Sean Ellis AMA

Thanks Nikki!

Thanks Dharmesh, really appreciate it.  I'd echo Hiten.  Hard to keep up with his selflessness.

Interesting thought @dharmesh .  The choice of the word "hacking" was originally more about scrappy creative problem solving than the engineering angle of the term.  I took a lot of inspiration from the popularity of Life Hacker.   

@GregoryCiotti I agree it would be great to see some new examples of growth hacks.  I think these some old ones are stated because they are informing non-growth hackers about it.   It's easy to forget that outside a relatively small group, most people have still never heard of growth hacking.  If you are reading thenextweb.com for growth hacking inspiration, you are probably not going to find any.  

Thanks for posting our conference Ed.  I notice the conference says "free" on the feed.  Just wanted to clarify that it isn't free.   But we do have a 60% off super early bird discount that ends tomorrow.   

It's over 50 paragraphs, figured people would appreciate a summary:)

Article outlines key marketing programs Hubspot has used to grow and speculates which ones had the most impact.

That's great data James, thanks.  Would be awesome if you could share it in the comments of the article too!

This was a collaborative effort by several marketers to understand how Belly Card was able to grow from a seed in Chicago to national rollout with 5000+ retail customers in about a year. 

Awesome!  Really love to hear about the Qualaroo lead gen form driving real value.

Hi Joe, thanks for this question.  I think it really gets to the heart of how I like to market a company.  It starts with the premise that consumers are very fickle about what they'll adopt and it's nearly impossible to predict if your solution will hit the mark.  So my approach is basically about crowdsourcing value.  If you can get your service into a broad variety of users hands, then it is likely someone will discover a must have use case that you never intended.  You just need to seek out these pockets of user passion and then reorient your solution around them.  This includes targeting, messaging and doubling down on functionality that supports the use case.  

I think an example from the early days at LogMeIn is the best way to demonstrate this... We created a very simple solution to remote control computers with the assumption that busy professionals would like the freedom that it gave them to access their computer from anywhere.  Other remote control solutions (ie VNC or PC Anywhere) were really complicated to use and primarily intended for IT support professionals.  When it came time to create messaging for our home page I essentially let the engineering/product teams write very feature/function messaging.  It wasn't worth the debate of trying to highlight benefits.  But it turns out that this general messaging was totally the right thing to do.  Within a short period of time, a large portion of the users were IT professionals on a very unintended use case.  They enjoyed the ease of use because the customers they were supporting could set it up themselves and allow them to take over to support their computer.  This discovery was a big part of what ultimately led to an IPO for the company.

Hi Steve, the answer is very similar for Eventbrite.   Nailing the product experience has probably been the most important driver of growth there.  I spent a lot of time studying the user intent, the must have experience and the onboarding funnel to deliver the experience.  We did quite a bit of optimization from there.  But Eventbrite benefits from several natural growth levers.  First is that many people are exposed to it when they sign up for an event, so it's top of mind if they have an event to organize.  Second is that events are naturally social, so they can build great hooks into social networks.  And finally their critical mass of events means they are become a great place to discover events in your local area or field of interest.  This opens an opportunity for SEO, since people often start looking for relevant events via Google. 

I think the best content for learning how to be a growth hacker is studying the growth of other companies.  I have some great case studies I've worked on with a few other people that I plan to post soon.  Follow me on twitter for more details @seanellis to be announced soon.

Hi Ross, first question I always asked when figuring out if I should take on a growth hacking role is "what do early customer think about the product?"  If there is no passion for the product, any growth I drove would be temporary.  The way I determined if people were passionate about the product was I surveyed them asking "How would you feel if you could no longer use this product?"  I only asked people that had already used the product and I only focused on the people that said they would be "very disappointed" without it. The other choices were "somewhat disappointed" or "not disappointed."  Over time I realized I need at least around 40% of users to be very disappointed without the product.  If a product couldn't generate that kind of passion, I was very likely to fail as a growth hacker.  But once it did generate that passion then I just need to understand the who and the how.  The how drove my messaging and onboarding flows and the who drove my outbound efforts.  I was usually creative enough to connect the dots to the market.  While I was waiting to be inspired, I focused on optimizing the delivery of the must have experience.

Hi Aaron, Essentially every group in the company plays a key role in driving growth - Marketing, Sales and Customer Success help with effective onboarding of customers.  The right onboarding is critical to improving conversions rates but also for reducing churn.  Product development can help also with retention (addressing the relevant gripes) and can drive negative churn through new product development.  David Skok has written some great articles on the subject with specific examples from his SaaS portfolio companies.  I'd start with this article: http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas-metrics/ . 

A free version with "powered by" links is something that would probably work pretty well for you guys.  Bloggers and small publishers are often pretty price sensitive.  Powered by links are a big part of what drives growth for my company, so I know the approach works well.

Hi Jay, as I've said in a lot of responses, it really depends on the target customers.  In the marketing tools space, we are all focused on creating great content for marketers.  Ideally that content sets a context where we can introduce the value of our products.  This AMA would be an example of that.  But I'm also running a four part series in Marketing Profs this week on Conversion Rate Optimization.  So I think content marketing (right content, right publications) is probably the best way to get earned media. 

Hi Marvin, first, thanks for being a customer :-)  My first instinct when we acquired KISSinsights was to make the free product more valuable and drive growth organically.  But I quickly realized that there wasn't as much price sensitivity on the product as we expected.  So we have been aggressively learning what we uniquely do very well and doubling down on the functionality that makes us even better at those things.  One thing we learned was that nothing else matters if you don't nail the customer experience on our customers websites.  Companies like Starbucks and Intuit trust us to sit between them and their customer, so we have to get that right.  If we are the best in the world at that, then people will pay a premium for it.  We've also worked hard to flesh out the depth of technology in the product so you can tie customer input with actual tracked behavior.  More technology and API integrations also increase the perceived value.  I expect that we'll continue to increase prices as we add more value to the product.  Strategy for managing it is that we grandfather customers into plans that don't include the good stuff and offer really good deals to upgrade.  New customers aren't anchored in the old prices, so it hasn't been hard to acquire and convert them on the higher prices.  The ROI of our product is very strong when people use it the right way, so we are also investing a lot of time into best practice training and materials.  

Hi Ed, First I'd spend at least a month finding the right person.  I recently recruited a new graduate from Virginia Tech to join my team in SoCal after a very rigorous process of narrowing down the right candidate.  Effective growth hacking requires creativity, relentlessness, discipline and a reasonably good analytical mind.  I can't train creativity, so this was essential to getting started.  I also can't train relentlessness.  I can train discipline and the tools to analyze, so that's where most of my focus is.  From there we spend a lot of time brainstorming and prioritizing tests.  But the guy I hired is very focused on self learning so he is heads down 12-14 hours per day studying growth across companies and channels.  Hope this helps.

Hi Marvin, I think the biggest mistake I've made and see others make with SaaS tools is always trying to get the big win customer acquisition channel rather than doing the disciplined work of managing all of the growth levers.  SaaS is something that can become a 20%-50% M/M growth rate through hundreds of micro optimizations across every part of the business.  Disciplined patience growing a business at 20%-50% M/M revenue growth gets really big after a couple years.  And with SaaS multiples, within a couple years you can become worth 100s of millions of dollars.  SaaS is not a get rich quick scheme, but if you are delivering true value in a disciplined way, you can build a very valuable business.