Growth Hacking Engine V 1.1.pdf

GROWTH HACKING EGROWTH NGINE HACKING ENGINE By: Mohammed Hanafy

B y: M ohammed Hanaf y

AGENDA CH1

CH2

CH3

CH4

WHAT’S GROWTH HACKING

THE PROFILE OF A GROWTH HACKER

THE GROWTH HACKING PROCESS

THE GROWTH HACKER FUNNEL VS FLYWHEEL

AGENDA CH5

CH6

CH7

CH8

PULL TACTICS FOR GETTING VISITORS

PUSH TACTICS FOR GETTING VISITORS

PRODUCT TACTICS FOR GETTING VISITORS

HOW TO ACTIVATE MEMBERS

AGENDA CH9

CH10

HOW TO RETAIN USERS

PRODUCT AND GROWTH WHAT YOU NEED TO DO

CH11

PRODUCT AND GROWTH WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

CH12

TOOLS, TERMINOLOGY and FAQs

HELLO! ▸Mohammed Hanafy ▸Egyptian entrepreneur and operations expert with a

passion for building and scaling startups. former G.C.C of Careem Egy, OP. Director of VOO, Former national director of International Relations and national director of talent management for AIESEC in Kuwait. Former manager board of advisors for AIESEC Indiana state university in USA, Former Deputy CEO of the National institute of Kuwait and Former SKN Startup Co-Founder and Operations Director, and Current Operations Director for Gereeb Company. [email protected] [email protected]

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SPECIAL THANK YOU To the Person who always stood by me, support me and always pushes me forward to my glory. My efforts always go to you. I gift this work and this piece of awesomeness to you.

CHAPTER 1 WHAT’S GROWTH HACKING

WHAT’S GROWTH HACKING Extreme Uncertainty

In an environment of extreme uncertainty, we’re talking about the fact that:

You don’t necessarily know who exactly wants to buy your product You don’t know exactly how to write the copy of the pages of your website

And you need to test hundreds of different things to figure out what is working and double down, and what’s not working and shut it off. And if you’re testing hundreds of different things you need to figure out what works for cheap. You’re not going to go running Super Bowl ads, you’re not going to be on TV at all. And that means that you’re probably going to turn to the internet.

RESOURCES

The Definition of Growth Hacking

Growth Hacking as Business

To define growth hacking, we should first define the two words that compose the term.

“Growth Hacking” is a new form of marketing that uses social metrics, analytical thinking, and creativity to market and sell products. Undoubtedly, the main objective of adapting the Growth Hacking approach is to reach the maximum number of potential customers and increase sales accordingly.

Growth is defined by dictionary.com as: “the act or process, or a manner of growing; development; gradual increase.” Wikipedia defines growth as follows: “Growth refers to a positive change in size, often over a period of time. Growth can occur as a stage of maturation or a process toward fullness or fulfillment. It can also perpetuate endlessly.” Hacking, hack or hacker. Dictionary.com defines hack as: “to modify (a computer program or electronic device) or write (a program) in a skillful or clever way “

In various cases, Growth Hackers perform their best in business by using online marketing activities such as, website analytics, search engine optimization, and content marketing while focusing on innovative and lowcost alternatives. The result? These high achievers leave the traditional marketing strategies behind, and focus entirely on viral marketing, social media, and other forms of modern marketing techniques to create and retain customers for life!

What’s Growth Hacking

History of Growth Hacking

One of the challenges of this memoire is to put a definition on the term growth hacking.

THE HISTORY of growth hacking is rather short since the term has been invented in 2010 by Sean Ellis, but earlier marketing actions have been called growth hacks as early as mid-1990s. We will review the birth, development and the current trends about growth hacking.

Since its first mention, the term has been under great controversy about whether it was an actual disruptive movement that was going to last, or about who growth hackers are. We will attempt to clarify the subject with the following research and findings.

Birth of the term Growth Hacking In this first blog post, Ellis defined a growth hacker as being “a The term Growth hacker was first introduced by Sean Ellis in 2010. Ellis helped many startups to reach high level of growth and become sustainable and even successful, two of them reaching IPOs3, including Dropbox. He was deeply focused on accelerating growth for these startups, and managed to reach his goals before moving on to another startup. But when he had to find a replacement for his position, he faced only finding regular marketing candidates that were not relevant to what the position required. This is when he asked for “growth hackers”. He posted the very first blog article called “Find a Growth Hacker for Your Startup” published July 26th 2010, and created the position that was about to become a revolution in marketing for startups.

person whose true north is growth”4. Required skills are to have entrepreneurial drive, to be creative, discipline and a mind for analytics, with single purpose of achieving sustainable growth.

❑Growth Marketing

So… IS IT GROWTH HACKING or GROWTH MARKETING ?

is when you focus all of your business efforts on growing an audience (or community) as fast as possible in an environment of extreme uncertainty, on a limited budget. So growth marketing is simply focusing on growing an audience instead of selling a product

Growth Hacking Growth Marketing

vs

❑Growth Hacking is finding an underutilized strategy for acquiring [your core metric] at an unexpectedly low cost per acquisition. RESOURCES

Growth Marketer

So a Growth Marketer is… A Growth marketer is constantly testing channels for their most successful metrics and cost of [metric] acquisition (CA[m]) in order to find the best way to get traction, and grow their business.

Growth Marketing Metrics

And all of this is specifically metric driven. But even more specifically, driven by the scientific method, the buildmeasure-learn method, the lean startup method, whatever you want to call it… So growth marketing is all about growing an audience, which then translates, of course, to growing a product, growing a business, growing sales.

RESOURCES

Growth Hacking, however…

So if that’s growth marketing, then why do you constantly hear the phrase “growth hacking?” Well, because more people want to be growth hackers than growth marketers. Finding a “sick trick” to double my Facebook following is much more impressive than the reality of growth marketing… Whether that’s 100 more email sign-ups or 200 more website visits, growth hacking is clearly about one SPECIFIC strategy that makes one large and “unexpected” benefit to one core metric in a short period of time, and usually for a low cost per acquisition. This means that when you read about a growth hack, it will be (slightly) less effective than when you invent one yourself. And a year from now, it may not even work. This is typical of the startup ecosystem and should only encourage you to find more creative ways to market and growth hack your business, using blog posts and articles as inspiration. RESOURCES

In order for you to truly be “growth hacking” you need to:

In Order to be a Growth Hacker

Be a growth marketer - which means, you need to have turned ALL of your business efforts towards growing an audience through a specific channel. You must only care about your core 1 metric - either follows, views, or most commonly email subscribers. You must be running a well thought out growth test.

