Anuj Adhiya

Cheat Sheet / Updated 04-12-2022

Growth hacking is the process of 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. A growth hacker is a person whose true north is growth. Everything they do is scrutinized by its potential impact on scalable growth. It is this person’s job to find scalable, repeatable, and sustainable ways to grow the business. This cheat sheet can help.

Article / Updated 07-01-2020

Growth hacking can be very beneficial to businesses. Here, you learn the ten most important benefits that the growth hacking methodology provides to organizations and products. Keep in mind that, in order to take full advantage of the growth hacking process, you need to have buy-in at the highest levels of the organization and establish trust with other teams so that you can focus everyone’s efforts on whatever delivers the greatest value to your customers. Growth hacking provides a focus on process versus tactics If you take away only one lesson, it should be this: Growth hacking is a process. Sustainable growth can come only from growing value for your customers on an ongoing basis. The growth process helps you understand where the strategic focus of your team’s growth efforts should be, which in turn produces ideas for you to test that lead to specific tactical decisions for your team to act on. Tactics, on their own and without the benefit of a strategy, are like a rudderless boat with no direction. You may find yourself running a lot of tests and maybe even generating a lot of wins, but without this focus, you’ll disperse your learning potential, which minimizes the impact you can have on your North Star Metric — leaving you with no clear way to move forward. Here are two syndromes to be wary of when it comes to growth hacking tactics: Copycat syndrome: The tactics you may have read about that worked spectacularly for others may not work as well (or at all) for you. Everyone’s products are different, the audiences are different, and the overall context is different. Too many variables are at play to take at face value all those online articles titled “X Ways We Increased Y by Z Percent.” It’s more important to understand why a company acted the way it did — its process, in other words — than what it did. Without that background understanding, you might take the wrong lessons from such content. Shareholder value syndrome: Worse are the tactics that are detrimental to the overall customer experience and deliver little to no value to them. These may be great at demonstrating how someone took advantage of a loophole in a system or exploited certain human biases, but if those tactics were more to benefit the business than the customers, you have to ask what the long-term impact of those tactics might be on the overall brand and perception of the company. When in doubt, err on the side of the customer’s gaining more from an interaction. It’s fair to say that, in the absence of a better understanding of what growth hacking is about, people can easily (and incorrectly) associate these spammy tactics and tricks with growth hacking as such and deride the overall practice. Growth hacking allows for cross-functional collaboration The greatest benefit of implementing a growth process is its ability to break down silos — those artificial “walls” between different groups within the company. A North Star Metric gives everyone a single point of focus. The ability to test needs resources from across the organization, and getting them, requires key stakeholders (including the CEO) to buy into the process. Make no mistake: This is hard to do — and increasingly harder the more the culture of the organization is already set. Having representation from key stakeholders in product, engineering, sales, creative, and analytics teams in the weekly growth meeting allows for a more holistic reality check for ideas that are proposed for testing. A well-implemented growth process also democratizes where ideas come from and allows you to take advantage of insights from across the organization that you might otherwise not have been able to access. Growth hacking creates organizational alignment A natural consequence of cross-functional collaboration is alignment across the company. A North Star Metric (NSM) allows everyone, irrespective of team status, to ask, “How is what I’m doing today helping move the needle on our NSM?” This is a powerful question for individuals to pose to themselves as well as managers to pose to their direct reports during meetings. If someone cannot articulate how their work will impact the NSM, it’s time to reprioritize tasks so that the person has a better response the next time this question is asked. When an entire company is focused on growing the NSM, you have a company that is rowing the proverbial boat in sync. Growth hacking enable data-informed decision-making The biggest trap that many companies fall into is using feelings, opinions, and hearsay to inform major business decisions. The problem with such approaches goes beyond not being objective. Generally, only the people at the top of the organizational food chains can get away with statements along the lines of, “I think we should do this or that.” This fuels the wrong culture — one that’s more about satisfying egos or doing as you’re told because raising your hand, so to speak, will only cause more trouble. Data takes all this conjecture out of the picture and rewards those hypotheses that are proven true. You’re telling everyone that no one gets to hijack growth and that everyone has a part to play. By injecting data into the company’s DNA, you create transparency into what’s working and what’s not. This allows anyone in the company to ask clarifying questions of the growth team or to propose new ideas. Growth hacking allows for improved customer focus The beauty of the NSM is that it’s entirely customer focused. If you grow the value that you deliver to the customer, by definition you raise the odds of your own success. By having a number that everyone cares about be all about the customer, you're better able to mitigate any bickering about individual team metrics and priorities because now the customer-focused metric is the most important one. This isn’t to say that the numbers for which teams are held accountable aren’t important. If anything, they should all roll up to the NSM. But by having a common, customer-focused number that everyone cares about that supersedes every other number, you actively convey the message that everyone is in charge of delivering and growing customer value. This is no longer the job of only the onboarding, customer success, or retention team. It’s everyone’s job. Growth hacking gives you a better understanding of your customers If growth hacking is all about growing the value you deliver to the customer, it behooves you to understand your customers' motivations so that you can help them achieve their goals. This is not to say that this is a one-time exercise. To help customers continue to derive value from your product, you have to understand at what frequency they need to use your product and where your product fits into the scheme of their lives. You’ll also find out why people stop using your product to learn. If you cannot determine who out there your product isn't a fit for or what was lacking from your end that caused them to give up your product, even if they found value from it, you've lost a growth opportunity. Beyond that, though you may start off serving a specific kind of customer, over time you will encounter many different types of people, with their own reasons for using your product. You’ll (have to) learn how to serve all these people in the way they want to be served, if they’re going to keep using your product over the long term. Again, the beauty of the NSM is that it’s explicit about quantifying value delivered so that, as you gain a better understanding of your customers, the NSM will lead you down paths to serve them better. Growth hacking provides a better customer experience If understanding your customers better is one side of the coin, the other side is all about delivering a better and more relevant experience for them. Your hard work in decoding their needs will produce a natural affinity for your product because few other products will have taken as much trouble to focus on their goals. Having the mentality “How else can we add value for you?” — where you’re constantly in touch with your customers — reveals new avenues to serve them. Here, too, you’ll find categories of customers who have similar needs that you can address in unique ways. As you travel down this path, you’ll gain further insights that allow you to slice your customer segments into smaller and smaller pieces. The logical end point will appear like a hyperpersonalized experience for each customer. It’s a difficult path to travel, for sure, but if you use personalized customer experiences as a simple way to visualize how far you need to go to serve each and every customer, it has a natural impact on the kinds of activities you choose to engage in to deliver that value. Growth hacking creates a state of constant curiosity To uncover your customers’ needs, you have to be in constant detective mode. The mystery of how to deliver value has many layers. You can’t sit there happy with having found only a single insight. If you do, you’ll inevitably see the impact on your growth metrics — they'll move in the wrong direction. Finding insights that drive growth, however, is addicting. Whether that needle moves slowly or quickly, you’ll be on the hunt for that next key insight. This need infects everyone on the growth team. So, whether its learning directly from customers or from external inspiration, if you’re looking to grow value, you’ll also be looking for a whole series of different ways to grow that value, perhaps in ways you (or your customers) never expected and that are in keeping with the ethos of growth hacking. Growth hacking enables better product-development processes For growth hacking to be successful, it’s strongly recommended that the product team be represented in growth meetings. Product managers, generally speaking, oversee the product features and how they’re brought to life. Their presence is vital to ensure that tests that have produced winners are incorporated into the product development cycle with as little disruption to existing plans as possible but also with an eye toward expediency. The best product managers will either have a dedicated stream of work for incorporating winning tests into the process or, if this isn’t possible, build the need to do so into their existing plans. Having the ability to incorporate insights gained from ongoing testing into the planned product development process can only help amplify the impact of the product to your customers. Growth hacking allows for greater control because of product-first growth Channels are changing all the time. If your growth is highly dependent on external channels, you need to be careful: You have zero control over when these channels will change and whether such changes will negatively impact your growth. Because growth hacking focuses on the entire customer journey, the product itself plays a greater part in growth. Yes, you have to scale acquisition, but retention is the name of the game after you have someone’s attention. After someone has decided to check out your product, you are in charge. Every aspect of their experience, big and small, is in your hands, which means that you can test and learn far more effectively about what a great first experience looks like and what it will take to Inspire people to come back to experience that core value of your product Monetize the value your product delivers Make it easy for your customers to spread the word about you

