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...