Starting and running a startup is not for the faint of heart. Those who decided to embark in this insidious adventure have left, over the years, some general advices to be followed on their testaments. Just like any successful relationship, you need to bring your passion and commitment to your startup. And yet, that is not enough.

So, what really is the key for a startup success? Disruption for the founders of Airbnb, dedication for Mark Zuckerberg and answering to an urgent need for Uber CEO. Different points of views and only one common goal: growth. How to reach it? With the minimum investment and the maximum return, following the growth hacking approach.

It was in 2010, in fact, that Sean Ellis, American marketing guru, decided to elaborate a mix of strategies and techniques to help startups in their mission of being lean and successful. And could possibly Friendz not be one of the first adopters of this visionary strategy? I think you need no answer!

What is the growth hacking about?

The growth hacking is a new vision of marketing, whose objectives remain unchanged: driving user acquisition and launching a new service or product. What is completely different is the experimentation of new channels which break the rules of traditional marketing, creating new hybrids mechanisms standing between advertisement and development, to attack the market, extinguishing all the competitors.

The “go to market” of a startup becomes, in the majority of cases, more influenced by the presence of a skilled growth hacker rather than an expert of traditional marketing.

Us at the beginning: smiling and needing a growth hacking!

The power of growth hacking

Sean Ellis was one of the first who understood that products and services of the digital economy had no need of advertisements since they congenitally have the potential of promoting themselves. As we said before, these new marketing hackers looking for such disruptive approaches inside the startups, need to be a little bit nerd and always updated about new technology and cheap solutions.

Once clarified that there is at least a bunch of people here at Friendz recognizing themselves with this description, we want to tell you how it was possible for us to hire 15 thousand employees in a day! (Incredible, and it is not a joke!)

Our hacker plan

At the time we realized our plan, Friendz was a digital marketing company at the beginning of its adventure. We were already counting on a great user base but we wanted to get more. Our dream was that in every region of Italy, somebody could have potentially downloaded our app. We wanted Friendz to be known all around the country and we wanted people to talk about how great was to join our community. Hype was all we were looking for. We needed to growth fast, acquiring more users in the fastest way possible.

We thought and thought and we came up with an idea. What about asking to all of the members of our community to update their Facebook profiles information, saying that they were currently employed at Friendz? Crazy and wild enough, so we did it!

The echo of this move was huge! In just one day, 15 thousand people wrote that they were working at Friendz. The name of our company was suddenly everywhere on Facebook walls! In that day only, we fictionally hired thousands of community managers, coffee deliverers, florists, radio speakers, photoshop masters, pictures counters and selfie developers and other strange new job positions here at Friendz. We even had deejays and dolphin cuddlers!

Users "working" at Friendz!

Super results

The word of mouth was super powerful and we were on everybody’s lips. Users created a great hype on Facebook! Consequently, also the followers of our app users, confused and intrigued with their friends change of job, asked them more about it. The result was just what we expected: a continuous chattering about Friendz leading to a consistent user acquisition!

That is how we made new users to get in touch with us and to download the app for the first time! With a little growth hacking move, we made everybody happy: users felt involved in a project designed to perfect the app they loved, users’ friends discovered a new way of being creative on social media and Friendz, of course, was a step closer to the realization of its national diffusion program.

Probably we could have obtained satisfying results with traditional marketing tools anyway. But being disruptive in everything we do is one of our main values and we are still convinced that thinking outside the box is always the bravest move to be taken to reach success.

We knew that our business can count on a very active community of users that, if activated, can help us in creating hype around Friendz, through a peer to peer communication. This acknowledgment gave us the courage to experiment a different way to run a marketing campaign. Our community model proved itself to be successful and efficient, bringing us new users, taking advantage of the great degree of engagement. Friendz users, indeed, not only do enjoy taking pictures expressing their creativity, but also love to be handy when they can to help us in promoting the app!

And that is why we love them ❤