The best growth hack ever – tried and tested in dozens of companies

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It was a Wednesday when one of the clients of the agency I worked for sent an email to my CEO, after we had sent the planning for the following months with the message:

“We are satisfied with the planning, it is approved. However, we will maintain the investment in paid media at R$500, with no increase at the moment”

The curious thing is not the rejection, but that the goals student database continued to be the same: to increase commercial requests through the website by 70% .

Fortunately, the goal was clear and measurable, and this is the first step to applying the best growth hack of all .

But first: what is a Growth Hack ?!
A Growth Hack is a tactic, usually Marketing and/or Sales, that has already worked in some situation or business and has a high chance of working again.

There are even 10 free ones here for you.

As I said, it was Wednesday, and I had this in my head until Sunday of the same week:

“How am I going to almost double the conversion without driving more traffic to the site?”

You may never have experienced this, but I have and if you work in digital marketing at some point you will .

But here we go:

Hundreds of millions of years ago, in case you didn't already know, movies, series and even pornographic videos were kept in black boxes in mysterious places known as rental stores .
If a resident of 2003 wanted to watch any of the titles, he would have to leave his house and go to one of these rental stores, pay to have the film for a few days and then return it. And if he didn't return it within the deadline, he would be fined.

Interestingly, these rental stores charged us R$20 to R$30 for a weekend of movies at home.

Netflix costs R$19 today. Pretty crazy, right?

In case you don't know the story behind the success, Reed Hastings, Co-Founder and CEO of Netflix tried to partner with the biggest rental company of all time, Blockbuster.

However, the response he got was “ Why bother with you sending DVDs in the mail when we are making billions of dollars a year from our physical stores? ”

What Blockbuster didn't realize at this point was that it neglected the biggest and best Growth Hack of all time , which may have been one of the reasons for its bankruptcy years later.

The giant of the rental world was so obsessed with its “core business”, that is, its main activity that was profitable until then, that it ignored the possibility of trying something new.

I imagine John Antioco, former CEO of Blockbuster, thinking at the time “ don’t change a winning team ”.

Thinking like this is extremely ANTI-Growth.
The best team to test is called the winning team , as the results can be neutral or surprising, and there is not as much risk to life.

Growth Hacking is nothing more than finding the best ways to grow through accelerated experimentation in growth channels.

See the chart below, from Growth Tribe :

Also read: Unconventional Acquisition Channels: 19 Ways (You Don't Use) to Attract Customers


Most Growth Hacking experiments will fail;
Another significant part of Growth Hacks will not change the reports much at the end of the month;
1 in every 100 Growth Hack experiments you apply will give you an explosion of results.
But do you know what all these Growth Hack experiments have in common , and what is responsible for the growth of successful companies?
Every experiment brings powerful insights for NEW experiments.

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon said the phrase in the image below:

jeff bezos quote

And in case you didn't understand well, there is another quote on the subject from one of the founders of Netflix:

marc randolph netflix quote

I hear a lot of companies asking:

“What is the best Growth Hack to increase my sales?”
Or any other objective that is on the agenda.

And I always answer: I don't know !

Not knowing something is a gift. Being open to experimentation is a golden coin.

Going back to the project with the client I mentioned at the beginning of this article, I was thinking “What can I do to get this client right?”

I listed at least 30 different ideas that I believed would increase the website's conversion rate.

I thought to myself: “Why not apply ALL the experiments listed here?!”.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, only one of the Growth Hacks I raised worked.
I applied many things at the same time, measured everything and only ONE of the tests gave the result of the image below:

the best growth hack

In 2 months I managed to increase commercial requests on this site by 130.96%.

If you want to read the full AB testing experimentation case study click here !

But AB testing wasn’t the growth hack that did all this, after all! (And it’s not the best growth hack ever either )
What I'm going to share with you in the next few paragraphs is the most powerful growth hack of all time.

But first, I want to simplify Growth Hacking with you.

It is common for enthusiasts to make Growth Hacking seem very complicated, full of new technologies, expensive tools and the like.

However, if we break down Growth Hacking into a few work steps, it becomes as simple as your work routine.

The 4 steps of doing Growth Hacking are:

Choose a goal that is very clear . Example: Increase the conversion rate of the quote page by 70%.
Find something in the experiment universe that you believe relates to what you want to achieve . Example: Reducing the number of form fields could get me closer to that goal.
Test what you have raised , that is, apply the Growth Hack that you raised on your own.
Analyze and improve . If you have increased your conversion rate a little, you have found a way forward. You have learned that the form impacts conversion and can make further improvements to it. Go back to step 1.
It is common to confuse Growth Hacking with Growth Hacks.
Hacks are those techniques that have already worked for company X or company Y, and that tend to work in specific cases.

But do you REALLY believe that the Growth Hacking experiments that worked for Amazon, Netflix and other giants will generate the SAME impact on your business?
I highly doubt it.

Also read: 10 movies about marketing and business that you need to watch
So here it goes:

The best growth hack of all time is the process of experimentation.
It wasn't AB testing that made my client double conversions, it was the daily and consistent process of testing new things that did it.

Referral Marketing was not responsible for turning DropBox into the giant it is today .

Before arriving at the referral program that generated the growth boom, Sean Ellis, former CMO of Dropbox, went through a multitude of other tests.

Writing everything down, learning more about the client and the company with each test.

When suddenly he got an experiment right and had an incredible growth curve.

usain bolt growth hack phrase

Usain Bolt is an incredible Growth Hacker, as you can see in the image above.
So many people attribute his success to a 9-second run, but there is a sequence of improvements and increments day after day that made him the greatest sprinter in history .

But how do I apply the accelerated experimentation process to my business?
I distribute my “growth hacking cycles” as follows:

Raise clear and objective goals;
A brainstorm of possible ideas;
Prioritization of the best ideas raised;
Execution of prioritized ideas;
Analysis of results and generation of new ideas;
Repeat all.