HACKING GROWTH

HOW TODAY`S FASTEST-GROWING COMPANY DRIVE BREAKOUT SUCCESS

當今發展最快的公司如何實現突破性成功-Morgan Brown、 Sean Ellis

INTRODUCTION 介紹

When I (Sean) got a call from Dropbox founder Drew Houston in 2008, I was immediately intrigued by the predicament the one-year-old start-up was in. The company`s cloud-based file storage and sharing service had built up a good early fan base, concentrated primarily among the tech-savvy community centered in Silicon Valley. Even before the product was completely built, Houston had pushed a video prototype online illustrating how the service would work, which had earned him the backing of powerful Y combinator start-up incubator and drawn a flood of early adopters.

2008年，當我(肖恩)接到Dropbox創始人德魯休斯頓打來的電話時，我立刻被這家初創公司陷入的困境所吸引。該公司基於雲端的文件存儲和分享服務已經建立起了一個良好的早期粉絲群，主要集中在以矽谷為中心、精通科技的社區中。甚至早在該產品完全建成之前，休斯頓就已經在網上推出了一款視頻，在線的原型闡明該服務將如何運作，這也為他贏得了強大的Y combinator創業孵化器的支持，並吸引了大批早期採用者。

It became clear that Houston was on to something when the waiting list he was keeping for the beta version grew from 5,000 to 75,000 in a blink of an eye when a second video was posted on news aggregator site Digg and went viral. The next wave of users who signed up after the public launch were happy with the service, but Houston was still running into a wall trying to break out beyond the tech elite. And he didn't have much time. The competition was fierce. One start-up, Mozy, had a three-year head start, while another, Carbonite, had raised $48 million in founding-versus the $1.2million in seed capital raised by Houston. meanwhile, behemoths Microsoft and Google were gearing up to enter the cloud storage arena. How could Dropbox grow their customer base in the shadow of such formidable competitors?

答案變的明顯，當第二個視頻發佈在新聞聚合網站Digg上，並在網上瘋傳，一眨眼，等待測試版本的名單從5000增加到了7.5萬。下一波的在公眾發布後註冊的用戶對這項服務滿意，但休斯頓仍在撞牆中，在努力突破，超越其他科技精英中。他沒有多少時間。競爭非常激烈。 Mozy，搶先三年的創業公司，而另一個則是Carbonite，已籌集了4800萬美元，對戰休斯頓的種子資金120萬美元。與此同時，巨獸微軟和谷歌加速進軍雲存儲領域。在如此強大的競爭對手的陰影下，Dropbox如何才能擴大他們的客戶群?

When Houston called me, he wanted to explore what I could do to help them grow beyond their very solid but not-yet-big-enough pool of early adopters. I was just wrapping up an interim VP of marketing role at Xobni, a start -up run by Drew`s good friend Adam Smith, when Adam suggested that we meet to discuss Dropbox`s challenges. I had developed a reputation in Silicon Valley as someone who could figure out how to help companies take off, particularly those facing fierce competition and limited budgets such as Dropbox was. I`d first had success driving growth at the online game pioneers Uproar, growing the site to one of the 10 largest on the Web, with more 5.2 million gamers at the time of IPO in March of 2000, all in the face of an aggressive push into gaming from Sony, Microsoft, and Yahoo. I`d then moved over to work on growth initiatives at LogMeIn, an innovative service started by Uproar founder. There I`d managed to help turn the company into the market leader despite a massive ma rketing campaign waged by is main competitor, GoToMyPC.

當休斯頓打電話給我時，他想和我探討我能做些什麼來幫助他們成長和超越他們那些堅實但又不夠多的早期採用者。我剛剛結束了Xobni的一個臨時營銷副總裁。 Xobni是由德魯的好朋友亞當史密斯創辦的初創公司，當時亞當建議我們會面討論Dropbox的挑戰。我在矽谷已經發展和顯露了一個能夠幫助企業騰飛的人的聲譽，尤其是那些面臨激烈競爭和預算有限像Dropbox這樣的公司。我第一次成功是推動增長的在線遊戲先鋒Uproar，十大網頁之一,有520萬玩家，IPO的時間2000年3月,從頭到尾面對索尼、微軟和雅虎的咄咄逼人的競爭。然後，我又轉到LogMeIn的增長計劃上，這是一個由Uproar的創始人發起的創新服務。儘管主要競爭對手GoToMyPC發起了一場大規模的營銷活動，但我還是成功地幫助這家公司成為了市場領導者。

What was secret? I work with the engineers to utilize technology for what was, to them, an unconventional purpose: to craft novel methods for finding, reaching, and learning from customers to hone our targeting, grow our customer base, and get more value from our marketing dollars.

