100 growth hacks in 100 days – 1 to 10 | Hacker News Reader

100 growth hacks in 100 days – 1 to 10

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61 pointsKebablite33 comments

When I was in NYC, I rented these Citi Bikes. The terms say:"After you purchased your 24 hour code, you get the bike for 30 minutes. If you return it late, there's a late fee added. 4$ per 30 minutes late." – "Fuck you", I thought. "What an annoying business model."

A few days later, I was in Washington DC. I rented these Citi Bikes that are called different there. The terms say:"After you purchased your 24 hour code, you get the bike for 30 minutes for free. If you want to keep bicycling, there's a small added cost of 4$ per 30 minutes for extended bike rental." - "That sounds fair", I thought.

This slide deck would be so much better, if it was called:"100 ways to improve your UI" instead of "100 Growth Hacks". Because they aren't. Only one out of ten is. And it's not even clever. Everybody does it. All others are marginal improvements to the UI and most of them don't even have data that support their effectiveness on growth / increased signups / decreased churn. They are interesting, but they aren't what they're advertised as. So I feel cheated although the "product" is good.

Thanks for your feedback. Not all of them are UI stuff, e.g the survey, the open-source warranty and the email where I asked why users had canceled. And these was the first 10, now I'm at day 36 and all of them are not about just UI. But I see your point, and the problem is mostly to be able to pull off one hack each day, many would have to be simple and easy to do, and therefore lower quality.

Regarding what actually is a growth hack or not, if it has to be new, none of my 35 hacks are a growth hack. Sharing stuff on social media would be social media marketing, blogging would be content marketing and SEO, and more fundamental "hacks" would be either a part of a business plan or just a marketing strategy.

However, my main goal of many of the things I do is to increase growth, both direct and indirect.

Your growth hacks don't have to be new, certainly not. My point is about communicating in an authentic way and how communication defines the user experience. My bicycle example talks about exactly the same thing and I had two completely different feelings DESPITE being aware of the hard facts.

In my opinion, you under-deliver by making false promises. Your goal should be to over-deliver by giving the user more than he expected. Your slide deck stays entirely the same, it's just about the expectations you set beforehand.

If you're open to suggestions, I'd love to see if you performed two A/B tests on userapp.io:

1. Take different photos of you guys where they look older. You look young. There was once a post on HN about a guy who split tested his profile picture on oDesk or something like that and gave himself an artificial beard in Photoshop. Result: More contacts, more jobs.

I wonder if the photos make a difference in your case and I would be happy to read about the result in one of your slide decks.

2. IMHO you got your coffee-pizza-beer comparison entirely wrong. 650$ is a lot of pizza. Exactly. So the service must provide a heck of a lot of value – more than if I put two coders of my business on a few night shifts to implement the same functionality (or use frameworks that do the same) and supply them with unlimited pizza for the rest of the year. Your goal is to give a feeling that 650$ is a steal by comparing it to something more expensive, not by comparing it to something that is cheaper and valuable as well. I'd kick the comparison altogether. People have their own mindset for comparing prices.

Love this comment.

Great UI is about words.

Reminded me of this: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3404-reminder-design-is-still...

Probably your best growth hack is publishing this deck.

Believe it or not, but this whole "stunt" (including this deck) hasn't generated that many signups in the long run. The best of my "hacks" would be creating the AngularJS module (http://timothy.userapp.io/post/69135125206/day-25-minimizing...) and then writing about it on Stack Overflow (http://timothy.userapp.io/post/70136752527/day-31-answering-...).

Please proofread this and the future presentations. Misspellings such as "Warrenty" and "Origional" really undermine your credibility.

At UserApp, Robin Y. is known as "Mr. Typo". He will be performing 100 spell checks in 100 days.

Is the Math.random() complaint really true?

Great read anyway. I normally dismiss anything labeled "growth hacking" as snake oil but this was really interesting.

Math.random() in modern browsers is a pretty good RNG. He would probably be happier with a pseudo-random algorithm or simple rotation, but over time a uniform distribution should be seen if his code is correct: http://coffeescript.org/#try:alert%20%5B0..300%5D.reduce%20(...

Actually "the tweet about us" is the only growth hack for the moment :)

Impatient to see the 90 others. Thanks for sharing.

