I read a post recently about how it is impossible to hire growth engineers. I’ve been lucky enough to have the opportunity to work on the growth engineering teams at two successful companies over the past few years. In that time I’ve learned that just like with any engineering role, hiring growth engineers is hard, […]
Push notifications (aka PNSes) can be a powerful re-engagement tool for mobile apps to communicate to their users. In this post, I’ll cover everything a growth hacker needs to know about push notifications on iOS and Android. Permissions One of the biggest differences between the two platforms is the permissions model for push notifications. On […]
The very first growth team I was on was run very democratically. Every month we would brainstorm new projects, everyone would vote on the ones they found most promising, and then we would execute on everyone’s top picks. After a few months, the team had delivered several projects that had beaten control, but we still […]
Getting existing users to invite their friends is a basic, but effective growth strategy. Many of the social networks such as Facebook/LinkedIn drive tremendous growth by pushing new users to invite their friends by importing their email address book. Mobile apps have tried to take the same approach, but the problem is, most don’t do […]
One of the most difficult user acquisition problems in mobile is finding ways to take advantage of traditional user acquisition channels. Web services have long used Facebook, email, SEO, AdWords, etc., to drive growth, but the problem for mobile apps is that most people still spend a lot of time browsing the web on their laptop or […]
This is a cautionary tale on what can happen when growth hackers focus too much on user acquisition. At the start of this year professional networking company BranchOut had 1 million monthly active users (MAU). In just 5 short months they had skyrocketed to over 14 million MAU. It looked like they had hit their […]
One of the most powerful user acquisition channels for a service is its existing user base. People tend to listen to recommendations from friends which is why word of mouth is so powerful. Sometimes though, users need a little nudge to start telling their friends about how great a service is. That is where incentivized invites come […]