Definitive Guide to Growth Hacking

Growth hacking is a term used to describe the process of experimenting with different tactics and channels in order to increase traffic, engagement, or sales. It can be used across many industries including marketing, IT services, web design, and more. Growth hackers are constantly testing out new ideas on their target audience until they find what works best for them every single time. In the realm of startup growth, there is a revolution going place, and we wanted to assist others to comprehend it. We wanted to create a solid framework for thinking about growth hacking since those that understand it will have a competitive advantage that is difficult to overestimate. This guide is intended for entrepreneurs, founders, growth leaders, and anybody else seeking to scale a business. This article is for you if getting new clients (and keeping current ones) is crucial to your company. If consumers are important to you, then growth hacking should be important to you as well. Let’s Get started now. Do you want more visitors to your website? Improve your traffic, leads, and income with the aid of a professional. Get started now

 

What is Growth Hacking, and how does it work?

This essay is desperately needed since growth hacking is so misunderstood. Few ideas have ever been so divisive and innovative at the same time. Is it a ruse for marketing? Is it a trendy word used to boost pay? Is this the way internet goods will go in the future? Let’s begin from the very beginning.

A brief history of a contentious topic

Sean Ellis created the word “growth hacker” in 2010. When I asked Sean why he felt compelled to develop a new word, he said that his dissatisfaction originated from the difficulty he had in finding substitutes for himself. Let me clarify.

Sean has aided a lot of online businesses in achieving phenomenal development, with a couple of them even going public. Sean became the go-to man in the valley when they wanted to expand their user base, and he would accept both equity and salary in return for his services. He effectively turned into a one-man development shop, establishing systems, procedures, and attitudes that could be sustained after he went. He’d eventually relinquish control of his growth machine to someone else and ride off into the sunset. This is when the issues began.

During his quest for a successor, he often received applications that were genuine but irrelevant. They possessed marketing degrees and had marketing experience, but something was still lacking. Sean was well aware that the methods he deployed were not typical of conventional marketers’ playbooks, and that entrusting them with the reins would not be a suitable match.

Traditional marketers have a wide focus, and although their skill set is incredibly significant, it is not as important early in the life of a firm. You don’t need someone to “create and manage a marketing team,” “manage outside suppliers,” “develop a strategic marketing strategy to accomplish corporate goals,” or any of the other things that marketers are entrusted with performing in the early stages of a business. One thing is required early on in the life of a company. Growth.

Sean had requested marketers. He was able to recruit marketers. As a result, Sean altered his request. “Find a Growth Hacker for Your Startup,” he wrote in a seminal blog post, and the concept was created.

A growth hacker isn’t meant to take the role of a marketer. A growth hacker isn’t always superior to a marketer. A growth hacker isn’t the same as a marketer. “A growth hacker is a person whose true north is growth,” according to Sean’s most simple description.

Growth influences every choice a growth hacker takes. Every plan, method, and effort is implemented in the goal of achieving growth. Growth is the sun around which a growth hacker orbits. Traditional marketers are concerned about growth as well, but not to the same level. Remember that a growth hacker’s strength is in their intense concentration on a single objective. They may fulfill the one objective that matters most early on by neglecting practically everything.

This exclusive emphasis on growth has spawned a slew of new methodologies, tools, and best practices that simply didn’t exist in conventional marketing’s toolkit, and the divide between the two disciplines is widening.

Product redefinition

Traditional marketers are adept at comprehending traditional goods, but the internet has given rise to a radical reinterpretation of the term. A product has been a tangible item for thousands of years, but today it is bits and bytes in the form of software goods. Cars, shampoo, sofas, and firearms used to be the only products available. Twitter is now a product. Your accounting software for the internet is a product. Products are things that you can’t hold. The new era of growth hackers is largely due to this transformation. The internet has given the world a new kind of product, which necessitates a new way of thinking.

Because of this redefinition, a product may now play a role in its own adoption for the first time. Do you think I’m crazy? Yes, it is. A service like Facebook enables you to share your experience on their platform with your friends in order to improve your own. That’s something shampoo won’t be able to achieve. If you persuade a buddy to join up with a service like Dropbox, you may obtain free cloud storage. Couches are incapable of doing so. You won’t be able to truly appreciate growth hacking until you understand this new categorization of goods that the internet has created.

Sean Ellis, the “growth hacker” who created the phrase, was also the first person in charge of Dropbox’s expansion. He knows what’s new in the world of online goods. Take a look at this snapshot of the growth scheme:

Growth hackers see the hidden potential of software products to expand, and it is their obligation to make that potential a reality.

Distribution is being redefined.

Regardless matter how important the product is, it would be unwise to limit your activities to it. The same internet that revolutionized product also revolutionized distribution, and not all distribution takes place inside the product. Those that have a good grasp of how people behave online will be able to put that information to good use in order to help their firm thrive.

Consider the highway system that was constructed in the United States beginning in the 1950s. McDonald’s saw that interstate highways were a new avenue for attracting people and capitalized on it. Exits are still dotted with golden arches. This was a case of off-line growth hacking in action (if there is such a thing).

This analogy’s contemporary analogue is the internet. You may put up your own golden arches where you know they will be seen if you grock the invisible web maps that now lead people, data, and ideas. Here are a few simple examples to help you start thinking in the correct direction:

• Rather as motorways connecting brick-and-mortar companies, we now have search engines connecting digital firms. Those who master SEO are visible to everyone who uses the internet.
• We choose to explore YouTube instead of taking the routes that go to local movie theaters. Those that fully grasp this will be able to attract attention to their goods in a variety of methods.
• Instead of utilizing the streets to go to our friend’s home, we utilize Facebook to socialize. Those that are aware of this will be able to subtly and explicitly push their own agenda into the discourse.