Article / Updated 03-30-2020

What is growth hacking? Growth hacking refers to a marketing strategy that utilizes low-cost solutions to scale business growth quickly. The focus of growth hacking is centered on results, rather than the process you take to get there. 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 Startup” blog post. 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, 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. 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. The explicit role of the growth hacker 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 their 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. Ultimately, growth hacking is a framework for thinking about how to find these scalable, repeatable, and sustainable ways to grow your business.

Article / Updated 03-24-2020

Webster’s Dictionary defines an audit as “a methodical examination and review.” Though you typically hear of it in the context of taxes, in the growth hacking context, the intent is much the same. A growth audit, then, is just an exploration of your current growth strategy undertaken in order to understand what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. The whole point of such a growth hacking analysis should be to help identify how your business grows today and potential areas of opportunity (or trouble) in the future. It should allow you to “zoom out” and ask bigger questions about why you do the things you do and whether they’re still the right things to continue doing. You may just find that conditions have changed since the initial setup — meaning that you no longer need to do things a certain way. If you’re familiar with the five interconnected phases known as Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control, or DMAIC, used as part of Lean Six Sigma initiatives, the intent of a growth audit is similar, where you analyze a specific process for waste and inefficiency and put in place mechanisms to improve it moving forward. If you’re the first growth hire, performing an audit is imperative to your success. It can take some time to get all the information you need, given how mature the data culture of your organization is. You may also need to spend time convincing key stakeholders, including your boss and even the CEO, about the importance of this activity on future growth hacking campaigns. Growth requires buy-in at the highest levels, and generating support for this activity is as important as running weekly tests. You want to learn three main outcomes as a result of this growth audit: What’s the current state of growth of the business? What key numbers is the business measuring? What is the business using to measure these numbers? Assessing the current state of growth of your business Think of this assessment like you would an annual health checkup. As part of this, you want to understand the answers to these questions: What is the North Star Metric (NSM), and what is its trend? You may find that the company you’ve joined hasn’t identified this yet, and you may have to talk to the executive team to help them understand the importance of this metric and the need to define one. As part of this assessment, you also need to investigate revenue growth. Logically, if you’ve picked the right NSM, you should see a correlation to revenue growth as well. What are the main forces behind its current trend? The cause(s) may be changes within acquisition channels or it may have something to do with the product, which is something you need to determine. You will have to start to gain a handle on the growth hacking model for the business to understand the big picture of what the customer journey looks like and conversion rates at each stage. Exploring key business measurements for growth hacking As you answer questions regarding key business measurements, you start to get a deeper look at the growth model and understand all the numbers the business believes to be important. This will be, by definition, a detailed look at the customer journey. Retention rate, customer growth rate, and annual contract/order volumes should be among the key numbers you look at here, and they will all bear some correlation to your North Star Metric (NSM). As you dig into the numbers, you will likely need to understand the history behind them as well. This will mean deeper conversations with key stakeholders to find out how they arrived at those numbers. If the organization has a history of running tests, you’ll also want to dig into past objectives and see which tests were run. These objectives and tests should map to hypotheses to grow numbers the business says it cares about. As a result, you'll also gain an appreciation for what the growth process — however informal — has been so far. You’ll also learn about any existing challenges in executing the growth process, whether those are related to people resources or other matters. Evaluating the tools that businesses can use to measure their numbers for growth hacking As a by-product of learning key numbers, you’ll start to be able to answer questions about the growth stack of the company— all the tools used for growth-related activities across the customer journey, in other words. You will of course learn about all the tools in use. But you should ask other questions, like these: Are these tools integrated in some way to provide comprehensive reporting, or is reporting done on an individual basis? Do the tools provide a complete picture of the customer journey, or are there gaps? How much detail is in the data from each tool? Can you trust the data? Do you see any discrepancies? Without asking questions like these, you will never know whether you have opportunities to influence the health of the data the company relies on. It helps to be systematic about this. Don’t forget to document these questions and their answers in a central document so that you have you a comprehensive view of your next growth hacking steps.