秘密是什麼?我與工程師們合作，利用技術，對他們來說是一種非傳統的宗旨: 用新奇的方法精心尋找客戶、接觸客戶和學習客戶，以打磨出我們的目標，培養我們的客戶基礎，使我們的營銷投入中獲得更多價值

I knew nothing about software engineering when I started my career in 1994 selling print ad space for a business journal at a time when businesses were just starting to move to the Web. But I saw the promise of the future in Web business, and so when I got to know the founder of Uproar, I decided to invest some of my hard-won sales commissions and hop over to work for the gaming portal, once again, selling ads. It wasn`t long before I caught on to the dangers of relying only on traditional marketing methods-even the newer, Internet-era versions of old methods, like online banner ads—to drive growth. My big wake-up moment was probably when the leading advertising firms I was trying to sell to, such as Saatchi and Ogilvy, declined to recommend banner ads on Uproar to their clients, on the grounds that the site didn't have a large enough user base. Short on cash and in danger of missing out on much-needed sales commissions, I suddenly found myself tasked by the founder with figuring out h ow to bring in more users, fast. My first approach was paid advertising on Internet portals, like Yahoo!, and that stoked growth nicely. But it was costly, and, just as Drew Houston later discovered with Dropbox, the ads weren`t bringing in enough bang for the buck. Meanwhile, Sony, Yahoo!, and Microsoft started making their big push, flooding the Web with gaming ads, and as a young start-up, Uproar didn`t have anywhere close to the money needed to compete with them head to head. I knew I had to find another way.

當我在1994年開始我的職業生涯-銷售平面廣告時，我對軟件工程一無所知。那時，商業雜誌剛剛開始向網絡轉移。但我看到未來的希望在網絡業務,所以當我認識了Uproar的創始人,我決定投資我的一些來之不易的銷售佣金去跳轉到遊戲門戶網站的工作,再一次銷售廣告。沒過多久我發現僅僅依靠傳統營銷的方法是非常危險的，即使新的,網絡時代的版本,比如網絡橫幅廣告推動增長。我最大的覺醒時刻可能是，我試圖推銷的主要廣告公司，如盛世長城和奧美，拒絕向他們的客戶推薦橫幅廣告，理由是該網站沒有足夠的用戶群。冒著缺少現金和錯失急需的佣金的風險，我突然發現創始人給自己的任務是如何更快的獲取更多的用戶。我的第一種方法是在互聯網門戶網站上付費廣告，就像yahoo！這也很好地刺激了增長。但這是一筆昂貴的費用，正如德魯休斯頓後來在Dropbox中發現的那樣，這些廣告並沒有帶來足夠的回報。與此同時,索尼,Yahoo !微軟開始大舉進軍，在網絡上充斥著遊戲廣告，而作為一家年輕的初創企業，Uproar並沒有達到與他們正面競爭所需的資金。我知道我必須找到另一種方法。

That`s when I got the idea of creating an entirely new type of advertisement that allowed Web proprietors to offer Uproar games for free on their site, meaning the site got fan new features to offer their visitors, and Uproar got exposure to everyone who visited those pages. The founder gave the go-ahead, and within a few weeks, the engineers and I had created a new single-player game that could be added to any website, with just a small snippet of code: one of the first embeddable widgets. The site proprietors would become Uproar affiliates, paid just $.50 for each new game player the company acquired through their sites. The low cost made it highly affordable for us and, because the game was so engaging, the affiliates were happy to feature it. In addition to sending new gamers to Uproar, we experimented with adding an “add this game to your site” link, which made it easy for other website owners to make the game available on their sites, too.

當我想到要創建一種全新的廣告模式，允許網站所有者在他們的網站上免費提供一些喧鬧的遊戲，這意味著該網站有了新的功能來為他們的訪問者提供服務，並且引起了所有訪問這些頁面的人的關注。創始人同意了，在幾週內，工程師和我創建了一個新的單人遊戲，可以添加到任何一個網站，只有一小段代碼:第一個可嵌入的小部件。該網站的所有者將會成為騷動的附屬機構，只支付了$。公司通過他們的網站獲得的每一個新遊戲玩家50。低廉的成本使我們能夠負擔得起，因為遊戲非常吸引人，它的附屬公司很樂意提供它。除了給新玩家發去憤怒，我們還嘗試在你的網站上添加一個“添加這個遊戲”的鏈接，這使得其他網站的用戶也可以輕鬆地在他們的網站上進行遊戲。

As we saw the game start to take off, we tested different versions of the copy, calls to action, and which free game we offered to find the most potent combination. The result for Uproar was explosive growth; the free games were soon on 40,000 sites and Uproar shot to the top of the online gaming world, beating out the behemoths and their splashy marketing campaigns. Many other companies have since used the same strategy to grow, the most famous example being YouTube, who later supercharged its growth by creating its embeddable video player widget, which landed YouTube videos all over the Web and turned online video into a phenomenon.