There are many more instances of the internet infrastructure that is producing tremendous potential for product distribution, but the point is that those that have a good understanding of how people move about online will have unimaginable growth advantages. The examples above are ones that we’re all familiar with, but there are hundreds more that need investigation, which is where the concept of a hacker comes in.

What does the word “hacker” imply in the context of growth hacking?

The meaning of growth hacker is influenced by a number of distinct meanings and connotations of the term hacker.

• Hacker with a Brain

  Someone who is intelligent, innovative, or imaginative is frequently referred to as a hacker. They’ll utilize whatever resources they have to come up with a solution that others may have missed. A “life hacker” is an example of someone who uses the phrase in this way. Growth hackers have the same mentality since they are obliged to be inventive in order to accomplish growth. Growth paths aren’t always evident, and finding them requires a lot of imagination.

• Hacker of software

  While a growth hacker may or may not be a programmer, they employ technology-based solutions to accomplish many of their objectives. To expand a company, growth hackers will employ software, databases, APIs, and other relevant technologies. If a growth hacker is also a coder, they may occasionally move faster, although this isn’t always the case. To be effective, though, a growth hacker must have a thorough understanding of technology. Even if a growth hacker isn’t a programmer, they’ll need to grasp programming well enough to coordinate the efforts of individuals who are. Remember that today’s goods are all about technology, therefore understanding it will be critical to your success.

• Hacker who is breaking the law

  Someone who gets illegal access to a system is sometimes referred to as a hacker. They trespass on someone’s property without permission. A growth hacker will not hack in the sense of breaking the law, but they will test the limits of what is anticipated or usually recommended. “Zero-day exploits,” which are security flaws that cause immediate vulnerabilities once they are discovered, are a common concept in computer hacking. The time between discovering a security flaw and exploiting it is 0 days. A growth hacker, on the other hand, will take advantage of comparable flaws. A growth hacker could leverage an API released by a new social network to attract users before the API is “updated” to seal the breach they exploited. Growth hackers are on the hunt for system flaws that will enable them to expand.

In practice, what does growth hacking entail?

We’ve been talking about growth hacking in a fairly philosophical way up until now. We discussed its origins, definition, and what distinguishes it in the marketplace of ideas. But, I’m sure you’re thinking, “Give me an example!”

The remainder of this tutorial will be tangible examples in one sense, however here is one common case study that we may utilize to get a better understanding of growth hacking. It’s none other than AirBNB, the growth hacking poster child. They enable anybody to turn their extra bedrooms into hotel rooms that may be booked by complete strangers, as many of you are aware. It’s a fantastic concept, and the execution is flawless, but growth hacking is what could put them on the map (pun intended).

They significantly increased their user base by using Craigslist, a marketplace with millions of customers seeking for lodging. When you fill out the form to offer your bedroom on AirBNB, you have the option of also posting it on Craigslist, which will result in more inbound links for both you and AirBNB as a platform.

In hindsight, you could ask why other businesses haven’t already flooded Craigslist with these types of cross advertisements, making it a loud route for client acquisition. That is an excellent question. The reason for this is because Craigslist did not have a public API. In layman’s words, Craigslist didn’t provide a simple method for other businesses (such as AirBNB) to advertise on their platform. There was no technology solution that AirBNB could simply adopt, and there was no reference material that AirBNB could use to have their listing automatically appear on Craigslist. Instead, they had to reverse engineer Craiglist’s forms in order to make their solution compliant, all without access to the Craigslist source. APIs are simple to use. Reverse engineering, on the other hand, is not.

Consider how our past philosophical ramblings ring true in light of this case study.

• First, AirBNB achieved something that a typical marketer would find difficult to imagine, much alone execute. A bachelor’s degree in marketing, as it is now taught, will not equip you with the tools, much alone the conceptual foundation, to achieve this level of deep integration with Craigslist, particularly without access to the API.
• Second, AirBNB primarily distributed their goods via their website. The Craigslist connection was not a separate feature of AirBNB’s app. It was a component of the plan. They didn’t advertise in magazines to promote their goods. The service drew attention to itself.
• Third, AirBNB understood that Craigslist was the distribution channel they needed to exploit. There is no such thing as a vacuum product, and the consumers they required were already congregating in another area. As a result, they attracted their attention.
• They were inventive, to say the least. They hadn’t heard of anybody else utilizing Craigslist to cross-promote their product. They came up with the idea themselves. Then they had the courage to put a magnificent solution into action when there were no assurances that it would succeed.
• Fifth, their growth strategy was highly reliant on technology. To reverse engineer Craigslist, the AirBNB team needed a lot of technical skills and a broad grasp of how online products are developed.
• Sixth, they acquired customers by exploiting flaws in an existing marketplace. There’s a reason Craigslist didn’t provide a public API. Craig Newmark does not approve of you doing this on his platform. By refusing to ask for an API and pushing on without one, AirBNB pushed the boundaries of what is acceptable.

Indeed, it seems that Craigslist has “fixed” the flaws that enabled this integration to take place. AirBNB’s website now has a FAQ response stating that they no longer publish to Craigslist. This is an excellent case study for growth hackers. The lifetime of most growth mechanisms is limited. AirBNB would be foolish to expect that they could continue to post on Craigslist for the next ten years, as if Craig would enable them to drain off people day by day. That’s OK, however. Taking advantage of this one-time chance provided them with a solid foundation from which to go ahead.

