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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
Hack your business growth the scientific way Airbnb. Uber. Spotify. To join the big fish in the disruptive digital shark tank you need to get beyond siloed sales and marketing approaches. You have to move ahead fast--with input from your whole organization--or die. Since the early 2010s, growth hacking culture has developed as the way to achieve this, pulling together multiple talents--product managers, data analysts, programmers, creatives, and yes, marketers--to build a lean, mean, iterative machine that delivers the swift sustainable growth you need to stay alive and beat the competition. Growth Hacking for Dummies provides a blueprint for building the machine from the ground-up, whether you're a fledgling organization looking for ways to outperform big budgets and research teams, or an established business wanting to apply emerging techniques to your process. Written by a growth thought leader who learned from the original growth hacking gurus, you'll soon be an expert in the tech world innovations that make this the proven route to the big time: iteration, constant testing, agile approaches, and flexible responses to your customers' evolving needs. * Soup to nuts: get a full overview of the growth hacking process and tools * Appliance of science: how to build and implement concept-testing models * Coming together: pick up best practices for building a cross-disciplinary team * Follow the data: find out what your customers really want You know you can't just stay still--start moving ahead by developing the growth hacking mindset that'll help you win big and leave the competition dead in the water!
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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Growth Hacking For Dummies®
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Growth Hacking For Dummies®
To view this book's Cheat Sheet, simply go to www.dummies.com and search for “Growth Hacking For Dummies Cheat Sheet” in the Search box.
Table of Contents
Cover
Introduction
About This Book
Foolish Assumptions
Icons Used in This Book
How This Book Is Organized
Beyond the Book
Other For Dummies Books
Where to Go from Here
Part 1: Getting Started with Growth Hacking
Chapter 1: Defining Growth Hacking
Defining Growth Hacking Goals
Working through the Basics
Recognizing the Distinctive Nature of Growth Hacking
Steering Clear of Growth Hacking Obstacles
Chapter 2: Building Growth Hacking Skills
Determining the Growth Hacker’s Skill Set
Inspecting the Growth Hacker’s Toolbox
Seeing What Makes Growth Hackers Tick
Chapter 3: Building Growth Teams
Investigating Growth Team Structure
Gauging the Impact of Growth Leads
Looking at the Four Types of Organizational Cultures
Strategic Priorities of Growth Teams
Part 2: Seeing Where Growth Opportunities Come From
Chapter 4: Applying Customer Journey Frameworks
Understanding Customer Journey Frameworks
Using Tools to Visualize Customer Journeys
Conducting a Growth Audit
More Context on Tools
Chapter 5: Diving into the Customer Journey
So, How Do Users Find Out about Your Product, Anyway?
Seeing What Excites Your Customers
Onboarding versus Activation
Landing That Repeat Customer
Inspiring Users to Pull Out Their Wallets
Turning Product Users into Product Proselytizers
Part 3: Applying the Growth Hacking Process
Chapter 6: Laying the Foundation for Growth
Doing It Like a Scientist: Developing and Testing Hypotheses
Identifying Your North Star Metric
Understanding How Your Product Grows Today
A Simple Growth Equation
Chapter 7: Identifying Potential Opportunities for Growth
Narrowing Your Sights
Choosing the Best Ideas to Test
Ensuring That You Have a Good Hypothesis
Seeing How the Pieces Fit Together
Chapter 8: Prioritizing Your Ideas before You Test Them
The Importance of Prioritization
Methodologies for Prioritizing Ideas
General Criticisms of Simpler Frameworks
Chapter 9: Testing Ideas and Learning from Them
Working with Two Types of Tests
Analyzing Results
Acting on What You’ve Learned
Chapter 10: Managing the Growth Process
Establishing a Weekly Routine
