Growth Hacking 101 - scale your app from zero to hero This talk gives insights about various growth hacks successfully applied by startups and big players. Suitable for newcomers and experienced marketing professionals. Talk at Google Developer Group Devfest 2015 Together with Lukas Masuch and Benjamin Raethlein

1. Growth Hacking 101
scale your app from zero to hero

2. Lukas Masuch
Google+: +LukasMasuch Twitter: @lukasmasuch
Henning Muszynski
Google+: +HenningBalboa Twitter: @henningmus
Benjamin Räthlein
Google+: +BenjaminRäthlein Twitter: @B3nRa
About us

3. Facebook
The Growth Hack everybody knows

4. Growth Hacking?

5. Growth Process

6. Growth Process

7. Validated-Learning-Cycle

8. Analytics Tools
Google Analytics: “Arm your team with the marketing
data & insights they need to make informed
decisions”
Crashlytics: Stay tuned about the crash behavior of
your app.
Google Play Dev Console: Get general metrics such
as number of downloads and user rating

9. Product/Market Fit
How Dropbox got 70k customers without a product
70000 users signed up for beta overnight and
strong interest by investors

10. Landing Page
Catch your audience
Outperformed competitors with $4500 video.
Todays valuation: $615 million

11. Landing Page – A/B Testing
How Highrise doubled signups with a pretty face

12. Landing Page – A/B Testing
Don’t be the John in your team

13. Landing Page – Tools
Get your Landing Page up in minutes
Launchrock: Click your landing page for free
MailChimp: Collect, manage & send your mails
LeadPages: Launchrock on steroids

14. Waiting List
Mostexclusivewebsite.com – the title says it all
Over 1 million users signed up resulting in 63.76
years were spent waiting

15. Waiting List
Mostexclusivewebsite.com – the title says it all
Over 1 million users signed up resulting in 63.76
years were spent waiting

16. Waiting List
Standing in line for Mailbox
800k users in queue at once resulting in over 1 million
sign-ups in 6 weeks

17. Invite system for 1 year, beta for > 3 years
Invites were sold for up to $500
Invite System
This has to be an April Fools Hoax

18. Invite System
OnePlus and the circle of VIPs
25.6M visits in Dec. 2014 to check invite status and
generated a total revenue of $300 million

19. Invite System
Ello pokes the giant
35k invites / hour (28. Sept. 2014)

20. Waiting List & Invite System
The Yin & Yang of Growth Hack
Buzz, Beta Testing & Stability
Combine with benefits for social media actions
Exclusivity & Snowball Effect
Combine & Conquer

21. Big Press Launch
Boom goes the dynamite
Press Release App. Buy PR. Get Press. Growth !?
When should I launch my startup? My answer is
almost always the same: don’t – Eric Ries (Lean Startup)
Don’t combine product release with a marketing
launch. Do a marketing launch later when you have
good indicators and a clear strategy.

22. Launch Strategy
Release silently, grow organically and collect feedback

23. Promote Promote Promote
Spam Spam Spam your Target Group

24. Promote Promote Promote
HackerNews Launch - Success Story
Takeaways: If not successful -> post again, encourage
participation, time your post (morning/breakfast time in SF),
join conversation, ask for specific feedback

25. Social Media
What fuels engagement

26. Social Media
Best Day

27. Social Media
Best Timing

28. Social Media
Tools

29. It’s a set of actions that separate customers who find value in your
product from those who don’t.
AHA Moment
The one metric to rule them all

30. AHA Moment
How long it needs to get hooked
Study about how many episodes it takes to get
you hooked on a TV show.

31. AHA Moment
Twitters point of no return
Once a user follows 30 people, they're more or less
active forever – Josh Elman (Growth Manager @ Twitter)
Figure out your AHA
moment and focus
your UX to encourage
people to reach it

32. AHA Moment
Facebooks magic number
Get a user to reach 7 friends in 10 days after signing up
– Chamath Palihapitiya (ex-Lead of Growth @ Facebook)
This number was the
single focus and
allowed the team to
drive towards a clear
objective

