Recently, I finished reading Growth Hacker Marketing book by Ryan Holiday. The book (around 100 pages) was a great introduction to growth hacking and how to use it for building the right product for the right people. Yep, this is what I said “building the product”.
If you ask yourself: what is the link between Growth Hacking (as a Marketing thing) and building the product?. Then this book will explain how growth hacking enters the design phase of the product. It’s not just that bunch of marketing activities that start before few days or weeks before launch.
For me as a guy who is interested in entrepreneurial skills development. This book helped me understand the growth hacking mindset and the core concept with practical tools and techniques that are used by many entrepreneurs, startups and enterprise companies.
The book itself is an example of a product that was developed with growth hacking practices. So whether your product is physical or digital, a book, a blog, an App or a T-Shirts e-commerce website, growth hacking will help you grow.
The introduction of the book
The book tells Ryan’s story and how he started his journey moving from traditional marketing mindset to growth hacking mindset.
The new marketing mindset is involved in product development to build a self-growing product that reaches millions of users. it’s not just an advertising campaign, billboard ads or getting a celebrity to use the product.
One of the first examples of growth hacking case studies is Hotmail. Hotmail team decided to grow their free web-mail service by a free unique idea at that time. They simply decided to put “Get your free e-mail at Hotmail” link at the bottom of each message. Instead of doing some billboard Ads, the email messages were working like advertisements for the service.
What I learned is:
- Growing the number of users is in the core of your product itself.
- It’s not just a campaign or any other separated activity. Growth Hacking is a mindset and a way of thinking of your product and how it will go viral by itself.
Product Market Fit
In this chapter, Ryan explains the product market fit which means building the product that the people need and want. To be able to determine your product market fit, you need to listen to your customer feedback.
Ryan quoted Eric Ries*, author of The Lean Startup, that explained the best way to get to Product-Market Fit is by starting a “minimum viable product” and improving it based on the feedback. To be able to get the feedback you need tools that help you understand the customer behaviors and analyze them so you can improve and reiterate.
Examples of the tools: Google Analytics, Optimizely, KISSmetrics, SurveyMonkey, Wufoo and Qualaroo.
What I learned is :
- Finding the Product Market Fit is neither a guessing game nor assumptions. It may start with assumptions that must be backed with data and information comes from the customers’ usage.
- When you back your decision with customers data, be careful don’t be prey for the vanity metrics. The number of downloads or the number of your site visitors is not the only metrics that you need to focus on.
- You need to know who is using your service, what part of the service, which time, when and why. Ask more important questions.
Finding Your Growth Hack Way
You have to find creative and new ways to promote your product. Mainly, by using cheap and effective ways that reach your prospects. For example, Dropbox founders published a funny video that explains to the users their service.
They didn’t even hire a production company, they just created the simple right video for the right people and they posted it in Digg, Slashdot and Reddit. I’m not sure if this is the video or not, please check it here and tell me.
Remember that not all people are the right people so try to attract the early adopters who are very interested in trying your new service or product.
What I learned is
- There should be always cheap and effective ways to tell your prospects about your product and service.
Going Viral
Going viral in its core is to depend on your users to spread your product for free!. Simply the product must be worth sharing and you should provide the user with tools and ways to easily share your product.
For example, Dropbox.com referral program and link account to Social Network. They offered the user a simple way to invite their friends and get free storage as a bonus.
Close The Loop
After the customers sign up for the product, It’s critical to know which users who are really using the product and grow them. This mainly comes from improving the product and keep providing the users with high-quality service until users can’t live without your product.
What I learned is:
- Increase your conversion rate: the number of people who match your metric(s) of the usage of the service divided by the number of people who signed up for. e.g: number of people who paid for your product divided by people who just downloaded your app and signed up.
- Decrease the bounce rate of your product : the bounce rate of a website is the number of people who visited it and left it after checking the first page they landed in.
Final Word (Conclusion)
- Growth hacking means marketing team and product development team will help to build a self-growing product together.
- Going viral is a science, not a guess. You use your customers feedback to adapt and improve your product.
- Through Iterations and Testing Customers’ Feedback , you build something your customers need.
- Don’t be a prey of vanity metrics like number of downloads.
- Your users will advertise your product if it provides high-quality value for them and this is the core of any growth hacking technique (high-quality product)
Other Growth Hacking References
- The definitive guide to growth hacking
- What is growth hacking: this post is worth reading!
This article is originally written in 11 of Nov 2017 .