An article from The Daily Beast claims Apple has opened the 'back door' to an iPhone before. The truth is that encryption, and the ability for savvy marketers to get around it for marketing, has been a technique practiced for years. It is called Growth Hacking and it requires understanding, among other things, your 'Application Programming Interfaces' or the-garden-variety-acronym API .
I don't think the general business world thinks about APIs as much as they should. They are, however, common to any company in the Digital Marketing space and that is why we have prepared of one of the definitive posts on the subject as it relates to the more sophisticated forms of exploiting encryption.
While it is not the API itself that opens the back door to a site or a platform, gaining fluency in a particular API can greatly increase your odds of successfully exploiting, and leveraging, its weaknesses. Here is the classic story on the 'growth hacking' of non-profit Craig's List by for profit AirBnB. Dave Gooden, who works in the rental space sector, talks in this article about how he first looked into the 'mysterious growth' of AirBnB.
“When a competing company comes on my radar, I always do my due diligence. In my AirBnB research, I didn’t find great SEO results or a gazillion followers on Twitter or any massive advertising spends on Google or Facebook. I looked everywhere but I couldn’t find any rational or traditional reasons for this type of growth. All of these AirBnB users can’t be coming from tech blogs, can they? Word of mouth? I didn’t think so. After thinking on it for a day or two, only one possible answer popped into my head: ‘These guys are black hats!’” [50 ]
And yet...
There is an ethical way to hack that can yield remarkable dividends for your brand or company. If you are really, really interested I have prepared a brief guide to growth hacking here. It's more 'White Knight' than black hat.
A Brief Growth Hacker’s Guide
1. The Definitive Guide to Growth Hacking – The book covers all aspects of growth hacking, including analytics. Chapter 4 talks about the growth hacking funnel, and Chapter 10 deals with analytics terminology and the various tools available. (These are the only Chapters that matter.)
2. Video: Lean Analytics: One Metric That Matters (OMTM) – Alistair Croll (author of Lean Analytics) explains with a YouTube video how: “By measuring and analyzing as you grow, you can validate whether a problem is real, find the right customers, decide what to build, and how to monetize it. Although you will need patience to monetize everything, this will help you count what hurts and helps.”
3. A Guide To Mastering Growth Hacking Analytics – This article explains how to pick your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and calculate essential metrics like LTV (Customer Lifetime Value) and other critical metrics.
4. The Beginner’s Guide to Startup Analytics – “Metrics are what ground startups in facts and logic.” Shanelle Mullin of Onboardly explains how analytics fit into early and mid-stage startups and when to incorporate growth analytics into your marketing.
5. Analytics for Viral Growth – Part 2 of The Growth Hacker’s Playbook – This article provides a more advanced overview of how a growth hacker should approach analytics and explains how key concepts come into play, such as cohorts and calculating the lifetime value of a customer and other critical variables that can spell success or failure in the long-run.
6. How to calculate cost-per-acquisition for startups relying on freemium, subscription, or virtual items biz models – Andrew Chen, a growth hacking “expert”, explains how to calculate cost-per-acquisition (CPA) for various traffic and customer sources across the web.
7. What factors influence DAU/MAU? Nature versus nurture – Chen explains how your product’s category influences what to expect from your daily active user (DAU) and monthly active user (MAU) metrics.
8. Zero to Product/Market Fit (Presentation) – In this presentation Chen explains what product/market fit looks like from a numbers standpoint.
9. Customer Analytics for Growth Hacking – Woopra, a customer intelligence tool, takes you through key analyses growth marketers can focus on to understand customer behavior within their saas platform.
10. How To Build And Optimize An Onboarding Funnel – This blog post from Woopra compliments the post above by showing how to build and optimize your onboarding funnel.
11. Viral Growth and Analytics – While the Viral Growth and Analytics feed on Quora leans more towards discussions about growth strategy than analytics, there are a few analytics-focused questions mixed in .
12. Growth Hacking Tools for Marketers Who Don’t Code – And you don’t need to, as I will talk about this in future blog posts.
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