Growth Hacking in Web3’s Wild West

The growth hacking movement evolved out of Silicon Valley in the late noughties.

Then, Airbnb pulled off perhaps the most infamous of all growth hacks — exploiting a vulnerability in Craigslist’s code to give hosts the option of re-posting Airbnb listings to Craiglist with one click, leveraging the latter’s traffic to fast-track Airbnb’s user growth.

Fellow Y-Combinator alum Dropbox used referral marketing to grow its user base. According to founder Drew Houston, the cloud storage pioneers saw sign-ups increase by 60% when they rolled out a referral campaign rewarding both the referrer and referee with a free 500MB of storage. Remember, this was the late noughties, and that was a lot back then.

The application of rapid experimentation, technology, and low-cost but high-impact techniques to drive user sign-ups at scale became known as growth hacking — a term coined by marketer and founder of GrowthHackers.com, Sean Ellis (listen to my conversation with Sean below).