What Does Successful Growth Hacking Look Like?

Last Updated on February 7, 2022 by justin

Successful Growth Hacks

To get you started, here are some examples of iconic real-life growth hacks which are the results of having an effective growth hacking mindset.

Twitter – give suggestions of people to follow when you started a Twitter account

When Twitter realized that users who followed more than 30 people were the most likely to become repeat users, they optimized the sign-up process to encourage this behavior by suggesting popular Twitter accounts to follow during the sign-up process.

Hotmail – “ps. I love you” tagline

Hotmail added the tagline “Ps. I love you. Get Your Free Email at Hotmail” at the bottom of all emails sent from their accounts, which If you clicked on the “Hotmail” link, you were redirected to a registration page where you were given the opportunity to create your own free e-mail account immediately.

McDonalds – building a restaurant at every exit (pre dot-com growth hacking)

In the 1950s, a McDonald’s was opened at every inter-state highway exit in the United States due to the realization that if they did not, another competitor would do it instead of them.

Nokia -pre-installing the game ‘snake’ into their phones

When mobile phones broke through the market and became popular among young people, Nokia pre-installed the game “snake” which became a hit and proved to be more important than the competitors’ often technically better products.

How do you find your own growth hacks?

The most famous growth hacks, such as the ones we have listed above, are often wrongfully-associated as a “quick fix” or a result of a sole individual’s suggestion. In reality, however, which becomes quite clear if you evaluate these successful companies, is that growth hacking is more of a way of working – a process – which in its simplest form can be copied; but to master it requires a lot of experience, experimentation, and work. This is what we usually call the growth hacking process as it is illustrated below.

Classic Marketing Process vs Growth Hacking Methodology

Traditional marketing processes often follow a short cycle with KPIs on an annual, monthly or weekly basis. The growth hacking process looks different. It is about getting to know their users / customers, being able to follow their behavior, being able to draw conclusions accordingly, being able to set up creative experiments to improve their customer understanding beyond the entire customer journey and do this as efficiently as possible with as fast iterations as possible.

So with a “growth hacking process,” will I immediately and definitely get 10x growth for my company? Short answer: no, perhaps not immediately. Rather, when you commit in doing these small experiments and optimizations and racking up those small wins, you will of course increase your chances of finding that 10x hack. However, you will never discover that if you do not establish the growth hacking mindset within your organization, i.e. systematically experiment with sensible hypotheses and then continuously following them up.

The key here is to maximize the amount of experiments and to actually implement and optimizing them. For a small company this may mean it comes from one person, while for a large corporation this would mean creating a dedicated whole growth team with a growth-lead, but more about that in the article “Who and what is a growth hacker”

Interested how the growth process can help your business? Send us a message! Let’s discuss how Growth Hackers can support and drive sustainable growth for you and your business.