By Ryan Holiday
“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 deliver-ability, and Open Graph…” xv
“P.S.: I love you. Get your free e-mail at Hotmail” – Tim Draper. How Hotmail grew virally. Then google followed suit by building a superior product then making it scarce as in “invite only”. xxii
“Make something people want” – Paul Graham 1
Product Market Fit – you need to make sure producers and consumers are in alignment. So make sure you don’ t have a mediocre product. Use Eric Ries’s MVP model first to quickly move to market and test viability before launch. Get feedback and adjust. Amazon’s approach to this is “working backwards from the customer” (Ian McAllister).
Amazon encourages product managers to think like Oprah – as in would she shout out this product and give it for free to all of her customers??
Blog extensively before publishing. Test ideas to audience first. Track how many Facebook shares. A/B test titles and covers. Write a hypothetical press release.
Try writing a user manual FIRST. Which includes concepts, how to, and reference. 8
Use Google, Optimizely, KISSmetrics, SurveyMonkey, Wufoo, Qualaroo, Google Docs to offer customer surveys for feedback. 11-12
Growth hackers must pull people in. You cannot expect them to just come to you. 16
Dropbox used Digg, Slashdot, and reddit to post content/video. 17
You can do this too. Use Quora, Hackernews, reddit, write block posts, HALO, exclusivity (like Pack) use fake profiles (crowds draw a crowd), use a small group and own the market then move on like a virus (FB @ Harvard), host cool events, dominate the App store, bring in influential advisors, set up a subdomain and donate to charity. 24-26
“Focusing on customer acquisition over ‘awareness’ takes discipline…At a certain scale, awareness/brand building makes sense. But for the first year or two it’s a total waste of money.” – Sean Ellis/Patrick Vlaskovits 28
“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. 31
Only a specific type of product or business or piece will go viral – it not only has to be worth spreading, it has to provoke a desire in people that spread it. You need to ask people to spend their social capital recommending or linking or posting about you FOR FREE. 32|
Virality CANNOT be left to chance. It isn’t something that is left for after the fact. We can’t wait to be pleasantly surprised by it. The product must be worth sharing and you must encourage the spreading by adding tools and campaigns that enable virality.
You cannot just throw up a “like on Facebook” button and expect it to spread. 34
Once you get people/users to SEE your product you can’t expect them to be evangelists of it either. You must provide incentives on your platform to do so. (Dropbox free gigs if you pass to friend). 40
Focus on customer retention more than customer acquisition. Don’t become Friendster/Myspace
Bain & Co – a 5% increase in customer retention means 30% increase in profitability for a co. 54
“Retention trumps acquisition” – Bronson Taylor 55
If you want to write a book:
1. Start with MVP. 1000 word blog post article
2. Then do an e-book
3. Then write the full book
4. Price it CHEAP 2.99 so EVERYONE can read it – virality
5. Before launch write a BUNCH or free articles and post it in your community to build anticipation up.
6. Interview influencers in your space (Mike Matthews types)
7. Create a positive disparity between price expectation and the product you deliver (OVER DELIVER)
8. Write with short actionable bites. If someone picked up book and turned to a single page they could get something out of it.
Build an email list – this is the easiest most effective marketing tool, period! 76
If your bounce rate is too high, you website either sucks or you are targeting the wrong audience. 81
Virality – person to person spread of a product. Asking someone to spend their social capital recommending or linking or posting about you for FREE. The viral coefficient (K factor) must be greater than 1. (K factor is used in medicine for contagion or disease) This means each user must bring in more than 1 other user then your start up is going viral. 88
Your product should elicit a “holy shit” from its users. 94