Growth Hacking For Dummies

Anuj Adhiya

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781119612162
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Development
• Index: Business

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!

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.

1. 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.
2. Analyze your growth model.
   If every product provides value differently, then the way to grow every product also cannot be the same. Too many dif...