Setting the Ground Rules
Moving to a Month-to-Month Schedule
Taking the Long-Term Perspective
Chapter 11: Laying the Right Foundation for Company-Wide Growth
Taking Baby Steps
Making Your CEO the Growth Advocate
Sharing Is Better than Hoarding
Part 4: The Part of Tens
Chapter 12: Ten Key Benefits of the Growth Hacking Methodology
A Focus on Process versus Tactics
Cross-Functional Collaboration
Organizational Alignment
Data-Informed Decision-Making
Improved Customer Focus
A Better Understanding of Your Customers
Improved Customer Experience
A State of Constant Curiosity
Better Product-Development Processes
Greater Control because of Product-First Growth
Chapter 13: Ten Things to Watch Out For
Ignoring the Need to Constantly Evangelize Progress and Learning
Not Sticking to the Growth Meeting Agenda
Testing Things That Don’t Need to Be Tested (Right Now)
Not Taking Big Enough Swings
Blindly Copying What Others Have Done
Measuring What You Did versus What You Learned
Not Understanding the Opportunity Costs of Testing
Having Lots of Tests That Yield Inconclusive Results
Not Analyzing Your Tests in a Timely Fashion
Not Checking on Whether the Gains Still Hold
Chapter 14: Ten (+Twelve!) Key Resources to Continue Your Education
GrowthHackers.com
CXL Blog
Optimizely Blog
Conversion Sciences Blog
Reforge Blog
Brian Balfour’s Blog
Andrew Chen’s Blog
Intercom Blog
Occam’s Razor Blog
Analytics Demystified Blog
MeasuringU Blog
Online Behavior Blog
Casey Winters’ Blog
Kieran Flanagan’s Blog
Growth Engineering Blog
Widerfunnel Blog
forEntrepeneurs Blog
Mobile Growth Stack Blog
Dan Wolchonok’s Blog
Christoph Janz’s Blog
The Amplitude Blog
The Breakout Growth Podcast
Glossary
Index
About the Author
Advertisement Page
Connect with Dummies
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 4
TABLE 4-1 Pirate Metrics and Marketing Hourglass, Superimposed
Chapter 5
TABLE 5-1 Channels Categorized by Who Does Most of the Work
TABLE 5-2 Calculating the Greatest Percentage Overlap for Key Action Frequency t...
Chapter 8
TABLE 8-1 The Hotwire Points Model
TABLE 8-2 The PXL Framework
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
FIGURE 1-1: The blog post that started it all.
FIGURE 1-2: The growth hacking process summarized.
Chapter 2
FIGURE 2-1: The T-shaped marketer framework, by Brian Balfour.
FIGURE 2-2: An example of a reference profile generated by the PI Behavioral As...
FIGURE 2-3: Key traits and strengths of growth leads.
Chapter 3
FIGURE 3-1: An independent growth team, organized by flows and features.
FIGURE 3-2: An independent growth team, organized by metrics.
FIGURE 3-3: A functional growth team.
FIGURE 3-4: The four major organizational cultures.
FIGURE 3-5: The four major foci of teams.
FIGURE 3-6: Distribution of behavioral profiles of 31 current and former growth...
FIGURE 3-7: Distribution of behavioral profiles of 31 current and former growth...
FIGURE 3-8: Distribution of behavioral profiles of 31 current and former growth...
FIGURE 3-9: Distribution of behavioral profiles of 31 current and former growth...
FIGURE 3-10: Strategic priorities overlaid on Team Work Style quadrants.
FIGURE 3-11: Top strategic priorities for growth teams of 31 growth leads.
Chapter 4
FIGURE 4-1: Dave McClure’s Pirate Metrics.
FIGURE 4-2: John Jantsch’s Marketing Hourglass.
FIGURE 4-3: The AARRR funnel and Marketing Hourglass, visualized as loops.
FIGURE 4-4: The customer journey is complex.
FIGURE 4-5: A Google Analytics JavaScript snippet.
FIGURE 4-6: Google Analytics Acquisition overview.
FIGURE 4-7: Sample goals in Google Analytics.
FIGURE 4-8: Sample funnel visualization.
Chapter 5
FIGURE 5-1: Evolution of channels.
FIGURE 5-2: A channel prioritization matrix, combining Balfour and Weinberg/Mar...
FIGURE 5-3: Actions taken by most people who retain within your product best ar...
Chapter 6
FIGURE 6-1: The Andy Johns growth equation.
Chapter 7
FIGURE 7-1: Dave McClure’s Pirate Metrics.
FIGURE 7-2: Sample user flow with metrics.
FIGURE 7-3: GrowthHackers To-Do List example, copied from Quora.
FIGURE 7-4: A sample online survey.
Chapter 8
FIGURE 8-1: An ICE score example.
FIGURE 8-2: A PIE framework example.
