Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success

anywhere close to the money needed to compete with them head to head. I knew I had to find another way.

That’s when I got the idea of creating an entirely new type of advertisement that allowed Web proprietors to offer Uproar games for free on their site, meaning the site got fun new features to offer their visitors, and Uproar got exposure to everyone who visited those pages. The founder gave the go-ahead, and within a few weeks, the engineers and I had created a new single-player game that could be added to any website, with just a small snippet of code: one of the first embeddable widgets.

first approach was paid advertising on Internet portals, like Yahoo!, and that stoked growth nicely. But it was costly, and, just as Drew Houston later discovered with Dropbox,
the ads weren’t bringing in enough bang for the buck. Meanwhile, Sony, Yahoo!, and Microsoft started making their big push, flooding the Web with gaming ads, and as a young start-up, Uproar didn’t have

“How is this thing you’re showing me going to improve my life?”