What is Growth Hacking?

Is Growth Hacking nothing but nonsense – smoke, mirrors and empty jargon – or something real that you should be doing? Thomas Knoll, advisor at LaunchRock and creator of clippPR has a compellingly simple answer:

Growth hacking–finding effective and unique ways to make sure the people who are most likely to care about your product have a chance to try your product–is very real.

Growth Hackers far-too-often spout as much nonsense as “Social Media Gurus”.

No-nonsense growth hacking involves:

Building a product that is actually useful and interesting
Understanding why existing customers/users would be upset if they could no longer use the product.
Discovering precisely where the people who would also be upset to lose access to your product but don’t know about it yet spend time. (Usually online, but you can get creative offline as well.)
Undersand what creates trust for these people. (Usually, the strongest is a referral from someone they know. Slightly weaker is ‘the crowd’ opinion. Weaker than that is an ‘expert’ they already trust.)
Run small tests to hack, exploit, and explore every opportunity to put the highest-level-of-trust experience in front of the most-likely-to-be-interested people.
Scale.
Repeat

Nonsense growth hacking involves:

Exploit every social channel to promote your product to as many people as possible.
Repeat.

Growth Hacking 101

There you have it, a great foundation for doing Growth Hacking the right way. Of course there is a lot to be said on each of the points in the No-Nonsense section, and we plan to bring you more great posts on this topic in the future.

Be sure to subscribe to our blog and create your free LaunchRock account now for a great no-nonsense tool to grow your audience.

Do you have any no-nonsense Growth Hacking advice? Let us know in the comments!

This guest post by Thomas Knoll was originally posted on Quora. A co-founder turned advisor to LaunchRock, Thomas is currently working passionately on his newest startup, clippPR. Follow Thomas on Twitter and Quora and like Clipppr on Facebook.

Clipppr makes it simple to bookmark, clip, and tag your press. We track the engagement and conversation: tweets, likes, shares, stumbles, trackbacks, comments etc. We show you how active the conversation is over time in a TopHits/BestSeller type chart, and alert you of major changes, making it easy to re-engage in the public conversation.

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What is Growth Hacking?

No-nonsense growth hacking involves:

Nonsense growth hacking involves:

Growth Hacking 101

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