Chapter 9
FIGURE 9-1:
Battleship
analogy.
FIGURE 9-2: A simple A/B test report from Google Optimize.
FIGURE 9-3: A simple A/B test example.
FIGURE 9-4: A simple A/Bn test example.
FIGURE 9-5: A multivariate test example.
FIGURE 9-6: A bandit testing illustration.
FIGURE 9-7: The growth process loop.
Chapter 10
FIGURE 10-1: A weekly cadence.
FIGURE 10-2: A quarterly review.
Chapter 11
FIGURE 11-1: Culture of growth and learning.
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Introduction
Welcome to Growth Hacking For Dummies!
First, a little bit of history. The concept of growth hacking became popular toward the middle of the 2010's, and its ideas have been used by some of the world’s fastest-growing companies to unlock breakout growth. You might already have heard about growth hacking and how it has contributed to the growth of the fastest-growing start-ups over the past decade. You may even have read about how growth hacking has transformed the marketing field as well as how products are developed. What you may still be unclear about is what this growth hacking concept really is.
Growth hacking has always existed, but before the phrase was coined by Sean Ellis, no one had a well-defined way to describe the process — a process, mind you, that was already being practiced with great success in areas of innovation like Silicon Valley. I was lucky enough to find Sean, and then work directly with him, as the popularity of the concept began to explode and helped cement its status as a concept that start-ups cannot ignore if they are to raise the odds of unlocking breakout growth. Start-ups aiming to replicate the success of bigger companies are looking to understand what these successful companies did differently that helped change the trajectory of their growth.
Over the past five years, having been part of (and leading) growth teams and mentoring start-ups on implementing growth hacking methodologies, I found that there was a need to write a digestible guide that someone like me — who previously had no background with start-ups, growth, marketing, or product development — could understand and use.
Growth hacking has now taken its place among other buzzwords among those familiar with the start-up and tech space. In this book, I clear up some of the biggest misunderstandings on what growth hacking is and, most importantly, what it is not. The information in this book will give you the confidence to be successful using the growth hacking methodology. Even if you’re familiar with the core concepts of growth hacking, this book may still introduce you to a different way of looking at growth, marketing, and product concepts and may also provide you with some tips on how best to explain to others exactly what growth hacking is.
About This Book
This is a book about clarifying growth hacking's intent. The entire point of the practice is to grow the value you deliver to your customers. You do that by implementing a cross-functional process of testing and learning that involves key stakeholders companywide. This book is as much about the process as it is about the people you call on to execute it and the kind of culture a company needs if this methodology is to take root and bear fruit. This is also a book about how important it is to align your goals with those of your customers and develop empathy for their needs and motivations if you’re going to truly find a path to sustainable growth.
When I can, I include real-world examples from my experiences and conversations with other growth professionals.
Whether you’re a founder, an executive, or a marketing/growth/product professional, you'll find something worth reading in Growth Hacking For Dummies.
Foolish Assumptions
To get the most from this book, I assume that you
Have worked for, are working for, or want to be working for a company that is moved beyond product-market fit. You shouldn’t be growing something that you haven’t validated a need for.
Are willing to let data help you make decisions about how you identify your best growth opportunities.
Are willing to try something different from what you have done in the past or from what other companies are doing.
Are comfortable reading about strategy, process, teams, and data.
Have (or will be able to have) access to data or at least want to collect and analyze data.
Are looking, of course, for an accessible source that keeps it as simple as possible and provides practical advice about how to get started in the real world, as opposed to what you might find in the content deluge you encounter every day.
Icons Used in This Book
Throughout this book, you’ll see these little graphical icons to identify useful paragraphs:
The Tip icon marks tips and shortcuts that you can take to make a specific task easier.
The Remember icon marks the information that’s especially important to know. To siphon off the most important information in each chapter, just skim these paragraphs.
The Technical Stuff icon marks information of a highly technical nature that you can safely skip over without harm.
The Warning icon tells you to watch out! It marks important information that may save you headaches. Warning: Don’t skip over these warnings!
How This Book Is Organized
The book is arranged into four self-contained parts, each composed of several self-contained chapters. By self-contained, I mean that I do my best to tell you everything you need to know about a single topic inside each chapter, other than when I have to reference other parts of the book to connect parts that are legitimately linked.
