’t know why until you test it against a variation.
I recommend testing everything, but start with the most conversion-heavy areas of your
website:
○ Landing pages
○ Homepage
○ Ends of blog posts
○ Sales pages
○ Contact page
Focus on one area of each page at a time so you don’t skew your results. If you change
more than one variable, you won’t know which impacted the outcome.
Use Crazy Egg to set up A/B tests on your website after you’ve run user behavior
reports like Heatmaps, Scrollmaps, Confetti reports, and List reports. When you have
data in hand, your A/B tests become much more effective because you know what to
test.
48 Switchbold.com
5. Change up your landing page layout

If your landing page doesn’t excite your audience, maybe it’s time to go back to the
drawing board. This is especially true if you’ve already A/B tested everything, and you’re
still getting low conversions.
Think about the landing page in a whole new way. What would convince you to convert
if you were the customer?
Maybe you’re targeting a younger audience that thrives on video games. By gamifying
your landing page, you make it much more enticing.
I’ll go back to my pet food example. You could create a series of questions about the
visitor’s pet to help determine what type of food would be best for him or her.
6. Invite your audience to email you

I’ve done this a few times and with great success. Flying in the face of conventional
email marketing wisdom, I occasionally invite my entire email subscriber list to email me
back with questions, comments, or answers to a question I’ve posed.
DoNotReply email addresses close off communication. They send a subtle message: I
don’t want to hear from you.
By opening the lines of communication, you can start conversations and glean
fascinating information from your audience.
7. Attend small, local events

A true growth hacker doesn’t eliminate any potential avenues that might lead him or her
toward a goal. This includes going offline to encourage growth.
If you have small, niche-related events in your area — or even out of town — consider
attending. You can go as a guest or reserve a booth for your business.
Meeting people face-to-face, shaking their hands, and asking them about their needs
can make you a more attractive solution than a faceless company.
8. Get interactive
I’ve mentioned before that interactive content has become all the rage. From
infographics and quizzes to calculators and animated video, people love interacting with
content online.
Why don’t you create some of that content for yourself?
It’s never been easier to hire someone to build interactive content for you. Sites like
Upwork and Fiverr are populated by professionals who can create whatever you want.
Read reviews, interview potential hires, and start building.
49 Switchbold.com
9. Issue a challenge
A great way to create a positive relationship with your audience and to boost your
credibility is to issue a challenge. It could be related to a personal growth goal, a
charitable cause, or a creative endeavor.
For instance, millionaire penny stock trader Tim Sykes issued a Trading Challenge. He
has used his training program to create several millionaires as well as many more six-
figure traders.
The trick here is to make it something that isn’t available to everyone. Tim invites people
to apply to his challenge — not to join.
Similarly, inspiring people to contribute to a charitable cause can help the charity while
amplifying your voice. Getting involved in something you care about will naturally draw
others to you.
10. Broadcast your personality

I talked about Gary Vee before. Many of his fans and followers don’t even know he got
his start selling wine.
People love Gary Vee because of his personality. No matter what medium he uses to
communicate, he’s unabashedly himself.
If you have a strong personality, use it to your advantage. Become the face of your
brand, and inspire and help others. Growth hacking often involves figuring out what you
can do for others before you ask for a conversion or sale.
11. Offer a freemium option

If you own a software or SaaS company, you might consider developing a freemium
model. This works great for apps of all kinds.
Offer something for free. It might not do much, but it’ll get people in the gate.
Once they see that they can benefit from your product, they’ll want more of it. Some
people will never convert into paid users, but you want to focus on the onboarding
process.
It’s easier to retain customers than to acquire them. That’s why the freemium model
works so well. You already have leads on the line. You just have to convince them they
want the paid version of your product.
12. Build a free, useful tool

Growth marketers, including myself, are starting to realize the amazing benefits of free tools.
You might know that I bought Ubersuggest among other tools. I’m making them better every day
because I’ve found that they generate tons of traffic.
You can do the same.
50 Switchbold.com
Chapter 7: Start Your Growth Hack

Strategy Now
Are you ready to call yourself a growth marketer? Growth hacking doesn’t come easily
or naturally to everyone.Start with a list of the best growth hacks for your business. Use
the list I provided above to give you a head start.
Once you have a few strategies mapped out, implement them fast. Don’t second-guess
yourself. Act.
Use Crazy Egg to test your theories and monitor performance. Maybe you’re getting a
ton of traffic on your landing page, but nobody converts. You need to figure out why that
page isn’t working.
It could be the offer, the design, or the headline. You won’t know until you test.
Some of your growth hacking strategies will fail. That’s fine. Just stop doing those things
and move immediately to the next thing. That’s how a growth hacker’s mindset works.
51 Switchbold.com
Conclusion
Growth hacking is often confused with conversion marketing and lead generation. It’s
actually much different.A growth hacker doesn’t care about all the little metrics. He or
she wants to cause exponential growth in the shortest possible timespan.
Sometimes, that means throwing money at customers via advertising, giveaways,

