The Dark Art of "Growth Hacking"

How do you make a new app become popular? I was sure the answer would be very different in the West v/s India or China. What’s legal, which laws can/are enforced, what’s tolerated by people: everything’s so different in these regions.

 

Matthew Brennan’s book on TikTok, Attention Factory, confirmed my suspicion. As he says, to go viral in China:

“The team had to master the darker arts of growth hacking.”

Imagine an airport, with crates full of new phones waiting to be shipped to different parts of China. There are companies whose job is to (1) unseal the phone boxes, (2) connect the phones to a device that has, say, 12 USB ports, (3) select the app(s) to install on the phones, (4) re-seal the phones in the boxes. On an average, this method can install apps on around 1 lakh phones per day.

 

But over time, this stopped being an effective to “distribute” your apps. Why? Because it is an endless cat and mouse game. Soon, app companies realized it was better to do the same thing (installing apps on phones) at the destination airports. After all, that way you could also uninstall your competitor’s apps!

 

You can see where this headed. Even better was to pre-install one’s apps was at the point of sale: the shops at which the phone is eventually sold. A side-effect of this entire mechanism? It’s always shifting downstream from the manufacturer. Thus, there’s no incentive whatsoever to pay the manufacturer to pre-install the apps. What’s the point if your app can be uninstalled at so many points (source airport, destination airport, shops) before the phone reaches the customer?

 

App creators, aware of these uninstallations, soon said they’d pay only if the app was launched at least once. This demand, while logical from the app creator’s perspective, transferred even more power to the shop-owners:

“As part of the buying process, store clerks would help setup the phone for the customer, insert the SIM card… and take the opportunity to activate the pre-installed apps.”

 

A key reason why this mechanism works at all?

“The app pre-installs practice worked because most consumers were either ignorant or indifferent to what software should be packaged on their phones. Buyers focussed on the price, brand, and specs of the hardware.”

 

No wonder the book says that in China:

“The market for pre-installing apps on smartphones was a chaotic, wild west.”

 

I can’t imagine this being the standard practice in the West, but in China and presumably India, it certainly “fits”.

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