Here’s an overview:
Part 1: Getting Started with Growth Hacking
These early chapters serve as a primer on growth hacking. In this part, you learn to walk before you run, but what you find here lays the foundation for all that comes later. You’ll see my definition of growth hacking (and what it is not) and find an introduction to its important concepts, applications, and options. You’ll also gain an understanding of the most important skills needed to build a growth team and have it succeed.
Part 2: Seeing Where Growth Opportunities Come From
Many people think of growth hacking as something that is complex or different from what they know. In the beginning of Part 2, you get to see how identifying a customer journey helps you identify potential growth opportunities and lets you see what you can hope to learn from interactions at every step of this journey.
If you read all of Part 2, you'll have examined the different opportunities to provide and enhance value to your customers that you can then double-down on with confidence — versus just going with your gut.
Part 3: Applying the Growth Hacking Process
In this part, I dive deep into the growth hacking methodology. The key ideas you’ll walk away with are the importance of a North Star Metric (NSM), building a growth model, and using the growth model to set objectives that you can run tests around. You’ll read about how to establish and manage a growth process that allows you to learn rapidly where the biggest signal for growth may be coming from. And though implementing a growth process is a great start, getting companywide adoption of the growth mindset is how you truly lay the foundation for unlocking growth, which you’ll also learn how to do.
Part 4: The Part of Tens
If you have ever read another book in the For Dummies series, this part of the book is like seeing an old friend again — the friend might be wearing a different outfit, but you will recognize the person right away. The Part of Tens is a collection of interesting growth hacking insights, advice, and warnings broken out into ten easy-to-digest chunks. This part offers ten benefits, ten things to watch for, and the like. These chapters crystalize some concepts you get a chance to read about in the rest of the book, or a way to dig right in to the concepts that matter if you haven’t.
Beyond the Book
Although this book broadly covers the growth hacking methodology and process, I can cover only so much in a set number of pages! If you find yourself at the end of this book and thinking, “This was an amazing book — where can I learn more about growth hacking?” check out Chapter 14 or head over to www.dummies.com for more resources.
Cheat Sheet: If you’re looking for the traditional For Dummies Cheat Sheet, visit www.dummies.com and type Growth Hacking For Dummies Cheat Sheet in the Search box.
Growth hacking is a vast domain where you’re continually challenged to learn something new, given how fast things change. Unfortunately, one book cannot do justice to all these topics, but, fortunately, that’s why you can find more than one book in this world (and people to help write them).
Aside from an introduction to a topic you may not have known much about before, what I aim to do in this book is cover that area of knowledge necessary for a successful application of growth hacking not already covered by other books. I provide a unique (if not sometimes strange) point of view about what really matters, honed over many years of practical experiences in the field. What I have to say isn’t often what people thought they would find, and I stand by what I think is important enough to share in this format. If you’re looking to obtain more depth in a specific technical domain, you can turn to plenty of resources in order to go deeper — not the least of which are other For Dummies books.
Other For Dummies Books
You can use a number of related books to drill down into topics I could only briefly touch on in this book — for example, Data Driven Marketing For Dummies, by David Semmelroth; Digital Marketing All-in-One For Dummies, by Stephanie Diamond; Marketing For Dummies, 5th Edition, by Jeanette McMurtry; Writing Copy For Dummies, by Jonathan Kranz; Web Analytics For Dummies, by Pedro Sostre and Jennifer LeClaire; SEO For Dummies, 7th Edition, by Peter Kent; Advertising For Dummies, 2nd Edition, by Gary Dahl; AdWords For Dummies, by Howie Jacobson, Affiliate Marketing For Dummies, by Ted Sudol and Paul Mladjenovic; Content Marketing For Dummies, by Susan Gunelius; Customer Experience For Dummies, by Roy Barnes and Bob Kelleher; E-Mail Marketing For Dummies, 2nd Edition, by John Arnold; Facebook Marketing All-in-One For Dummies, 3rd Edition, by Andrea Vahl, John Haydon, and Jan Zimmerman); Social Media Marketing For Dummies, 4th Edition, by Shiv Singh and Stephanie Diamond; Inbound Marketing For Dummies, by Scott Anderson Miller; Lead Generation For Dummies, by Dayna Rothman; Mobile Marketing For Dummies, by Michael Becker and John Arnold; New Product Development For Dummies, by Robin Karol, Beebe Nelson, and Geoffrey Nicholson); Public Relations For Dummies, 2nd Edition, by Eric Yaverbaum, Ilise Benun, Richard Kirshenbaum; and Selling For Dummies, 4th Edition, by Tom Hopkins — all published by Wiley. Any and all of these books can produce valuable knowledge, skills, and abilities that can be used to become a more effective growth professional and leader.
