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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Sean Ellis
Started reading
July 4, 2018
an unconventional purpose: to craft novel methods for finding, reaching, and learning from customers in order to hone our targeting, grow our customer base, and get more value from our marketing dollars.
figuring out how to bring in more users, fast.
they soon plateaued, and I realized that ads were once again proving far too costly for the payoff—
At over $10,000 in ad spend per month, the customer acquisition costs no longer generated a positive return on the investment.
I got my marketing and engineering teams in a room to brainstorm ideas for how to change the landing page, to better communicate to customers that there was no “catch”—that LogMeIn did, in fact, offer a completely free version of the product.
healthy doses of out-of-the-box thinking, cross-company collaboration and problem solving, real-time market testing and experimentation (conducted at little or no cost), and a commitment to being nimble and responsive in acting on the results.
growth was achieved not with traditional advertising, but rather with a dash of programming smarts and on a shoestring budget.
build marketing into products themselves,
a rigorous approach to fueling rapid market growth through high-speed, cross-functional experimentation, for which I soon coined the term growth hacking.
all achieved with no traditional marketing spend, no banner ads, no paid promotions, no purchasing of email lists, and, in fact,
Mark Zuckerberg tasked the team to focus exclusively on experimenting with ways to break through that plateau. As the team racked up success after success, Zuckerberg saw that the investment in the new unit was paying off, and continued to add more manpower, enabling the team to experiment more and grow the site even faster.8
“Growth was not about hiring 10 people per country and putting them in the 20 most important countries and expecting it to grow. Growth was about engineer[ing] systems of scale and enabling our users to grow the product for us.” Johns has called it one of the most significant levers in scaling Facebook to the massive reach it enjoys today.
As Facebook’s user base was spreading, so was the growth hacking method (albeit on a much smaller scale). This was in part due to the number of Facebook employees who moved to new start-ups, including Quora, Uber, Asana, and Twitter, bringing these methods with them.
always had the theory that the success of sv are in part due to the mobility of talent between successful startups
a number of other companies including LinkedIn, Airbnb, and Yelp, were adopting similar experiment-driven approaches.
The team tried all sorts of ideas to grow the user base, all of which proved unsuccessful. That is, until they finally hit upon an untapped-growth gold mine with a brilliant growth hack, which has since become Silicon Valley legend. Using some sophisticated programming, and lots of experimentation to get it right, the team figured out a seamless way to cross-publish Airbnb listings on Craigslist, free of cost, so that whenever someone searched the popular classifieds site for a vacation rental, listings for properties on Airbnb popped up.
“Let’s be honest, a traditional marketer would not even be close to imagining the integration above—there’s too many technical details needed for it to happen. As a result, it could only have come out of the mind of an engineer tasked with the problem of acquiring more users from Craigslist.”10
By breaking down the traditional business silos and assembling cross-functional, collaborative teams that bring together staff with expertise in analytics, engineering, product management, and marketing, growth hacking allows companies to efficiently marry powerful data analysis and technical know-how with marketing savvy, to quickly devise more promising ways to fuel growth.
It is the solution to the misplaced, often quite stubborn, devotion to features or marketing approaches that don’t work, replacing wasteful, outdated, and unproven approaches with market-tested and data-driven alternatives.
immaculate
barraged
pernicious
A Harvard Business Review article about growth stalls reported that 87 percent of the companies in a large study had run into one or more periods in which growth slowed dramatically,
Among the causes of stalled growth they cite are problems “in managing the internal business processes for updating existing products and services and creating new ones,” and “premature core abandonment: the failure to fully exploit growth opportunities in the existing core business.”12 Growth hacking is a powerful solution to both of these problems.
cultures resistant to change,
In our experience, building a cross-functional growth team is the best—and most cost effective—way to do so.16
This highly inefficient cycle can take quarters or even years to complete, creating a debilitating lag in both responding to changing consumer demands or technological developments, and in rolling out the new capabilities, product improvements, and marketing channels through which to reach customers.
life is too short for this mode of working
fastest possible tempo.
Alex Schultz
Meanwhile, programming teams are spoon-fed requirements based on yesterday’s data, which meet outdated customer needs.
internal fragmentation that the most powerful growth ideas and opportunities are missed because dots can’t be connected.
“You need marketers who can appreciate what it takes to actually write software and you need data scientists who can really appreciate consumer insights and understand business problems,”
most companies are far too slow to adopt promising platforms, trapped by legacy planning, budgeting, and organizational norms.
evanescent early advantages are long gone.
many companies believe they can simply hire a single Lone Ranger to be the growth hacker, who will swoop in with a bag of magic tricks to bring growth to their business.
aboveboard.
customer survey tools, templates for prioritizing hacks to try to keep track of results, guidelines for running growth meetings, and scores of testable experiments in each area of focus,
make the marketing efforts more alluring and ensure they are conveying the value of the product most effectively. At some companies,
The head of marketing granted her permission to do so, but only after she first focused on user acquisition programs and only once they’d achieved their marketing team objectives.
the most frequent response to the question of why a customer hadn’t purchased the paid version took them completely by surprise.
Often, ideas for changes that aren’t part of the preestablished roadmap are met with resistance.
the changes being asked for are poorly conceived,
the team fundamentally altered the culture at BitTorrent from one constricted by traditional marketing and product silos to an open and collaborative one in which everyone, from marketers, to data analysts, to engineers and executives, was aligned around the fast-paced, collaborative growth hacking process.
the most damaging effects of departmental silos is that they slow innovation that drives growth.
the ability to collaborate in networks is more important than raw individual talent to innovativeness,”
Put simply, engineers and product designers are quite capable of coming up with marvelous ways to satisfy customers’ needs and desires, but they most often are simply not privy to what those needs and desires are.
he or she plays a role that is part manager, part product owner, and part scientist.
Dead ends, inconclusive tests, and abject duds are a part of the reality of growth experimentation.
product managers’ experience with customer surveying and interviewing, as well as with product development, allows them to make vital contributions to the idea generation and experimentation process.
Yet all too often they are left out of the ideation process as companies work to plan new products and features, or are relegated to simply taking orders, implementing whatever product and business teams have come up with.
What is essential is that data analysis not be farmed out to the intern who knows how to use Google Analytics or to a digital agency, to cite extreme but all too frequent realities.
