The origins of Growth Hacking clearly go back to one name: Sean Ellis . Ellis is a famous American marketer who has worked for some of the most prominent American startups such as Dropbox, Kissmetrics, Qualaroo and LogMeIn. In July 2010 , he wrote an article on his blog which became the discipline's manifesto: Find a Growth Hacker for Your Startup . This is how the word was born. Sean Ellis Silicon Valley has been the scene of it all, the cradle of innovation and start-ups from which many of today's market players originate. But why the world of start-ups? Because they operate under conditions of limited resources, time and budget . Therefore, to compete with the giants, start-ups had to come up with alternative strategies .
And that's where the Growth Hacker comes in: it takes the competition from an economic playground to a more varied terrain made up of many different aspects. For Sean Ellis, marketing is just one of the tools available to the Growth Hacker, which actually approaches the problem of growth in an unconventional way . #2 | Four case studies: Dropbox, Hotmail, Instagram, Airbnb Even giants were once children. For Image Masking Service example, over a period of 12 months, Dropbox saw its number of users increase from 100 thousand to 4 million . This unusual growth would be unthinkable with canonical marketing strategies. In fact, Sean Ellis has something to do with it. When he arrived at Dropbox, Ellis put aside AdWords, the company's most used channel, to experiment with a new strategy: encouraging users to invite an acquaintance to Dropbox in order to obtain more free space.
Thus, referral marketing was born. Even if it is considered a good practice today, it represented a formidable Growth Hacking operation at the time. Another interesting case study is Hotmail , which started when two friends got tired of using corporate email to send private content. So they decided to create the first webmail. How did Hotmail get big enough to be acquired by Microsoft? The two friends discovered a little trick: they implemented a function that automatically added a signature to each outgoing email: PS I love you. Get your free email on Hotmail In doing so, each user has become a Hotmail ambassador. Instead, Instagram struggled to build an audience from scratch.