These 3 startups reveal their marketing tips and the truth about growth hacking

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Sean Ellis, the Godfather of Growth Hacking, defines a growth hacker as “a person whose true north is growth.” In other words, they are focused on growth above all else, consumed with finding hacks to achieve explosive, short-term gains, rather than following tried and tested methodologies.

Ellis explains that growth hackers are like marketers, but that they also need to understand technology to comprehend how engineering and marketing can work together.

Take Airbnb’s legendary growth hacking case study, for example. Their growth team realized that by reverse engineering Craigslist, they could enable Airbnb hosts to automatically advertise on the platform. The platform’s API was actually not open, and the company eventually shut this loophole, but not before Airbnb had hit a critical mass of traffic, propelling them to the next stage.

By baking shareability and, therefore, discoverability into the actual product, Airbnb was able to achieve a speed of growth that normal marketers simply couldn’t.

However, the cases of true growth hacking on the scale of Airbnb are extremely rare. So rare that I call into question if there is a genuine job market for Sean Ellis-type protege growth hackers.

In the most recent Tech in Asia City Chapter event in Seoul, I had the opportunity to interview three entrepreneurs whose startups have all enjoyed rapid growth.

Here’s what the panel uncovered, along with actual examples from our discussion.

The panel

Simon Lee is the CEO of Flitto, a crowdsourced translation app. Total investments in the company currently stand at US$10 million. Flitto was also Korea’s first TechStars entrant in 2014.

Joon Oh is the CEO of MangoPlate, which is essentially the Yelp of Korea. The company is gearing up to launch their app in Chinese within the next few months.

Seung June Oh is from SK Holdings and is an investor in Socar, a social car rental service that allows people to locate, book, and pay for a car from Korean cities on a per-hour basis.

Growth tactics

Be creative and gutsy

According to Lee, Flitto used the cult of celebrity as their primary tactic to achieve growth quickly. At the time, Psy was the global voice of Korea and had millions of fans around the world. He was also social, frequently tweeting to his fans but only in Korean.

Lee called translators from the platform to translate Psy’s tweets into other languages, luring them with prizes from Psy himself. Once the tweets had aired, providing the celebrity with publicity around the world, Lee approached Psy’s agency to request for the prizes. The agency parted with a few signed albums and posters in exchange.

Takeaways and a caveat