Internet enterprises in the future

Growth hacking is an intriguing topic that provides insight into the future of internet-based businesses. Between the product team and those in charge of obtaining consumers for the product, there has frequently been a chasm. The programmers construct. The impetus comes from the advertisers. For a time, everything appeared to operate that way. Those in charge of development must now understand what an API is, and those in charge of programming must consider the client experience inside the product. The worlds have collided.

This cross-pollination is logical. If growth is really an organization’s lifeblood, why shouldn’t it be weaved throughout every part of the business? Because unhappy consumers churn, even customer service should be handled by professionals who think about growth. Designers should also have growth in mind, since attractive art does not necessarily attract people. The online firms of the future, as well as the teams who create them, will not look like they did yesterday.

One last thought about the future. For the time being, growth hacking is limited to startups, but it will ultimately find its way into Fortune 500 organizations. Due to a lack of resources and existing connections that would enable them to be successful with conventional marketing strategies, startups are compelled to growth hack. Growth hacking, on the other hand, may be used to both small and big businesses. Imagine what growth hacking can do with resources if it can function without them.

A Growth Hacker’s Personality

Individuals who are attracted by the potential of being a growth hacker may question whether they have what it takes to be a growth hacker as this new world of growth hacking gains popularity and opportunities open up. Certain types of people will thrive better than others in this field, but before we get into that, let’s dispel a few fallacies.

To be a growth hacker, you must be a coder.

“Many of the growth hacking definitions on the web are overly restricted,” Gagan Biyani, co-founder of Udemy and a growth hacker himself, remarked. When many of the most well-known growth hackers don’t code on a daily basis, I don’t think growth hackers need to be formal engineers.”

Given the need on code to fulfill many growth hacking objectives, it’s clear why this misconception is occasionally made, but it’s simply not true that a growth hacker must be a programmer. A growth hacker normally requires a programmer on his team, although it isn’t necessary for him to be the programmer. Consider the following scenario, which is based on real-life events:

A tiny startup’s growth hacker has a three-person team: himself, a front-end developer, and a back-end developer. The team has just recently been put together, and no growth hacking has yet taken place. The two developers have never given much attention to expansion. They understand why it’s necessary, and they’re eager to learn, but they’ve never been on a growth team before. The growth hacker speaks to everyone on the first day about event-based analytics and why they are important. The growth hacker then creates a list of all the events he wants to measure on the product (signups, referrals, interactions, and so on), and then shows them KISSmetrics, his preferred tool. He directs the developers to the documentation that will assist them in tracking occurrences on their product, and then he departs them to put the code into action.

After a few weeks, the growth hacker summons everyone. He creates a funnel in KISSmetrics using the data that has been flowing in. He shows them how to create a decent funnel and sets targets for each stage of the conversion process. The team decided to concentrate on the conversion rate of unique visitors to signups. The growth hacker hypothesizes that people aren’t signing up because the copywriting isn’t clear or strong enough, so he writes fresh material and has the front-end developer make it appear great on the site. In the most recent month over month cohort, the conversion rate for that area of the funnel increased by 7%.

This team is now in charge of growth hacking as a whole, but ask yourself this question. Which of the three was the catalyst for development to become a reality? Engineers could hardly have raised conversions by 7% on their own. Of fact, some programmers could accomplish all of the goals in this scenario, but that isn’t the point. This is a thought experiment to demonstrate that you don’t have to be a coder to be a growth hacker.

Growth hackers can’t be traditional marketers.

In a negative manner, growth hacking has become a religion, and marketers are seen as the adversary rather than a close friend. A growth hacker, on the other hand, is a marketer who has focused only on growth. Yes, this concentration has spawned a subculture that resembles marketing less and less as time goes on, but their origins are not diametrically opposed.

Consider the tale of the growth hacker and the two engineers from earlier. Copywriting is frequently a part of a traditional marketer’s skill set. So they have an advantage over someone who has never been trained. In the scenario above, a marketer would be growth hacking if they took their copywriting talent, restricted their emphasis on growth only, and integrated event-based analytics to do funnel analysis for various cohorts to measure improvements due to copywriting. If they have a strong analytical and technical mind, the conventional marketer is best positioned to become a growth hacker (relative to the general population).

In fact, Sean Ellis, the godfather of growth hacking, referred to himself as Dropbox’s first marketing. When he didn’t have any designation for his job, he went by the title of marketer. Many of today’s finest growth hackers have the titles of Chief Marketing Officer or Vice President of Marketing. More and more businesses are hiring a Growth Lead, VP of Growth, or even a Growth Hacker, but they used to be referred to as marketers, so let’s not forget where we came from.

To be a growth hacker, you must be unethical.

When you concentrate only on one aim (in this example, development), you run the danger of making judgments that are not in the best interests of others. Every growth hacker has to draw a line somewhere, and just like any other discipline, there will be negative actors.

Path has been accused of going too far in recent months as a result of their aggressive techniques in getting their users’ phone numbers and the manner they messaged those numbers. Many people believe they went too far. I tend to agree with you. However, I do not believe AirBNB went too far since they were helping people while serving themselves, and Craigslist might amend their site at any point to prohibit AirBNB’s behavior. Users of Path are unable to reverse the spam that has been sent in their name.

But here’s the crux of the matter. Most growth hackers don’t even have to consider the issue of ethics. They are creating non-harmful product features that enhance conversions, and they are distributing that product to the general public using their distribution channel expertise. It’s not immoral, but it’s clever. Every growth hacker must choose between becoming a Jedi or a Sith.

