Willix Halim's Tips on Growth Hacking

Growth hacking isn’t something new in internet industry. It’s the solution for startups with limited capital who intend to have a performance optimation. Freelancer’s Vice President of Growth & Data Science, Willix Halim, shared his tips on growth hacking for startup in “Game of Growth:Redux”.

Halim, who leads the growth team at Freelancer, stated that a startup needs to think about growth at first, then monetize later. Therefore, growth hacking must redefine the startup.

The growth team is responsible towards the strategy, produck management, data science, and company’s data analysis. Freelancer, a job-seeker marketplace, has so far had 14 mill users worldwide, and 500 thousand in Indonesia. It has gone IPO in Australia.

Below are the tips Halim presented during the session.

Hire Engineering Team, not Marketing One

“I define growth team that I lead as growth engineering, a hybrid between marketing staffs and programmers,” Halim said.

He further explained that his team consists of engineers of various background. They sit for hours in front of their computers, analyze data, try understanding users, knowing how users adopting the product, and develop required features. They do all that to attract users to use their product, as simple as that.

“Hire those who are passionate and hungry for this position,” he added. According to him, there are many tools out there that can be used and learned to enable us analyzing deeper. He said, “We may learn a lot of things through Internet.”

Data Driven Culture

“Prior to launching our products, re-check the data and always conduct A/B testing,” Halim confidently highlighted. He pointed out that doing what other companies do, which only check the traffic, user, and revenue, is not advisable. “Take a closer look at every data. Always find out why this works for your users, while that one doesn’t. ‘What can we do?’”

Develop a learning machine as well. Halim commented, “Amazon’s revenue mostly come from its ‘recommended’ feature. Get to know your users’ behavior and interest as best as you can, so that you can recommend them the right products.”

One last important thing according to Halim, “get to know your competitors’ metric.” He claimed that this is as important as mastering your own metric. By doing so, you’re one step ahead of your competitors.