If, for a moment, you started doubting your growth hacking possibilities, it’s time to realize that a lot of companies that once were toddlers in the business world have found their way to success owing to growth hacking strategies.
So, I’ll crown my post with five growth hacking use cases for you to get amused and inspired:
These guys invented a clever onboarding strategy by creating an aura of exclusivity and arousing public interest. They’ve identified their ideal customers and launched the product at a business event where these customers gathered. Yet, the access to the service was invitation-only, so people interested in trying Dropbox had to get an invitation from the existing users (Clubhouse has used this same technique recently!).
They didn’t stop there, though. Its CEO Drew Houston made a short demo video about the service and uploaded it to the popular social news network of that time — Digg. Even though it was a formal demonstration, the video included plenty of Digg Easter eggs. As a result, the number of people wishing to try the service has grown tremendously.
Just like in the previous case, Gmail account creation was based on invitations at first. And this growth hacking strategy worked really well! Since each new user had a limited number of invitations, it triggered the already mentioned FOMO effect, and people started auctioning off their Gmail invitations on eBay.
One of the most popular SEO tools has demonstrated growth hacking in action when they hacked the conference with… not a brilliant presentation, not a line of brilliant speech… but with just a 10 cent coffee cup.
That was the best possible ad since most conference members were holding the cup in their hands. This coffee cup worked as a real ice breaker, which drew lots of attention to the brand and initiated relationship building during the event.
Known for its great marketing courses, HubSpot proves that creating valuable content is as important as elaborating on an effective growth hacking strategy to make people use it.
When, in 2016, Eric Peters, a growth marketer from HubSpot Academy, created five new courses, together with his team, they decided to promote them in the following way. They implemented a module that showed all the certification badges one could acquire, in grayscale, within Academy emails. Those that have been passed were marked orange. As soon as they expired, they became gray again.
Users were stimulated to pass more courses to get more orange badges. All badges were linked to the list of courses. This way, new certification courses quickly got many users.
Slack is an example of an astounding global growth hacking strategy. It started accidentally when Stewart Butterfield and his team were working on a games app Glitch. They realized how challenging it was to communicate within the organization and what a chance they had to streamline it. So they did.
The success of Slack is based on the following: