Growth hacking answers the burning question of “How do i get more customers for my product”.

This post is the first in a series of posts about growth hacking for the everyday business person. The next one “Creating newsletters should not suck: the Flashissue growth hacking story” , relates how i started the company Flashissue.

“Growth hackers are a hybrid of marketer and coder, one who looks at the traditional question of “How do I get customers for my product?” and answers with A/B tests, landing pages, viral factor, email deliverability, and Open Graph. On top of this, they layer the discipline of direct marketing, with its emphasis on quantitative measurement, scenario modeling via spreadsheets, and a lot of database queries”. – Growth Hacker is the New VP Marketing by @andrewchen

Before you shout “wait up, this is all too computer technical for me” bear with me.

For the most part i use growth hacking to try out new ways of making money or finding new angles on products within my business. Here’s a some what what dumb example of growth hacking but it’s a good illustration of what i mean.

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First, the dumb example

In a past life, I was a Regional Manager for a small bank called Stash The Cash Credit Union. I came up with this great idea new idea that would transform my bank: make cash available to all our customers on any street corner at any time of the day or night. I decided to call this product an Automated Teller Machine, aka an ATM.

The first thing i needed to do was test the concept? I knew that creating real teller machine would take a lot of computer knowledge, time and money, all of which was in short supply. So I came up with the perfect growth hack.

Yes, it was cheap and by no means scalable but it gave me the initial data i needed to make the decision on whether to anyone would want to use an ATM. If successful, I could then pitch the idea to the big bank honchos at HQ.

Here’s what i did. I set up a handful of boxes around town and stuck a guy inside to operate them. They’d behave just like a real ATM would work.

It delivered  a “real life” ATM experience with a very low outlay in time and money. It worked well and nobody knew about the man behind the screen. Admittedly, he was uncomfortable but he survived and got a nice Xmas bonus.

Note: the screen of the ATM was just an ipad with an app running as the ATM screen. When the lady inserted her bank card,  Randy inside took over. He took the card that came through the hole and using his mobile phone called the  bank for verification. When he was happy with everything he pushed the cash and card out a slot for the lady to take. 

It turned out that people really liked the idea of an automatic cash machine and the project got the go ahead. We had invented the ATM. People loved the convenience and even better, we found that they were willing to pay a really exorbitant fee for using them (HQ loved this part).

Since completing our growth hack test, most banks have copied our idea for an ATM and deployed their own all over.

Back to the real world

What i want to do with this series of blog posts is show how growth hacking can be applied to ANY business, not just technology driven companies.

The first step  – and the essence of the example on growth hacking i give in the next post – is to show how you can growth hack without needing any computer coding skills or technical savy. I guaranty you don’t need to know the difference between a bit or byte.

Going back to the Andrew Chen article for a moment. If you do click over to his post and take a read, you ‘ll see how he relates the incredibly clever story of a newbie Silicon Valley web company called AirBNB and how it used growth hacking to better its business. The article is very technical so dont bother reading it if you’re not that way inclined.

In short, AirBNB a new hip website for booking rental houses and apartments for the weekend, came up with a very creative way to post take the rental listings from their website and post them on Craigslist (so their clients would get more marketing exposure). The cleverness comes from the fact that they did this without ever needing the cooperation or involvement of the Craigslist people. They created their own *backdoor* into the Craigslist ad creation process that enabled all their clients to post a listing to Craigslist without ever leaving the AirBNB website.

So, can you be a growth hacker?

Growth hackers can come from any background. You could be the VP of engineering or the Head of Sales, it doesn’t matter.

The next story is how I got Flashissue off the ground with virtually zero money using a growth hack.

Although, my company is a web company, i am not a programmer (i’m a business guy). I could do what i did only because i got to know the ins and outs of setting up a run of the mill wordpress blog in the most minute detail.

Trust me, this was a pure byproduct of countless hours of frustration and learning how to get my site up and off the ground. It wasn’t even my goal to acquire this knowledge, it just happened.

If you feel you have a real real deep knowledge of any aspect of your business then you can potentially turn that in a growth hack. I dont care whether you own a car repair business or a travel store, someone somewhere is growth hacking a business like yours and seeing pretty remarkable results.

You’ll need some characteristics like these to growth hack:

  • Creativity to find new ways to grow
  • A deep & detailed understanding of your customer’s needs and how your market works <==== big stress on the *detailed* part.
  • Disciplined and skilled in the *test*, *analyze*, *repeat* and *scale* loop.

 

Next: Read the second part in this blog series:

I dug out all the stats and details on how the team got started on Flashissue.

“Creating newsletters should not suck: the Flashissue growth hacking story”

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