Cheng Hao: Achieve Maximum Growth with Limited Resources

Recommendation preface to Hacking Growth—Cheng Hao Achieve maximum growth with limited resources Cheng Hao, founder of Xunlei and founding partner of 遠望資本 (Yuanwang Capital, pinyin rendering) As an entrepreneur with more than a decade of experience, I read this book straight through in two days, then spent another day drawing a mind map. Its detailed, vivid account reorganized my previously vague intuitions into a coherent body of knowledge. I must say that Hacking Growth is a practical guide every frontline entrepreneur and executive should study carefully twice. For effective customer acquisition, retention, and explosive business growth, it offers systematic methods and detailed practical techniques. Any entrepreneur seeking maximum growth with limited marketing resources—or even without additional spending—should read it. Especially now, with Chinese capital chasing fashionable themes and projects becoming highly similar, startup competition is much harsher than in the United States. Overseas, a category may have only two or three competitors. In China, more than a dozen bike-sharing or shared-power-bank providers can emerge simultaneously. At that point, clever business models and impressive team credentials do not help. Founders need systematic knowledge of rigorous, detail-oriented operations to stand out quickly from the melee. This is the innovative approach Hacking Growth offers. Ingenuity makes it possible to challenge giant incumbents on a tight budget. Internet unicorns such as Facebook, Uber, Airbnb, and Pinterest, an image-sharing website, used this methodology to expand rapidly in their early days and achieve great success. Drawing on Xunlei’s difficult entrepreneurial journey and more than a decade of frontline management, I previously studied Eric Ries’s The Lean Startup in depth. I developed new and richer interpretations through practice. After becoming an investor, I repeatedly taught Lean Startup courses to Chinese founders as a startup-camp mentor. Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown’s painstakingly written Hacking Growth can be considered a companion to The Lean Startup. The Lean Startup focuses on rapidly validating needs and solutions at low cost. Eric therefore devotes less space to user growth: demand must exist before users can grow. Yet Lean Startup is no universal key. Especially in China, as both demographic and mobile-internet traffic dividends disappear, the business environment has shifted from broad-brush growth to rigorous, detail-oriented operations. Even after validating needs and solutions, startups still face acquisition and retention challenges. Hacking Growth explains how to acquire, activate, retain, and earn more profit after demand validation. Together, the two books cover most of the entrepreneurial process. The book explains growth teams’ composition and operating mechanisms, using familiar companies such as Facebook, Yelp—the largest American review website—and Uber. We practiced many growth-hacking techniques during our own internet ventures: building funnels, analyzing data to identify problems, optimizing landing pages, increasing paid conversion, and A/B testing… But these efforts were largely project-based. In short, most Chinese companies lack a dedicated growth team. As an experienced practitioner, I see two shortcomings in project-based work. First, projects are temporary responses to specific problems. Once solved, teams disband, leaving no one continuously responsible for user growth, even though growth never stops. Second, execution depends directly on the project manager’s experience. Without experience, prioritizing the work is not enough. Such talent is scarce in China, so implementation varies and knowledge is difficult to accumulate. I therefore believe a dedicated growth team is worth adopting. In practice, however, we must watch for potential conflicts with business departments. On customer acquisition, a major corporate concern, the book emphasizes viral marketing. Its advantages are obvious: explosive reach and low or even zero cost. For social products such as WeChat and Facebook, viral spread is the most natural promotion. We all remember WeChat asking us to invite contacts immediately after registration; little explanation is needed. Making non-social products spread virally requires more ingenuity. The book describes Dropbox, a file-storage service, offering extra space for referrals to friends. This is clever; I myself recommended it to several friends. An analogous example is WeChat Wallet. In theory, payments are clearly a utility: tools need a use case—you decide what to buy before paying. They have little connection with virality and no network effects. Indeed, Tencent’s Tenpay had remained lukewarm before WeChat. How could such a tool spread virally? It sounds difficult, but the answer is familiar: WeChat red packets! I vividly remember one Chinese New Year’s Eve when Xunlei colleagues lined up messages in a group, pressing me to send red packets. I could not escape and had to activate WeChat Wallet. Recipients likewise had to activate it to transfer the money into their bank accounts. To my knowledge, nearly 100 million users activated WeChat Wallet during a single Chinese New Year, without Tencent spending a penny throughout. That is viral marketing’s appeal. Reading Hacking Growth was deeply satisfying. It organized previously scattered knowledge. Although its examples are foreign, they involve familiar mainstream applications, making them easier to absorb. The translation is also concise, fluent, and precise. I thank translator Simon Zhang for his hard work. Finally, every entrepreneur in the thick of battle, racing against the clock, can achieve more with less by understanding and applying these growth-hacking methods. I hope every reader gains something. This is a “hacker’s guide” to finding a shorter route through the business world!