Growth Hackers have a keen eye for detail.

Now that we’ve established what a growth hacker isn’t, let’s discuss what a growth hacker is. One of the most important characteristics of every growth hacker, regardless of their experience, is their passion for, reliance on, and grasp of analytics.

The blood that passes through the veins of a growth hacker is analytics. They use analytics in almost everything they do, whether it’s in the spotlight or the background. A growth hacker feels naked without analytics. Here are a few examples of how growth hackers use analytics:

• Growth hackers are held accountable by analytics.

  For a long time, the world of marketing has been a place of sentiments and emotions. What was the return on investment for the Times Square billboard? Who knows, but that seems cool, doesn’t it? The world has changed. It no longer matters how charming you are in meetings, how strong your ideas seem, or how many sheep in high management approved the campaign. Your brilliance or folly will be shown by the analytics. Period.

  Dan McKinley, an Etsy principle developer, recounts a terrific tale about their endless scroll debacle that perfectly encapsulates this concept. They launched the new functionality after spending five months developing an endless scroll for Etsy items. Of course, they were the first to rejoice. High-fives all around. Smacks on the back. As is customary. Then the figures came in, revealing that customers were purchasing less items through search. What? They got rid of the limitless scroll, of course. Here are two of Dan’s slides from his presentation on this topic. It’s not enough to be hot:

  

  There are a lot of takeaways from this anecdote, but for our purpose we’ll focus on the analytics. If they hadn’t depended on analytics they might not have realized their error. Growth hackers are held accountable by analytics..

• The emphasis of growth hackers is shifting because to analytics.

  The statistics have a way of altering your emphasis in unexpected ways when you have systems that measure your product and actions. You may never have imagined devoting additional resources to your referral loop. It might have been a test feature you included in the product to see what would happen. Then, after digging further into the data, you discover that this loop accounts for over 20% of all new signups, with a greater lifetime value than the typical user. You know you can make the loop far more efficient, so you direct your team’s attention on this feature for the next two weeks. Analytics may assist you in stack ranking your to-do list in novel ways.

• The use of analytics allows success to be replicated.

  You can’t effectively reproduce prior triumphs if you don’t take analytics seriously. You know nothing if all you know is that the corporation earned more money in Q4 than it did in Q3. Why was Q4 so much better? Were more people signing up for your service, or did you merely convert a better percentage of those who did? Is there a specific feature that has become more popular as a result of a recent redesign? Was it because a rival that bid up the cost per click quit running Google advertising that the AdWords campaign eventually started to have a positive ROI? You can repeat what is working (and stop what isn’t) if you know what is causing your success.

• The future of growth hacking is predicted by analytics.

  Every day, businesses place bets on the future. They make educated guesses on the outcome of the tournament. They make educated guesses about what the market will want. They try to figure out how to skate to where the puck is heading rather than where it has been. They make educated guesses. To be clear, the future will always be a guess, but inductive reasoning based on analytics allows us to make educated judgments about tomorrow based on facts from yesterday.

  Is the sun going to rise tomorrow? Although there is no logical method to know, we may infer that it will since it has always done so. When you look at your charts and see a distinct line flowing in one direction, there’s no assurance it’ll continue that way, but if other elements remain constant, it’ll most likely do so. This isn’t an exact science, but it’s certainly preferable than guessing.

  Correlation and causality become significant notions at this point. If your analytics suggest that A and B are on a similar path, you may utilize that knowledge to shift the trajectory of those numbers. Experiments might be conducted to determine if A and B are just corollaries of one another or whether one of them is the cause of the other. When a growth hacker discovers causality, which is facilitated greatly by analytics, they have a very potent weapon in their hands.

T-shaped are growth hackers.

When it comes to a growth hacker’s abilities, they ought to be formed like a capital T. Here’s what I’m talking about. The T’s flat horizontal portion reflects all of the many talents and disciplines that a growth hacker must be proficient with. You must have a basic understanding of a wide range of topics. You’ll need a basic understanding of psychology. You should be familiar with viral loops. You should be familiar with drip email marketing. You’ll need a basic understanding of…well, you get the idea. There shouldn’t be anything in this book on which you can’t have a conversation.

That, however, is insufficient. You’ll also need a few of abilities to make the T’s vertical line. These are the abilities in which you excel. In these areas, you are the expert. You go into the depths. Maybe you know all there is to know about onboarding, and 85 percent of everyone who joins up for your product makes it to the MHX (must have experience), lowering churn. This may compensate for a variety of errors. If you can make any part of the funnel much more efficient, you’ll have a solid foundation on which to develop your business. To even have a shot of scaling, you need to be good at a few things.

However, there is one thing that distinguishes experts from the rest of the pack. A T-shape is unpopular among professionals. They’re looking for a V-shape. They don’t have one or two vertical lines reflecting profound knowledge as they master more and more subjects, but rather 10 or 20. This forms a V.

Growth hacking may seem strange, but it isn’t. A growth hacker is more like a runner than an illusionist. There are no smoke and mirrors here; rather, mastering the abilities that apply to development requires a lot of hard effort. If you want to run a marathon, you must train for months ahead of time. More than that, you must train in the proper manner. Similarly, if you want to build a product, you must first become a T-shape, then a V-shape, and who knows, maybe even a U-shape, all of which requires months of training. There is no such thing as a quick fix whether it comes to running a marathon or establishing a business.

Growth Hackers are Right-Brained as Well.