Article / Updated 03-24-2020

Growth hacking is all about understanding where the biggest opportunities lie within the customer journey to grow the value you provide to your customers. To understand where such opportunities lie to power your growth hacking initiative, you need to visualize how customers get to that value. A customer journey framework is a system to help you visualize customers’ experiences with your product or brand. Once you’ve visualized their journey, you can analyze how they complete each step of that journey. This analysis in turn helps you understand more about how you can better help them through each step of that journey. This (repeatable) process allows you to improve at growing the value you provide as they take more turns experiencing the value your product provides. If you Google the term customer journey framework, you’ll see that people have come up with multiple ways to visualize this concept. The problem with most of them is that they can be too detailed or complicated for people with zero experience with growth or marketing. in all areas of growth hacking, you have to find a balance between getting things done and gaining an in-depth understanding of a topic. The two frameworks that are often found to be most useful when getting started in growth hacking are the Pirate Metrics and Marketing Hourglass frameworks. As you’ll soon see, both of them do an excellent job of providing you with the big picture of the customer journey. This is important when starting out, because drilling down into detail without this macro view may cause you to miss, or misidentify, where your biggest growth opportunities may lie. Applying the Pirate Metrics customer journey (also known as AARRR) In 2007, Dave McClure, a co-founder of the startup accelerator known as 500 Startups, changed how startups thought about the customer journey. He presented a simple framework he called Pirate Metrics (you’ll see in a moment, why he came up with that name). The framework had five steps, called Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and Revenue. Because the mnemonic (or memory aid) for it literally was “AARRR.”— the clichéd pirate expression from numerous books and movies — McClure felt that the term “Pirate Metrics” was a fitting one. It still is one of the most commonly referred-to frameworks for how startups think about key steps in the customer journey and how to optimize for them. Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and Revenue are, as described by the questions in this list: Acquisition: How are your prospective customers finding out about your product? Activation: What convinces your prospective customer of the value of your product? Retention: How do your customers continue experiencing the value of your product? Referral: What gets your customers to talk about your product with others? Revenue: What gets your customers to pay for your product? McClure visualized these steps as a funnel to communicate the idea that as people work their way through each stage, fewer and fewer people make their way to the end of that customer journey. Depending on the kind of product you sell, the position of Referral and Revenue in your funnel can be different. For example, a food delivery app may provide a referral code only after you’ve had a great experience that you’ve paid for. Knowing how many people completed each stage gives you a macro picture of conversion rates and points to the part(s) of the journey where people are having difficulty realizing their true potential as customers. The advantage of this approach is that it focuses you on a subset of numbers that you absolutely must track and influence if your product is to deliver on its promised value. A downside of McClure’s approach was that it lacked nuance — perhaps intentionally — for the sake of understanding his central point. It didn’t take into account that the relative difficulty of making it from one step of the journey to the next may be different based on which steps you’re talking about. Fortunately, another framework can help you understand this better. Applying the Marketing Hourglass customer journey John Jantsch, the creator of the Duct Tape Marketing System, came up with the concept of the Marketing Hourglass to address the fact that convincing people that your solution is the one they need is the toughest part of the journey. If you can do that, everything becomes easier from there on out. He envisioned this as an hourglass where, just like a funnel, you could have a lot of people showing up and checking out your product, but fewer people would end up trying it. This represented the small neck of the hourglass. If people tried it and it was the right solution for them, you would have no problem persuading them to pay for and talk about your product. Jantsch, helpfully, labeled each step of his process with easy-to-understand words, such as know, like, trust, try, buy, repeat, and refer. The key difference between McClure’s approach and Jantsch’s approach is that the former is envisioned as a series of sequentially decreasing conversion rates that you can optimize, whereas the latter is meant to depict the increasing opportunity to create an advocate once they’ve decided to give your product a shot. He used an image similar to the one below to represent the Marketing Hourglass. It’s fairly easy to tell that there are similarities in the words used to describe McClure’s Pirate Metrics and the stages of Jantsch’s Marketing Hourglass. You can see the two customer journey frameworks superimposed below. Pirate Metrics and Marketing Hourglass, Superimposed AARRR Startup Metrics Marketing Hourglass Acquisition Know Activation Like, trust, try Revenue* Buy Retention Repeat Referral Refer* *The position of Revenue is interchangeable based on the business. The reality, however, is that neither of these frameworks gives you the complete picture of the customer journey. Both customer journey frameworks — among other, similar ones — make it easy to understand key points in the customer journey. Their effectiveness in doing so is beyond question, given how often they’re quoted and used years after their introduction. The problem with these oversimplified views is twofold: Unidirectional: Despite the last steps of these frameworks being the act of referring your product to others, they’re visually depicted as unidirectional. If customers are going to refer someone, then referrals become, by definition, another way that people find out about your product. This suggests that the visual representation should be more like a loop than a funnel. This absence of visual element connecting the referral step to the acquisition step strengthens the implication of this 1-way traffic nature of the frameworks. If you connect the loop, it provides a better understanding of how the end of one journey enables the start of another and what you need to do to enable it. Blind to nonlinearity: Think about the last time you bought something online. How much research did you do? How many tabs did you have to open during that research? How many review sites did you visit? Did you also ask any friends what they thought? And then did you make your purchase during the first visit to the product site? The reality is that, more often than not, your customer journey is more of a zigzag than a straight line. These customer journey frameworks help with understanding the key points of a customer journey, but fall short of communicating the actual reality of that journey.

