
What was your greatest growth hack? - madreader121
What hack did you create that helped increase engagement and visitors to your platform?
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telebone_man
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. :)

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microwavecamera
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.

~~~
rdlecler1
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.

~~~
microwavecamera
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.

~~~
jazoom
>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.

~~~
microwavecamera
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-...](http://www.campaignlive.com/article/apple-ad-spend-
rises-50-record-18-billion/1370742)

"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.

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mettamage
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 :)

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exclusiv
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.

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

~~~
exclusiv
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.

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drojas
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.

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trumbitta2
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.

~~~
Dradee
> 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.

~~~
trumbitta2
I had another deal with a third-party site coming in March and was afraid to
completely burn the thing :)

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indescions_2017
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/](http://www.myviralsecrets.com/)

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tarikozket
\- 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.

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vinty_v
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.

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NikitaMatveev
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

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rdlecler1
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.