It’s easy to forget that growth hackers are predominantly right-brained since they spend so much time talking about data (fact #1). Curiosity, originality, and a general affinity for anecdotal evidence and qualitative facts are all quite crucial. If I had to pick between analytics and anecdotes, I’d go with analytics. Fortunately, I don’t have to make such a decision, and a false dichotomy is unnecessary. When you combine the appropriate amount of whimsy with serious science, you get products that generally fly. Don’t err on the side of caution.

• The cat was murdered by curiosity, but…

  Your product will die due to a lack of interest. Growth hackers have a strong desire to attempt new things and develop fresh notions. Become a middle manager if you wish to follow a guidebook that specifies every process for your position. Join the army if you want to obey commands. Get intrigued if you want to build a product. Perhaps something has never been attempted because it is a bad concept, but perhaps it has never been tried because no one has ever been inquisitive enough to see whether it works. Here are a few instances of inquisitiveness…

  • What if we made our whole product invite-only, rather than just the testing period?
  • What if we forced our customers to perform something every week in order to protect their accounts from being canceled indefinitely?
  • What if we gave our customers the option of choosing their own pricing, perhaps for free?
  • What if we provided everybody who paid to have Chinese cuisine delivered to our workplace during lunch hours a free upgrade to our product? Every time it occurred, we tweeted about it.
  • What if, on the first of every month, we dedicated our whole site to our industry’s heroes and made it simple to share with friends?
  • What if we redesigned all of our site’s error message copywriting using iconic quotations from cult classic movies?
  • What if a customer service contact launched a drip email campaign with amusing YouTube videos related to their issue?

  Are these concepts illogical? Many of them are undoubtedly true, but I’m courageous enough to put them down in a book that will be read by millions. Why are you so terrified of recording stupid thoughts in a text file that no one will ever see? Curiosity is a result of conquering fear. Fear of making a mistake. Fear of being proven correct. Fear of standing out. You’ll never be able to implement excellent ideas if you don’t have the courage to consider very awful ones.

• The soft, transient, airy thing isn’t your adversary.

  Logicians and mathematicians yearn for an universe in which everything is black and white. Everything would be a yes or no proposition. The statistics would be unmistakable. The strategy would be apparent. But, sadly, we live in a world of grey, where the answers to many problems are “kind of” and “maybe.” This is something that the growth hacker must never forget.

  The statistics might indicate a decrease in conversions from the second to third screens of the checkout process. You might spend hours staring at numbers and still be confused, or you could walk to Starbucks and ask a complete stranger to use your credit card to pay. I’m sure you’d pick up some useful information. Sure, one person isn’t a big enough sample size to make statistically meaningful choices, but not every situation requires mountains of data. After seeing Jenny from Starbucks attempt to check out, you may notice that you failed to explain what “CVV” stands for and that she had no clue what to write in that section. How much information do you need to post a helpful note on the site that corrects the problem? One tale isn’t always enough.

Obsessive Growth Hackers

Do you have what it takes to always think about growth? Sure, it’s entertaining for a week, but will it remain entertaining in six months? Do you have the capacity to concentrate on a single objective for the foreseeable future, to the exclusion of everything else? Here’s why being obsessed is so important:

• The 213th strategy, not the 7th, is more likely to succeed.

  There would be no need for a book like this if growth hacking was as simple as testing five or ten different things and then seeing the people join up and the money stream in. The fact is that growth hacking seems straightforward only once you’ve discovered what works for your product. You’ll have to attempt hundreds of dead ends till then.

• You can annihilate your opponents with enough papercuts.

  It’s a common misconception that all it takes is one breakthrough to win. To own your market, use one huge fantastic growth hack. I believe you can eliminate your competitors, but it generally happens as a result of a million micro-lacerations rather than a single large one.

  Small victories add up over time. If you can stay the course and improve your stats day by day, you’ll look back after a year and see that you’ve made some significant progress, but there may not be a breakthrough moment. According to Bryan Goldberg of Pando Daily,

  “One of the most typical questions I receive when pitching a VC is, “When did Bleacher Report really take off?” Never is the answer. Bleacher Report is now one of the top 50 websites in the United States… But it’s the graph of how we got there that’s even more amazing. Now I dare any reader to take a pen and mark the point where Bleacher Report attained escape velocity with a “X.” It’s possible that you’ll discover that it can’t be done. There was never a time when we “launched into space like a rocket.”

The Growth Hacker Funnel is a funnel designed to help you grow your business.

If you’ve ever had to change the oil in your automobile, you’re familiar with the concept of a funnel. The top of a funnel has a large opening, and as oil flows down it (still with our automobile example), the aperture becomes smaller and smaller until the oil reaches the engine, which is the end aim. A funnel is a device for guiding anything ungainly and recalcitrant, such as liquid.

If you’re creating a product, your job is to direct people toward a certain purpose (signup, checkout, etc.). The issue is that humans are unpredictable and possess a great deal of free will. If you want to get a large group of individuals to accomplish anything, you’ll need to use a funnel. When you think about growth hacking, this funnel should be the picture that comes to mind:

Identifying the funnel’s three tiers

The funnel’s initial objective is to attract visitors. This is the process of attracting new visitors to your website or app. At this point, they are referred to as guests since they do not yet belong to you. They haven’t chosen to participate in anything. They aren’t members or users since such terms indicate that they are related to you, which they aren’t. They’re simply random folks who happen to be on your website. They’re only passing by. There are just three methods to encourage someone to visit your website or app, and they are all the same. You may bring them in by pulling them in, pushing them in, or using the product.

• It’s like going on a blind date when you have a guest.

