What has been your biggest 'growth hack' or best (most creative) marketing campaign

When we launched my first startup in the US we were bootstrapped so didn't have the funds to run a big campaign for our first tradeshow. The tradeshow had about 14,000 people attending and we only had the budget for a tiny booth so we ran a competition. We had lego people created with our logos on their shirts and hid them all over the conference (typically in competitors booths) and then anyone who attended our stand we told them they could only get access to one of these lego people by visiting our competitors, finding one and bringing it back to us - if they brought one back they could win a bunch of Aussie themed prizes like Tim Tams. We didn't expect it to go viral but people were finding the lego people, telling their friends and posting on socials, we even got a mention over the loud speaker. We had the most foot-traffic of any of the stands and had the cheapest stand option available (total spend including flights and accomodation for the team was under 20K, some of our competitors spents 300K+ and had less foot traffic).

Love this topic! I had a great moment working with one of our clients at We Are Heroes. We focus on impacting growth through design for early stage and growing startups. They were looking for ways to improve the number of people who viewed their product page after completing an online consultation. Originally the content after consultation was shown linearly, with product being shown at the end of the journey. We changed the format so that the user was shown a menu of options to choose from when completing the consultation. A change that took 1 day dev time, and a few hours to design, and improved the number of users who viewed the product page from ~25% to 70%+ I love finding these little changes that have a huge impact! And so often it's something you wouldn't expect.

Being able to get on the front page of Digg back in ~2006. Once I got 100,000 unique visitors in 24h, which created extra virality after the front page, and a lot of backlinks.

So the growth hack that I want to explain was based around the requirement to have 100+ reviews on your product using preferred review platforms to have stars come up in your paid search ads. This was about 3-4 years ago when it was still a new feature. I had my thoughts adding review stars (and 4 out of 5 or better) would improve CTR and reduce bid costs in adwords, not to mention improve conversion rates. What I did was start segmenting our customers into those who had customer enquires and left a positive CSAT, and those who recently had insurance claims paid and did an email blast asking for feedback. During this process we would ask for NPS score, and based on the result of that NPS score we redirect them to get further personal feedback or ideally if they were a promotor (8+) we would redirect them Trustpilot (we later optimised this flow to push them to a variety of review sites, facebook, google etc.) It worked well and helped us get a bunch of quick reviews, but we expanded it and we realised that claim payment was really the "magic moment" when people would leave amazing feedback. We timed the email to go out 2 days after we knew the money had hit there account, as it was international this was actually challenging as some time it could take up to 10-14 days where other regions would be <2 days. This worked perfectly and what we did in the email was ask them "If there was anything that would stop you giving us a 5 star review we want to hear about it, please reply to this email and we will get it solved" We gave the customer support team a 48hr SLA to resolve any problems no matter what within 48hrs and then after 2 days we automatically got TrustPilot to send a review request from their system. Once we had our 100+ reviews which created 4.8 rating, we were getting 40% more volume, and our conversions jumped 20% from adding the review stars in our google adwords! Way better than expectation.

You are not going to believe it but back then when LinkedIn outreach and cold email marketing wasn't known and we were the first one to start using it but with a personalised proposal. Good one checking the performance between cost, reach, customers.