Where to Go from Here
You don’t need to read this book from cover to cover. You can, if that strategy appeals to you, but it’s set up as a reference guide, so you can jump in wherever you need to. Looking for something in particular? Take a peek at the table of contents or index, find the section you need, and then flip to the page to resolve your problem.
Part 1
Getting Started with Growth Hacking
IN THIS PART …
Seeing what growth hacking is all about
Developing your growth hacking skills
Building a growth team from the ground up
Chapter 1
Defining Growth Hacking
IN THIS CHAPTER
The goals of growth hacking
The basic process
Separating growth hacking from other practices
Sorting through controversies, misunderstandings, assumptions, and falsehoods
Looked at one way, this book is years too late, and yet, from lots of other perspectives, this book is right on time. Growth hacking as a concept became highly popular around 2013 and became, for the next few years, the hot new thing everyone was talking about. So, from that perspective, publishing this book in 2020 would appear to be unnecessary because so much discussion on the topic has happened since then and people have already had a chance to learn more about it. The problem I’ve noticed is that, outside of a relatively small percentage of true practitioners, no one really seemed to articulate the growth hacking concept correctly. Many people applied an interpretation I thought to be unrepresentative of the ethos of the phrase — an ethos I had learned directly from the person who coined growth hacking in the first place. And, as with all things that become popular and aren’t understood well, people started applying the growth hacking label to things it shouldn’t be associated with.
Around 2017, I thought that this would pass because the field was still getting off the ground, but years later I find that there’s still a massive lack of clarity when it comes to this topic. This lack of understanding intensifies as you move geographically farther away from centers of innovation like Silicon Valley — and even there, it feels like it isn’t understood 100 percent of the time. I have a hypothesis for why that may be the case.
Relatively speaking, the number of people who have actual experience with growth hacking is rather small worldwide. This is simply a function of the high failure rate of start-ups. If you concede that 90 percent of start-ups fail, then simply having the opportunity to grow any start-up is relatively small. This means that the number of people who have had the opportunity to apply the growth hacking methodology successfully is also small.
In my experience, not everyone who's achieved this success ends up wanting to blog about it or talk about it, either at all or with any regularity. I got a sense of this when I worked to recruit growth professionals for the weekly AMA (Ask Me Anything) sessions on GrowthHackers.com. Often, I had on subject matter experts (SMEs) who were not well known or who didn’t write and speak as often on the topic.
Unfortunately, such a situation presents an ideal opportunity for those who have not been in environments where growth hacking was practiced as intended to present themselves as “experts” and then offer takes that put forward something that merely approximates growth hacking or, worse, bastardizes the concept to the point where any association with growth hacking starts to have a negative connotation.
This book is my attempt to help people who are just like my former self — in other words, people who have no firsthand experience with growth hacking but finds themselves reading about it all the time. It’s also for those who have taken their first steps into the field but don’t yet understand it fully because what’s out there hasn’t been presented in a systematic, easy-to-understand way.
Defining Growth Hacking Goals
In relative terms, growth hacking as a concept is quite new. Sean Ellis coined it in 2010 in his seminal “Find a Growth Hacker for Your Start-up” blog post. (See Figure 1-1.) The concept gained popularity mostly among Silicon Valley practitioners until early 2012, when Andrew Chen wrote his “Growth Hacker is the new VP of Marketing” post (https://andrewchen.co/how-to-be-a-growth-hacker-an-airbnbcraigslist-case-study), when the phrase truly entered mainstream consciousness.
This is not to say that growth hacking was not a thing before Sean coined the phrase. It’s just that no one had come up with a way to describe it well.
FIGURE 1-1: The blog post that started it all.
