
When Growth Hacking Goes Bad - hackhackhack
http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/03/when-growth-hacking-goes-bad/
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timje1
Near the end of the article is a link to this very interesting write up about
airBnB's 'growth hacking' on craigslist. It acts as a useful counterpoint to
rapgenius' case.

[http://davegooden.com/2011/05/how-airbnb-became-a-billion-
do...](http://davegooden.com/2011/05/how-airbnb-became-a-billion-dollar-
company/)

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belluchan
It's interesting, but it's one of those unique things that you can't easily
duplicate with other business types.

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eps
> _Yesterday, the site had 234,590 unique visitors, according to Quantcast
> (...) On Monday, before it was knocked out of Google, it had 1,376,535
> unique visitors._

So Google gave them over 80% of all their uniques, meaning that they have an
insane bounce rate and very poor user retention.

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timje1
The nature of their site means that people will often display the following
usage pattern:

-search Google for something like 'rapgenius track X'

-read the page covering the track that they're looking for

-close the page

Similar to songmeanings.net or other lyrics+ sites.

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smackfu
Or they are just looking for lyrics, and don't care about the interpretation.
Then the usage is:

-search Google for something like 'track X lyrics'

-click the first link that looks correct

-close the page

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rowyourboat
The article mentions sending SMS invitations and shows as an example the case
where the user apparently did not mean to send the text message.

Do text messages cost the user money in the US, too? In Europe, they do, and
while it's not a big amount, I would be furious if an App just sent out a text
message on my behalf without making very sure I wanted to do that. It's both
my reputation with my friends and my wallet they're damaging here.

So SMS "invitations" seem to be an extremely risky move to me.

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jgh
I pay $0.25 per text message on Verizon (note: I don't have a text plan, which
I could get for $10/month. But I don't send/receive enough texts to make it
worthwhile)

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ameister14
A lot of this just seems like it wasn't thought through correctly.

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ErikAugust
on Circle's Growth Hack: "You cannot sign up without location, and they hide
this "spam hack" in Bay Area, maybe even entire California."

Ha. That is especially hilarious. I wonder if it's true?

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21TmsT1qsPo](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21TmsT1qsPo)

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danso
I'd love to read an article about "Growth Hacking Gone Good"...because I'm
sure there are a few good cases to follow, in situations that were more
difficult to get growth than Rap genius.

The first thing that comes to mind is Imgur. I've only read about the site's
growth casually, but what I remember as a user was that one day, someone
announced the service to Redditors, people loved it, I liked it, but assumed
it was a small minnow in an ocean that include Flickr, Picasa, Tinypic,
Twitter-friendly services like yFrog, and so forth. Even more problematic was
that the feature that made Imgur likeable -- hotlinking hosted images -- was
basically impossible to attach user-retaining measures/loyalty/SEO-hacks, etc,
all the while sucking up massive bandwidth.

Edit: also worth noting: not only is Imgur not a place to (easily) search and
revisit, as a domain, it has the same copyright-infringing/duplicative-content
risk that RapGenius does too.

And yet Imgur is now a behemoth, by _not_ jilting its main feature for easy
profit...I'm still wondering.. _how the hell did they do that?_ I pay
attention to imgur because I'm a geek who often looks at URLs. Even among
redditors I must be a rare case, but my perception is that Imgur did things so
right and so well that, now they're close to becoming a near-essential service
of the Internet

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b0b0b0b
cotap could not be more annoying.