Article / Updated 03-24-2020

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 hackers 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 startup versus growth hacking A 1-line definition from the Lean Startup site, co-founded by Eric Ries, says that Lean Startup provides a) a scientific approach to creating and managing startups 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, growth hackers 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 startup 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 startup approach emphasized two coequal parts of any startup 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 startup methodology, more attention has been paid to value hypothesis activities. Even Sean admits that, until that particular AMA, he had thought of lean startup 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 startup 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 startup approach could have lit the spark for the growth hacking movement. But getting back to how Sean Ellis articulated the differences between a lean startup 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 hacking process with product development sprints. There are other alignment challenges as well in lining up testing with product development, but the tension between prioritizing changes based on tests versus new features development or bug-fixing is real.

Article / Updated 03-24-2020

Many organizations, websites, podcasts, blogs, communities, and companies exist to provide information about and support for growth hacking (even if they don’t explicitly say so). To help you get started, check out this list of key resources (in no particular order) that many growth hackers have used and continue to refer to and that you, too, can use to support your journey with growth hacking. These have intentionally been picked for their broad applicability across the customer journey and to the growth hacking process in general, rather than a specific part of the journey. GrowthHackers.com The GrowthHackers site probably contains the largest curated database of the highest-quality growth content around. Discussions around this content, questions about all aspects of growth hacking, and Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions with subject matter experts ensure that you’ll have ample growth content for continual learning. CXL blog CXL (formerly known as ConversionXL) has been churning out high-quality, in-depth marketing, analytics, and optimization content by offering a combination of in-house and guest posts by subject matter experts. The site’s stated goal is to make the knowledge and insights possessed by the best experts in their field accessible to anyone who’s motivated enough to take advantage of them. Optimizely blog The Optimizely blog, operated by the company that owns the popular A/B testing tool, mostly features its own team of optimization experts, who share their best advice on A/B testing and experience optimization. The site also tends to dig deeper into the process than most growth-oriented blogs. Conversion Sciences blog The Conversion Optimization blog aims to teach digital marketers how to embrace data and science in their work. The blog is organized into three main levels of mastery: conversion rate optimization (CRO) 101 for beginners, conversion rate optimization (CRO) 102 for intermediate, and conversion rate optimization (CRO) 103 for advanced, so you choose your level and start learning. Reforge Blog Reforge, led by Brian Balfour and Andrew Chen, has created lots of must-read content that takes a more holistic view of growth than most other sites. Almost all the content, which is a combination of posts by the Reforge team and guest contributors, is focused on strategy and process. Brian Balfour’s blog Brian Balfour also maintains his own site, where he’s been producing in-depth essays for years on building a machine of sustainable growth. He appears to have stopped posting on this site in favor of the Reforge blog starting in 2019, but the content that’s still on his blog is evergreen and worth revisiting over and over again. Andrew Chen’s blog Andrew Chen’s blog features long-form essays on start-ups, growth, metrics, and network effects. An investor at Andreessen Horowitz — where he focuses on consumer products, marketplaces, and bottoms-up SaaS — he shares from these experiences and more. Intercom blog The Inside Intercom team members share thoughts, tips, and lessons learned from their years of product building and developing sales, marketing, and customer support. The site doesn’t position itself as a growth resource, but given that it tackles various aspects of building great products, it truly is one and provides valuable perspectives on how to deliver value. Occam’s Razor blog Possibly one of the best blogs on analytics for its ability to make the topic easy for everyone to understand, Avinash Kaushik's site provides practical takes on how to unlock the power of research and analytics to create a data-driven culture. Analytics Demystified blog Another helpful resource for all analytics topics, from setup to measurement and reporting, the Analytics Demystified blog stays on top of the latest developments with analytics tools and presents content on everything from strategy and implementation to testing and reporting. MeasuringU blog This blog, from the quantitative research firm MeasuringU, specifically centers around usability, customer experience, and statistics. Online Behavior blog This blog is a useful knowledge source when it comes to understanding how online customers behave. The site understands and espouses a broad range of techniques and strategies to help optimize websites and provides content on targeting and segmentation, site testing and usability, as well as analytics and optimization. Casey Winters’ blog Casey Winters has been an early (if not the first) marketer at many high-profile start-ups. His experiences in scaling multiple start-ups to large technology companies as an employee and an advisor inform his wide perspective on growth that few other people can match. Kieran Flanagan’s blog Kieran, the VP of marketing at HubSpot, has a proven track record in helping SaaS businesses — from start-ups to enterprise-level — grow their traffic, users, and revenue. His blog posts about founders or senior executives at different companies investigate which unique aspects of growth they might be handling effectively. In his podcast (which he cohosts), he conducts weekly interviews with subject matter experts to understand strategies that have helped the best companies in the world grow. Growth Engineering blog The blog of Jeff Chang, who leads growth teams at Pinterest as a technical lead, focuses on conversions, user engagement and retention, mobile acquisition, A/B testing, data analysis, and other topics on growth based on his firsthand experience. Widerfunnel blog The Widerfunnel digital marketing agency has championed experimentation from the start. Its content covers everything from process to culture to tactics and trends sweeping through the industry. The posts are written by a combination of the site’s internal team and experts who’ve had firsthand experience in driving the experimentation methodology across industries. forEntrepeneurs blog forEntrepreneurs is a blog by David Skok, a venture capitalist at Matrix Partners. The blog is an in-depth resource that offers advice on the key issues founders and their teams face in getting started, getting funded, and building a successful company. This blog has some of the best resources on go-to-market strategies and metrics. Even though the focus is on SaaS products, the content here applies to most products. Mobile Growth Stack blog Mobile Growth Stack is a publication by Phiture, a leading mobile growth consultancy. Phiture's co-founder, Andy Carvell, used to be the mobile growth lead at Soundcloud. This is probably the most useful resource for content on how to develop and evolve a strategy for growing the user base of a mobile product. Dan Wolchonok’s blog Dan Wolchonok works with Brian Balfour and is the head of product at Reforge. He admittedly hasn’t write much, but what he has written on the topics of retention and analytics is content you will not find anywhere else. He’s a highly technical growth professional and some of his content around data analysis is very advanced. Christoph Janz’s blog Christoph Janz is a partner at Point Nine Capital. He shares his thoughts on startups, SaaS, and early-stage investing here. He doesn’t write as frequently as he used to on growth related topics either but, like Dan Wolchonok, his content on retention, business models, and strategy is very unique, evergreen, and explained very simply. The Amplitude blog Amplitude, a behavioral analytics software company, shares perspectives and best practices on product management, building products, user retention, growth, engagement, and more on their blog. Their blog is often a good first stop when looking for answers, especially when you’re looking for deeper insights on retention. The Breakout Growth podcast In the Breakout Growth podcast, Sean Ellis interviews CEOs and product, growth, and marketing leaders from the world’s fastest-growing companies to strike at the heart of what truly drives their breakout growth. This way, you can apply their lessons to take your growth to the next level. Discussions cover everything from the role of mission and product/market fit in driving growth to team structure and leadership style to specific tests and tactics used to accelerate growth. Want to learn more? Check out these growth hacker tools.