So, growth marketing is the broader concept that you need to grow an audience and test various channels, whereas growth hacking is literally executing a specific tactic, on a specific channel, that grows that audience (and usually for a very cheap price).

Growth Marketing vs Growth Hacking

GROWTH MARKETING is slow and steady, in a sense, and

GROWTH HACKING is fast spurts of spontaneous growth. Tortoise vs. hare. A growth hacker is not a replacement for a marketer. A growth hacker is not better than a marketer. A growth hacker is just different than a marketer. To use the most succinct definition from Sean’s Post, “ ”. RESOURCES

Marketers are important, but early in a startup you need someone with a narrower focus on growth. Every decision that a growth hacker makes is informed by growth. Every strategy, every tactic, and every initiative, is attempted in the hopes of growing. Growth is the sun that a growth hacker revolves around. Of course, traditional marketers care about growth too, but not to the same extent. Remember, the power of a growth hacker is in their obsessive focus on a singular goal. By ignoring almost everything, they can achieve the one task that matters most early on. This absolute focus on growth has given rise to a number of methods, tools, and best practices, that simply didn’t exist in the traditional marketing repertoire, and as time passes the chasm between the two discipline deepens

“ A traditional marketer has a very broad focus, and while their skill set is extremely valuable, it is not as necessary early in a startups life. In the first phase of a startup you don’t need someone to “build and manage a marketing team” or “manage outside vendors” or even “establish a strategic marketing plan to achieve corporate objectives” or many of the other things that marketers are tasked with doing. Early in a startup you need one thing. Growth.

”

Sean Ellis “The first who introduced the term of growth hacking

GROWTH HACKING

GROWTH HACKING

How do I get more users?

VIRAL GROWTH

VIRAL GROWTH

Product management

Landing page optimization Analytics

SEO

Email marketing

Others PR

Onboarding UX

Behavioral economics

Growth Hacking Examples: Dropbox & AIRBnB Dropbox who use the refer-a-friend for free space campaign to help increase the growth to twenty percent per month. What made this so clever was that dropbox realized that rather than pay google AdWords 350 dollars for customer they could simply leverage the cheap cost of storage space.Giving out free space was cheap and everyone referred everyone for it.

Another great example is Airbnb who after some clever reverse-engineering allowed their users to auto post the ads on Craigslist without the approval of Craigslist. This was ingenious! AirB&B knew that a huge portion of their target market gathered on craigslist and tapping into it skyrocketed their growth

IS GROWTH HACKING FOR STARTUPS ONLY?

Because of examples like these Growth Hacking seems to be associated firmly with startups. But I don't really agree with that notion. Let's break down the term. Growth - Hacking.

Growth: “The process of increasing in physical size” Now, in regard to ‘Hacking’ you're probably thinking software hacking. I understand why but I'd like to subscribe to something different:

Hacker: Someone who is willing to skirt or break the rules to achieve a singular goal.

Product Market Fit First - Growth Hacking Second! Growth Hacking isn't really possible if your product hasn't picked up stride yet. Think of it as trying to pour gasoline onto a fire. The fire is your product. The gasoline is your Growth Hack. If there aren't any flames.. The fuel isn't really going to do much, is it? So before anything else validate your product and find a product market fit. Once you do, you can go out there to find your gasoline.

Growth Hacking Ecosystem Christmas PRESENTATION LOREM IPSUM DOLOR SIT AMET

Portfolio Presentation

Since growth hacking takes its roots from the lean startup, which is dedicated to high tech startups, growth hacking also is deeply tied to this ecosystem. We will analyze why and how growth hacking is a part of the startup ecosystem and of the technological ecosystem.

STARTUP ECOSYSTEM Growth Hacking was born in startups, because of their needs to develop quickly in order to survive. Now startups have embraced growth hacking. Startups need to implement growth hacking techniques in order to not only grow, but differentiate from the competition. They need to access market quickly and to grow their user base. Depending on the kind of funding, and on their own objectives, startups can focus either on growing their user base, or attempt to become profitable as early as possible. But growth hacking does have a prerequisite: the product market fit. When a startup as attained product market fit, then it can start using growth hacking to attract and retain users. “Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market” according to Marc Andreessen, who first introduced the term.

Startups and growth hacking share many values. For example, they share risk taking. Both rely on innovative ways to address a specific issue or need. They also share the “fail fast” mindset under which it is better to make tests and be ready to fail fast so other tests can be implemented, and so on, until something positive eventually come out of it.

CHAPTER 2 THE PROFILE OF A GROWTH HACKER

THE PROFILE OF A GROWTH HACKER

As this new world of growth hacking comes to prominence, and jobs begin to open up, individuals who are enticed by the possibility will wonder if they have what it takes to be a growth hacker. As with any career, certain kinds of individuals will flourish more than others. But before getting into that let’s debunk a few myths.

What is so good about the intelligence of growth hackers is that they have their understanding of figuring things out analytically. Almost everything carried out by growth hackers have something common, i.e. analytics. For instance, with analytics, it is not about how appealing your ad looks when placed on the billboard. What matters the most is the increased number of sales generated from that ad, which can be determined only if you use analytics.

GROWTH HACKERS ARE ANALYTICAL

ANALYTICS KEEP GROWTH HACKERS HONEST

Here are some of the ways that growth hackers use analytics: The world of marketing has been a place of feelings and emotions for quite some time. What was the ROI of the billboard in Times Square? Who knows, but it looks cool, right? Times have changed. Now it doesn’t matter how charismatic you are in a meeting, or how powerful your ideas seem, or how many sheep in upper management signed off on the campaign The analytics will uncover your awesomeness or your daftness. Period.