Sean defined a growth hacker as “a person whose true north is growth. Everything they do is scrutinized by its potential impact on scalable growth.” After your company has found product-market fit (a measure of the degree to which a product satisfies a strong market demand), you need to find a way to grow quickly. (I’ll talk about product-market fit more in the next section.) The explicit role of the person who would spearhead these growth efforts would be to, as Sean also talks about in this post, “[find] scalable, repeatable and sustainable ways to grow the business.” Some concepts were implicit in the words he used in this last statement that have been clarified in various contexts over time but are worth summarizing here:
Growth had to be sustainable.
You cannot build a sustainable business if it’s one that doesn’t continue to deliver value over time. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a world where people give us money for nothing on an ongoing basis. So, we must provide value. And, given that this is a business and all businesses must grow, it follows that the value we deliver must also grow over time.
Sustainability is a function of scalable and repeatable activities.
When something is repeatable, it’s a process. When an activity or a process is scalable, it means that it can adapt to larger demands — whether that’s more users or some other business need — leading to greater stability and competitiveness, which in turn helps growth be sustainable. This also tells us that it will never be just one thing that does the trick — it will always be a combination of many elements working together, each playing its part and leading the way to explosive growth.
These scalable and repeatable ways to build a sustainable business would have to be
found.
By definition, there are no silver bullets. Every business is different. Every context and every audience has its own variables. What works in one instance isn’t guaranteed to work in another. You will have to put in the hard work of seeing what works (and doesn’t work) for you. The only way to find what works is to just try things out and see what happens. It also follows that, to see what works, those things must be testable and measurable to understand their impact. The more things you try and the faster you try them, the quicker you’ll learn about what truly delivers value to your customers.
It's never a situation where you’re just trying things randomly. You take advantage of what you already know about your customers to inform hypotheses about what might work across the entire customer journey.
To bring this back down to earth, the goal of growth hacking is to be continually and rapidly testing, across the customer journey, to learn about activities that can be systemized as processes to grow the value that a business provides its customers. It is as simple and as complicated as that. Any definition that doesn’t at least cover all these key aspects is talking about something else — not growth hacking.
This book is dedicated to giving you a framework for thinking about how to find these scalable, repeatable, and sustainable ways to grow your business.
Working through the Basics
Before you think about growing anything, you must have a product that is growable. In other words, you must have validated the need for your product first (popularly known as product-market fit). You have no business (literally and figuratively) growing something that you have not confirmed, through testing and learning, that it’s something people want.
Sean Ellis has created a survey to help you qualitatively ascertain how close to product-market fit you might be. You can find it at https://pmfsurvey.com.
Even before you get to product-market fit, you must know — or at least have a hypothesis for — the value your product provides. This starting point for all growth hacking activities serves as the first part of the growth hacking process. Figure 1-2 shows the process in graphic form, but it can be summarized as follows:
FIGURE 1-2: The growth hacking process summarized.
Identify your North Star Metric (NSM).
The NSM is the number that quantifies the value your product provides to your users or customers. Every product will have its own NSM because every product provides value differently. (Google provides value through search results, for example, whereas Lyft provides value with rides on demand.) When I’ve asked people what number quantifies the value their product delivers to their users, it generally is the first time they’ve been asked that question. I then get silence followed mostly by their statement that their NSM is revenue or money — and they're mostly wrong when they say that.
Chapter 6 goes into more detail on this topic, along with examples.
Analyze your growth model.
If every product provides value differently, then the way to grow every product also cannot be the same. Too many different variables are at play. So, you have to understand what the customer journey looks like to be able to identify all the points within it that contribute to growth. (The customer journey, put simply, is the collection of interactions between your company and a customer over the duration of your relationship. For more on the customer journey, see Chapter 5.) This analysis is based on quantitative and qualitative data to help you understand key points within the customer journey that represent the biggest opportunity you could exploit or the problem that, if you were to tackle it, could potentially lead to greater growth.
Chapter 6 talks a lot more about how to go about this because this step is critical to focusing your team on activities that have the highest potential to impact your NSM.
Set objectives.
After you know what part of the customer journey you’ll focus on, set an objective on which to focus tests. Set a time frame of 30 to 90 days in which to test so that you can better understand the impact of your tests on your NSM. If NSMs are your long-term goal, then your objectives are your short-term goals. The quantification of any objective becomes your One Metric That Matters (OMTM).
In Chapter 7, I talk more about how and why setting objectives helps the team test only around an area of maximum potential impact.
