Talk given to Start-up Chile E-Commerce Tribe on Growth Hacks for Start-ups

1. Engineering Growth
Sumeet Patel
E-Commerce Tribe
December 13, 2012

2. My Background
• First programming class age 14 - Java
• UC Berkeley – Industrial Engineering and Operations Research
• FICO –Analytic Scientist - helped to develop a credit risk score model that
effects over 100M people worldwide
• LinkedIn – Early employee and Data Scientist. Built analytic products and
analysis with the growth, international, sales, marketing and monetization
teams over 3 years.

3. GoMakeIt Labs
GoMake.it : Platform that helps people create or get involved
with projects they are passionate about
Nowlr : Discover the top trends and measure your ability as an
expert across your interests
BrandBacker : Intelligently connecting brands with bloggers

4. Rivers of Information
Definition: A river is a place online your users rely on for
information that you can use to get eyes on your product or
engage existing users. (credit to Elliot from LinkedIn)
Growth Rivers:
1. Email
2. Google (SEO)
3. Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, Pintrest, Tumblr, etc)
4. Content Producers (Publications and Blogs)
The more your product shows up in the rivers, the
higher likelihood it will take off. Don’t pollute the rivers!

5. Email: Data Scraping and Cold Emailing
Automated Cold Emailing :
1. Seed - Find an online directory, source, community, or association for
your target users. (GMI Examples: Behanced, CarbonMade, IFB). If
not explicitly in a member list, use the browse or search pages (most
are paginated).
2. Scrape user information (Name, Age, Gender, Email, Social Media
Profile URLs and Handles)
3. Email – build a mechanism (not attached to your production server)
to send individual emails out that are personalized based on
information you scraped (gender, profile information, etc).
4. Attractiveness - Emails need to appeal to user vanity and ego’s and
keep the call to action button simple (“Join”, “Continue”, “Learn
More”, etc.) and always show value props.
Results: Brand Backer is seeing 40% CTR on Email and 20% overall signup rate
from the email. Over 3,000 signed up blogs in just over 1 month. 20% of emailed
users engage with the emails by replying back for more information.

6. Email: Warm Signups and Invitations
Warm Signups through user generated email invitations:
1. Addressbook Uploader – ask users to upload their address books to
see who they know in the community (signup flow, home page)
2. Referral Incentives – give your users incentives for inviting their
friends to your site. (money, discounts, badges, unlocking features
and others specific to your site)
3. Personalize emails with the name of the referrer and if you can try to
add something personal in the subject line (e.g. Max thinks you’re an
expert in Indie Music)
4. Crisp invitation cycles to increase viral speed (i.e. suggest friends to
invite via email, one click invite options and one click join options for
the receiver of the email

7. SEO: Public and Peek Pages
• Public pages and directories – Try to publish a limited or peek version of
pages inside your site that can be indexed by google (pages like profiles,
browse pages, overview pages, blog posts, etc.)
• Make it easy for google to index pages – Add links to a directory structure
or browse page that can easily be found from the landing page, use a site
map.
• Pick unique titles and descriptions for each page and make sure they are
repetitive. For profiles, use full names of the people in the page title,
description and permalink
• Think about long tail traffic. Does you product have something that would
be searched an only found on your site, even if it’s low search results
• Back Links from other reputable websites and publications

8. Social Media: Follower Bots
For all social media channels:
1. Come up with an intial list of handles/profiles of influencers in your
target market (“Seed”).
2. Use the social media API’s to start following their followers and their
followers followers. Use real faces for profile pictures and not you’re
logo.
3. The ones that follow you back or handles with bigger followers start
auto-tweeting. Interacting with the users increases chances of
conversion
4. Conversion is correlated to the number of followers you have. The
more followers you have the higher likelihood of someone following
you back.

9. Social Media: Transactional Engagement
Using transactions as a viral mechanism:
• Facebook Open Graph – auto pushes content to facebook when someone
does a transaction (i.e. backing trends)
• Share buttons and widgets – prompt users to share content from your site on
every action
• Trickle emails – periodically email users of friends from social media who are
on your site
• Activity Feeds – a way to show off transactions on your site that promotes
engagement
• Warm Signups/Invites – add ways for users to auto invite friends from their
social networks (personal message vs app requests)

10. Questions?