GROWTH HACKERS ARE ANALYTICAL

ANALYTICS SHIFT THE FOCUS OF GROWTH HACKERS

When you have systems that are tracking your product and activities, the numbers have a way of shifting your focus in unforeseen ways. You might have never dreamed of spending more resources on your referral loop. It might have been a throw away feature that you put in the product just to see what would happen. Then, after you dig into the data, you realize that over 20% of all new signups are coming from this loop, and their lifetime value is higher than your average user. You know that you can make the loop much more efficient, so you change the focus of your team for the next two weeks to focus on this feature. Analytics can help stack rank your to-do list in interesting ways.

GROWTH HACKERS ARE ANALYTICAL

ANALYTICS MAKE SUCCESS REPEATABLE When you don't take analytics seriously you can't efficiently repeat past successes. If all you know is that the company made more money in Q4 than in Q3, then you know nothing. was Q4 better? Were there more users signing up for your product, or did you just convert higher numbers of those that did sign up. Was there a particular feature that began to be used because of a recent redesign? Did the AdWords campaign finally began to have a positive ROI because a competitor who bidded up the cost per click stopped running Google ads? If you know what is leading to your success then you can repeat what is working (and stop what isn't working). Growth Hackers Are Analytical

ANALYTICS PREDICT THE FUTURE FOR GROWTH HACKERS Companies make bets on the future everyday. They guess what the competition will do. They guess what the market will want. They guess at ways to skate to where the puck is going, instead of where it’s been. They guess. Let me be clear, the future will always be a guess to some extent, but inductive reasoning based on analytics allow us to make informed decisions about tomorrow, based on yesterday’s data. Will the sun rise tomorrow? Technically, there is not a deductive way to know, but inductively we can reason that it will since it always has. When you look at your charts and there is clearly a line moving in a particular direction there is no guarantee that it will stay the course, but if other factors remain the same, it probably will. This isn’t an exact science, but it’s better than guessing. Growth Hackers Are Analytical

GROWTH HACKERS ARE T-SHAPED

T-SHAPE When it comes to the skills possessed by a growth hacker, they need to be shaped like a Capital T. Here's what I mean. The flat horizontal part at the top of the T rep- resents all the various skills and disciplines that a growth hacker needs to be familiar with. You need to know at least something about many different things. You need to know a little about psychology. You need to know a little about viral loops. You need to know a little about drip email campaigns. You need to know a little about... well, you get the picture. There shouldn't be anything mentioned in this book that you couldn't hold a conversation about.

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GROWTH HACKERS ARE T-SHAPED

T-SHAPE But that's not enough. You also need to have a few skills that create the vertical line of the T. These are the skills where you dominate. You are the expert in these areas. You go deep. Maybe you know everything about onboarding and 85% of everyone that signs up for your product gets to the MHX (must have experience) which keeps churn down. This can make up for a lot of mistakes. If you can take any piece of the funnel and make it drastically more effcient then you have something to begin building your growth around. You need a few things that you're awesome at to even have a chance at scaling.

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GROWTH HACKERS ARE T-SHAPED

V-SHAPE However, here is what separates the professionals from everyone else. Professionals are not happy with a T-shape. They want a V-shape. As tbey begin to master more and more disciplines they don't have one or vertical lines representing deep knowledge, but rather 10 or 20. This creates a V. Growth hacking seems mysterious, but it really isn’t. A growth hacker is less like an illusionist and more like a marathoner. There’s no smoke and mirrors here, but rather a lot of hard work to master the skills that pertain to growth.

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GROWTH HACKERS ARE RIGHT BRAINED Yes, they are creative! Though they spend their lives dealing with analytics, they make correct use of their right brain too. Obviously, this is something without which they cannot survive in business. So, if you want to ensure that your product is preferred by your customers the most, you need to come up with creative ideas to maintain the image of your product.

CURIOSITY KILLED THE CAT, BUT... A lack of curiosity will kill your product. Growth hackers have an urge to think new thoughts and try new things. If you want to follow a manual that outlines every procedure for your job then become a middle manager. If you want to follow orders then join the army. If you want to grow a product then get curious.

THE SQUISHY, EPHEMERAL, FLUFFY STUFF IS NOT YOUR ENEMY A lack of curiosity Logicians and mathematicians crave a binary world. Everything would be yes or no. The data would be clear. The plan would obvious. But alas, we live in a world of grey, where “sort of” and “maybe” are the answers to many questions. The growth hacker must never forget this..

In the world of Growth Hacking, there is no word as “Shortcut.” Secondly, becoming a growth hacker does not require you to be a genius. Growth hackers believe that they are not going to get anything without putting maximum efforts. So, they perform their best by applying the right tools and techniques to increase user growth within a short time period.

IT’S THE 213TH TACTIC THAT WILL PROBABLY WORK, NOT THE 7TH

GROWTH HACKERS ARE OBESSIVE

If growth hacking was just a matter of trying five or ten things and then watching the users signup and the money roll in, then there would be no need for a book like this. The truth is that growth hacking only looks simple once you've found out the things that work for your product. Until then you have to try hundreds of dead ends.

WITH ENOUGH PAPERCUTS YOU CAN KILL YOUR COMPETITION There is sometimes the assumption that all you need is one breakthrough to win. One big awesome growth h ack to own your market. I do think that you can kill your competition, but it usually occurs because of a million micro-lacerations, not one huge one. Small successes compound over time. If you are able to stay the course and improve your numbers day by day, then you II look up after a year and realize that you actually moved the needle in some pretty remarkable ways, but there might not be a breakthrough moment.

