Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success

anywhere close to the money needed to compete with them head to head. I knew I had to find another way.

That’s when I got the idea of creating an entirely new type of advertisement that allowed Web proprietors to offer Uproar games for free on their site, meaning the site got fun new features to offer their visitors, and Uproar got exposure to everyone who visited those pages. The founder gave the go-ahead, and within a few weeks, the engineers and I had created a new single-player game that could be added to any website, with just a small snippet of code: one of the first embeddable widgets.

first approach was paid advertising on Internet portals, like Yahoo!, and that stoked growth nicely. But it was costly, and, just as Drew Houston later discovered with Dropbox,
the ads weren’t bringing in enough bang for the buck. Meanwhile, Sony, Yahoo!, and Microsoft started making their big push, flooding the Web with gaming ads, and as a young start-up, Uproar didn’t have

“How is this thing you’re showing me going to improve my life?”

This means that the language you use must directly and persuasively connect with a need or desire they have in order to hook them—in eight seconds or less!—into giving you a few more heartbeats to convince them of why they should come on board.

Research has shown that the average attention span (the amount of time we focus on a new piece of information online) of humans is now eight seconds, which is down from twelve seconds in 2000, and confers on us the dubious distinction of having an attention span shorter than that of goldfish.5 With so little time to impress people, it is imperative that they understand almost immediately how your product can benefit them.

The term language/market fit was coined by James Currier (who we met in the introduction) to refer to how well the language you use to describe and market your product to potential users resonates with them and motivates them to give it a try. This includes the language used in all aspects of the marketing campaign—from emails, to mobile notifications, to print and online advertisements—as well as, in the case of Web- and mobile-based products, the messaging used within the product itself: not just the tagline and value proposition on the landing page, but also the text accompanying the product’s every feature or screen or page.

At the same time, increasingly tech-savvy consumers are tuning out. In fact, 69.8 million Internet users in the US (up 34 percent year over year), including nearly two out of three millennials, report using ad blocking software.22

General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt recently said that “every industrial company will become a software company,” and the same can be said for consumer goods companies, media companies, financial services firms, and more.15

But growth hacking isn’t just about how to get new customers. It’s about how to engage, activate, and win them over so they keep coming back for more. It’s about how to adapt nimbly to their ever-changing needs and desires and turn them not only into a growing source of revenue, but also passionate ambassadors and an engine of word-of-mouth growth for your brand or product.

A Harvard Business Review article about growth stalls reported that 87 percent of the companies in a large study had run into one or more periods in which growth slowed dramatically, and that “on average, companies lose 74 percent of their market capitalization…in the decade surrounding a growth stall.”