Yes, that may be true, but the others could still contribute to growth. And it would be really hard (and probably not even good) to come up with 100 "true" growth hacks, and perform them one day after another ;)

Thank you, glad you liked it :) You can follow me here: http://timothy.userapp.io or on twitter: https://twitter.com/timothyej

Maybe call the others "retention hacks"? :)

Actually most hacks are about user acquisition, but there's also retention hacks :)

How much time between the implementation of each of these? 1 day? Variable? I would think you would need longer sampling periods to determine impact.. Not all days of the week are created equal.

Bingo - there's no mention of sample size, which makes it hard for me to take the results seriously. I do however think this is good for sparking creative thought on what tests to run.

How many signups have there been for UserApp overall?

While I would never recommend optimizing for the top of the funnel first, it seems like it's really hard to measure the effectiveness of growth-hacks when there's not much data to operate off of.

Agree! I do actually work on more deeper problems. At the moment I spend a lot of time creating integrations, improving the documentation and the getting-started guides. As we do get new signups every day, I want more of them to get started and really using UserApp. But to learn how I can improve all that I need feedback, and things takes time. Meanwhile I wait for feedback and test results I spend my time trying to improve conversion rates on the website and to drive more traffic, etc.

Here are a few of my more important "hacks":

[How to guarantee continued operation for an SaaS startup](http://timothy.userapp.io/post/67053194467/how-to-guarantee-...)

[Day 25: Minimizing integration times](http://timothy.userapp.io/post/69135125206/day-25-minimizing...)

[Day 26: Codecademy course](http://timothy.userapp.io/post/69292858355/day-26-codecademy...)

[Day 30: A/B testing getting-started guides](http://timothy.userapp.io/post/70034047713/day-30-a-b-testin...)

[Day 31: Answering questions on Stack Overflow](http://timothy.userapp.io/post/70136752527/day-31-answering-...)

[Day 32: Customer development survey](http://timothy.userapp.io/post/70245235839/day-32-customer-d...)

I love "tweet about us and we'll give you an extra month for free"!

I have one pet peeve about this, which is typically my pet peeve on a lot of growth hacking / optimization writeups: lack of longer-term focus. I hate to preach too much because doing things without a proper measurement strategy may be more practical than implementing a proper measurement strategy and is better than doing nothing at all, but....

The results were listed as "very good" because 20% of new signups tweeted. However, you're giving away revenue in hopes of generating more long-term revenue. The success or failure of the experiment should be given in terms of customers who signed up from seeing the tweets and what the lifetime value of those customers are, taking into consideration the initial revenue loss.

You're right. What's important isn't how many people tweet, it's how many people sign up. Of course 20% of new signups will tweet, they get a free month for it.

That's why you give a user-specific shortened link with UTM values for people to tweet out and don't simply reward them for tweeting your site name or address.

Agreed. One more thing:

The product is valued at "a tweet for a free month". Does this support the pricing tier? There's something about the perception of price and brand value here.

I disagree. I'd say the free month is not for a tweet, but for the number of users who sign up because of your tweet and then how much those users end up paying to use the product. If just one user signs up because of your tweet and pays to use the product for a month, then what's been given away has been earned back. And none of this says how much the product should be valued quantitatively, i.e. how much one month is worth.

On the other hand, you do comment about perception–if the users perceive the product to worth less because of this deal, "a tweet for a free month", the rationale behind why the deal is good for the product might not do anything to offset that loss in perceived value.

Your assumption, however, is that people wouldn't tweet about it if they had no incentive. The question now is: Does the tweet incentive help to increase the user base or not? That would actually be interesting data :)

Can we please begin to penalize the phrase "growth hack" on HN?

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https://www.growthhacker.tv/

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I feel it's important to measure the impact of a growth hack right from the beginning instead of going back and doing micro a/b tests. I.e. set things up so that it's trivial to A/B test every feature right from the start.

I've written about what worked for me here: https://medium.com/what-i-learned-building/3408064eda35

So if you do arbitrary stuff which kind of makes sense to make a webapp more attractive (or not) we call this "growth hack" now? That's just ridiculous.

I see your point, and many of my later "hacks" has been improved since my first ten. But it also depends on who's definition we use. Most of my "hacks" includes coding (i.e. hacking) and are meant to increase growth. Are they considered growth hacks then? Or must something be "hacked" for it to be called growth hacking?

How are some of these, namely the help button, hacks?

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6956893

IMO, You should mix these hacks with the impact/time prioritization framework shown here for example

http://denoyel.com/post/71113783478/the-easiest-prioritizati...

to calculate the ROI on each hacks of the 100's

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