Article / Updated 03-24-2020

Growth teams can make common but serious mistakes when implementing the growth hacking process. This article provides an overview of some of the more typical problems and looks at ways for you to work around them. As you’ll see, many of these pitfalls are related to cultural issues and usually result from not following the established growth hacking process itself. Let the data and your empathy for the customer guide you and you’ll mitigate most of the problems that afflict growth teams who are just starting out. Ignoring the need to constantly evangelize progress and learning An inability to sing from the rooftops the praises of the growth hacking process is probably the biggest stumbling block when it comes to creating a company-wide culture of growth. Especially as you’re getting your growth program off the ground, you have to be able to evangelize experimentation and share those quick wins in high-decibel fashion. When the business isn’t used to operating this way, seeing data for the first time can create a sense of empowerment throughout the organization. Be consistent with what, how, and where you communicate progress when it comes to growth. Whether it’s an internal wiki, an internal communication platform channel, email, company-wide meetings, lunch-and-learns, or any other venue, posting summaries of tests and the insights the team gleaned leads to greater understanding and adoption of the growth mentality. Ultimately, your goal is to build companywide excitement for the program in order to break down silos and gather input from every corner of the company on ideas that hold growth potential. Not sticking to the growth meeting agenda The one hour you set aside for the weekly growth meeting goes by fast. Having an agenda and sticking to it is critical for working your way through communicating key metrics, sharing the insights gained from the past week, and then deciding on tests to prioritize in the next testing cycle. You should expect that additional questions may emerge when discussing what happened last week, but you absolutely cannot afford to let the agenda be derailed by anyone, especially if they’re someone higher up in the organization. For good reason, the agenda of the growth meeting has fixed time slots for discussing specific aspects of growth. If the discussion extends beyond the allotted time, end the meeting with a commitment to pick it up again later, and communicate a summary with the rest of the team. The other common trap is for the growth meeting to become a brainstorming session. Avoid this at all costs. All brainstorming should happen between growth meetings. Within the meeting, you simply discuss ideas that have already been prioritized from the backlog before the meeting. If you don't impose some discipline here, you won’t be able to establish the rhythm of a growth process. Testing things that don’t need to be tested (right now) When you first start testing during the growth hacking process and you’re looking for quick wins, it’s okay to not necessarily be informed by your growth model. But as you gain a bit of confidence, you can’t afford to be scattershot about it. It’s easy to fall into this trap, where you meet the goal of conducting three or more tests per week but barely move the needle on our NSM, which was incredibly frustrating. It’s easy to understand the lure of testing in areas you’re comfortable with, yet you cannot allow yourself to do only the simple things or the ones you like doing. Growth hacking is about doing more of what works. Finding out what works is a matter of investigating your growth model and setting objectives around the highest leverage opportunities (or problems). Not taking big enough swings Recognizing a big swing when it comes to tests isn’t obvious when you start. In fact, almost everything in the growth hacking process looks like a big change the first time it's made, because something like that has never been done. It’s important, however, for the team to undertake the process of making swings that aren’t big enough and to realize the small impact, if any, on your NSM. That’s when the light bulb will go off — the team will realize that what they thought was a big deal really wasn’t. This will trigger better growth hacking discussions on what it truly means to be big. Undertaking this process of taking swings and realizing you can go bigger is necessary to for the team to build the courage to take bigger swings and also realize that they have permission to do so. This is not to say that small wins don’t matter; of course they do. But the bigger wins in growth hacking come when you do something so radically different that the reaction to it has to be big. If that reaction happens to be a positive one, you’ll see it reflected in your NSM. Then take all the small swings you want, to incrementally make that big positive result as big as you can. Just be aware that small tests give you small results. If you want big results from growth hacking, conduct bigger, bolder tests. It’s as simple (and as hard) as that. Blindly copying what others have done You’ll find no dearth of articles espousing awesome results from tests. It’s these types of posts that have led people to think that growth hacking is all about tactics. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t be inspired by others. Of course you should. External sources of growth hacking inspiration are a powerful source of ideas. It’s important to understand why a test worked rather than get caught up in the tactic that resulted in spectacular results. This is why, if you were to blindly implement a referral program, like the Dropbox example, or create a contest offering an iPad as a prize, it likely wouldn’t produce the same breakout results as in others. Understanding your own users' motivations and knowing what they value should guide your growth hacking strategies more than what has worked for famous companies or for competitors. Measuring what you did versus what you learned It’s easy to get caught up in running tests and increasing conversion rates. If you didn’t add value for your customers, however, all that just isn’t very meaningful — and therein lies the difference between what you did (your outputs) versus what you learned about helping your customers achieve their goals (your outcomes). You should understand that, ultimately, customers are interested only in outcomes — the benefit they receive from your product. This can happen only if you understand their needs, priorities, motivations, and challenges. What you did, on the other hand (running tests or optimizing your product, for example) is just an output of the growth process. Measuring what you learned about delivering value is ultimately what creates the biggest difference in your customers’ lives, so make sure you’re measuring the right things. Not understanding the opportunity costs of testing Failing to understand the opportunity costs of testing goes hand in hand with running tests that don’t need to be run right now. Every test has an opportunity cost associated with it, and you need to calculate how much more value a test provides versus doing more research. Now, if you can conduct a quick test all by yourself and it doesn’t interfere with another test, just do it, because there’s no downside here. But if you’re doing something more involved or what you're doing deals with an integral part of the product, any changes here could have a noticeable negative impact. In this case, check to see whether you have enough data to justify a test, and reduce the amount of uncertainty associated with that test. The other opportunity cost is related to not being able to identify tests that are actually winners. Sample size and test duration both impact your ability to call a true winner, but the longer any given test runs, you also potentially risk losing out on bigger gains from other, more impactful tests. Think about the size of the insight you’re testing for before determining how much resources and time you allocate to any given test. Committing to a process where you run big, bold tests to discover big changes in response, followed by the smaller tests to optimize that response, helps mitigate some of that opportunity cost. Having lots of tests that yield inconclusive results First, you can expect tests now and then to yield inconclusive results. It’s bound to happen. What should not happen is that it becomes normal to see inconclusive results for tests. This situation occurs for one of these reasons: You lacked a good hypothesis to begin with. The experiment itself wasn’t designed well. You didn’t set up how to measure the test correctly. The analysis itself was incomplete. This last reason is the most difficult to correct for, because the others are related more to process issues, which you should analyze and correct the first time you encounter them. The bigger problem that emerges in growth hacking is the fact that, if you have inconclusive results, you don’t learn anything. A test you didn’t learn from is effectively wasted, which adds to the opportunity cost of testing. Continually encountering these dead ends can become quite demoralizing. They start to instill apathy regarding testing, in the sense that everyone starts to expect that conducting a certain number of tests will be wasted effort, no matter what. This can have a negative impact on the effort that people invest in tests, and the result can be extremely insidious, leading to a negative feedback loop of less interest and effort, leading to bad tests with inconclusive results, leading to even less enthusiasm for the next round of tests. Not analyzing your tests in a timely fashion This one hurts. Running a lot of tests is one thing, and you can get a lot of the process right by creating the right objectives and generating a lot of ideas to test. But running tests and leaving them unanalyzed is the kiss of death to a growth program. After all, growth involves learning more about what works. How else will you do more of it? One growth hacker experienced this problem firsthand, where he was responsible for analyzing acquisition tests related to selling more tickets for an event. Because he took longer to analyze these tests, the growth team didn’t learn about some opportunities they could have capitalized on, and that inevitably led to selling fewer tickets than usual. You can b sure he has never let it happen again. Remember, not capitalizing on a win is also costly. On the topic of acquisition, because you have no control over how channels will change, it’s even more important to stay on top of such tests. You may find that, although an initial test gave you positive results, if you waited too long to learn about it and the channel evolved in a way that’s unfriendly to that specific tactic, future tests won’t work So it’s doubly important to analyze your acquisition tests quickly, to get an early sign that things might be changing so you can adapt in a timely manner. Not checking on whether the gains still hold When you’re in the rhythm of testing, and launching tests weekly, it’s easy to forget about tests you’ve already analyzed. They’re in the knowledge base, but out of sight and out of mind. The problem with this part of the growth hacking process is that no winning test provides infinite gains — not to mention the fact that most tests have small gains. You should have a process to go back and analyze how well the gains of any winning test have held over time and whether the gains show signs of decreasing (or have already decreased). You can use that information as a trigger to perform a new test around the area that provided the gain. Without this information, you’ll feel like you're running in place or, even worse, like your momentum slows because the efficiency of earlier tests that you were counting on as stepping stones are no longer available to you. To start, it may be useful to review the winning tests every couple of months to see how well they’re performing and then adjust your growth hacking approach from there.