當我們看到遊戲開始起飛，我們測試了不同版本的拷貝，用行動召喚，我們提供的免費遊戲，以找到最有效的組合。結果是Uproar爆炸式的增長;免費遊戲很快就在4萬個網站上進行，Uproar在網絡遊戲世界的頂端，擊敗了這些龐然大物和它們引人注目的營銷活動。此後，許多其他公司都採用了同樣的策略，其中最著名的例子就是YouTube。後來，YouTube通過創建嵌入視頻播放器的小工具，讓YouTube視頻變得更強大，從而將YouTube視頻傳到了網上，並將在線視頻變成了一種奇蹟。

It was this success that led the founder of Uproar to ask me to come help grow his next venture, LogMeIn. LogMeIn was an ingenious product that let users access their files, email, and software on their home or work desktop computer from any other PC connected to the Internet. Yet while an aggressive search engine marketing campaign led to a good initial burst of customer sign-ups, they soon plateaued, and I realized that ads were once again proving far too costly for the payoff—especially since, at my suggestion, LogMeIn had pivoted from a paid to a freemium model in an effort to differentiate the service from its fierce competitor, GoToMyPC. At over $10,000 in ad spend per month, the customer acquisition costs no longer generated a positive return on the investment. Despite lots of ad copy testing and playing around with different keywords and advertising platforms, the conversion rate was woefully low-and this for a service that was clearly incredibly helpful, and was free, to boot. So once again I turned to technology to find a novel way to try to solve the problem.

正是這樣的成功，導致了Uproar的創始人要求我來幫助他的下一個創業公司LogMeIn。 LogMeIn是一款很有創意的產品，用戶可以在家中或電腦上訪問他們的文件、電子郵件和軟件。雖然積極搜索引擎營銷活動導致的一個很好的初始引爆客戶註冊,他們很快過了高速增長期而趨於穩定期,我意識到廣告再次證明對收益來說太昂貴。特別自我建議,LogMeIn已經付費的投入模式轉向免費增值模式,以區分服務從激烈的競爭對手,GoToMyPC。在每個月超過1萬美元的廣告支出中，客戶獲取成本不再產生積極的投資回報。儘管有大量的廣告複製測試，並在不同的關鍵字和廣告平台上玩，但轉化率低得令人遺憾，這對於一項顯然是非常有用的服務，而且是免費的。所以，我再次求助於科技，尋找一種新穎的方法來解決這個問題。

I decided that we should try to get feedback from people who had signed up but had then abandoned the service. We had collected their email addresses as part of the sign-up process, and we sent out an email asking them why they weren't using LogMeIn. Seems obvious, but it was a radical idea at the time. After just a few days, the collective responses offered an absolutely unequivocal explanation: people didn't believe the service was really free. At the time, the freemium software model was new and it still seemed too good to be true to lots of people. So with that realization, I got my marketing and engineering teams in a room to brainstorm ideas for how to change the landing page, to better communicate to customers that there was no “catch”—that LogMeIn did, in fact, offer a completely free version of the product. We experimented with many iterations of marketing copy and page designs, and yet even this led to very little meaningful improvement. We then decided to test adding a simpl e link to buy the paid version to the page. And with that, we found a winning combination of design, message, and offer that led to a tripling of the conversion rate. That was just the start, though. Upon digging into the data , we discovered an even bigger drop-off among users who downloaded the software but then didn't follow through and use it. We kept experimenting, such as with changes in the install process，the sign-up steps, and more, and ultimately we improved the conversion rate to the point that search ads not only became cost effective again, they could be profitably scaled by over 700 percent. So scale up the company did, and immediately growth took off.

我決定，我們應該試著從那些已經註冊的、但後來他們放棄了這項服務人身上得到反饋，。我們收集了他們的電子郵件地址作為註冊過程的一部分，我們發了一封電子郵件詢問他們為什麼不使用LogMeIn。這似乎是顯而易見的，但當時這是一個激進的想法。僅僅過了幾天，集體的回答提供了一個絕對明確的解釋:人們不相信這項服務真的是免費的。當時，免費增值的軟件模式是全新的，對於很多人來說，它仍然是一件好事。有了這個認識，我在一個房間裡找到了我的營銷和工程團隊，來集思廣益，如何改變登陸頁面，更好地與客戶溝通，告訴他們免費但沒有“陷阱和捕捉”——實際上，LogMeIn提供了一個完全免費的產品版本。我們嘗試了很多次的營銷拷貝和頁面設計，但是即使這樣，也沒有什麼有意義的改進。然後，我們決定測試添加一個簡單的鏈接，以購買付費版的頁面。通過這個，我們發現了設計、信息和提供的成功組合，從而使轉化率達到了三倍。不過，這僅僅是個開始。在深入挖掘數據之後，我們發現下載該軟件的用戶數量甚至會更大，但隨後並沒有使用該軟件。我們一直嘗試,與安裝過程的變化,如註冊步驟, 並最終完善轉化率,搜索廣告不僅再次成為成本效益,它們可以盈利比例超過700%。公司的規模擴大了，然後迅速增長。

