Comment by WA | Hacker News Reader

Comment by WA | Hacker News Reader

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...

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