

There were many contributing factors to the dot-com bubble and its burst. By the end of the year, more than a handful of the dot coms that had spent small fortunes to get their names in front of the 88.5 million Super Bowl viewers had gone bankrupt. Just 40 days later the NASDAQ hit an all-time high. It was the peak of dot coms going mainstream.
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Commercial breaks were full of names like, , and. 19 tech companies spent an average of $2.2 million each for Super Bowl advertising spots. The tech world remembers it for an entirely different reason. Football fans will remember it for its dramatic finish, with the Titans’ Kevin Dyson falling a mere yard short of tying the Rams on the final play of the game. January 30th, 2000 was the day of Super Bowl XXXIV. “It didn’t take long for them to figure out that it doesn’t work.” “During the dot-com boom, there was a bunch of traditional marketers who believed they could use normal consumer marketing techniques to grow websites,” Andrew remembers. To understand how and why growth hacking came to be, you first have to go back to January 30th, 2000. And if it’s unique, it deserves a novel set of growth solutions. If your product is any good, it’s unique. It’s about creating a growth system around your product, not just applying a universal set of tactics to it. The way Andrew sees it, growth hacking is a philosophical approach to the problem. To do it successfully, you have to understand why it works, when it does. But, more importantly, Andrew knows that growth hacking is not something you can learn by just reading a bunch of blog posts (like this one). He knows the value in it, the huge upside it can bring. Understandably, Andrew is a bit evangelical about growth hacking. On the screen is a Google Trends report for “growth hacking.” The graph is exactly what you want to see in growth, dramatically up and to the right. “But you asked me if growth hacking was slowing down,” he says and hands over his phone, showing me what he’s been tapping away at. Growth hacks turn your user base into a channel to pull in more users, compounding your previous success.Īfter another minute of back and forth on the importance of a bullet-proof product, Andrew looks up from his phone with a wry smile. But if it’s just kind of a tiny piece of shit, then it’s just going to be a big piece of shit, right?”Īt its core, a growth hack is a way to get more people into your product by using your existing user base. If you have a tiny diamond and you put it under a magnifying glass, then you’ll make something big and great.

“The folks that are doing growth very successfully start out with an amazing product, right?” he continues.Īndrew has a habit of ending his statements with “right?” and it makes it almost impossible to not come around to see from his perspective. What is he doing? Is he returning an urgent text or something? Thousands subscribe to his newsletter to get articles explaining the viral loop or the Law of Shitty Clickthroughs.Īnd currently he’s explaining to me why my observation-that the popular growth hacking tactics seem to be less effective as they go mainstream-isn’t indicative of any slowing in growth hacking as a movement. His early posts on growth hacking helped put the term on the Silicon Valley map. In a relatively new field, Andrew is an elder statesman. When it comes to growth, there are few names that carry the weight of Andrew Chen.

They are, Andrew assures me, one of the best teams in the game. On the other side of the glass is a growth team of engineers, data scientists, product managers, and who knows what else. After navigating a few winding hallways at Uber HQ to find a tucked away conference room, I’m chatting with Andrew Chen about one of his favorite topics: growth hacking.Īcross the table, he’s telling me about the importance the product plays in growth hacking, all as he taps away on his iPhone.