Article / Updated 03-23-2020

A popular construct for the varied skill set a growth hacker should possess is that of the T-shaped marketer. The use of the word marketer here has always been a bit confusing in this context, given that traditional marketing has been focused more on increasing brand awareness and acquiring leads versus the focus on the full customer lifecycle that defines any true growth professional. Putting that aside, however, the construct itself is useful in demonstrating the depth and breadth of knowledge needed to have the ability to continually grow value for your users and, as a result, for your product. Being T-shaped means having general knowledge of many skills and having deep knowledge or ability in one or a few areas. The first popular version of this T-shaped marketer construct was the one created by Brian Balfour in 2013. The idea here was that you could develop a T-shaped approach to acquiring the skills necessary to do your job: In other words, you could develop broad knowledge of the basics, key processes, and activities of a growth program and then build deep expertise within specific channels. The T would have three layers, starting from the top: Base Knowledge: Consists of those non-growth, more generalized topics that nevertheless have an impact across multiple aspects of the growth program Marketing Foundation: Much like the base knowledge layer, consists of marketing and growth fundamentals that inform all activities at one point or another Channel Expertise: Knowing how to work with the channels that are performing well today and finding those that could work well tomorrow It’s no surprise that these layers of the T correspond well to the three key jobs of a growth lead: Understand how products grow (necessitating a broad understanding of your product and the value it provides), focus on where the best growth opportunity for your product lies (requiring more specific growth/marketing skills), and test new channels (yep — calling for channel expertise.) Since Balfour released this concept (which itself was inspired by an earlier, more SEO-specific version of the same idea, by Mike Tekula), others have expanded on what specific skills are part of the T as an understanding of growth and marketing has evolved and as new channels have emerged. Some of these updates have even repositioned whether certain skills might lie within the base layer or the Marketing Foundation layer. To a certain extent, the debate might be academic. What is clear, though, is that as our understanding of growth hacking has evolved and as the inevitable expectations of growth professionals have increased, what may be considered a part of any specific layer has evolved as well. Even though everything you’ve been reading here has been from the lens of the growth lead, it should be apparent that the T for a growth lead would look quite different from the T of, say a data analyst, community manager, or content marketer on the team, because they have different strengths that they need to go deep on. This may mean that, for some people, the stem of the T — that part that represents specific channel expertise — may not necessarily show up in the middle. For others — those who go deeper in multiple channels, for example — their T may end up looking more like an M — 3 "legs" rather than 1. Take the T framework for what it is — a starting point to understand where you could make choices on where to go deep. Writing about each of these growth skills in depth would merit separate books, but knowing in general terms the universe of skills waiting to be tapped is beneficial because it gives you a starting point for where to attack based on the knowledge you may already have or on personal preferences. Having this general overview, then, will help you to think about building the next set of skills from that point on. Based on the original Balfour framework, conversations with other growth professionals, and iterations since, these skills turn out to be similar to this list (in no particular order): Base Knowledge Layer Behavioral psychology: This theme is so important is that growth is about growing value for your customers. That means having an understanding of why they do what they do (and don’t do). To understand their pain points and the goals they want to achieve, you simply have to have a knowledge of behavioral psychology. You could think of this area as an extension of the process of research for customer development as a way to understand your ideal customer better. It’s not much of a stretch to say that if you understand behavioral psychology, your ability to grow almost any product or service effectively increases dramatically. Branding/positioning/storytelling: Part of understanding your customers is also identifying the particular value of your product or service and communicating it in a way that resonates with them. The cliché is true: “If you build it for everyone, you build it for no one.” Here's how you learn about how your offering is different from your competitors in order to craft narratives that stand out from the crowd. This is hard to do because this set of skills is all about creating excitement around your company — in other words, it goes beyond excitement about the product itself. It’s the sum of the experience people have while interacting with your company along its many touch points. And because it’s not just one thing, it’s a difficult skill to master. Customer journey mapping: This area overlaps in many ways with building a growth model, but it's generally more detailed as you understand all the different ways people can experience your product and all the touch points involved, depending on where they came from and where they landed and all the combinations therein that ultimately lead them to value. Part of knowing how to do mapping correctly involves seeing how painful it can sometimes be for customers as they make their way along their journey; it's a great way to build empathy for your customers by designing better ways for them to reach their goals. Design/user experience design: As you start to understand the customer journey, you need to start putting that understanding into practice in the form of wireframes for subjects like onboarding flows, checkout flows, or even detailing how new features work. You obviously won’t turn into a design specialist, but you need to understand how aspects of design impact product, marketing, and growth as a whole. As you do more of this, you’ll start to develop the “good taste” necessary for understanding what great design and a great user experience look and feel like. Statistics fundamentals: Face it. You have to deal with numbers — a lot. When doing testing, it’s helpful to have a basic understanding of concepts like statistical significance, confidence intervals, p-tests, and sample sizes. And whether you know it already or not, you’ll create lots of spreadsheets where you track all sorts of numbers and goals. Basic HTML and CSS: You can find plenty of drag-and-drop templates to work with for all sorts of web design tools that you’re sure to use regularly. But soon you’ll realize that whenever you want to customize just a little, you’ll be pointed to the dreaded Advanced mode, which requires you to know at least some HTML or CSS. Having even basic familiarity here makes you more independent, whether it’s the layout of your email, landing pages, or even your blog. Marketing Foundation Layer Data and Analytics: Growth is nothing if not informed by data. Every tool you use will generate data, and you’ll have the task of stitching together all these pieces of data into a unified picture. So, understanding data analytics and how to integrate them is vital. Data is a true rabbit hole, so before you get sucked into all it can offer, you should