  When a visitor arrives on a website, novice growth hackers believe they’ve completed their task as a growth hacker. That’s not even close. You must now activate them and convert them to members. An activation occurs when they perform a tiny or significant action that establishes a connection with you. This might be anything from joining an email list to opening an account to completing a transaction. You could even keep track of many activations. They are no longer simply guests, but members. They’ve become involved in some manner with what you’re doing.

• It’s like being in a relationship with someone when you activate a member.

  It’s difficult to convert a visitor to a member, but it’s much more difficult to convert a member to a user. A user is someone who utilizes your product on a regular basis, as the term indicates. You’ve decided to keep this person. You’ve had them for quite some time now. You’ve arrived at the holy grail of growth hacking if you can produce retained users.

• Keeping a user is similar to getting married.

What kind of conversion rates should this funnel have?

One of the most challenging aspects of using this funnel for your business is determining what constitutes decent conversion rates. As you go through the funnel, fewer and fewer individuals remain. You can receive 100k visits in a month, but only 1k members (1 percent conversion), and only 700 people are kept (70 percent conversion). Are these figures accurate? For a variety of reasons, it’s almost difficult to know:

• Is your traffic coming from folks who might be interested in your goods, or are they people who should leave as soon as they read your first headline? Certain types of traffic will always convert to members at a greater rate than others.
• Do you want to make a purchase or just acquire an email address on file as part of your activation goal? The lower the conversion rate, the more you ask for.
• Is it typical for your market to have strong retention rates, or would it be an exception to have repeat customers? Is your product a consumer online product that has to have a high retention rate to survive?

Given all of the factors that go into determining if you have high conversion rates along the funnel, here are some pointers to remember:

• If your stats aren’t improving all the time, you’re doing something wrong. Despite the unknowns, you should be improving month after month in comparison to your previous performance.
• Some businesses make their conversion percentages for certain parts of the funnel public. If you collect enough of them, you may start comparing your performance to their measures. https://blog.totango.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/2012-SaaS-Conversions-Benchmark2.pdf is a nice analysis on the conversion rates of over 100 SaaS firms.
• As you consider your funnel, the buddy method works effectively. You may both agree to open up your figures for the other person if you can locate another growth hacker with a comparable (but non-competing) product. This is one of the most effective benchmarking techniques for determining if your funnel conversion rates are successful or not.
• Ratios are not compartmentalized throughout the funnel. You could do something that increases visits by 1,000%, but it decreases retention by.05 percent. You’ll miss the point if you make this modification and then focus on the fact that your retention has decreased. Although the retention percentage is decreasing, the number of maintained users is increasing. Your objective is to establish conversion rates that work together at all levels of the funnel to have the greatest overall effect. Don’t overlook the forest for the sake of the trees.

Allow your growth hacking priorities to be dictated by the funnel.

The funnel may occasionally make this choice for you when you evaluate where to focus your attention. If you’re converting 50% of all visitors to members and 50% of members to users, but only obtaining 200 new unique visitors each day, you should focus your efforts on attracting more visitors. In other cases, you may want to hold off on attracting visitors until you’ve improved your ability to move individuals down the funnel.

On a related topic, Sean Ellis popularized the concept of product-market fit, which is very useful when utilizing this funnel to determine your priorities. Sean has long argued that you don’t have product-market fit until at least 40% of your current customers are “extremely upset” if your product disappears. This simply signifies that your product does not address a sufficient amount of a problem. It isn’t well-liked by consumers, and the staff should concentrate on product rather than expansion. His main argument is that you shouldn’t attempt to attract new visitors or optimize your funnel for them until you’ve created a product that people desire.

This creates a bit of a catch-22 situation. If you don’t have any traffic, you won’t have any users to poll to see how dissatisfied they’d be if you weren’t there. Focusing only on growth, on the other hand, would be a negative idea, since you’d be optimizing in vain if your main product was weak.

As a result, here’s what I suggest. Use this funnel to build a sufficient user base. Then, before moving on to the next step, go back to them to see how well your product matches their demands. To determine whether you’re on the correct track to grow more, you must first grow some. Just don’t put yourself in a scenario where you’re wasting a lot of time and effort trying to create a product that no one wants. That’s all there is to it.

It started with pirates.

I owe Dave McClure a debt of gratitude. He began giving a PowerPoint presentation called Startup Metrics for Pirates a few years ago. What connection did these measurements have to pirates? To convey his content, he utilized the abbreviation A.A.R.R.R., which stood for Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and Revenue. This framework has received a lot of praise, and for good cause. I’d be lying if I claimed it didn’t have a significant impact on my thinking. As a result, the structure I use is identical (get visitors, activate members, retain users). The following are the reasons why I prefer this simpler funnel over Dave’s:

• It employs the terms visitor, member, and user to describe a person’s status at various stages of the funnel.
• Referral (the first R in Dave’s architecture) is just another method of obtaining traffic. As a result, I simplified the funnel by treating product referral channels as a subset of attracting visitors rather than a separate category. Also, as we’ll see, referral isn’t the only method to utilize the product to get new visitors.
• The second R in Dave’s theory, revenue, is essentially a kind of activation. If you opt to make a purchase as your activation step, there is no need for further step in the process. This will make it easier for us to think about activation methods in terms of revenue.
• It’s less complicated, yet it retains all of the organizational power and insight depth.

Terminology and Tools

It may seem like a section dedicated to the Terminology and Tools of a growth hacker should be closer to the beginning of this book. Tools are so basic, so fundamental. Terminology is the shared jargon we use to communicate. Well, there is actually a good reason why I’ve saved this section for the end. Terminology and Tools can make people feel like they are growth hacking when they have no clue what they are doing.

