Technology

#Growth hacking isn’t just a buzzword — let these 20K+ new users be your inspiration

#Growth hacking isn’t just a buzzword — let these 20K+ new users be your inspiration

‘Growth hacking‘ has come to take on a not so positive meaning. Many see it as a hyped-up buzzword that indicates a cheap temporary solution — but I couldn’t disagree more. What it’s really about is finding small and effective actions you can execute with the resources you’ve already got.

So to drive you to start looking for the opportunities that are already present at your own startup, I’d like to give you a full rundown of a recent growth hacking process my team did.

Now let’s start by setting the scene the almost all of us are familiar with:

Back in the days where traditional software engineering models were popular — before agile became the ruling and dominant mindset that almost every company shares — the relationship between a developer and a client was one where the client would give the developer a bunch of requirements (negotiated at the start), and the developer dutifully carried them out one by one.

This led to a ton of problems that you’ve probably heard of before (unable to respond to changing requirements, less user involvement in the process, large time gap between writing requirements and delivery, etc.). 

Collaboration between developers and clients

In modern software engineering, we software development firms try to work alongside the clients from the bottom up, and in every phase of the project. The immediately apparent consequence of this is that the now continuous process of requirement specification becomes collaborative, and better decisions tend to be made because the client and the technical team are aligned.

Less obvious is the fact that when the developer is so intimately involved in all aspects of a project, the situation becomes a fertile land for the growth of innovative ideas.

If the development firm is encouraged to give insight pertaining to domains that are not exclusively related to the development cycle — such as Marketing, R&D, Human Resources, Production, etc. — they might come up with strategies or solutions that arise from a very different, more tech-oriented perspective. They might end up having an enormous impact, or even be the key to the project’s ultimate success.

The startup

Here at Light-it, we’ve recently had one of these wonderful moments where our marketing team had an idea that ended up delivering tremendous value to one of our clients.

The client in question was job-search startup MjobO. The MjobO platform works in the following manner:

  • Talented individuals in search of a job upload their resumé to the platform.
  • Businesses upload job offers to the platform, with a focus on transparency; they need to specify the starting salary, the working hours, and job responsibilities.
  • Based on a position’s required qualifications, each job offer gets matched with the potential applicants.

We built their platform here at Light-it. In keeping with the philosophy I wrote about in the first section, as we worked on the project, we sought to learn as much as possible about the entire MjobO enterprise.

The reasoning behind this was that valuable insights only arise when a team fully grasps a project in its complete length and breadth. It needs to understand every area of a project; hyper-focusing on development would make it hard to come up with insights that involve other areas of the project.

The eureka moment

The eureka moment came as the development team was working on the functionality to upload resumés. When a job searcher fills out the form with all of their qualifications, MjobO automatically generates a consistent, clean looking resumé. Businesses use these to determine the best applicant for the job.

While this functionality was being implemented, the marketing team pitched another use for these generated resumés. The thinking was that applicants might — after filling out and generating a clean looking resumé — want to share it elsewhere other than on MjobO. If it were possible to harness this impulse, an opportunity for viral marketing could arise.

So here’s what we did. In the screen shown after an applicant’s resumé is generated, the developers added a big, eye-catching button that reads “Share on LinkedIn.”

Most applicants are very eager to share their newfangled, updated resumé on their LinkedIn feed. So they do. It looks like this.

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