Growth Hacker Marketing Quotes

“In the absence of big budgets, start-ups learned how to hack the system to build their companies.”2 Their hacking—which occurred right on my watch—had rethought marketing from the ground up, with none of the baggage or old assumptions. And now, their shortcuts, innovations, and backdoor solutions fly in the face of everything we’ve been taught.”
― Ryan Holiday, Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising

“The headline stood out clearly amid the online noise, as though it had been lobbed directly at me: “Growth Hacker Is the New VP [of] Marketing.” What?”
― Ryan Holiday, Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising

“I prefer the discipline of knowledge to the anarchy of ignorance. We pursue knowledge the way a pig pursues truffles. —DAVID OGILVY”
― Ryan Holiday, Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising

“Before he became the most brilliant and famous man in the ad business, David Ogilvy sold ovens door-to-door. Because of that, he never forgot that advertising is just a slightly more scalable form of creating demand than door-to-door sales.”
― Ryan Holiday, Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing and Advertising

“raw growth is great, but at the end of the day, we’re running businesses here. We want to turn stats into dollars.”
― Ryan Holiday, Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing and Advertising

“Virality isn’t luck. It’s not magic. And it’s not random. There’s a science behind why people talk and share. A recipe. A formula, even. —JONAH BERGER”
― Ryan Holiday, Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing and Advertising

“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.”
― Ryan Holiday, Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing and Advertising

“9. You can try to name a Planned Parenthood clinic after your client or pay D-list celebrities to say offensive things about themselves to get all sorts of publicity that promotes your book (OK, those stunts were mine).”
― Ryan Holiday, Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising

“1. You can create the aura of exclusivity with an invite-only feature (as Mailbox did). 2. You can create hundreds of fake profiles to make your service look more popular and active than it actually is—nothing draws a crowd like a crowd (as reddit did in its early days). 3. You can target a single service or platform and cater to it exclusively—essentially piggybacking off or even stealing someone else’s growth (as PayPal did with eBay). 4. You can launch for just a small group of people, own that market, and then move from host to host until your product spreads like a virus (which is what Facebook did by starting in colleges—first at Harvard—before taking on the rest of the population). 5. You can host cool events and drive your first users through the system manually (as Myspace, Yelp, and Udemy all did). 6. You can absolutely dominate the App Store because your product provides totally new features that everyone is dying for (which is what Instagram did—twenty-five thousand downloads on its first day—and later Snapchat). 7. You can bring on influential advisors and investors for their valuable audience and fame rather than their money (as About.me and Trippy did—a move that many start-ups have emulated). 8. You can set up a special sub-domain on your e-commerce site where a percentage of every purchase users make goes to a charity of their choice (which is what Amazon did with Smile.Amazon.com this year to great success, proving that even a successful company can find little growth hacks).”
― Ryan Holiday, Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising

“You need the kind of objectivity that makes you forget everything you’ve heard, clear the table, and do a factual study like a scientist would. —STEVE WOZNIAK”
― Ryan Holiday, Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising

“The movie marketing paradigm says throw an expensive premiere and hope that translates into ticket sales come opening weekend. A growth hacker says, “Hey, it’s the twenty-first century, and we can be a lot more technical about how we acquire and capture new customers.” The start-up world is full of companies taking clever hacks to drive their first set of customers into their sales funnel. The necessity of that jolt—needing to get it any way they can—has made start-ups very creative.”
― Ryan Holiday, Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising

“Uber, a car service start-up founded by Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp, has been giving out free rides during Austin’s SXSW conference for several years. During a single week, thousands of potential Uber customers—tech-obsessed, high-income young adults who cannot find a cab—are motivated to try out this service. One year Uber offered free rides. Another year, it offered BBQ delivery. Instead of spending millions on advertising or countless resources trying to reach these potential users in their respective cities, Uber just waited for the one week a year when they were all in one place and did something special. And Uber did this because a few years earlier they’d watched Twitter take SXSW by storm with a similar collaboration with the conference. This is thinking like a growth hacker—it’s how you get the most bang for your buck and how you get it from the right people.”
― Ryan Holiday, Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising

“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. If they are geeks, they are at TechCrunch or Hacker News or reddit or attending a handful of conferences every year. If they are fashionistas, they are regularly checking a handful of fashion blogs like Lookbook.nu or Hypebeast.”
― Ryan Holiday, Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising

“The race has changed. The prize and spoils no longer go to the person who makes it to market first. They go to the person who makes it to Product Market Fit first.”
― Ryan Holiday, Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising

“As Marc Andreessen—the entrepreneur behind Netscape, Opsware, and Ning who, in addition to running a major venture capital fund, happens to be on the board of directors for Facebook, eBay, and HP—explains it, companies need to “do whatever is required to get to product/market fit. Including changing out people, rewriting your product, moving into a different market, telling customers no when you don’t want to, telling customers yes when you don’t want to, raising that fourth round of highly dilutive venture capital—whatever is required.”10 In other words: everything is now on the table.”
― Ryan Holiday, Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising

