“Growth Hacking” is the process of marketing a product using creative technical and social solutions, often uncovered using experimentation and measurement. The holy grail of this approach is to find a way for a product to grow exponentially like a virus, as epitomized by success stories like Facebook.

Lets be honest, this sounds a little creepy. Referral programs and viral growth imply intrusion into other people’s lives, like Avon knocking on your door.

At it’s heart though, growth hacking is about finding ways for your existing customers to find the customers you haven’t met yet. This doesn’t have to be intrusive, it can include a friend taking to to hear their favorite new band or a discussion of a new TV show. Word-of-mouth referrals of this nature can certainly be less intrusive than mass marketing or direct marketing.

This user generated growth doesn’t have to be viral to be useful. If we measure the average number of new users referred by each existing customer, we have a number called the Viral Coefficient. If this number is greater than 1.0, even if only slightly, you have viral (exponential) growth. A number less than one results in growth that will not continue on it’s own accord. However, it’s still incredibly useful. A viral coefficient of 0.5, for example, means that if you can reach 100 new users, they will in turn refer another 50, who will refer another 25, and so on, resulting in a total of 197 users for the marketing effort normally used to reach 100.

This type of growth is called the Viral Engine of Growth, and is one of the three main methods of startup growth discussed in The Lean Startup.

At One Submissive Act, we’re working in the sex industry, which presents interesting opportunities and challenges. On one hand, user-to-user growth is very important to us. Human sexual expression usually relies on relationships between people, and many of these relationships depend greatly on connecting with people who meet very specific criteria for compatibility that vary from person to person.

If someone has a specific sexual interest, such as being tickled, then an online service could cater to them directly by recognizing this and building an online community specifically for ticklers and tickle-ees. However, we can’t possibly know about every sexual interest that exists or might exist in the future. It seems far better to let people drive their own interests, and create networks and communities of like minded people.

An obstacle for traditional marketers is the fact that users may not publicise their interest in tickling. These niches aren’t big enough to allow you to simply market to everyone and hope that you reached enough ticklers to matter. Targeted advertising based on private searching, such as Google Adwords, is the only really viable approach for marketing to people with specific and private sexual interests, and Google does not allow adult advertising on it’s platform, nor does it advertise on adult sites.

How do we encourage referrals on One Submissive Act?

One Submissive Act started as a referral based service. You create a link representing your desire to be asked to take a sexual photo, and you could share that link via any means that you liked. We assumed that this would be a fun tool for people to use with their lovers.

As I’ve mentioned previously, people preferred instead to share these links with strangers. They started cropping up in public tweets, and on social networks. This worked well to drive traffic, and we got an initial boost of users powered by this referral engine. The few thousand users we had recruited through paid advertising became tens of thousands over the course of several weeks.

However, the user experience of interacting with these shared links wasn’t great. Once someone had visited a link and claimed the right to demand a photo, that link was now useless, and resulted in a “you missed out” message. We obviously tried to convert these visitors, but the essential experience of using the site only happened for one visitor per link.

To provide a good experience for users who were keen on this type of interaction, we had to start providing public directories of people volunteering to perform a submissive or dominant act. These were always kept up to date so no one missed out and everyone had a lot of fun. However, our users were now only interacting with users already on the site, and we’d lost our viral referral system.

Do people’s friends consent to being referred to?

We’ve since thought of ways that we could ensure that links wouldn’t be useless after one use. Our site has attracted sexually dominant people and voyeurs, which provides a nice balance with those wanting to share photos. Some of these people are happy to provide dominant acts for many people to perform, and we have considered having shareable links that represent ongoing “channels” of acts that a submissive could perform, thus creating community and ensuring that nobody misses out.

This still leaves us with a core problem. Adult social networks and dating sites already suffer from a huge problem of massive amounts of unsolicited and inappropriately intimate messaging being directed at certain users. For the benefit of anyone who has never been a woman on the internet, you may or may not be aware that women on adult or dating sites almost always attract a steady stream of unsolicited contact, often accompanied by pictures of penises.

If someone has a way of sharing the opportunity for a fun and sexy interaction, and happens to know people who might well share their interests, that doesn’t mean that we should encourage people to email their friends out of the blue with explicit requests.

Push vs Pull

The beauty of the internet is that we can craft wholly new social interactions. I’m sitting in a cafe right now, and I enjoy being tied up. However, I’m not going to stand up and ask the whole room if anyone here likes tying people up, finds me attractive, and would like to get together for some rope bondage. Even if it wasn’t inappropriate (and it is), it’d still be embarrassing.

Interrupting other people’s lives with my request for a connection is a push model of communication. In an ideal world, if people wanted me to know that they found me attractive and wanted to tie me up, then that information would be available without me having to intrude on their lives. But, they’re faced with the same problem, they don’t want to wear a sign saying that they like bondage either. Even if the sign was subtle, it might be a little less inappropriate than shouting across the cafe, but it’d still be just as embarrassing.

Who are they not embarrassed to reveal this information to? Probably several categories of people, including supportive friends, and most importantly people who are complimentary and compatible. So, if myself and some other person in this establishment both find each other attractive, one of us likes being tied up, the other likes tying people up, then the ideal barista should discretely slip us both a note letting us know.

This interaction is exactly the one that you find on sites like Tinder.com. Tinder didn’t think of this idea, they stole it from HotOrNot, who stole it from pre-internet speed dating. On Tinder, when both parties indicate they are attracted to the other, then a conversation gets started. Unless the consent was mutual, no one has to know they were passed over.

Tinder’s use of this model starts and ends with whether you think a person is hot based on glancing at their photo for a couple of seconds. This may not be interesting enough for the needs of those with more varied sexual interests, or for those for whom attraction isn’t so clearly based on first impressions of body type. Additionally, once a match is found on tinder, all further information reverts to the push model. If you find a tinder match, and you want them to tie you up, you need to tell them. Probably less embarrassing than shouting to a cafe, but we think that there are still opportunities to apply matching and mutual consent to specific sexual interests.

How does all this relate to Growth Hacking?

If we want to give people the option to connect directly with others with compatible sexual tastes, we need to do so with a pull model. That doesn’t mean sending links offering to show someone a picture of your cock. However, imagine something more subtle, like a link that someone could click on to find out about your sexual interests if they are interested, and in fact acts more like my hypothetical omniscient barista and only informs you of mutually compatible interests.

If the person who wants to share a dick pic genuinely connects with someone who likes to look at dicks, then we really want to connect them and ensure they have a good time. Our hypothesis is that the solution to unsolicited online sexual communication isn’t necessarily better ways of blocking people (although that is sometimes necessary). Instead, it’s through the provision of non-intrusive ways of finding the compatibility that people seek.

So, instead of providing intrusive but shareable adult content, our goal is to provide shareable opportunities to connect, which don’t themselves include any adult content unless that mutual interest is discovered. As we move into these area, we’ll be exploring various hypotheses and talking to people about what works for them, while also holding in our minds our ethical goals.

Coming Soon

We’re working on some new designs for this sort of interaction, under the working title “Explicit Consent”. The ideas for this include two way matching of specific types of sexual interaction, and a focus on a pull model while still attempting to drive referral based growth.

If you’re interested in finding out more, we’re currently recruiting co-founders. Please check out my first article, or contact me at craig@enspiral.com for more details.