Presentation on Growth Hacking for Sydney SEO meetup. With case studies on airbnb, paypal, reddit, angelleak. Includes key principles of growth hacking.

1. Growth Hacking
& SEO
Matthew Ho, Native Tongue Apps!
December 2013!

2. Who am I?
Matthew Ho!
• Director, Native Tongue Apps
• Digital Producer, Account Manager,
Entrepreneur
• Worked in online marketing for 6 years
About Native Tongue Apps
• First winner of Startup Weekend in Australia
• 4 language & word game apps
• 350,000 downloads, 1.5 mil plays

3. Law of Shitty Click throughs
Over time, all marketing !
strategies result in !
shitty click through rates!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
- Andrew Chen!

4. Top Drivers of Law of Shitty Clickthroughs
• Customers respond to novelty, which !
inevitably fades!
• First-to-market rarely lasts!
• More scale means less qualified customers!

5. Growth Hacking is the New VP of Marketing
Growth Hacking is
a set of techniques
and practices used
to optimize user
growth."
"
"

6. Noteable Quotes
“ Growth hackers are a hybrid of marketer"
and coder. ”"
"
- Andrew Chen, andrewchen.com"
“Growth hacking is a mindset more than a toolset.” "
"
- Dan Martell, Clarify"

7. Case Studies
7

8. Case Study: My store on ebay
8

9. Cross post to Gumtree
9

10. Cross post to Trading post
10

11. Cross posting for more distribution
• Very manual
• Need to upload the photos each time
• Cut and paste the description
• I didn’t want to meet with people on gumtree
or trading post
• Funnel people towards eBay because it is
transactional"
11

12. There must
be an easier
way!
12

13. Case Study 1: airbnb
Craigslist integration!
Even though Craigslist had no API!
13

14. Case Study 1: airbnb
• Realised craigslist was a distribution platform for
airbnb listings"
• Could post a listing from Airbnb to Craigslist"
• When a craigslist user wanted to enquire about
the property or transact, had to go to Airbnb and
signup
• Required someone technical to implement that
integration"
14

15. Case Study 2: PayPal
Realised eBay was their main
distribution platform
Paypal used bots that bought
from eBay merchants and
demanded to pay with Paypal"
BUT they also solved painful
payment problems on eBay

16. Case Study 2: PayPal
It
was
be1er
than
other
payment
solu;ons
on
eBay
Created
a
self
reinforcing
behaviour
as
more
merchants
adopted
it
and
consumers
wanted
it
Principles!
1. Piggybacking"
2. Simulation of demand - created the
appearance of popularity"
3. Solved a problem for eBay platform"

17. Case Study 3: Reddit
Set the tone... by seeding supply!
• Reddit staff created fake
profiles"
• Submitted their own high
quality content at the start "
• Showing activity in the site, "
• Elicited desired behavior
from target users."

18. Case Study 4: Angelleak
• Angelleak is a “hot or not” for startup investors.
• We needed to get a lot of profiles on startup
investors
• The biggest source was Angellist
• However, there was no Angellist API available
to get the investor information
• But this didn’t stop us!"

19. Case Study 4: Angelleak
The AngelList API doesn't have investor
information so we created our own method to
obtain it. "
Each investor paginated search result page
contain 25 investors and you can't scrape the
page. So we had to create a work around this
restriction."

20. Case Study 4: Angelleak
In the search result URL: "
1. Replace n with n "
2. Replace " with " "
3. Remove stuff before div that looks like json. "
Eg {HTML:" "
And after also... "}
Save as HTML
Re-created a single page with all the investors
profiles.
Then used another hack to scrape entire page."

21. Case Study 4: Angelleak
If you go to “inspect element” and look at the
console, they have an easter egg message that
encourages hacking "

22. Case Study 4: Angellist
Message: Do you have an idea that would
make Angellist better? Want to implement it?
We’re always hiring!"

23. Case Study 4: The final result – Angelleak.com
h"p://angelleak.com

24. Case Study 4: Angelleak leaderboard
h"p://angelleak.com/leaderboard

25. Engineering + Marketing
A traditional marketer would not !
even come close to imagining these !
technical marketing mechanisms. !
These could only have come out of !
the mind of an engineer & online
marketer tasked with the problem of
acquiring more users.!

26. Principles of Growth Hacking
1. Be one of the first. Create. Experiment. Hack!"
2. Piggyback on another platform: "
• Where you can solve a problem for that platform"
• Underlying users are the same"
• Emerging and not yet exploited
3. Keep a close eye on user patterns, traffic sources,
conversions.
4. Google isn’t the only source of traffic – Craigslist,
Gumtree, Ebay, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter,
Facebook, Reddit, HackerNews, forums etc..

27. Principles of Growth Hacking
5. It works and then it doesn’t. "
- The gap will close quickly as more people become
aware of it and marketers/engineers start becoming
more sophisticated in how to use it "
- Always be on the lookout for new methods of growth. "
- Only the opportunistic and the paranoid will survive."
6. Seed demand, supply, content."
7. Look for scaleable, repeatable distribution. An engine of
growth.
8. Initially do it manually. Then have an engineer to do it
manually so they can understand the problem. Have
the process automated."

28. Questions?
Matthew Ho, Native Tongue Apps !
Twitter: @inspiredworlds!
Blog: http://inspiredworlds.com!
Email: hello@nativetongue.com!

29. But wait,
there’s more!
29

30. This presentation was outsourced & hacked together
• Used a spreadsheet with instructions for each
slide and links to articles "
• Shared existing slides on dropbox & created a
notebook on evernote"
• Some tweaking and refinement"
• Freelancer worked with me before on similar
tasks"

31. Outline

32. Evernote notebook

33. Resources
About Matthew Ho
The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs
Growth Hacker is the new VP of Marketing
How Paypal and Reddit faked their way to traction
Stealing Traction: How Youtube, Paypal, StumbleUpon
and AirBNB grew through piggybacking
Willix Halim: My top five “Growth Hacking” techniques