Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising

by Ryan Holiday

WHAT IS GROWTH HACKING? The end goal of every growth hacker is to build a self-perpetuating marketing machine that reaches millions by itself.

First Google built a superior product. Then it built excitement by making it invite-only. And by steadily increasing the number of invites allowed to its existing user base, Gmail spread from person to person until it became the most popular, and in many ways the best, free e-mail service.

A growth hacker is someone who has thrown out the playbook of traditional marketing and replaced it with only what is testable, trackable, and scalable. Their tools are e-mails, pay-per-click ads, blogs, and platform APIs instead of commercials, publicity, and money. While their marketing brethren chase vague notions like “branding” and “mind share,” growth hackers relentlessly pursue users and growth—and when they do it right, those users beget more users, who beget more users. They are the inventors, operators, and mechanics of their own self-sustaining and self-propagating growth machine that can take a start-up from nothing to something.

Marketing has always been about the same thing—who your customers are and where they are.”5 What growth hackers do is focus on the “who” and “where” more scientifically, in a more measurable way. Whereas marketing was once brand-based, with growth hacking it becomes metric and ROI driven. Suddenly, finding customers and getting attention for your product are no longer guessing games. But this is more than just marketing with better metrics; this is not just “direct marketing” with a new name. Growth hackers trace their roots back to programmers—and that’s how they see themselves. They are data scientists meets design fiends meets marketers. They welcome this information, process it and utilize it differently, and see it as desperately needed clarity in a world that has been dominated by gut instincts and artistic preference for too long. But they also add a strong acumen for strategy, for thinking big picture, and for leveraging platforms, unappreciated assets, and new ideas.

how do you get, maintain, and multiply attention in a scalable and efficient way?

growth hacking is more of a mindset than a tool kit. The good news: it’s as simple as changing your mindset.

Growth hacking is not a 1-2-3 sequence but instead a fluid process.* Growth hacking at its core means putting aside the notion that marketing is a self-contained act that begins toward the end of a company’s or a product’s development life cycle.

The new marketing mindset begins not a few weeks before launch but, in fact, during the development and design phase. So we will begin there, with the most important marketing decision you will likely ever make.

Make something people want. —PAUL GRAHAM

Airbnb had a good idea in 2007, but the actual value proposition, if we’re being honest, was a little mediocre. The founders could have spent all their time and energy trying to force the “let people crash on your floor and feed them breakfast” angle and creating a small business around it. Instead, they treated their product and service as something malleable and were able to change and improve it until they found its best iteration.

Some companies like Airbnb and Instragram spend a long time trying new iterations until they achieve what growth hackers call Product Market Fit (PMF); others find it right away. The end goal is the same, however, and it’s to have the product and its customers in perfect sync with each other. Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, explains that the best way to get to Product Market Fit is by starting with a “minimum viable product” and improving it based on feedback—as opposed to what most of us do, which is to try to launch publicly with what we think is our final, perfected product.

Isolating who your customers are, figuring out their needs, designing a product that will blow their minds—these are marketing decisions, not just development and design choices.

But the most effective method is simply the Socratic method. We must simply and repeatedly question every assumption. Who is this product for? Why would they use it? Why do I use it? Ask your customers questions, too: What is it that brought you to this product? What is holding you back from referring other people to it? What’s missing? What’s golden? Don’t ask random people or your friends—be scientific about it. Use tools like SurveyMonkey, Wufoo, Qualaroo, or even Google Docs, which make it very easy to offer surveys to some or all of your customers.

Growth hackers resist this temptation (or, more appropriate, this delusion). They opt, deliberately, to attract only the early adopters who make or break new tech services and seek to do it as cheaply as possible.

This means that our outward-facing marketing and PR efforts are needed simply to reach out to and capture, at the beginning, a group of highly interested, loyal, and fanatical users. Then we grow with and because of them.

“Whatever your current state is, it can be better.”22 Growth hackers know this, and that is why they are trying new iterations constantly.

they merged marketing into their product development; they kicked off growth with early adopters; they added viral elements; and then they relentlessly repeated these cycles, always guided by the data, with an eye toward optimization.

The thing about marketers—and, well, everyone—is that we’re wrong all the time. We think we make good gut decisions, but we don’t. The old model makes being wrong incredibly expensive.

Growth hacking doesn’t make our instincts any better, but it fundamentally reduces the costs of being wrong, giving us freedom to experiment and try new things.

SPECIAL BONUS If you would like the raw transcripts of the interviews I did with the world’s best growth hackers for this book, along with the research and materials I gathered, I’d like to send them to you. All you need to do is send an e-mail here: growthhackermarketing@gmail.com. I will also send you a chapter from my first book, Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator, which shows you how to get free publicity and press. As a bonus I’ll give you a redemption code for one month of free membership to Growth Hacker TV (a $29 value), which has hundreds of video interviews from the people who built everything from Facebook to the Huffington Post to Etsy.