know what data can and cannot show you and what good data analysis looks like. Only when you know what is happening and marry that with an understanding of why it’s happening can you optimize effectively. If you can learn to be consistent with what and how you measure data, the better positioned you’ll be in order to understand how to move key numbers in the right direction. As you gain more experience here, you’ll find that you'll want to slice your data in ways that just aren’t possible by using standard analytics tools. Having some basic SQL querying knowledge can help you get the data in the right format from your database. And even after that, you’ll likely want to manipulate the data in a spreadsheet to extract even more insights, so knowing what’s possible within Excel or comparable programs is useful as well. Conversion rate optimization (CRO): The CRO process and the tactics used will help you uncover the biggest obstacles in the way of your product’s growth and/or the largest opportunities to unlock that growth. Doing this results in more conversions or more people doing what you wanted them to do, be it signing up for your product or making more sales. This plays into every test you run across the customer journey, whether it’s within your product or with any acquisition channel. Funnel marketing: This area takes your knowledge of the customer journey to the next step, where you can start to get a deeper understanding of how and why people move through each stage of the journey. Here you’ll try to dig deeper into what it is exactly that tips someone over to becoming a customer or what keeps them coming back; as always, your goal is to continually improve the customer experience and the value you provide. Copywriting: Understanding your current customer’s psychology (as well as the psychology of potential customers) should inform everything you use to communicate about your product. This manifests itself in everything from ad copy to site copy and any content you generate within any channel. You don’t necessarily have to be an amazing copywriter if you have writers on your team, but you should be able to communicate messaging strategies to the writers if that’s the case. Testing and experiment design: Testing is an aspect of CRO, but it involves more than just running tests. This also goes to developing a growth mindset that is all about gaining insights. And, when you run tests, you need to design them properly so that you can extract the greatest level of learning, and the right kind of learning, from them. Pricing: It’s not uncommon to see pricing be a function of guesswork or simply following what someone else is doing. But, as with all other aspects of your business, this too requires a deliberate approach that’s a combination of qualitative and quantitative data. Decisions you make here, unsurprisingly, have a direct impact on your ability to survive and grow. Automation: As you start using more tools, you’ll quickly realize that managing them becomes a hassle. Coordinating data and interactions between them becomes critical, and doing it manually quickly stops being an option. Knowing how to automate these connections and interactions using purpose-built tools or application programming interfaces (APIs) will become a key advantage, because you’ll be able to make your entire system work more efficiently by automating repetitive, critical, and time-sensitive tasks like data transfers, data syncing, and reporting. Collaboration: As you and your team start running more tests, you’ll inevitably need assistance and involvement from other groups. Learning how to influence and bridge competing needs is invaluable, in not only keeping your testing program going but also spreading adoption company wide. Channel Expertise Layer Viral marketing: You grow by encouraging your users to refer other users. Public relations (PR): Your name is mentioned in traditional media outlets, like newspapers, magazines, and TV. Unconventional PR: Do something unexpected, like initiate publicity stunts or do business in a way that no one else does, in order to draw media attention. Search engine marketing (SEM): Show targeted ads to consumers who are already searching online in order to solve a particular problem. Social and display ads: Run ads on popular sites like YouTube or Facebook to reach new customers. Offline ads: Run ads on TV, radio, or billboards; in newspapers or magazines; or create flyers and other local advertisements. Search engine optimization: Ensure that your website shows up for key search results so that you can cheaply acquire lots of highly targeted traffic. Content marketing: Generate high-quality content that attracts an outsized level of attention from people interested in a topic, which in turn drives traffic to the business. Email marketing: After you have a prospect's attention, use email to convert, retain, and monetize them. Engineering as marketing: Build tools, calculators, or widgets that people can use for free, and in turn they give you their contact information so that you can nurture them into customers. Targeting blogs: Target niche blogs (or microinfluencers) to talk about your product to their highly engaged audiences. Partnerships: Partner up and create strategic relationships that produce a mutual benefit. Sales: Create sustainable and scalable processes to make it easier for customers to buy. This is mostly seen in the B2B world, where transactions can be complex. Affiliate programs: Enhance your distribution by allowing other people or companies to sell your product for a commission. Existing platforms: Piggyback on a huge platform like Facebook or an app store so that you leverage the attention of their large user base toward your product. Trade shows: Showcase your product to a specific industry and, more importantly, to decision-makers who attend such events. Offline events: Sponsor or host offline events — of any size — putting your product in front of a qualified audience in order to generate interest. Speaking engagements: Speak at high-profile events, which results in your product being promoted to an interested audience as a natural consequence of promoting you. Community building: Grow by forming passionate communities around your product. Given the number of channels out there, a question you may have is, “Which one(s) should I specialize in?? One way to do this is to start with channels for which you have a natural interest or aptitude. It’s just easier to stay motivated that way. If you then layer on what the needs of your business might be, that gives you another lens to further narrow your focus to a channel that might be a win-win for everyone. Start with one, but if you have the ability, try to develop expertise in two channels. That way, you can get a leg up on the competition, because most folks stick to a single channel. Here's another suggestion: if you have the flexibility to do so, focus on a new or emerging channel. In doing so, you become one of the first people to learn about the dynamics of that channel, which (if it becomes popular) you’ve become an “expert” in. And, because everyone else is rushing to catch up to where you are, there won’t be many people like you, further burnishing your brand as well as personal opportunities to leverage what you’ve learned. If you don’t have the flexibility to pick emerging channels, consider whether you can specialize in a couple of channels that people generally don’t do together. For example, people who are comfortable with paid marketing tend to focus only on the channels that allow them to do this well. But what if you were to excel at using AdWords and community building? This again positions you uniquely to be knowledgeable about how to leverage an unusual combination of channels towards specific growth goals.