CHAPTER 3 THE GROWTH HACKING PROCESS

THE GROWTH HACKING PROCESS

Step 1: Define actionable goals “ BRAINSTORMING “

Step 4: Execute the experiment “ ANALYZING “

Step 2: Implement analytics to track your goals “ PRIORITIZING “

Step 5: Optimize the experiment “ Systemizing “

Step 3: Leverage your existing strengths “ Designing and Testing “

Step 6: Repeat and iteration

C H A P T ER 3

T H E G R O W T H H A C K I N G PROCESS

Step 1: Define actionable goals “BRAINSTORMING“ Everything begins by focusing on a narrow, actionable goal. This is im- portant because a growth hacker can easily have a focus that is so broad it becomes meaningless. Yes, the overall goal is growth, but you don’t attain that kind of end-result without breaking it into smaller, achievable, tasks. Let’s say you have a product and you want your DAU (daily active users) to increase, but that’s too broad of a goal. Then you decide tofocus just on the retention of existing users since this will increase the DAU, butretention is still too broad. Then you decide to focus on helping current users create content because your numbers show that when someone becomes a content creator (and not just a consumer) within your product then their activity on the site is far greater. Content creation leads to retention which leads to increased DAU. Therefore, you decide to make the goal to increase content creation by 2x.

C H A P T ER 3

T H E G R O W T H H A C K I N G PROCESS

Step 1: Define actionable goals Too Broad: Increase daily active users Appropriate: Increase content creation by 2x Many people have a hard time knowing when they’ve narrowed their goal enough. Here is a rule of thumb that I use. Think about your goals as nested hierarchies, tasks which can be completed once and for all, then you’re not narrow enough. In this case our hierarchy might look something like this As an Example:

Actionable Goals

C H A P T ER 3

T H E G R O W T H H A C K I N G PROCESS

Step 1: Define actionable goals GROW MY STARTUP

INCREASE DAU INCREASE RETENTION INCREASE CONTENT CREATION BY MEMBERS

C H A P T ER 3

T H E G R O W T H H A C K I N G PROCESS

Step 1: Define actionable goals

Educate Members About Content Creation Through Email

When Someone Comments Content Automatically Send The Creator An Email To

Make Onboarding Experience Include Content Creation Features

Improve Images On Homepage To Show Creators And Not Just Consumers

Add “What’s New” Category TO Homepage That Will Highlight New Content Creation

Will there ever conceivably be a day when you can mark off "grow my startup" from a to-do list? No. The goal is too broad. Is there ever going to be a time when you can say that you've finished "increasing DAU “ No. Too broad. However, you can mark off that you've "educated members about content creation through an email." When you find yourself at the part Of the hierarchy that can be checked Off as done, then you 've narrowed your goal appropriately.

C H A P T ER 3

T H E G R O W T H H A C K I N G PROCESS

Step 2: Implement analytics to track your goals “ PRIORITIZING “ Now that you’ve decided to increase content creation by 2x, the next question is, are you in a position to know if you actually attain this goal? Are the

appropriate analytics in place? Here are some questions to ask yourself: Do you currently track content creation metrics at all? Do you track content creation by cohorts or just in aggregate? Do you track metrics around the content itself “ File size, length, views, shares, etc “ Do you track the devices that are used to create and consume the content? Do you track the referring URL’s which are most responsible for content creation? And many more...

Without analytics, goals are empty. If you can't definitively say when a goal has been reached then you have not completed the requisite requirements before moving ahead. Furthermore, analytics will give you valuable data which can change your goals. Your analytics and your goals create a reflexive equilibrium, where they actual inform, refine, and shape each other.

C H A P T ER 3

T H E G R O W T H H A C K I N G PROCESS

Step 3: Leverage your existing strengths “ Designing and Testing “ Archimedes once said, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.” This quote is not just poetic. It’s true. With a

long enough lever a very small amount of strength can lift massive objects. Every startup has inherent strengths or assets that can be used as leverage. When there is something at your disposal which requires little energy, but can produce big results, then you've found a lever. Plans, goals, and tasks, that are stack-ranked in a vacuum, without concern for leverage, are usually mis-ordered. Plan your attack based on strengths. I would recommend reading chapters 3-6 of this book and then give each tactic that is mentioned a score based on your company s specific leverage.

C H A P T ER 3

T H E G R O W T H H A C K I N G PROCESS

Step 4: Execute the experiment “ ANALYZING “ Increasing content creation by 2x. You’ve already completed step 2, and now you are tracking the necessary data that will tell you if you’re successful in your goal. You’ve already completed step 3, and now you are going to focus on educating your members through an email blast, since this is where you possess leverage. Now it’s time to execute the experiment, which means actually sending an email in this case. Here are some things to keep in mind as you execute the experiment (note: we call them experiments at this point because no one really knows what will happen): 1- WRITE DOWN YOUR HYPOTHESES BEFORE YOU EXECUTE AN EXPERIMENT 2- DO NOT BE NAIVE ABOUT THE RESOURCES NEEDED TO RUN THE EXPERIMENT 3- DO NOT GET DISCOURAGED BY THE INITIAL RESULTS 4- LEARN FROM SUCCESS AND FAILURE

GROWTH HACKING PROCESS

1- WRITE DOWN YOUR HYPOTHESES BEFORE YOU EXECUTE AN EXPERIMENT

Before you actually run the experiment you should write down your best guesses at to what will happen. Do you think this email will have a higher or lower click through rate than the emails you already send? Why do you think this? How much do you think the email will increase content creation over the next month? Will it single handedly give you the 2x content creation goal you’re shooting for, or do you think it will get you part of the way there? It may seem silly to write these kinds of things down when you can just send the email and find out what’s going to happen. I f that’s your attitude then you’re missing the point. Hypotheses are accurate reflections of your assumption before you are given the chance to rewrite the past to make yourself look like a genius. For instance, imagine that you write down the hypothesis that the click through rate will be lower because you already send users one email a week, and you think the second email will annoy them. Then you run the experiment and it has a higher click through rate. If there wasn’t proof of your wrong hypothesis you would be tempted to rewrite history, and you would tell the team members that this is what you expected to happen because you’re such a godsend to the startup world. Hypothesis keep you honest

GROWTH HACKING PROCESS

2- DO NOT BE NAIVE ABOUT THE RESOURCES NEEDED TO RUN THE EXPERIMENT Anytime you run experiments it is going to disrupt the normal flow of events in your startup. First, the entire team needs to be notified about upcoming experiments so that they can be ready for any mishaps that might occur. Second, know when your startup is already resource constrained, and be mindful of this when planning your experiments. If Tuesdays are when the server is already on the brink of failure, then don’t do something that will send 30% more traffic on that day if you can avoid it. Third, If you need a certain amount of time to finish the components of the experiment before it can be ran, then don’t overlook the time requirements needed.

