
100 growth hacks in 100 days – 1 to 10 - Kebablite
http://www.slideshare.net/RobinYjord/100-growth-hacks-100-days-1-to-10#!
======
WA
When I was in NYC, I rented these Citi Bikes. The terms say:"After you
purchased your 24 hour code, you get the bike for 30 minutes. If you return it
late, there's a late fee added. 4$ per 30 minutes late." – "Fuck you", I
thought. "What an annoying business model."

A few days later, I was in Washington DC. I rented these Citi Bikes that are
called different there. The terms say:"After you purchased your 24 hour code,
you get the bike for 30 minutes for free. If you want to keep bicycling,
there's a small added cost of 4$ per 30 minutes for extended bike rental." \-
"That sounds fair", I thought.

This slide deck would be so much better, if it was called:"100 ways to improve
your UI" instead of "100 Growth Hacks". Because they aren't. Only one out of
ten is. And it's not even clever. Everybody does it. All others are marginal
improvements to the UI and most of them don't even have data that support
their effectiveness on growth / increased signups / decreased churn. They are
interesting, but they aren't what they're advertised as. So I feel cheated
although the "product" is good.

~~~
timothy89
Thanks for your feedback. Not all of them are UI stuff, e.g the survey, the
open-source warranty and the email where I asked why users had canceled. And
these was the first 10, now I'm at day 36 and all of them are not about just
UI. But I see your point, and the problem is mostly to be able to pull off one
hack each day, many would have to be simple and easy to do, and therefore
lower quality.

Regarding what actually is a growth hack or not, if it has to be new, none of
my 35 hacks are a growth hack. Sharing stuff on social media would be social
media marketing, blogging would be content marketing and SEO, and more
fundamental "hacks" would be either a part of a business plan or just a
marketing strategy.

However, my main goal of many of the things I do is to increase growth, both
direct and indirect.

~~~
WA
Your growth hacks don't have to be new, certainly not. My point is about
communicating in an authentic way and how communication defines the user
experience. My bicycle example talks about exactly the same thing and I had
two completely different feelings DESPITE being aware of the hard facts.

In my opinion, you under-deliver by making false promises. Your goal should be
to over-deliver by giving the user more than he expected. Your slide deck
stays entirely the same, it's just about the expectations you set beforehand.

If you're open to suggestions, I'd love to see if you performed two A/B tests
on userapp.io:

1\. Take different photos of you guys where they look older. You look young.
There was once a post on HN about a guy who split tested his profile picture
on oDesk or something like that and gave himself an artificial beard in
Photoshop. Result: More contacts, more jobs.

I wonder if the photos make a difference in your case and I would be happy to
read about the result in one of your slide decks.

2\. IMHO you got your coffee-pizza-beer comparison entirely wrong. 650$ is a
lot of pizza. Exactly. So the service must provide a heck of a lot of value –
more than if I put two coders of my business on a few night shifts to
implement the same functionality (or use frameworks that do the same) and
supply them with unlimited pizza for the rest of the year. Your goal is to
give a feeling that 650$ is a steal by comparing it to something more
expensive, not by comparing it to something that is cheaper and valuable as
well. I'd kick the comparison altogether. People have their own mindset for
comparing prices.

------
inthewoods
Probably your best growth hack is publishing this deck.

~~~
timothy89
Believe it or not, but this whole "stunt" (including this deck) hasn't
generated that many signups in the long run. The best of my "hacks" would be
creating the AngularJS module
([http://timothy.userapp.io/post/69135125206/day-25-minimizing...](http://timothy.userapp.io/post/69135125206/day-25-minimizing-
integration-times)) and then writing about it on Stack Overflow
([http://timothy.userapp.io/post/70136752527/day-31-answering-...](http://timothy.userapp.io/post/70136752527/day-31-answering-
questions-on-stack-overflow)).

------
uladzislau
Please proofread this and the future presentations. Misspellings such as
"Warrenty" and "Origional" really undermine your credibility.

~~~
timothy89
At UserApp, Robin Y. is known as "Mr. Typo". He will be performing 100 spell
checks in 100 days.

------
Kiro
Is the Math.random() complaint really true?

Great read anyway. I normally dismiss anything labeled "growth hacking" as
snake oil but this was really interesting.

~~~
ricardobeat
Math.random() in modern browsers is a pretty good RNG. He would probably be
happier with a pseudo-random algorithm or simple rotation, but over time a
uniform distribution should be seen if his code is correct:
[http://coffeescript.org/#try:alert%20%5B0..300%5D.reduce%20(...](http://coffeescript.org/#try:alert%20%5B0..300%5D.reduce%20\(p%2Cc%2Ci\)%20-%3E%0A%20%20%20%20%2B%2Bp%5BMath.floor\(Math.random\(\)%20*%203\)%5D%3B%20p%0A%2C%20%5B0%2C0%2C0%5D)

------
apiapi
Actually "the tweet about us" is the only growth hack for the moment :)

Impatient to see the 90 others. Thanks for sharing.

~~~
ricardobeat
Maybe call the others "retention hacks"? :)

~~~
timothy89
Actually most hacks are about user acquisition, but there's also retention
hacks :)

------
ErikRogneby
How much time between the implementation of each of these? 1 day? Variable? I
would think you would need longer sampling periods to determine impact.. Not
all days of the week are created equal.