If you just install an analytics tool without a philosophy or knowledge of how growth hacking works, you’ll be fiddling with data and making arbitrary changes to your product, giving yourself a false feeling of security. You’ll believe you know what you’re doing because of the numbers. The information will seem to be official. The graphs will be extremely appealing. To explain what you’re looking at, you’ll need sophisticated terms. That is not something you should do.

Another reason I saved this section until now is because the tools are always changing, but the process of a growth hacker doesn’t. Whatever tool you use you’ll always be guiding people through your funnel. You’ll always be creating hypotheses, running experiments, and optimizing the results. However you get the data, and however you label the data, you’ll always be engaged in a process that is deeper than the Terminology and Tools you use. Growth hacking is a mindset and process more than it is a collection of tools.

In truth, growth hacking is more than simply a set of strategies (despite the number of tactics outlined in this book). The process of arriving at such approaches is known as growth hacking. Yes, apply the tools, vocabulary, and methods, but first learn the foundations of growth hacking before leaping to Conclusions. If you allow yourself to think like a growth hacker, you’ll discover strategies that no one else is aware of, and you’ll be able to keep going long after the current round of tips and tricks has run its course.

This is by no means a complete list, however the phrases listed below are some of the most often used in growth hacking circles. I’m not going to offer you a long, complicated definition. These will be explained in clear English. I’m prepared to forego technicalities in exchange for clarity:

Indicator of Key Performance (KPI)

Every firm has its own set of KPIs, yet they all exist. A key performance indicator (KPI) is a figure that allows you to quickly assess how things are progressing in your organization. If you offer software subscriptions, a key performance indicator (KPI) would be the number of new subscriptions sold today. Another KPI to consider is the number of persons who have canceled their membership today. A KPI isn’t some arcane metric that has no meaning until it’s run through a sophisticated formula. A KPI is a statistic that matters for obvious reasons, and you may get a sense of business trends and health by merely glancing at it. Here are some excellent practices when it comes to KPIs:

• Every day, week, and month, have an automatic email give out KPI data.
• Create a dashboard using KPI data that allows you to see trends based on previous performance. It’s useful to observe whether a KPI is increasing or decreasing in general.
• Make KPI data available to everyone in your organisation. This will help individuals understand which indicators are important to the organization, affecting their choices.

Coefficient of Viral Transmission (K)

The viral coefficient is a metric that indicates how many new users are attracted to your product as a result of current customers. Your viral coefficient would be two if every 50 visits to your product brought in 100 new visitors. Anything over 1 indicates that you are gaining viral traction. Here are some factors to keep in mind when it comes to virality:

• A formula is used to determine whether or not anything will become viral. It’s not merely a catchphrase for something that seems to be all over the internet.
• A viral coefficient of more than one is ideal, but even if it’s less than one, it’s still beneficial to the firm. The pursuit of virallity isn’t necessarily the aim (or even possible). Anything greater than 0 indicates that you are boosting your product distribution.
• Virality is definitely over-emphasized. Growth hacking is a broad range of abilities that may let a product expand rapidly and economically without relying on virality.

Cohorts

A cohort is a group of people who joined your product at the same time. The January cohort includes everyone who joined up in January. The February cohort includes everyone who joined up in February. Cohorts must be used since otherwise, your data will not be as clear as it may be. If your KPIs for new cohorts improve month after month, you’re on the right track. If you just look at one measure and average it over all customers since the start of your product, your data will be distorted by the good and bad of previous cohorts, and you won’t be able to understand how things are going with your product as clearly as you should.

Segments

Segments are similar to cohorts, only they are based on other segmenting characteristics rather than the enrollment date. You may divide your users into male and female categories to observe how they act differently. If this provides you with relevant data for your product, you could even divide cohorts down into subgroups.

Multivariate Analysis

Multivariate Analysis (or A/B testing) is when you make product changes that are only seen by some of your users. This gives you some people that see the A version of your product and other people that see the B version of your product. Then you can see if version A or B gives you the results you want. A debate within Multivariate Analysis is whether or not multi-armed bandit testing is the best kind of A/B test. Bandit testing is a continuous form of A/B testing that always send people toward the best performing options. In essence, the experiment never ends. I’m not going to get into this debate here, but I wanted you to know that there is a debate.

It’s vital to remember that sample size counts while doing A/B testing. It doesn’t matter what the findings indicate if option A and B are only presented to a few hundred visitors. There aren’t enough people in the test to make the statistics useful. To illustrate this argument, consider the following incident. If you perform an A/B test for one day and get 2,000 visits on that day, and option A gives you the results you desire 70% of the time, you’d consider the experiment a success. Later, you discover that this occurred on the same day that a new blog linked to your product, and that the traffic from this site accounted for 90% of your total traffic that day. At best, your A/B test revealed something about this blog’s readership, not about all of your product’s consumers.

www.experimentcalculator.com is a handy online program that allows you to compute experiment variables that are important for a successful test.

Cost of acquiring a customer (CAC)

The expense of acquiring a new client is referred to as customer acquisition cost. Your customer acquisition cost for this channel is $250 if you spend $500 on Google Ads and get two new customers. It’s critical to understand the CAC for each channel since it might vary significantly. Also, once you know the CAC per channel, you’ll know how much you can spend on that channel and whether or not you should.

Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)

The customer’s lifetime value is the estimated amount of money you’ll generate from them over the course of their relationship with your product. If clients pay you $300 per month and remain with you for an average of two years, your LTV is $300 x 24 (months) = $7,200.