Once again, the solution had been found in just weeks, using a recipe that included healthy doses of out-of-the-box thinking, cross company collaboration and problem solving, real-time market testing and experimentation (conducted at little or no cost ), and a commitment to being nimble and responsive in acting on the results. These are the very ingredients that I later codified into the growth hacking methodology you`ll read about in the pages that follow.

再一次，解決方案在短短幾週內就被發現，用了一種處方，包括健康的跳出箱子思考、跨公司協作和解決問題、實時市場測試和試驗(很少或沒有成本)，並承諾在結果上採取靈活和響應性的行動。這些是我後來將其編入成長黑客方法的材料，你會在接下來的幾頁中讀到。

Of course, Uproar and LogMeIn weren`t the only start-ups in town combining programming and marketing know-how with the emerging characteristic of the Web to drive growth. Hotmail, for example, was one of the first to tap into the viral quality of Web products-and their ability to “sell themselves”-when it added the simple tagline “PS: Get Your Free Email at Hotmail” at the bottom of every email that users sent, with a link to a landing page to set up an account. At the same time, PayPal had demonstrated the extraordinary growth potential in creating the synergy between a product and a popular Web platform-in their case, eBay. When the team noticed auction owners promoting the PayPal service as an easy way for winners to pay, they created AutoLink, a tool that automatically added the PayPal logo and a link to sign up to all of their active auction listings. This tool tripled the number of auctions using PayPal on eBay and ignited its viral growth on the platform. LinkedIn, which had str uggled to gain traction in its first year, saw their growth begin to skyrocket in late 2003, when the engineering team worked out an ingenious way for members to painlessly upload and invite their email contacts stored in their Outlook address book, kicking network effects growth into high gear.5 And in each of these cases, growth was achieved not with traditional advertising, but rather with a dash of programming smarts and on a shoestring budget.

當然，Uproar和LogMeIn並不是唯一一個將編程和營銷技巧結合起來的初創公司，知道與網絡的新興特色相結合，推動增長。例如Hotmail,是第一個利用病毒網絡產品質量一和“自我推銷”的能力——它簡單的口號“附:獲得你的Hotmail免費郵箱”，在每封發送郵件的底部，並鏈接到一個登陸頁面建立一個賬戶。同時,Paypal已經展示了非凡的增長潛力在創造產品和一個流行的Web平台eBay之間的協同, 當該團隊注意到拍賣所有者推廣PayPal服務時，他們創建了AutoLink，這是一種自動添加PayPal標誌的工具，並鏈接到所有活躍的拍賣清單。該工具在eBay上使用PayPal的拍賣次數增加了兩倍，並在該平台上引發了其病毒式增長。 LinkedIn,難以在第一年獲得增長動力,看到他們的增長在2003年底開始飆升,當工程團隊成員制定了一個巧妙的辦法輕鬆上傳,並邀請他們的電子郵件聯繫人存儲在Outlook地址簿,啟動了網絡效應發展進入了快車道。在上述每一種情況下，增長都不是靠傳統的廣告實現的，而是通過少量的編程技巧和低成本的預算實現的。

Approaches like these to building, growing, and retaining a customer base that relied not on traditional marketing plans, a pricey launch, and a big ad spend, but rather on harnessing software development to build marketing into products themselves, were proving both extraordinarily powerful and incredibly cost effective. Perhaps more important, companies, growing ability to collect, store, and analyze vast amounts of user data, and to track it in real time, was now enabling even small startups to experiment with new features, new messaging or branding, or other new marketing efforts—at an increasingly low cost, much higher speed, and greater level of precision. The result was the emergence of a rigorous approach to fueling rapid market growth through high-speed, cross-functional experimentation, for which I soon coined the term growth hacking.

方法像這樣是建立、發展和保留一個不依賴傳統營銷計劃、昂貴的啟動和巨大的廣告支出的客戶群，而是利用軟件開發來構建產品本身的營銷，這兩種方法都非常強大，而且成本也非常高。或許更重要的是,企業成長能力收集、存儲、和分析大量的用戶數據,並實時追踪它,現在允許甚至小公司試驗新功能,新的消息或品牌,或其他新的營銷努力越來越低的成本,更高的速度和更大的精度水平。結果就是出現了一種嚴格的方法，通過高速、跨功能的實驗來刺激快速的市場增長，我很快就創造了“增長黑客”這個術語