The Article talks about methods of achieving viral Growth. The Article points out various methods on Achieving explosive growth. Growth is not something you look for when you launch a product, you have to build features in your product to help you grow and at the same time keep on with experiments for growth via marketing channels. One day you will get the hack you may need for explosive growth. Remember, no matter how world-class your product is if you don't build it for growth it will never grow. Just like your team runs a product or service exactly you need to have a team to focus on just one thing, Growth.

1. Achieve growth like
facebook
Think about it, if you made a product which can achieve growth like
Facebook, what would you do next? My point is unless you have thought of
the end result, you haven't yet started.

2. The first requirement of growth is a great product. If your product is leaking
funnel there is not point focusing on growth and if this not the case and your
product is retaining customers, you have a business case. You are welcome to
move to next step of product marketing which is growth. Remember the
single biggest factor which will fuel growth is User Retention. Nothing in
the world is a better recommendation than existing customers talking about
your product.
A good case study of customers talking about the product is Eventbrite.
Eventbrite made a ticketing product for the companies and it was a B2B
product and when someone didn't charge for the event or tickets it became a
free event without any payments to Eventbrite. It was an accident, but this
accident exploded and people worldwide started booking free events and
promoting events on Social media, blogs, websites etc. Eventbrite was getting
noticed by everyone. After a while, people who hosted free events started
hosting paid ones too. It becomes a tool for everyone and Eventbrite became a
B2C company. The company has now opened it's API to developers worldwide
which will power the company to grow faster than before. It is now valued at
$1 Billion with an IPO planned in near future.
The point is you need your users to talk about your product, give them an
incentive or not but you need to get them talking. That's how all Viral

3. marketing works. Sometimes you have a great product but people don't talk
about it. Let's solve this problem, let's get them talking.
If you need people to talk about your product you need to explore growth
tactics and tools. A perfect example is Airbnb. Airbnb engineering team
integrated with Craigslist and growth exploded for Airbnb. Do you think
someone in marketing can realise this growth hack without help from
engineering teams? Growth is not longer ownership of marketing team, it is a
joint property of product and marketing teams & essentially a mix of
Marketing, Engineering and lot of experimentation which we call growth
hacking.
Growth hacking is a fast-paced experimentation process intended to result in
huge growth. It can be applied to the product or the marketing channels or it
is discovering marketing channels where none existed. So what are the few
things which you can implement to achieve a growth hack but haven't
explored yet?
Virality: Remember it doesn't happen automatically, people make it happen
for their products.

4. For virality, you need to get your users to invite friends and keep a high
conversion percentage. Try to fulfil this equation: Invites sent * Conversion%
> 1 If you are able to fulfil the equation, congratulations you have won the
Virality game. If you haven't implemented yet then begin a comprehensive
referral campaign. Get your users to invite others and repeat the process with
the new users. Make the process part of the core product offering and not a
campaign. It should obvious to users to invite friends to use the product. Do
you think before inviting anyone on LinkedIn, dropbox or Google drive, it just
seems so flawless and that's the game. Make it extremely easy for the users to
invite others.
Engineering: Use engineering teams to make the presence of your website
or app felt by developing widgets, toolbars, Chrome Shortcut, desktop
shortcuts, tools for sending invites to all your email list, LinkedIn connections
or facebook friends, releasing API for your product, browser extensions,
Notifications on relevant activities, chatbots etc. The easy you make
customers access your product & refer across channels the faster you grow.
Gratifications: Instant gratifications. They always work. Subscribe now and
win, refer and win, download and win. Gift a value of your own product.
Subscribe now and get the first-month subscription free, Refer and get two
months subscription free. Has to be your own product gratification. Don't gift

5. and Ipad, Iphone and car. Never Integrate Gifts which you cannot gratify
instantly.
Explore: Explore marketing channels or reach to the user which you haven't
explored yet. Think of the possibilities, integrations to the unexplored
marketing channels. Food for thought, can you explore what's App as a
marketing channel, is it possible to integrate browser alerts or may be an
auto-scheduled phone call. Imagine what you can do with AI.
Automation: Automate processes to retain & gain subscribers. Here are few
examples of startups companies who have implemented this well.
Ready for zero - a fin-tech company, auto deducts small amounts from your
bank to collect & pay for your debts. It has created award-winning online
tools for tackling debt and managing credit - automatically. With $350
million in debt paid down by its customers, it is a company to watch. Another
such company is Digit which auto deducts small amounts for savings. Digits
have collectively made savings of $500 million for its customers. Do you think
customers would have saved this much if left on their willingness?
I loved this automation concept and this can be applied anywhere, automate
processes to retain your customers, don't ask them to do things, do it for them

6. and they will love you for it. It was when I was working on an app store for an
OEM, I implemented an algorithm which suggested users the top apps of the
day, right on the first screen. The top items were auto decided on the basis of
user behaviour and refreshed every day. The downloads jumped from 2
million/Month to 9 million/month. Similarly, Jobscan just scans your CV to
find right jobs for you, facebook auto suggests your friends so that you don't
have to search for them. Quora auto suggests you, people, to follow and read
what they answer.
Conclusion
Growth is not something you look for when you launch a product, you have to
build features in your product to help you grow and at the same time keep on
with experiments for growth via marketing channels. One day you will get the
hack you may need for explosive growth.
Remember, no matter how world-class your product is if you don't build it for
growth it will never grow. Just like your team runs a product or service exactly
you need to have a team to focus on just one thing, Growth.