Original post by RYAN HOLIDAY via Mashable
It’s a spectacular feat. Right in front of our eyes, a group of marketers helped build billions of dollars of brand equity on products like Facebook,Twitter, AirBnb, StumbleUpon, Zynga, Dropbox, Reddit and LinkedIn.
Stunningly, these brands were built without traditional advertising, brand partnerships or celebrity endorsements — in less than a decade. And the people who did it blew off traditional marketing for a new set of strategies that felt more like engineering and product development than a Don Draper strategy. But it worked
Now consider that those brands were only the freshman class. Their success has inspired and informed another batch of startups with equally stunning prospects: Evernote, Everlane, KISSMetrics, Qualaroo, Soma and countless other companies incubated off the radar, ready to explode based on the same strategies.
The marketers behind these brands don’t see themselves as such, though.
They are “growth hackers.”
So how did they do it? What’s their secret? How does growth hacking really work? We went straight to the source to ask the gurus who actually helped build these billion dollar brands. What follows is the the growth hacker method, easily applicable to any kind of business or product someone may launch.
