SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
646: He Coined Term "Growth Hacking" After DropBox, EventBrite, LogMeIn Work, Now Launching Book "Hacking Growth" with Sean Ellis
01 May 2017
Chapter 1: What is growth hacking and how did Sean Ellis define it?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per talk.
Chapter 2: How did Sean Ellis drive growth at Dropbox using referrals?
Five and six million. He is hell bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000 unit soul mark.
Chapter 3: What strategies did Sean implement at Eventbrite for viral growth?
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Many of you who I've met in person have seen my unbelievable dashboards that I built.
Chapter 4: What role did word-of-mouth play in LogMeIn's success?
You know, I'm an analytics like crazy person. I love the data.
Chapter 5: How did Sean scale Qualaroo to millions in recurring revenue?
And I love presenting the data in beautiful dashboards that my team can use on their mobile devices, their phones, and TVs throughout the office. Now, the way I do this without having to hire a big development team is at nathanlaca.com forward slash analytics. It's using a company called Clipfolio.
Chapter 6: What is Sean's strategy for launching his book 'Hacking Growth'?
And I'll tell you more later on in the show how I use them. It's nathanlaca.com forward slash analytics. This is episode 646, and coming up tomorrow morning, you'll learn from Alex Meir, who is Tai Lopez's business partner in his company, MentorBox.com. Specifically, you'll learn that Tai owns 50% of the $89 per month membership company.
And at launch, they sold 800 units, which came out to $80,000 in initial sales all before launch. You want to tune into that if you want to learn more about Tai and Alex. Good morning, everybody. My guest this morning is Sean Ellis. He's the founder and CEO of growthhackers.com.
Chapter 7: What makes Sean's book different from other growth hacking literature?
Now, he coined the term growth hacking in 2010 after using it to ignite growth for Dropbox, Everbright, LogMeIn, and Lookout. He's also founded and sold customer insights company Qualaroo, growing it to millions of dollars in recurring revenue. Sean, are you ready to take us to the top?
I am, it's actually Eventbrite in case people are unsure what Everbrite is.
Oh, I said Everbrite.
Chapter 8: How can companies effectively organize teams for growth?
I'm so sorry. You know what that is? You know what that is?
That's this coffee. It's running through my system, right? Eventbrite, my apologies. So I've seen you speak before at Capital Factory here in Austin. You gave an interesting presentation, really focused on viral coefficients and why it's important to decrease the time of the original share to really drive growth. Walk me into kind of an example of how you did that at one of these companies.
And then I'm going to ask you why you left that sexy world to go into publishing.
Well, so I am a founder and CEO of a company as well. So I've got a lot of different kind of balls in the air right now. But for me, viral growth actually starts – I think most people who are approaching viral growth are approaching it as basically how do you just game something and you get kind of like a branch out situation where it's –
where maybe you can optimize every step in the loop, but ultimately, if you don't have a lot of value at the foundation of that growth, it's not very sustainable. So most of the growth that I've been doing is really focused on understanding the value of a product first and working backwards from there. And referral is usually a very natural outcome of having a very valuable experience.
And then working to optimize a viral loop on top of that. So that's the type of thing that we did at Dropbox where we, like the referral program would be a specific example for you.
Would most folks at Dropbox kind of credit you as being the guy that kind of thought up? I'm asking you to be a little braggadocious for a second, but would they credit you for coming up with this system of giving away free storage to drive the viral coefficient?
It was a group. Like most things, I don't think it was something. I mean, there was less than 10 of us at the company at the time. I was the only non-engineer at the company. But most of what we did there was really inspired by what a couple of other companies were doing. So a friend of mine had tested a double-sided referral program, and it had worked really well at his business.
Who's that friend? He's Jamie Siminoff, the guy that runs Ring, the super hot video doorbell company now. But prior to that, he had a company called PhoneTag, where he had basically done a ton of testing and came up with this double-sided incentive as being really effective. But PayPal did the same thing. And so in our case, the currency was storage. So it just made sense.
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