GROWTH HACKING PROCESS

3- DO NOT GET DISCOURAGED BY THE INITIAL RESULTS There is a phenomenon which I have experienced countless times, and that is the ever-present belief that whatever experiment I’m working on right now is the one that will change everything for the better. The experiment that I’m currently devoted to seems to be the obvious answer to my company’s problems. If it’s worthy of my time then it must be the thing that will allow us to reach escape velocity. Oh, the joys of the entrepreneur’s disease. Like we mentioned in the last chapter, most things fail. It’s ok to be optimistic (hey, it keeps me going too), but then you can’t be devastated every time an experiment produces mediocre results. That`s what a defined goal should be attacked from multiple angles. Most of the attacks simply won’t work.

It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law. Hofstadter's Law

GROWTH HACKING PROCESS

4- LEARN FROM SUCCESS AND FAILURE Data is like publicity. There is no such thing as bad publicity and there is no such thing as bad data. Even if an experiment fails you will have undoubted- ly gathered a lot of information about your product and your users that can be used in future experiments. Thomas Edison failed more than 1,000 times when trying to create his light bulb. When asked about it, Edison allegedly said, "I have not failed 1,000 times. I have successfully discovered 1,000 ways to not make a light bulb." You can learn from successes, and you can learn from failures. You only stop learning when you give up.

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T H E G R O W T H H A C K I N G PROCESS

Step 5: Optimize the experiment “ Systemizing “

Experiments are meant to be optimized. Experiments are fluid. They are not things you do one time and then move on. You tweak experiments. You re-run experiments. You only give up on experiments when it’s appropriate to do so, not when you’ve grown tired of them. A. HAVE A CONTROL GROUP B. UTILIZE A/B TEST

C. WHEN TO GIVE UP ON AN EXPERIMENT

GROWTH HACKING PROCESS

A. HAVE A CONTROL GROUP You should always have a control group when you are able to because this will account for environmental changes that are hard to track. If you send out the email to only 80% of your users then you can track how much content creation goes up in that group as opposed to the control group. There might be an unforeseen reason, outside of your company’s control or knowledge, that has actually led to a widespread decrease in content creation on your site. Without a control group you might be led to think that the email actually decreased content creation, which would be far from the truth. Look at the table below. Without a control group you might think.

CONTENT CREATION +/- (AFTER EXPERIMENT)

GROUP A (TEST GROUP)

GROUP B (CONTROL GROUP)

-10%

-15%

GROWTH HACKING PROCESS

B. UTILIZE A/B TEST A/B tests are championed by growth hackers for a reason. They’re magical! You may think you know what the subject line of an email should be to ensure it’s opened, but an A/B test will tell you the truth. You may think you know what landing page the email should send them to, so that they will start creating content, but an A/B will tell you the truth. There are very few tools that create such large gains overall. Remember, if you are going to run A/B tests then you must decide this before you start running an experiment. Otherwise, in our example, you would have emailed everyone on your list and then there would be no one left to benefit from what you are learning.

GROWTH HACKING PROCESS

C. WHEN TO GIVE UP ON AN EXPERIMENT I usually will not give up on an experiment until my leverage has proven to be weaker than I initially thought, or I can’t logically conceive of the experiment yielding better results without an inordinate amount of resources dedicated to it.

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T H E G R O W T H H A C K I N G PROCESS

Step 6: Repeat and Iteration Now it’s time to select a new experiment, or an optimized version of a previous experiment, and move through these steps all over again. If you work the system that I’ve enumerated here, then success is more a byproduct of tenacity, and less a child of luck.

CHAPTER 4 THE GROWTH HACKER FUNNEL

GROWTH HACKING FUNNEL

If you are building a product then your task is to guide people towards a particular goal (signup, checkout, etc.). The problem is that people are unpredictable and full of free-will. If you are going to get people to do what you wish, en masse, then you must employ a funnel. When you think about growth hacking the image of this funnel should dominate your understanding:

DEFINING THE THREE LEVELS OF THE FUNNEL If you are building a product then your task is to guide people towards a particular goal (signup, checkout, etc.). The problem is that people are unpredictable and full of free-will. If you are going to get people to do what you wish, en masse, then you must employ a funnel. When you think about growth hacking the image of this funnel should dominate your understanding:

DEFINING THE THREE LEVELS OF THE FUNNEL first goal in the funnel is to get visitors. This is the act Of getting any- one to visit your website or app for the first time. They are called visitors at this stage because they don't belong to you yet. They haven't opted in to any- thing. They aren't members, or users, because that would imply that they have some sort of relationship to you, and they don't. They are just strangers that just happen to be on your site. They are visitors. There are three, and only three, ways to get someone to visit your website or app. You can pull them n, push them in, or use the product to bring them in. The three P's will be the topic of the next chapter.

GET VISITORS

ACTIVATE MEMBERS

RETAIN USERS

DEFINING THE THREE LEVELS OF THE FUNNEL

1. Getting A Visitor Is Like Going On A Blind Date. After a visitor lands on a site, this is when rookies think they’ve done their job as a growth hacker. Not even close. Now you have to activate them and turn them into members. An activation happens when they have taken an action, large or small, that creates a relationship with you. This might be joining an email list, or creating an account, or even making a purchase. You could even have multiple activations that you track. Now, they are not just visitors, but they are members. They have joined what you are doing in some way.

GET VISITORS ACTIVATE MEMBERS

RETAIN USERS

DEFINING THE THREE LEVELS OF THE FUNNEL

ACTIVATING A MEMBER IS LIKE BEING IN A RELATIONSHIP WITH SOMEONE. It’s hard to turn a visitor into a member, but it’s even harder to turn a member into a user. A user is someone who, as the name implies, uses your product regularly. This is someone that you’ve retained. You’ve kept them around for a period of time. If you create retained users then you’ve reached the holy grail of growth hacking. Chapter 9 will outline some of the best practices that growth hackers have discovered to retain users.