contests, and free gifts. On other occasions, grassroots incentives work better.
Only you know what’s best for your particular business. Try at least three of these
growth hacking tips and get back to me on how they worked.
52 Switchbold.com
Chapter 8: Growth hacking case studies
1. Airbnb
This one's pretty clever.
Airbnb gave an option for anyone listing their property on their site the opportunity to
post it on Craigslist. If they agreed, the listing would appear on both sites. Then, any
clicks on the Craigslist site would be linked back to the original posting on Airbnb.
53 Switchbold.com
On top of this, Airbnb combed through posts on Craigslist, contacting users. If they were
looking to rent out their place, they would be sent an email tempting them to also list it
on Airbnb.
So basically, they infiltrated Craigslist, and overtook 'em from the inside. Like a cool spy,
or a parasite.
2. Dollar Shave Club
Dollar Shave Club, launched in 2012, was up against some stuff competition. Gillette
had been the go-to of every razor-buyer in America for decades. So, DSC had to pick a
strong argument to overthrow its the industry's incumbent.
To do this, they asked customers two questions: Do you like spending $20+ a month on
razors, and do you think that razor needs all the flashing lights and unnecessary do-
dads of the current products on the market.
Plus, DSC knew the power of video marketing. Do you want to see the ad that triggered
over 12,000 orders in one day, and was viewed over 26M times? Of course you do:
54 Switchbold.com
Basically, DSC knew that word of mouth could be the key to growth. This works
perfectly alongside viral videos, in order to spread the ad from customer to customer.
But they also noticed that when a customer receives a great experience from their
brand, they were more likely to recommend it to a friend. This led the company to focus
their efforts on the retention of their current customers, over acquiring new ones.
So, investing in the customer lifetime value brings in new customers with ease. So,
when your customers are super happy with the product, they create their own
advertising.
3. Tesla
600,000 cars produced. $0 spent for marketing strategy. How did Tesla do it?
55 Switchbold.com
Well, as Tesla isn't a traditional car manufacturer, it wouldn't make sense for them to
market like traditional car manufacturers. Instead they, like DSC, utilized their
customers.
Selling a lifestyle and an image, not a product, the car company made sure their
customers were chomping at the bit to show off their purchases. Plus, when a customer
purchased a Tesla, they felt as if they were representing the modern sleek image, and
sustainability, that the brand stands for.
They also leveraged two specific tactics: Scarcity and Exclusivity.
Car production was made-to-order, so the product, and as a result the experience, was
highly personalized.
56 Switchbold.com

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Growth Hacking - A Path to Scale Your Business

Copyright © All rights reserved worldwide.

Any perceived slights of specific persons, people, or organisations are unintentional.

About the Authors:

● Trained Thousands of People in the field of Digital Marketing.

● Managed More than $80K ad budget in Paid Avertising.

This concept of “growth hacking” according to Josh Helman, is made up of two

Chapter 2: Short History of Growth

Growth is the sun that a growth hacker revolves around.

Chapter 3: Skills Needed for a Growth

Chapter 4: What Does a Growth Hacker

Growth hacking strategies might encompass content marketing, steep discounts on

Examples of Growth Hacking

Chapter 5: 8 Steps of Growth Hacking

● Step 1: Make sure you create a product people actually want

Step 1: Make sure you create a product people actually

The first one has gathered 15 million views so far:

What’s the solution to this? It’s simple: Get feedback.

Two Secrets Steps to Ensure Your Product Hits the

2. As soon as you have an idea, start getting feedback.

A company who definitely nailed the feedback part is Instagram.

Step 2: Don’t target everybody

Guess who Airbnb’s target customer was in the beginning?

How to Target the Small Minority of People Who Get the

Be specific. Describe a real person as best as possible

The funnel stages outlined included:

And yet the average retention for apps is awful.

Check out this terrifying graph for app owners:

Next up, let’s start to dig deeper.

Step 3: Growth Hacking Acquisition

Step 4: Activation With Growth Hacking

Here’s what a Totango study found:

Fraser Deans highlights three distinct phases for a successful acquisition:

Getting someone to convert is only half the battle, though.

Claire Suellentrop outlines three distinct methods including:

Step 5: Retention Through Growth Hacking

Your best customers also spend the most.

They’re visiting different sites and consulting different sources.

Think about what Facebook does.

Why does a social network invest so heavily in using email?

Don’t just stop with connecting to email, though.

Step 6: Revenue With Growth hacking

One of the final emails in that sequence is a hard-sell.

You can often find bigger, faster ROI jumps.

Another perfect example is an abandon cart sequence.Users abandon almost 70% of e-

Growth hacking isn’t completely difficult.

Step 7: Referrals With Growth Hacking

He applied it to a variety of industries and found similarly-strong results across the

Here’s how they break down:

Step 8: Improve Your Product Continuously

You must iterate, iterate, iterate.

here’s a good quote about this idea of constant improvement:

Never stop learning because life never stops teaching.

How to Use Growth Hacking, In Summary

1. Make sure you create a product people actually want

7. Get More Referrals

I can already hear you making excuses.

Chapter 6: 12 Best Growth Hack

1. Find social media platforms your competitors aren’t