Examples:

Dropbox - referral program.

Dropbox had a very strong customer loyalty.

Airbnb - growth hack - reverse engineered Craigslist’s search experience, so that Airbnb bookings would show more prominently on Craigslist.

Airbnb benefited from audience coming from Craigslist.

BitTorrent - convert more free users to paid users.

They did a survey across free users - who were actually not aware that there was an option to use a premium service. Just by putting a prominent button on their app, BitTorrent team increased free-to-paid conversion rate by 92%.

Another insight - a major problem point for users was that BitTorrent was very battery intensive.

They added battery saving mode as a feature, and made it available to premium users. In addition, they made it so that users with low battery would be notified that they could conserve their battery by adopting the Premium version.

The goal of all these examples is that the business achieved growth, not by spending money on traditional concepts of marketing - buying media spots, or running paid ads.

They brought together customer insights & creative tech-enabled solutions, to unlock user value. And this led to growth in real revenue terms.

Growth hacking is a mode of rapid experimentation - bringing together user insights & tech-enabled solutions,

“Growth hacking” sounds a bit like a buzzword - a quick-fix to boost growth. It kind of creates a picture that there are deterministic number of growth hacks in the world, and that one of them will click.

SEO for example, that’s a growth hack.

On the other hand, growth hack is more about looking deeply into customer insights, and creating a solution that leverages the user themselves to drive growth.

In dropbox solution, user’s innate motivation to get 250MB of extra storage of an outstanding product motivated them to be superspreaders of Dropbox.