Growth Hacking & SEO

Matthew Ho, Native Tongue Apps!December 2013!

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

Over time, all marketing !strategies result in !shitty click through rates!! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! - Andrew Chen!

Law of Shitty Click throughs

•  Customers respond to novelty, which ! inevitably fades!

•  First-to-market rarely lasts!

•  More scale means less qualified customers!

Top Drivers of Law of Shitty Clickthroughs

Growth Hacking is a set of techniques and practices used to optimize user growth."" "

Growth Hacking is the New VP of Marketing

“ 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"

Noteable Quotes

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Case Studies

Case Study: My store on ebay

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Cross post to Gumtree

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Cross post to Trading post

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Cross posting for more distribution

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•  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"

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There must be an easier way!

Case Study 1: airbnb

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Craigslist integration!Even though Craigslist had no API!

Case Study 1: airbnb

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•  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"

Case Study 2: PayPal

BUT they also solved painful payment problems on eBay

Realised eBay was their main distribution platform

Paypal used bots that bought from eBay merchants and demanded to pay with Paypal"

Case Study 2: PayPal

Principles!1. Piggybacking"2. Simulation of demand - created the appearance of popularity"3. Solved a problem for eBay platform"

It  was  be1er  than  other  payment  solu;ons  on  eBay    

Created  a  self  reinforcing  behaviour  as  more  merchants  adopted  it  and  consumers  wanted  it  

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."

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!"

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."

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."

Case Study 4: Angelleak

If you go to “inspect element” and look at the console, they have an easter egg message that encourages hacking "

Case Study 4: Angellist

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

Case Study 4: The final result – Angelleak.com

h"p://angelleak.com  

Case Study 4: Angelleak leaderboard

h"p://angelleak.com/leaderboard  

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.!

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..

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."

Questions? Matthew Ho, Native Tongue Apps !

Twitter: @inspiredworlds!Blog: http://inspiredworlds.com!Email: hello@nativetongue.com!

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But wait, there’s more!

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"

Outline  

Evernote notebook  

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