GET VISITORS ACTIVATE MEMBERS

RETAIN USERS

DEFINING THE THREE LEVELS OF THE FUNNEL

RETAINING A USER IS LIKE GETTING MARRIED.

GET VISITORS ACTIVATE MEMBERS

RETAIN USERS

WHAT ARE GOOD CONVERSION RATES FOR THIS FUNNEL? One of the great difficulties of utilizing this funnel for your company is knowing what good conversion rates actually are. As you move down the funnel, less and less people stick around. In a given month, you might get 100k visitors, but only 1k members (1% conversion), and only 700 retained users (70% conversion). Are these numbers good? It’s almost impossible to know for a number of reasons:

Is your traffic from a source that would identify with your product, or ❑ are they people that should bounce as soon as they read your first headline. Certain traffic sources will always convert to members at higher rates Does y our activation goal include a purchase or are you simply trying ❑ to get an email address on file? The more you ask for the lower the conversion rate will be. In term s of retention, does your market usually experience high ❑ retention rates, or would it be an anomaly to have repeat users? Like wise, is your product a consumer web product that should expect to have incredibly high retention if it’s going to survive?

What We Do Now?

Given all the variables that go into knowing whether you have good conversion ratios through the funnel, here are some tips to keep in mind:

WHAT ARE GOOD CONVERSION RATES FOR THIS FUNNEL?

Your numbers should always be improving, or you’re doing it wrong. ❑ Despite all the unknowns, you should at least be improving month over month relative to your own historical performance. Some companies publish their conversion ratios for certain aspects of ❑ this funnel. If you compile enough of them then you can beg into benchmark your performance against their metrics. another growth hacker that has a similar (but non-competing) product, ❑ then you can both agree to open up your numbers for the other person. This is one of the best benchmarking tactics for understanding the success or failure of your funnel conversions rates. Ratios throughout the funnel are not siloed. You might do something ❑ that drives up visitors by 1,000%, but by doing so it drives down retention by .05%. If you make this change and then dwell on the fact that your retention dropped then you’d be missing the point. The retention ratio is going down, but the number or retained users is actually going up. Your goal is to create conversion rates throughout all the stages of the funnel that work together to create the largest overall impact. Don’t miss the forest for the trees.

What We Do Now?

LET THE FUNNEL SET YOUR GROWTH HACKING PRIORITIES As you consider where to place your energy, the funnel can sometimes make this decision for you. If you are converting 50% of all visitors to members, and 50% of all members to users, but you are only getting 200 new unique visitors a day then you should obviously spend your time getting visitors. In other situations you might want to wait on getting visitors until you are more successful at moving people through other aspects of the funnel. On a related notes, Sean Ellis has popularized the idea of product-market fit, which has a lot of value as you decide your priorities using this funnel. Sean has often said that if at least 40% of your existing users wouldn’t be “very disappointed” if your product disappeared then you don’t yet have product-market fit. This basically means that your product doesn’t solve enough of a pain. It isn’t adequately loved by the users, and the team needs to focus on product more than growth. His overall point is that you shouldn`t try to find new visitors, or optimize the funnel for them, until you have a product that people actually want. This creates a little bit of a catch 22. If you don’t have any traffic then you won’t have users to poll as you try to find out how disappointed they would be in your absence. However, focusing solely on growth would be a bad move, as you’d be optimizing in vain if your core offering is lacking

Therefore, here is what I recommend. Use this funnel, use the process from the previous chapter, and use the tactics in the following chapters, to get an adequate user base. Then, circle back to them to find out how well your product fits their needs before taking things to the next level. You have to grow some to know if you’re even on the right path to grow more. Just don’t put yourself in a situation where you are expending massive energy in an attempt to growth hack a product that people don’t love. It’s that simple.

IT ALL BEGAN WITH PIRATES Click HERE

Most companies only track three things

TRAFF IC US E R S

R EVEN UE

Phase 1 Phase 2 Phase 3 Phase 4 Phase 5 Get Traffic

?

Get Users

The Magic Is

What Happens In Between!

?

Profit

IT ALL BEGAN WITH METRICS PIRATES PIRATES “ AARRR “

The lean Growth Hacking framework

1. ACQUISITION

2. ACTIVATION

3. RETENTION

How do users become aware of you ?

Do drive-by Visitors subscribe, use, etc ?

Does a one-time user become engaged?

SEO, SEM, Widgets, Emails, PR, Campaigns, Blogs, …

Features, Design, Tone, Compensation, Affirmation…

Notification, alerts, reminders, emails, updates …

4. REVENUE Do you make money from user activity? Transactions, clicks, subscriptions, DLC, analytics …

5. REFERRAL Do users promote your product? Emails, Widgets, Campaigns, likes, RTs, affiliates …

THE GROWTH HACKER’S JOB IS

TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO MOVE USERS FROM ONE STATE TO THE NEXT

?? CREATES AN ACCOUNT

VISITS AGAIN LATER

You need to measure conversions at each step 1744

10%

Acquisition

174 Activation

30%

30%

52

17

Retention

Revenue

Dave McClure’s example conversion metrics

AT FIRST YOUR NUMBERS WILL BE REALLY NOT GOOD 1744

1%

Acquisition

18%

0%

17

3

0

Activation

Retention

Revenue

AT FIRST YOUR NUMBERS WILL BE REALLY NOT GOOD 1744 FOCUS HER E

1%

Acquisition

18%

0%

17

3

0

Activation

Retention

Revenue

TIPS Time DON’T FOCUS ON ACQUISITION IF YOUR ACTIVATION RATE IS 1%

FUNNEL TO FLYWHEEL ➢ WHY THE FUNNEL IS NO LONGER EFFECTIVE ? For a little over 10 years, companies have structured their business strategies around the funnel — and it worked. It helped professionals like me and millions of others level up their game. But the framework is aging, and since its development purchasing behaviors have changed dramatically. More specifically, overall trust in businesses is plummeting: 81% of buyers trust their families’ and friends’ recommendations more than companies’ business advice, and 55% report trusting the businesses they buy from less than they used to.

FUNNEL TO FLYWHEEL Customer referrals and word-of-mouth have become the largest influence on the purchase process, which spotlights the funnel’s major flaw: it views CUSTOMERS as an afterthought, not a driving force.