33. AHA Moment
Airbnb bookings depend on aesthetics
The photos were really bad. No one was booking
because you couldn't see what you were paying for.
– Joe Gebbia (Co-Founder of Airbnb)
Airbnb now offers its
hosts free professional
photography services
from thousands of
freelancers

34. Reddit was first populated with content
submitted by fake users to not look like a
ghost town.
Fake It Till You Make It
Faking demand does not only work the on stock market

35. User Activation
Push Notification

36. User Activation
Facebook Photo Tagging
Facebook’s photo tagging feature turned out as an
extremely effective viral growth and retention loop
Retention: Notifying inactive users resulted in retention
rate of 75% (visual and personal stimuli)
Growth: Fueled user acquisition by notifying non-users
about photo tagging

37. User Reactivation
This email brings users back to your app

38. Referrals – PayPal
One customer acts as sales person for bringing in
other customers – Elon Musk (Co-founder of PayPal)
Started a $10 Refer-A-Friend viral marketing
campaign in the early 2000s
7-10% daily user growth resulting in about 1 million
customers in one year

39. Referrals - Dropbox
Increased signups from 100k to 4 million users (60%)
in 15 months with about 2.8 million referral invites

40. Referrals - Airbnb
Increased bookings by over 25%

41. Referrals – Airbnb Learnings
A rebuilt referral system involved 3 months, 30k lines
of code and extensive A/B testing.
Focus: personalization, discoverability, localization

42. Referrals - Uber
Personalization
Social Sharing
Progress

43. Leverage Friends – Facebook
• Famous ambassadors
• Seeing all your friends
• Word-of-Mouth
• Television Appearance
QuizClash: Addictive social quiz makes it easy to
play with your friends
Facebook API is much more restrictive nowadays

44. Leverage Friends – Address Book
Black-hat Growth Tactic: LinkedIn had to pay $13m
for spamming mails to your contacts
When LinkedIn introduced Address Book Import their
invitations increased by 30%
Sign-up and Friend Discovery via phone numbers is a
proven concept

45. App Store Optimization

46. App Store Optimization

47. Polish your visuals: Video, Screenshots and App Icon
Research your Keywords: Put them in the title and
repeat them in the description
63% of Apps are discovered through app store
searches„“
App Store Optimization
SEO for your mobile app

48. App Store Optimization
AdWords Keyword Planner is here to help

49. Social Contests
Qwertee – the friendly shirt dealer
Collected more than 200.000 likes on their page

50. Countdown
The ever-effective trick from a psychologist‘s tool belt
Groupon grew faster than Ebay, Amazon or Google

51. Call-to-Action with clear benefits
Countdown
The ever-effective trick from a psychologist‘s tool belt

52. Countdown for psychological pressure
Countdown
The ever-effective trick from a psychologist‘s tool belt

53. Online peer pressure
Countdown
The ever-effective trick from a psychologist‘s tool belt

54. Social components: Sharing and Buying for a friend
Countdown
The ever-effective trick from a psychologist‘s tool belt

55. Crossposting
Or: How YouTube became the powerhouse it is today

56. Crossposting
Or: How YouTube became the powerhouse it is today

57. Crossposting
Or: How YouTube became the powerhouse it is today

58. Crossposting
AirBnB helps itself using Craigslist

59. Crossposting
Instagram made it easy to post to every platform

60. When posting shareable images add a watermark
Investor suggested to put “PS: I love you. Get your
free email at Hotmail” under every E-Mail
• 3000 new signups every day
• 1 million users after 6 months
• 1.5 years later: 12 of 70 million
internet users were registered
Watermarking
Hotmail loves you

61. There is no right, no wrong, just growth!
Test and experiment as much as possible
Learn from the best
and apply it to your brand / product
Define your metrics
to get actionable insights
Key Takeaways
It’s all about the growth

62. Lukas Masuch
Henning Muszynski
Benjamin Räthlein