"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"
- Growth Hacker Marketing, page xxv
"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. It is instead, a way of thinking and looking at your business."- Growth Hacker Marketing, page xxix
To be a true growth hacker you must think more holistically and less about the nuts and bolts of performing your everyday tasks. While at the end of the day it’s all about increasing revenue, the initial impetus that spurs that growth comes from the desire to help make life easier.
The growth hacker knows their core audience—often times because they are a member of that audience. They understand the pain points, and they understand what the group will get excited about. The hard part is matching how to improve the product/service to further help their core audience. The easy part is “selling” it to them. For you Marketers out there, isn’t that a twist?
"You are, in effect, the translator who helps bridge the producers and the consumers so they are in alignment."- Growth Hacker Marketing, page 5
The new way of doing business is to break down the silos many large and small companies have built up over the years. If you look at how and why the startup craze is still thriving—it’s in part because these companies are so agile. They understand everyone in the company is a part of the Marketing team and therefore improving the product to address the needs of the customer becomes the number one priority.
“Product Market Fit is a feeling backed with data and information,” writs Holiday.
It’s no longer about creating products/services in a laboratory bubble. It’s about everyone in the company communicating about the customers’ needs and then solving them. Growth Hacking is the term that encompasses this concept, that everyone is invested in making the customer as happy as possible, and then helps evangelize the superiority of this product/service to those that care most about it.
The new wave of Marketing isn’t about throwing out the understanding of how and why customers behave the way they do, but applying a much more analytical and engineering mindset to the practice by helping to create the best product possible from the onset. In doing that it inherently becomes easier to market to the community that cares the most about it.
This shift in mindset from “I can sell anything” to “How can this product be improved?” is fundamentally mind-blowing.
How do you start? Some places to start would be:
"What growth hackers have mastered is the ability to grow and expand their businesses without having to chase down new customers."- Growth Hacker Marketing, page 48
It’s a well known fact that you make more money with retaining current customers than trying to acquire new ones. Customer loyalty will automatically get you new customers because your current customers will evangelize your product/service to their friends, who will be much more likely to purchase a product/service based upon a friend’s recommendation than through any ad you would ever run.
“According to Bain & Company,” writes Holiday, “a 5 percent increase in customer retention can mean a 30% increase in profitability for the company. And according to Market Metrics, the probability of selling to an existing customer is 60 to 70 percent, while to a new prospect it’s just 5 to 20 percent.”
Growth hacking is about maximizing ROI by spending your time, effort and resources only on things that are the most effective. The most effective method to creating a better product is by simply using the Socratic method repeatedly:
Successful growth hackers then take it one step further and apply this method to their customers and ask:
Granted the book uses mainly product-based companies, and mostly online software product companies as examples, but it’s pretty easy to see how this would work for service based industries as well.
Overall this is a great introduction into understanding Growth Hacking regardless of your profession. For marketers, I think it’s a great book to get your creative juices flowing. It’s not a tactical book, but one that uses real life examples of how companies we all know were able to achieve great things using and trusting the data they had about their customers’ needs.
Ryan Holiday is a media strategist and prominent writer on strategy and business. After dropping out of college at 19 to apprentice under Robert Greene, author of The 48 Laws of Power, he went on to advise many bestselling authors and multiplatinum musicians. He served as director of marketing at American Apparel for many years, where his work was internationally known. His campaigns have been used as case studies by Twitter, YouTube, and Google and written about in AdAge, the New York Times, Gawker and Fast Company. His first book, Trust Me I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator–which the Financial Times called an “astonishing, disturbing book” was a debut bestseller and is now taught in colleges around the world. His subsequent books, Growth Hacker Marketing and The Obstacle is the Way were both published by Penguin/Portfolio.