When calculating LTV, segmentation come in helpful since you can find that some parts of your consumers have a substantially greater LTV than others. This will have an impact on the CAC you’re prepared to pay for that particular portions.

It’s tough to employ any push methods to acquire traffic if you don’t have a good understanding of your CAC and LTV. It’s also difficult to estimate your financials, which might have an influence on employment and other non-growth hacking objectives.

Now that we’ve learned some of the lingo of growth hackers, the next issue is: how do we collect this data? To do so, we look to the tools used by growth hackers. The most frequent growth hacking analytics tools are divided into a few categories:

Analytics in general

For general data, Google Analytics is by far the most used analytics tool. It’s both free and quite effective. Google Analytics is great for high-level product overviews, but it’s tough to utilize for detailed event or people analytics (like the kind of tracking that is becoming popular). This is an excellent tool for monitoring geographical data, device data, bounce data, and other common metrics. However, if you’re attempting to find out whether customers churn less after seeing your demo video (a kind of event/people-based analytics), you’ll run into problems. It was just not designed to deliver this level of detail. Most businesses run many analytics solutions at the same time, thus despite its shortcomings, Google Analytics should be implemented.

Analytics that are based on events or people

The technologies that growth hackers utilize have undergone a revival of sorts. A variety of new software tools have been launched to enable growth hackers to monitor the kind of information that they are interested in, thanks in large part to the limitations of Google Analytics.

When you install Google Analytics then you place a single piece of Javascript in each page of your site. When you install Analytics that are based on events or people tools then you actually attach a script to each event on your site (not just the site as a whole). This simple change opens up huge possibilities. Now you can get an answer to the following kinds of questions:

• Is the LTV of those who utilize feature X higher?
• Is there a greater level of engagement with feature Z among users in segment Y?
• And pretty much everything else you can think of.

Take note of how we are now recording events and individuals, which leads to novel discoveries. You’re trapped in the dark ages if you merely install Google Analytics but don’t monitor particular events inside your product. Sorry, but this is correct.

KISSmetrics and Mixpanel are two of the most popular tools used by growth hackers to monitor events and individuals.

Analytics for a specific niche

Another trend in analytics is platforms that specialize on certain verticals or niches. You may now discover analytics solutions that are designed specifically for mobile applications, lean startups, or ecommerce. There are far too many to name, but a Google search for specialized products tailored at the metrics that important to your sector can be helpful.

Analytical Services

As much as software products are used by growth hackers, many of them also use solutions that are built in-house. Sometimes it’s just easier to roll your own dashboard for specific use cases than it is to get a product to do what you need it to. This will depend on your internal engineering resources also. If you don’t have the engineers then you might not be able to build a Analytical Services platform, in which case you’ll have to use off the shelf products. When possible, I recommend installing Google Analytics, some event based product, and building in-house solutions when necessary. It’s always better to have too much data than not enough.

Conclusion

If you’ve read this far, I’m guessing you’re eager to learn how to growth hack, so here’s some advise. Growth hacking is a talent that can be learnt, and I hope that this book has steered you in the right way and aided you in getting started. There is only one way to really perfect a talent, and that is to practice it. It’s one thing to read a book. Another is growth hacking. If you want to enhance your skills, start with a project (big or little) and apply the growth hacker attitude to it. You’ll get more insight from your own accomplishments and mistakes than from others’. You’ll never forget how great it feels to achieve your own achievement. You won’t repeat your own failure since it hurts so badly. Go growth hack something if you want to be a growth hacker.

If you learn the abilities outlined in this book, you’ll be future-proofing yourself since growth hacking isn’t going away anytime soon. Some try to dismiss it as a passing craze, but it is just too strong to go away. The name may change, but the content remains the same. Growth hacking is a new way of thinking, and those who dismiss it will find themselves handicapped for no apparent reason.

Finally, here’s a tale. Atlassian is one of the world’s fastest-growing software firms, and its growth hacking team is one of the most advanced I’ve ever seen. They approach their experiments with the rigor of a scientist, and they enhance their technique over time using machine learning models. They have a group dedicated just to new client acquisitions, as well as a group dedicated solely to the funnel after they’ve entered the product. It works like a well-oiled machine. But here’s the catch: they’re a B2B corporate software firm that sells products that most people have never heard of. They make dull products that let people to communicate and collaborate in software settings. They don’t spread because they’re attractive. They’re using growth hacking to go to the top of the heap. Good luck competing in the future if you disregard Atlassian and the firms who are following their path.

I highly recommend that you read the next 7 articles below for further information on growth hacking approaches and ideas.

Do you want more visitors to your website?

Improve your traffic, leads, and income with the aid of a professional.

Get started now. now.

The “growth hacking tools” is a definitive guide to growth hacking. The article not only has information on how to do it, but also the tools that you will need to get started.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I start growing hacking?

A: The best way to start hacking is by showing your enemies what youre capable of. This can be done through creative use of speed and accuracy, as well as the usage of weapons like grenades or guns.

What is a growth hacking strategy?

A: A growth hacking strategy is a process of using different types of marketing strategies to grow your business. This can include anything from spending less money on advertising, to creating viral content that will make people want to visit your site or buy your product.

How much does a growth hacker make?

A: That depends on your experience and the company you work for. A growth hacker will make anywhere from $50,000 – $250,000 a year depending on their skillset.

Related Tags

• growth hacking funnel
• growth hacking marketing
• growth hacking course
• what is growth hacking in digital marketing
• growth hacking examples