First marketer at Dropbox, Lookout, Xobni, LogMeIn (IPO), and Uproar (IPO). Also interim marketing exec roles at Eventbrite, Socialcast, and Webs. Founder and CEO of Qualaroo through it's acquisition.
Now founder and CEO of GrowthHackers.
Sean Ellis is credited with coining the term “growth hacking” in 2010 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_hacking. The term was based on the approach he used to grow Dropbox, Eventbrite, LogMeIn and Lookout and what he saw teams doing at other fast growing Silicon Valley companies doing like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Unlike traditional or even online marketing, growth hackers use a process to rapidly experimenting across all of the key growth drivers in a business from acquisition and activation to engagement, referral and monetization.
The growth hacking process has now been adopted by 1000s of fast growing companies. In 2013 Sean launched a community for growth hackers at GrowthHackers.com where every month over 150,000 active users now learn and share best practices for accelerating sustainable growth using a growth hacking process.
Whether you're just getting started with growth hacking or want to build a world class growth team, Sean can help you think through the challenges and come up with a game plan to maximize your success.
Sean Ellis has led marketing as VP Marketing at two companies from launch to IPO filings (Uproar and LogMeIn). He also was the first marketer at Dropbox and Lookout in an interim marketing executive role (both reportedly worth over 1 billion dollars today). He is credited with coining the term “growth hacking” in 2010 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_hacking. The term was based on the approach he used to grow Dropbox, Eventbrite, LogMeIn and Lookout and what he saw teams doing at other fast growing Silicon Valley companies doing like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Unlike traditional or even online marketing, growth hackers use a process to rapidly experimenting across all of the key growth drivers in a business from acquisition and activation to engagement, referral and monetization.
Sean Ellis has implemented or executed the freemium business model at startups that are today collectively worth over $15 billion (LogMeIn, Dropbox, Lookout, Eventbrite, Wordpress, Webs...). The link provided below is an article he wrote for the Wall Street Journal that gives a good overview of his approach to freemium.
He can help you think through whether you should implement a freemium model. He removed the freemium model from his current business (Qualaroo) where he is founder and CEO, so he understands that freemium is not ideal for every situation. If you already have a freemium model, he can help give you guidance around how you can more effectively execute it or help you weigh a decision to discontinue it.
We have some success with it, but I recommend you check with Hiten Shah at KISSmetrics. I believe he told me that most of their sales can be tracked back to their content marketing efforts.
It's a pretty long answer. My colleague recently published a several page analysis of Snapchat's growth (link below). But a quick summary is that Snapchat is almost the perfect product for driving natural word of mouth and engagement. It was released by Stanford students for the iPhone, but didn't really grow quickly until it was discovered by high school students. Growth was amplified by the Android release and international expansion.
Here's the link to the full article:
http://www.growthhackers.com/companies/snapchat/
Sean was very helpful, although a little early for calling him he still pointed out things I should be doing and really showed the details I need to have an eye for. Highly recommend.
Sean was very helpful and provided very targeted answers to the questions I had. Great value.
Sean was great at understanding where we are in the start up process and offering specific actionable advice on both growth and growing the business. It was so valuable to get his direct insight and feedback for our specific business and stage. In clarifying when and how to grow this call has saved me weeks in effort and possibly months of going down the wrong route. Do yourself a favour and book a 30 min slot or more with Sean. The ROI will be spectacular.
Highly professional, nice person, interesting. If you need advice he knows what to do.
Amazing feedback from Sean. He was very generous with his deep knowledge in SaaS and how to set the basis for healthy growth.
I was about to spend 100's of hours analyzing survey data and build our product strategy accordingly and a 30 minute call with Sean saved me weeks of wasted time and brought things super clear. Even though he's a friend, and didn't want to charge me for the call, it's easily one of the best ROI's I've ever gotten. Not calling Sean is just wasteful :)
Sean started our call by saying that because he thought he might not be the best possible person to answer my question, he'd brought his friend along w/ highly relavant experience.
That awesome move, combined with his concise and wise feedback, earned my respect on our 15 minute call.
I highly recommend Sean.
Sean is beyond awesome. He genuinely wants me to be successful and gave clear advice on how to get there. I love him and I will be calling him many more times soon.