“Amazon, for its part, has a couple of other easy suggestions for you if the advice “write a hypothetical press release” doesn’t quite work for your situation. Their CTO, Werner Vogels, suggests trying to write an FAQ for this product you’re developing. (That way you can address, in advance, potential user issues and questions.)9 Or try to define the crucial parts of the user experience by making mockups of pages, writing hypothetical case studies so you can actually start to see what it would look like and who it would work for and how. Finally, try writing the user manual, which as Werner explains usually has three parts: concepts, how-to, and reference. (Defining these means you understand your idea in and out from the customers perspective. Also, he says, if you have more than one type of user then write multiple manuals.)”
― Ryan Holiday, Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising

“In my experience, the books that tend to flop upon release are those where the author goes into a cave for a year to write it, then hands it off to the publisher for release. They hope for a hit that rarely comes. On the other hand, I have clients who blog extensively before publishing. They develop their book ideas based on the themes that they naturally gravitate toward but that also get the greatest response from readers. (One client sold a book proposal using a screenshot of Google queries to his site.) They test the ideas they’re writing about in the book on their blog and when they speak in front of groups. They ask readers what they’d like to see in the book. They judge topic ideas by how many comments a given post generates, by how many Facebook “shares” an article gets. They put potential title and cover ideas up online to test and receive feedback. They look to see what hot topics other influential bloggers are riding and find ways of addressing them in their book.* The latter achieves PMF; the former never does. One is growth hacking; the other, simply guessing.”
― Ryan Holiday, Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising

“Product Market Fit is a feeling backed with data and information.”
― Ryan Holiday, Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising

“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.”
― Ryan Holiday, Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising

“In other words, the best marketing decision you can make is to have a product or business that fulfills a real and compelling need for a real and defined group of people—no matter how much tweaking and refining this takes.”
― Ryan Holiday, Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising

“Yet for years, this was a scenario that marketers tolerated and accepted as part of the job. We all told ourselves that “you go to market with the product you have, not the one you want.” And then we wondered why our strategies failed—and why those failures were so expensive.”
― Ryan Holiday, Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising

“Make something people want. —PAUL GRAHAM”
― Ryan Holiday, Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising

“director of growth at StumbleUpon, put it best: growth hacking is more of a mindset than a tool kit.”
― Ryan Holiday, Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising

“how do you get, maintain, and multiply attention in a scalable and efficient way?”
― Ryan Holiday, Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising

“It was only a matter of time before someone smart came along and said, “It doesn’t have to be this way. The tools of the Internet and social media have made it possible to track, test, iterate, and improve marketing to the point where these enormous gambles are not only unnecessary, but insanely counterproductive.” That person was the first growth hacker.”
― Ryan Holiday, Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising

“Our first idea is a grand opening, a big launch, a press release, or major media coverage. We default to thinking we need an advertising budget. We want red carpet and celebrities. Most dangerously we assume we need to get as many customers as possible in a very short window of time—and if it doesn’t work right away, we consider the whole thing a failure (which, of course, we cannot afford). Our delusion is that we should be Transformers and not The Blair Witch Project. Needless to say, this is preposterous. Yet you and I have been taught, unquestionably, to follow it for years. What’s wrong with it? Well, for starters: most movies fail. Despite the glamour and the history of movie marketing, even after investing”
― Ryan Holiday, Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising

“There’s no business like show business. Yet, when it comes right down to it, that’s the industry every marketing team—no matter what business they’re actually in—pretends to be in when they’re launching something new. Deep down, I think anyone marketing or launching fantasizes that they are premiering a blockbuster movie. And this illusion shapes and warps every marketing decision we make. It feels good, but it’s so very wrong.”
― Ryan Holiday, Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising

“A growth hacker doesn’t see marketing as something one does but rather as something one builds into the product itself. The product is then kick-started, shared, and optimized (with these steps repeated multiple times) on its way to massive and rapid growth.”
― Ryan Holiday, Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising

“Whether you’re currently a marketing executive or a college grad about to enter the field—the first growth hackers have pioneered a new way. Some of their strategies are incredibly technical and complex. The strategies also change constantly; in fact, occasionally it might work only one time. This book is short because it sticks with the timeless parts. I also won’t weigh you down with heavy concepts like “cohort analysis” and “viral coefficients.”* Instead, we will focus on the mindset—it’s far and away the most important part. I start and end with my own experiences in this book, not because I am anyone special but because I think they illustrate a microcosm of the industry itself. The old way—where product development and”
― Ryan Holiday, Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising

“of being a great marketer. Growth hackers are a hybrid of marketer and coder, one who looks at the traditional question of “How do I get customers for my product?” and answers with A/B tests, landing pages, viral factor, email deliverability, and Open Graph. . . . The entire marketing team is being disrupted. Rather than a VP of Marketing with a bunch of non-technical marketers reporting to them, instead growth hackers are engineers leading teams of engineers.1 What the hell is a growth hacker? I thought. How could an engineer ever do my job? But then I added up the combined valuation of the few companies Chen mentioned as case studies—companies that had barely existed a few years ago.”
― Ryan Holiday, Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising