Seeding Growth Hackers Growth hacking is a term coined in 2010 by Sean Ellis, a marketing blogger and [63] entrepreneur. The concept behind it is for product teams to come up with extremely clever, cost-efficient ways to increase customer growth. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Airbnb, and Dropbox are companies that have all used growth hacking techniques to become successful. Hardcore growth hackers are a crossbreed of marketers, coders, and analytics experts. They are masters of analytics tools, traffic generation, and product optimization with a deep understanding of the innards of search-engine optimization (SEO), ad platforms, and social media tools. They are called hackers because they are ruthlessly focused on growing the business by any means necessary. They push the limits of traditional marketing using techniques such as A/B tests, landing pages, viral factors, email deliverability, and social media integration. The goal of growth hacking is to tie viral and paid ad campaigns to user engagement metrics so that you can identify the most valuable marketing channels. Growth hacking entails continuous tinkering with the product’s sales funnel so that it is fully optimized for acquiring new users and getting them more deeply engaged. In the case of TradeYa, our core team knew we were out of our depth. We could design, strategize, and develop the MVP. We could fill out the Funnel Matrix — we knew what kind of answers we needed. What we didn’t have was the expertise to get those answers from the metrics and analytics reports in front of us. We didn’t know how all the tools and dashboards worked, but we had to run hardcore tests to refine and perfect our MVP to relaunch in 30 days. It was the Christmas holidays, and we were pretty sure it was a fantasy to hope for a highly advanced growth hacker with usability testing and design skills to end up at our door. Plus, we had a budget of only about $5,000. So, we decided to hack together some growth hackers of our own. That’s how the TradeYa MVP Apprentice Program was born. Jared and I wanted to diversify our budget with as many fresh minds as possible who would work collaboratively on connecting all the analytical tools we needed to update the existing MVP. They would use the Funnel Matrix to plug in the feedback data from each other of their initiatives so that we could validate all the assumptions the core team had made about the levels of user engagement. Figure 9-2 shows the blog post we used to attract the talent we needed.