FUNNEL TO FLYWHEEL Funnels produce customers but don’t consider how those customers can help you grow. There is no way to reinvest what comes out at the bottom to get more at the top to continue to feed growth over time. Along with this, it’s common for companies to structure teams by the funnel’s layers. Marketing owns acquisition. Customer success owns retention. Sales owns revenue. Then each one of those teams is given a metric that corresponds to that layer of the funnel.

WHAT IS THE FLYWHEEL? Unlike the funnel, the flywheel is remarkable at storing and releasing energy — and it turns out that’s pretty important when thinking about your business strategy. Invented by James Watt, the flywheel is simply a wheel that’s incredibly energy-efficient. The amount of energy it stores depends on how fast it spins, the amount of friction it encounters, and its size. Think of it like the wheels on a train or a car. This energy is especially helpful when thinking about how customers can help your business grow.

HOW IT WORKS ? As we mentioned above, the amount of energy, or momentum, your flywheel contains depends on three things:

1) How fast you spin it 2) How much friction there is 3) How big it is The most successful companies will adjust their business strategies to address all three. The speed of your flywheel increases when you add force to areas that have the biggest impact — like your customer service team. By focusing on how you can make your customers successful, they’re more likely to relay their success to potential customers.

THE INBOUND METHODOLOGY AND THE FLYWHEEL Companies that choose to use the flywheel model over the typical funnel have a huge advantage because they aren’t the only ones helping their business grow — their customers are helping them grow as well. Every business is different, and the way you design your flywheel is dependent on your business model. Figure out the teams and areas of your business that have the biggest impact on growth. Ask yourself, “how does my product grow?” and personalize your flywheel by leveraging those insights and applying force to those areas. Here’s an example of a flywheel from the smart folks at Reforge:

Pinterest The driving force behind Pinterest’s growth is: 1) 2) 3) 4) 5)

User signs up (or returns) They activate you on the product with specific/relevant content You save new content or re-pin existing content which gives Pinterest quality signals Pinterest distributes the quality content to search engines A user finds the content via search engines and either signs up/returns (see step 1)

HOW TO FLYWHEEL-IZE YOUR FUNNEL In his keynote at INBOUND 2018, Halligan (HubSpot’s CEO), explained the flywheel, and why it’s a powerful new growth model:

1)

Identify the core flywheel metrics your company tracks.

2)

Identify your company’s forces by flywheel stage. ❖ Re-draw those forces to maximize delight and word of mouth.

3)

Identify points of friction between your customers and your employees, and points of handoff between internal teams, that affect customer experience. ❖ Re-align those points of friction to better serve the customer through automation, shared goals, or a reorganization.

WHY THE FLYWHEEL FRAMEWORK MATTERS When you think of your business as a flywheel instead of a funnel, you make different decisions.

At HubSpot, shifting to the flywheel model helped them change in the following ways: 1.

Flywheels represent a circular process where customers feed growth. They’ve invested more in customer marketing, more in customer advocacy, and more in creating delightful onboarding for new customers. They’ve also invested in an integrations ecosystem that helps customers do more with HubSpot and creates real value for people who adopt our suite of software.

2.

Friction kills flywheels. They’ve made investments that systematically target thier biggest points of friction: Great free software as an entry point, channels that help people connect now instead of later, a sales process that solves for prospects, and a broad range of customer education.

FLYWHEEL RESOURCES ➢ Flywheel Model ➢ Why You Need To Replace Your Funnel With A Flywheel ➢ How the Flywheel Killed Funnel

CHAPTER 5 PULL TACTICS FOR GETTING VISITORS

3 Ps of Growth Hacking So, you are looking for new ways to increase the number of your website visitors? This is easy, even for a startup, provided you follow the right approach. From the Growth Hacking perspective, you can get t h e r e q u i r e d we b s i t e traffic of your visitors by following only three Ps of Growth Hacking, i.e. Pull Tactics, Push Tactics, and P r o d u c t Ta c t i c s . ?

Pull - You entice them to come to you.

Product - You use y our product itself to bring them to you

Push - You coerce them to come to you.

There are 12 pull tactics that we covered:

Infographics

Blogging or Guest Blogging

Webinars

Podcasting or Guest Podcasting

Deal Sites

Ebooks, Guides, and Whitepapers

Marketplace

Conference Presentations

SEO

Contests

Social Media

LOPA

FUNDAMENTALS OF A STRATEGY

PULL

As you think about the following pull tactics, here are some of the things they have in common:

The cost of these tactics are usually measured in time or personnel, but you are not directly paying to get visitors. These tactics revolve around providing something of value that entices people to visit your site. If you stop providing value then you’ll stop pulling them in.

FUNDAMENTALS

OF A PULL STRATEGY 1- Blogging or Guest Blogging Blogging is a no brainer. The only decision you have to make is whether to start your own blog or guest blog for others. The main reason to guest blog is that you don’t have to create the audience. You only have to create the post. Trust me, it’s easier to create a post than to gather the people together that are willing to read it. However, the main benefit to starting your own blog is your ability to have full control. If you build your own audience you have more flexibility over the content. You might choose to get more aggressive in the future with sending traffic to your product from the blog, but if someone else owns all your content then you don’t have this possibility. Neither answer is wrong as long as you choose for strategic reasons.

Remember, you can always do both. Maybe you start by guest blogging but then transition to your own blog. Whichever route you choose you must not make your blog posts an extended pitch for your product. You’re gently pulling people in, not begging them to visit your site. If you get too overt about your intentions it will turn people away. With a little creativity you can easily get click throughs without making your post feel like an ad. Always start a new post with a bio that links to your product (no one will begrudge you this), and try to link to your product once within the post, but only when it’s relevant to what you’re saying. Also, the blog posts that get read and shared are the ones that tap into something emotional, trendy, educational, enjoyable, or surprising (amongst others). Take note of the kinds of posts that get your attention, and then reverse engineer them to inform your own writing.