Build a backlog of ideas to test.
After you know what your objectives are, you need to come up with ideas — hypotheses, really — to test. Hopefully, coming up with new ideas is an ongoing process on your team, but every new objective presents opportunities to think anew about what options might be tried. Everybody on the team (and in the broader company) should be encouraged to contribute ideas to test. Chapter 7 has more detail on how to come up with testable ideas.
Prioritize ideas to test.
After you have a list of things you can try, you need to identify which ones might have the greatest potential. You can use any number of prioritization frameworks that will help you pick the ideas with the best potential. (See Chapter 8 for more on prioritization frameworks.)
Test your ideas.
More than anything else, growth hacking is about learning quickly what works and doesn’t work. So, when you test ideas, you perform a minimum viable test to learn whether it’s worth your while to continue testing in that area. This means constructing your test correctly with respect to any design, copy, engineering, and measurement specifications as appropriate and then launching the test effectively.
To learn faster, you also need to test faster. Build a cadence of multiple tests a week (or biweekly) so that you can be extremely agile about spotting opportunities. (Chapter 9 guides you through this process.)
Analyze your tests.
Tests that you don’t learn from are useless. As soon as you have enough data, analyze your tests to glean any insights those tests may have provided. All the time you’re trying to understand why a test worked or didn’t work? What can you take away from the learnings that you can apply to the next set of tests, irrespective of whether the answer is to double down on something that seems to work or move in a different direction? The second half of Chapter 9 guides you through how to learn from your tests.
Systemize what works.
To capitalize on tests that have worked, you need to make them part of how you operate moving forward. Depending on the kind of test, you can do this in one of two ways: Make the change you tested part of your product by coordinating with the product development team or, if the test was a result of multiple steps (like generating content), create a process that represents a playbook that anyone can repeat in order to achieve similar results.
Since growth never ends, growth hacking is a continual process. As you continue testing against an objective and understand more about whether you’ve extracted the most gain from that opportunity, you’ll make decisions on whether to continue testing where you have been or to evaluate your growth model for new areas of opportunity and repeat the process over again.
The greatest growth hack you’ll find is building a culture of testing and learning. Creating such a culture is incredibly hard, but if you can pull it off, you’ll have put yourself in a position to provide even greater value to your customers than your competition can.
Recognizing the Distinctive Nature of Growth Hacking
Given that many other popular product development and marketing methodologies are out there (all whose ultimate purpose is to grow a business), it’s useful to understand how and where they differ from growth hacking proper.
Traditional marketing versus growth hacking
Traditional marketing has always been about getting customers to (become interested in) your product. Its major focus is on promoting finished products, and its biggest goal is to fill your sales pipeline and generate revenue. It does this through a variety of methods — content marketing, search engine optimization, public relations, social media ads, and anything else that will bring attention and interest to the product they’re selling.
Morgan Brown, coauthor with Sean Ellis of the book Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success (Random House), describes growth hacking as “experiment driven marketing focused primarily on how the product is used to create growth both from the distribution and retention side. The key differentiator being the product-level focus vs. the channel-level focus of traditional marketing effort.”
Did you catch that difference? Growth hacking relies more on the product itself to unlock growth instead of simply attracting people to the product. Whereas traditional marketers may no doubt be optimizing for how they draw people to the product, growth professionals consider the entire customer journey, with an explicit focus on retention. Because of this product-level focus, growth professionals can team up with product-and-engineering folks to learn more about what it will take to get someone to not only come to the product but then also remain a devoted customer because they experience so much value from the product.
So, it should be clear that although traditional marketing and growth hacking have some overlap — so much so that practitioners on both sides of the aisle may even use many of the same techniques — they have fundamentally different goals.
Lean start-up versus growth hacking
A 1-line definition from the Lean Start-up site, co-founded by Eric Ries, says that Lean Start-up provides a) a scientific approach to creating and managing start-ups and b) a proven way to get a desired product to customers' hands faster. Some of this sounds just like growth hacking, doesn’t it?
Now, we were lucky at GrowthHackers early on to have an AMA (Ask Me Anything) session that featured both Eric Ries (the author of the most famous book on the lean start-up methodology) and Sean Ellis. To no one's surprise, folks were eager to find out whether the two approaches were substantially different.