~~~
lukethomas
Bingo - there's no mention of sample size, which makes it hard for me to take
the results seriously. I do however think this is good for sparking creative
thought on what tests to run.

------
austenallred
How many signups have there been for UserApp overall?

While I would never recommend optimizing for the top of the funnel first, it
seems like it's really hard to measure the effectiveness of growth-hacks when
there's not much data to operate off of.

~~~
timothy89
Agree! I do actually work on more deeper problems. At the moment I spend a lot
of time creating integrations, improving the documentation and the getting-
started guides. As we do get new signups every day, I want more of them to get
started and really using UserApp. But to learn how I can improve all that I
need feedback, and things takes time. Meanwhile I wait for feedback and test
results I spend my time trying to improve conversion rates on the website and
to drive more traffic, etc.

Here are a few of my more important "hacks":

[How to guarantee continued operation for an SaaS
startup]([http://timothy.userapp.io/post/67053194467/how-to-
guarantee-...](http://timothy.userapp.io/post/67053194467/how-to-guarantee-
continued-operation-for-an-saas))

[Day 25: Minimizing integration
times]([http://timothy.userapp.io/post/69135125206/day-25-minimizing...](http://timothy.userapp.io/post/69135125206/day-25-minimizing-
integration-times))

[Day 26: Codecademy
course]([http://timothy.userapp.io/post/69292858355/day-26-codecademy...](http://timothy.userapp.io/post/69292858355/day-26-codecademy-
course))

[Day 30: A/B testing getting-started
guides]([http://timothy.userapp.io/post/70034047713/day-30-a-b-
testin...](http://timothy.userapp.io/post/70034047713/day-30-a-b-testing-
getting-started-guides))

[Day 31: Answering questions on Stack
Overflow]([http://timothy.userapp.io/post/70136752527/day-31-answering-...](http://timothy.userapp.io/post/70136752527/day-31-answering-
questions-on-stack-overflow))

[Day 32: Customer development
survey]([http://timothy.userapp.io/post/70245235839/day-32-customer-d...](http://timothy.userapp.io/post/70245235839/day-32-customer-
development-survey))

------
ahugon
I love "tweet about us and we'll give you an extra month for free"!

~~~
ssharp
I have one pet peeve about this, which is typically my pet peeve on a lot of
growth hacking / optimization writeups: lack of longer-term focus. I hate to
preach too much because doing things without a proper measurement strategy may
be more practical than implementing a proper measurement strategy and is
better than doing nothing at all, but....

The results were listed as "very good" because 20% of new signups tweeted.
However, you're giving away revenue in hopes of generating more long-term
revenue. The success or failure of the experiment should be given in terms of
customers who signed up from seeing the tweets and what the lifetime value of
those customers are, taking into consideration the initial revenue loss.

~~~
WA
Agreed. One more thing:

The product is valued at "a tweet for a free month". Does this support the
pricing tier? There's something about the perception of price and brand value
here.

~~~
mvleming
I disagree. I'd say the free month is not for a tweet, but for the number of
users who sign up because of your tweet and then how much those users end up
paying to use the product. If just one user signs up because of your tweet and
pays to use the product for a month, then what's been given away has been
earned back. And none of this says how much the product should be valued
quantitatively, i.e. how much one month is worth.

On the other hand, you do comment about perception–if the users perceive the
product to worth less because of this deal, "a tweet for a free month", the
rationale behind why the deal is good for the product might not do anything to
offset that loss in perceived value.

~~~
WA
Your assumption, however, is that people wouldn't tweet about it if they had
no incentive. The question now is: Does the tweet incentive help to increase
the user base or not? That would actually be interesting data :)

------
drharris
Can we please begin to penalize the phrase "growth hack" on HN?

------
ing33k
I joined growthhacker.tv and found it very useful. do check it out for
interesting interviews and growth hacks.

[https://www.growthhacker.tv/](https://www.growthhacker.tv/)

ref link ( 25 % off )
[https://www.growthhacker.tv/signup?r=8f745853](https://www.growthhacker.tv/signup?r=8f745853)

------
amenghra
I feel it's important to measure the impact of a growth hack right from the
beginning instead of going back and doing micro a/b tests. I.e. set things up
so that it's trivial to A/B test every feature right from the start.

------
kirk21
I've written about what worked for me here: [https://medium.com/what-i-
learned-building/3408064eda35](https://medium.com/what-i-learned-
building/3408064eda35)

------
jhh
So if you do arbitrary stuff which kind of makes sense to make a webapp more
attractive (or not) we call this "growth hack" now? That's just ridiculous.

~~~
timothy89
I see your point, and many of my later "hacks" has been improved since my
first ten. But it also depends on who's definition we use. Most of my "hacks"
includes coding (i.e. hacking) and are meant to increase growth. Are they
considered growth hacks then? Or must something be "hacked" for it to be
called growth hacking?

------
brodney
How are some of these, namely the help button, hacks?

~~~
davidw
See:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6956893](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6956893)

------
htuao
IMO, You should mix these hacks with the impact/time prioritization framework
shown here for example

[http://denoyel.com/post/71113783478/the-easiest-
prioritizati...](http://denoyel.com/post/71113783478/the-easiest-
prioritization-framework)

to calculate the ROI on each hacks of the 100's

