The original growth hacker, and inside Dropbox’s blockbuster referral loop - with Sean Ellis from GrowthHackers.com - a podcast by Shamanth Rao

My guest today is Sean Ellis. Sean is widely regarded as the Godfather of Growth, and is credited with coining the phrase ‘growth hacking’. Where do I begin talking about him? Sean has held leadership roles with gaming platform Uproar and the remote desktop tool LogMeIn - and pioneered the cross functional approach to growing businesses that has since become known as ‘growth’, ‘growth hacking’ or ‘growth marketing’. All of that was before he worked on some of his biggest wins - most famously, he helped set up Dropbox’s referral program. If you remember back in 2008, if you invited a friend to Dropbox, both you & your friend would get storage space for free from Dropbox. This was nothing short of revolutionary at the time. I remember this not only generating such incredible buzz at the time but also resulting in some breakout growth for Dropbox, laying the foundations for the unicorn that it’s become today. Sean also founded Qualaroo, and advised many fast growing companies including Eventbrite & Lookout - and helped them grow faster. Today he runs GrowthHackers.com, a community focused around growth that organically resulted in a growth-focused SaaS product called NorthStar. Sean has also co-authored the books Growth Engines and Hacking Growth, which are considered definitive resources on growth.  In so many ways, Sean pioneered ideas about growth that were way ahead of their time - and he did this consistently over time. We’ll talk about so many of these wins, and about the culture of growth & experimentation that he’s both championed & helped drive the adoption of. 

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

• Sean was a salesperson early on in his career. The circumstances at his company Uproar that led him to shift his focus from selling to building the customer base via an approach that would subsequently become known as ‘growth’ or ‘growth hacking’.
• What gave Sean the confidence that Dropbox was something special, even though it wasn’t clear at the time that cloud storage could be a big market, and even though it looked like big competitors like Google & Microsoft could enter the market any time. What made Sean confident that referrals could be a strong growth engine for Dropbox(even though he’d been actually afraid to set up referrals at his previous company LogMeIn).
• What inspired the coining of the phrase ‘growth hacker’ - a juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated words. How Sean feels about the way the phrase is used today - and why he has no regrets even though some people employ the phrase in ways it wasn’t intended to be used.
• How GrowthHackers.com originated as a passion project that organically grew into a SaaS product.

Check out the full transcript and show notes here:
https://howthingsgrow.co/the-original-growth-hacker-and-inside-dropboxs-blockbuster-referral-loop-with-sean-ellis-from-growthhackers-com/

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