Eric said that the lean start-up approach emphasized two coequal parts of any start-up or business strategy: the value hypothesis and the growth hypothesis, with both given equal importance. However, in terms of what’s written about the lean start-up methodology, more attention has been paid to value hypothesis activities. Even Sean admits that, until that particular AMA, he had thought of lean start-up as being about making something growable (validating product-market fit, in other words) and growth hacking as the process of growing it.
Morgan Brown noted in that same AMA session that, whereas growth is definitely part of the lean start-up approach, the growth hypothesis has elements that might have been ignored because of the product-centric thinking of Silicon Valley — a thinking that, in the past, had espoused a “build it and they will come” mentality. He further hypothesized that the perception that the growth aspect was somehow missing from the lean start-up approach could have lit the spark for the growth hacking movement.
But getting back to how Sean Ellis articulated the differences between a lean start-up approach and growth hacking, the one thing Ellis felt was 100 percent true about growth hacking is that you shouldn’t even be thinking about growing a product that has not been validated yet. All you’d do is expose potential users and customers to a product they'll come to hate, ensuring that they’ll never want to return to it in the future.
Don’t let all this talk about terminology become the start of some semantic discussion about whether one methodology is better than the other. What you should be doing instead is taking concepts that work for you from wherever you get them so that you can get the results you want. Nothing is more important than that.
Agile product development versus growth hacking
The most consequential differences between agile product development and growth hacking are their goals and rhythms. Agile product development’s primary focus is to develop a product that works. Growth hacking is about developing a product that attracts and retains customers. You could say that product retention, monetizing users, and making the product experience so great that it drives word of mouth are the product team’s responsibility. The growth team would constantly evaluate all these aspects in order to figure out the best way to get users to the product and provide them with a great first experience. Again, you can see a bit of an overlap here. Both focus heavily on the user and delivering something of value, but the way they do it is quite different.
The other difference between the two is that agile processes like Scrum create sprint backlogs that define the tasks for the next two, three, or four weeks. A growth hacking process, on the other hand, is based on a high tempo of experimentation with weekly or biweekly sprints that can show wins in the most unpredictable places and times and that could be systemized within the product experience. This makes it nearly impossible to align the growth process with product development sprints.
There are other alignment challenges as well in lining up testing with product development that I cover later in this book, but the tension between prioritizing changes based on tests versus new features development or bug-fixing is real.
PRODUCT-LED GROWTH VERSUS GROWTH HACKING
The phrase product-led growth, coined by the venture capital firm OpenView Venture Partners, has started to become more fashionable of late. There’s even a book on the market by Wes Bush as well as communities starting to sprout around this notion. It’s been used to help define how companies have built their growth strategies around their products. Though the term may be new, again, people have been using product-led growth strategies for a while.
I asked Wes Bush to clarify the distinction for me during an AMA session on GrowthHackers. He noted that growth hacking is an iterative process that you can use to grow any type of business. He also observed that not every business can be product led. This is especially true of complex products that require demos and multiple meetings to convince someone of the value of the product. Finalizing the sale can take days or weeks. This model of operating is common for traditional sales-led companies. Product-led growth, on the other hand, is specific to a subset of businesses, where the “time-to-value” is really fast and is a function of someone being able to use the product without jumping through any hoops. This in turn allows people to start experiencing the value of the product much faster.
There are other criteria that apply specifically to product-led companies but for now the distinction that I hold in my head is that product-led growth applies to a subset of the products that you could apply the growth hacking methodology to. Again, this is not intended to stir a debate on which methodology is better as much as having an understanding as to what differentiates them.
Steering Clear of Growth Hacking Obstacles
As with any idea that’s hasn’t found a universal understanding yet, people are bound to voice their — at times, rather unfounded —opinions about it. Given that I learned about growth hacking from the guy who coined the phrase, I’ve had the opportunity to understand better than most what it truly is and is not about. In this section, I address some of the more problematic “hot takes” that folks have come up with when it comes to this topic.
The phrase itself
I think it’s fair to say that there is a fair amount of hatred for the term growth hacking. Sean Ellis has said on multiple occasions that he intended for the term to be controversial. After all, it's hard to imagine anything worse than coining a new phrase and then having people ignore it. The fact that people have a strong reaction to the term growth hacking
