Kindle Notes & Highlights
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August 2 - October 22, 2017
Recent societal and technological developments have created an urgent need for online businesses to focus on retention and engagement.
They all used A/B tests, viral product features, creative e-mail marketing, landing pages, and Open Graph to grow their user bases from zero to millions.
when we're talking about hacking growth, we're talking about creative approaches to growing businesses.
The idea behind growth hacking is to find a way to cut through the clutter and reach the target audience through non-traditional marketing techniques and product development.
growth hacker is interested in a holistic approach to business that focuses on creating a pattern of viral growth that, once set in motion, will expand at an exponential rate,
The first lesson to take away from growth hackers is to have a sense of humor about your work.
AARRR stands for Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and Revenue.
Provide useful, high-quality content to consumers in your niche and you'll earn their trust. Leverage SEO to get the most out of your content marketing efforts.
Evaluate how consumers use your product, experiment, and recreate until your find a strategy that attracts and retains long-term users.
simply crafting a strong ad or choosing colors, a marketer has to know all about content propagation, social media, user experience, user expectations, customer behavior, consumer psychology—the
subjects to study
Strip down your home page to the bare essentials.
first growth hacking technique
Integrate your product with a business that has a large user base.
Speed up your web site. If your web page is taking a long time to load, you're going to lose customers, plain and simple.
Actually, this is a marketing concept known as "social proof."
helps us navigate uncertainty and reassures us that we're doing the right thing in the right way.
They're passionate about data. Not "data"
Growth hackers are fascinated by questions others wouldn't think to ask
When we talk about growth hacking as an interdisciplinary technique, it's because it's not purely scientific.
Good luck developing a "one-size-fits-all" marketing strategy in 2013. Today’s buzzwords are "immersion," "personalization," "experience," and "content," all because of the advent of growth hacking.
Growth over budgets.
Viral is everything.
What this means is in order to achieve exponential growth, you're going to have to skip the low-hanging fruit.
growth hacker's sweet spot in the funnel is user retention. This is the channel that is least saturated and the key to maximizing returns both up and down the funnel. As
The whole key to hacking growth is to find previously undiscovered distribution advantages that your company can leverage.
the motions; it's a deep, abiding knowledge of the craft,
the beginning. As you get ready to embark on your 10,000
invites you're presenting to potential users. There are usually seven steps in a conversion funnel, but your business might have more or less, depending on your product. Here's an example:
The equation: New users + reengaged users – churned users. Insert this equation into the graph and you can track your daily net change.
need to track daily
Core Daily Actives metric comes into play. Your CDAs are people who use your service on a regular basis, regular being five times a month.
A growth hacker has two major responsibilities: planning and modeling and executing projects.
you can (and should) be obsessive about the data and research how businesses similar to yours execute their growth strategies in order to help you construct a successful model.
The paper started offering free WiFi (and a free month of the newspaper) to densely populated areas in New York City in exchange for registering on their simple landing page.
wsj - free wifi
The first thing they did was to add an e-mail notification when a person received a new follower.
twitter - email notifications
LivingSocial's idea was to incentivize their users by offering them a free product or service if they could get three friends to buy the same product or service.
livingsocial - referral
Customers respond better to a graphic than an underlined word.
Location, language, size, color, contrast—test everything you can think of—in order to find the configuration that will enable you to fully optimize your conversion rate.
Use social pressure around calls-to-action.Facebook's vast wealth of user data allowed them to use social pressure to galvanize their calls-to-action.
Test images.
Go light on text. Preach about your company everywhere you go; use words only when necessary. Make sure any text on your page is clear, concise, and as brief as possible.
Utilize a minimalist design and heavy functionality.
Go international.
Twitter was a great little startup (now it's a great big startup) that hacked humongous growth early on by employing a variety of tactics, specifically, user experience optimization, extensive testing, and creative e-mail contact.
The longer someone uses a site, the more likely they are to refer a friend, so in a sense, retention is acquisition. This is one the key concepts behind virality.
You need to have a granular understanding of your product or service.
It takes a deep understanding of psychology and a ton of self-knowledge to cultivate a thorough understanding of why the product exists, who it's helping, and how it will provide value to your customers, or you won’t be able to design effective models and experiments to get consumers to the "a-ha moment."
Everybody's product has sharing functionality.
Consumers are lazy, selfish, and vain.
Laziness:
Selfishness: When people use social media, they promote themselves or people whose attention they’re trying to gain.
Vanity: People talk about themselves, and they like to hear other people talk about them.
