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Q&A
CONVERSATION WITH SEAN ELLIS
- The Godfather of Growth Hacking Back in the far-flung past that was the business world of the mid-nineties, things were a little more straightforward. Industries, company departments, and job roles were tidily scoped in well-defined packages. Hardware companies made hardware. Software was built by software developers. Big companies did big things, and small companies had small ambitions. Salesmen sold, marketers marketed.
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kip forward a couple of decades, and things are a little more fuzzy. The assembly-line thinking of the mid-20th century - build in stages, get each stage right before you move onto the next - just doesn’t work in an increasingly complex, fast-paced world. Anchored to the past, companies that operate this way recede into the distance as their modern competitors speed ahead. How did companies like Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn corner the market - and how do they stay on top? Put simply, they have Growth Hacking embedded into their DNA. A data-driven cousin of natural selection, Growth Hacking done right incorporates elements of Scrum, Agile, Lean, and Growth Marketing methodologies to guide companies towards growth by improving every step of their customer journey. Enter Sean Ellis. An engineer by trade and data-driven to his core, Sean literally co-wrote the book when it comes to Growth Hacking. 34
NORDIC BUSINESS REPORT 2019
NBR: Throughout your career, you have helped steer many companies towards growth. Can you tell me about your first steps towards developing Growth Hacking as a methodology? Ellis: This question goes right back to 1996, when I started doing internet marketing when I was living in Budapest. People back then didn’t have any experience with internet marketing, so you kind of had to invent the process as you went. Additionally, because I wasn’t in Silicon Valley or a major hub, I had more freedom to develop my own way of doing things. In fact, even though I was Head of Marketing at the time, I actually had no marketing experience, which meant I had no preconceived notions of how marketing was supposed to work - however, I was very data-oriented from an early stage. This led to us building the best data tracking of any in-
ternet marketing company at the time. For every dollar we spent, we could see every ad impression across our entire network. This freedom gave us the opportunity to come up with the strategy YouTube would use later on - taking our content and making it embeddable on third-party sites to drive traffic our way. This approach was so successful, we ended up having the lowest customer acquisition cost of any publicly-traded company - below 5 dollars - for a free registered user. Yahoo by comparison was considered good at the time with a 30-dollar customer acquisition cost. NBR: You moved to Silicon Valley in 2007. How did this affect your understanding of Growth Hacking? Ellis: When I got to Silicon Valley, I realised that there were a few companies that were actually trying to grow using many of