Article / Updated 03-23-2020

The growth hacking process requires a dedicated individual to see the endeavor is managed appropriately. The basic growth process for any company follows the same pattern: Identify your North Star Metric (NSM). Analyze your growth model. Set objectives. Build a pool of ideas to test. Prioritize ideas to test. Test ideas. Analyze your tests. Systematize what works. Assume that, as a business, you’ve already identified your North Star Metric. It follows, then, that whoever will lead growth understands and agrees with it. (So Step 1 is taken care of.) The person’s first critical job is to understand and build out a model for your product to grow. (That’s Step 2.) This doesn’t have to be a complicated model, but it should contain the key growth levers and be able to show how pulling those levers will help your company grow. After they’ve identified a growth model, the next key function in this role is to choose which part of the growth model the company should focus on. (This is Step 3, setting objectives.) Given that much of the growth model in many cases encompasses the actual product experience in many cases, the growth lead tends to be a product person. This makes sense, because making the product experience itself more valuable is tightly correlated to understanding user motivations. What isn’t obvious here is that, along with the focus on whatever part of the growth model is being prioritized, there will also always be the need to test (and scale) new customer acquisition channels. No channel retains its efficiency forever, however. Growth leads are always looking ahead to find the next best channel, so as to not get caught flat-footed and stall growth. All other steps in the growth process focus on building a testing program. So the third key job entails not only the regular work of managing the testing process but also engaging cross-functional teams to participate in the program and creating a culture of learning company wide, if it is to be truly successful. It’s helpful if you have had some project (or product) management experience as the process is much the same with managing scope, resources, and time as part of your regular sprints. All these skills need to be learned, and there is no question that it takes hard work to develop mastery across the spread of knowledge you'd need to acquire in order to become truly proficient at growth. You should not be hiring for growth until you have achieved product-market fit. After your product has had some organic growth as a function of achieving product-market fit, hire your first growth person to take a systematic approach designed to build on that natural growth.