The talk on growth hacking by Bjorn Lee, co-founder of Stickery was rather refreshing, especially after all the engineering-focused talks we’ve been having.

I found his section on forum seeding one of the most applicable for our app, if we’re going to be taking it beyond the first assignment. Perhaps not quite the way they did it, but there are very relevant communities for our initial target audience (women), like CozyCot and Flowerpod, which could be useful for marketing.

Another thing that struck me was how they gathered really high-quality feedback from mothers. Similar to them, our team is made up of all guys, so we may not have a first-hand understanding of our target market, but we can certainly try to make up for that by going out there and talking to our users, which should be easier now that our app’s at an MVP(ish) stage.

On a related note, I’ve been researching on BillPin for Monday’s presentation, and they pulled off an impressive growth hack back in April by buying over another bill-splitting service, BillMonk.

It’s rare to see a 6 month old startup acquiring an 8 year old rival with around 50 times the number of users. Not only did they get an instant massive boost to their user base, but also gained some buzz from the usual tech news websites, and valuable usage data.

Probably not something we can mimic directly, but their clever and unorthodox approach aptly illustrates how far you could move beyond the mold in order to acquire traction.