This book didn’t start as a book. It started as a minimum viable product—a short, one-thousand-word article for Fast Company, in fact.

instead of following the traditional publishing playbook (it takes about fourteen months to produce a physical book) we started by publishing a digital single right away. Publishing Growth Hacker Marketing as a short eBook drastically reduced our cost and let us test the market, and more important, beat our competitors to market. The fact that many people are reading this book in print right now is because that experiment—that minimum viable product test—was validated. I was then able to edit, improve, and add to the original text of the eBook for the version you’re now reading. Based on the feedback of the thousands of original readers, I’m able to produce a better, more marketable product to ideally take this project to the next level. Now we can have our big launch because we know the audience is there.

Cheaply test your concept, improve it based on feedback, then launch.

So the digital single for this book was $2.99. That meant basically anyone could afford to give it a read. By making the cost really low and then overdelivering on content we set this book up to succeed. I had some other great hacks, too. Before launch I wrote approximately a dozen articles by adapting lessons and content from the book for publication on influential sites. Instead of charging for my writing as I usually do, I gave these away for free. The result was popular articles on MarketWatch, Betabeat, Fast Company, Thought Catalog, The Huffington Post, Shopify, Hacker News, SlideShare.com, reddit, Medium, and a few others. This content marketing strategy is now quite common in the start-up space because it’s cheap and available to anyone who can write decently. I also relied on my own ten-thousand-person mailing list, which I had built slowly over the past six years painstakingly recommending books by other authors. This list has some of the most die-hard book fans and rabid readers you can imagine. (For anyone who wants to sign up, you can do so here: http://www.ryanholiday.net/reading-newsletter.) Finally, I reached out to the growth hacker community, who was looking for a book that validated and championed its work. The most influential guys in the space, from Sean Ellis to Andrew Chen, all helped promote the book to their audiences on Twitter and Facebook, which helped get this project going. Lesson: Reduce barriers to entry; use targeted media and platforms to ...

Build your e-mail list!

Virality at its core is asking someone to spend their social capital recommending or linking or posting about you for free. But virality is not an accident. It is engineered.

growth hackers look for a viral coefficient (or “K factor”) greater than one. The term “K factor” is typically used in medicine to describe the contagion of disease. In the start-up world, the viral coefficient measures the number of new users that each existing user is able to convert. If each new user is bringing in, on average, more than one user, then the K factor is greater than one and your start-up is going viral. A product or business or piece of content will go viral only if it provokes a desire in people to spread it. On top of that, a growth hacker must facilitate and encourage its spread by adding tools and campaigns that enable virality. All of which is to say a simple truth that we try to deny too often: if you want to go viral, virality must be baked into your product.

Who are my ideal early adopters? How can I make my platform particularly enticing to them right now? Why is this service indispensable? Or how do I make it indispensable to them? Once they come on board, does the service provide/encourage/facilitate them inviting or bringing more users with them? How willing and prepared am I to improve based on the feedback and behavior of these users? What kind of crazy/cool thing can I do to get attention—something that, ideally, no one has ever done before?

Isn’t growth hacker marketing just an evolution of traditional marketing? It is not in the marketing industry’s DNA to be any of the following things, which are critical to growth hacking: In-house Lean/efficient Trackable Internal (that is product development) over external (public facing/attention seeking)

What are some key strategies to acquire your first 100K users with zero marketing budget? The best strategic marketing decision you can make is to have a product or business fulfill a real, compelling need for a real and defined group of people—no matter how much tweaking and refining this takes.

The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story by Michael Lewis

Billion Dollar Lessons: What You Can Learn from the Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last 25 Years by Paul B. Carroll and Chunka Mui Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices by Christopher Locke

BLOGS AND PERSONALITIES Andrew Chen’s essays http://andrewchen.co Noah Kagan’s blog http://okdork.com Patrick Vlaskovits http://vlaskovits.com/blog http://www.twitter.com/pv Jesse Farmer http://20bits.com Sean Ellis http://www.startup-marketing.com http://growthhackers.com Paul Graham’s essays http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html Aaron Ginn http://www.aginnt.com Josh Elman https://medium.com/@joshelman Or just follow most of these guys as they answer questions at: http://www.quora.com/Growth-Hacking

www.quora.com/What-is-Amazons-approach-to-product-development-and-product-management.

Werner Vogels, “Working Backwards,” November 1, 2006, www.allthingsdistributed.com/2006/11/working_backwards.html.