FUNDAMENTALS

OF A PULL STRATEGY 2- PODCASTING OR GUEST PODCASTING Podcasting is another great pull tactic because audio has inherent in- bound qualities. When you hear someone speak then you are given a window into their mind that is different, and sometimes even better, than reading their thoughts. Like blogs, podcasts have in built distribution mechanisms (Podcast listening apps), but there are differences between blogging and podcasting when viewed through the lens of getting traffic.

It is highly unlikely that a podcast will be a viable channel for traffic, unless you think very creatively about it. Here are some twists that you could try: Whatever you do, go niche. You probably don't have the production experience or the budget to compete with general interests podcasts. Instead, select a very narrow niche, and dominate it. Don’t start a podcast with a goal of doing an episode every week. Rather, set a goal of 10 episodes total and make it more like an educational course on a certain topic that your market would love to learn. With beautiful album art and a great audio intro, people will find you in the podcast directories and get cu- pious. Never promise more episodes, and tell them upfront in the first episode what your intention is.

FUNDAMENTALS

OF A PULL STRATEGY 3. EBOOKS, GUIDES, AND WHITEPAPERS A potential visitor may not stay on your website just because of a one-page blog, but if it is a hefty document in the form of an eBook that has something important to tell them about a subject of their interest, then there are high chances that they will give it a click. Whether it is an eBook, whitepaper, or a user guide, if your readers love reading useful information about a product’s usage, they will more likely order it from your website.

FUNDAMENTALS

OF A PULL STRATEGY

Adam Breckler, of Visual.ly, provides the following advice when creating an infographic:

✓ SELECT A GOOD TOPIC

✓ FIND THE RIGHT DATA ✓ ANALYZE THE DATA ✓ BUILD THE NARRATIVE ✓ COME UP WITH A DESIGN CONCEPT

4. INFOGRAPHICS Infographics can entice people to your product because they simultaneously display expertise and aesthetic taste. Visualizations are powerful tools, and they are spread using social media extremely easily.

✓ POLISH AND REFINE THE DESIGN ✓ DISTRIBUTE THE INFOGRAPHIC

FUNDAMENTALS

OF A PULL STRATEGY

5. Webinars Seminars are offline, and easier to ignore. However, webinars are what online users can get access to easily. Furthermore, webinars are considered as one of the most successful channels that can help you bring new visitors to your website. Still thinking how?

The following reasons justify this fact well: a. Generally, webinars are conducted live. Therefore, people interested in it cannot delay it at all. If they cannot risk missing it, then the only choice they are left with is to “attend” it online. b. There are often limited seats in webinars. This makes people analyze that the content to be discussed in the webinar is important and exclusive. c. Many webinars end with some special promotion for a company’s product. You can adapt the same way and offer your product to people for free. If they like the product, they will visit your website to buy it.

➢ SLIDE DECK If you’re presenting at a conference then you probably have a slide deck.

FUNDAMENTALS

OF A PULL STRATEGY

➢ VIDEO / AUDIO Many conferences will record your presentation, and this will allow you to put it on your company blog, upload it to YouTube, place it in email signatures, or use it during a drip email campaign. ➢ INSTANT RETWEETS

6. CONFERENCE PRESENTATION that’s just because you’re not thinking of it creatively enough. A conference presentation may pull in a few more visitors to your product, but not many, and the amount of preparation required is very high. However, a conference presentation creates a number of by-products which can be used to pull in Visitors more effectively.

➢ PERSUASION Why did Steve Jobs do presentations? Because they’re are powerful. If you have the gift of gab, and can command an audience, then sometimes a few moments on stage can create a number of traffic. Remember, growth hackers are right-brained and left-brained. Sometimes the ROI is fuzzy, but that doesn’t mean it is nonexistent.

FUNDAMENTALS

OF A PULL STRATEGY 7. SEO Even today, SEO is considered as the primary way to get maximum traffic to your website. This is simply because thousands of people search for product information by using popular search engines. In this case, your efforts of writing eBooks, user guides, and whitepapers about something related to your business are worth it.

So, when you create a lot of such content, search engines will soon realize that you have high authority on the topic of your interest. Eventually, your website rankings will increase, and give another chance to your potential customers to visit your website. However, there are really two kinds of SEO strategies. I call them: content and code.

FUNDAMENTALS

OF A PULL STRATEGY 8. SOCIAL MEDIA For most businesses, social media is the only way to enhance their online presence in front of millions of potential customers. To do this for your own startup, learn what social media is, and what it can give your business. Create the existence of your business on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, and watch what happens next.

➢ However, this requires you to interact with your potential customers on a regular basis, but once your social media activities are carried out professionally, the results will be worth noticing. Eventually, your target audience will visit your website, and there is a possibility that they will buy your product. You can do this by following these tips: a. Increase the number of your Facebook page likes by launching various contests in which your target audience may be interested in. b. Social media can be the best form of customer support, so utilize it as effectively as you can. Answer the questions of your potential customers through this powerful media and give them advices. c. As soon as you launch a new feature of your product/service, communicate it through social media to enhance its exposure.

FUNDAMENTALS

OF A PULL STRATEGY 9. CONTESTS For startups, contests are an amazing way to drive traffic. You can pull your potential customers to get in touch with your products or services by following ways:

➢ Give away gifts which are actually meaningful to your potential customers. Also, the gift should represent your company. ➢ A free trip to a memorable destination may mean a lot to your potential customers than just giving them an iPad. So, give away experiences too. ➢ Do not announce the giveaway of a grand prize. Instead, divide it to first, second, and third prize.

FUNDAMENTALS

OF A PULL STRATEGY 10. APP MARKETPLACES One of the channels for gaining new visitors which has arisen in the past few years is marketplaces. The Apple App Store is a marketplace. The Google Play Store is a marketplace. There are actually two kinds of app market places and they are different.

➢ B2C APP MARKETPLACES If your company made an app for a consumer then you’ll probably be in a B2C app store like the Apple App Store.

➢ B2B APP MARKETPLACES If your product can be used for businesses then you might consider this relatively new kind of marketplace. Companies like Salesforce or Mailchimp now have their own marketplace for apps that integrate with their product.

FUNDAMENTALS

OF A PULL STRATEGY 11. DEAL SITES In order to save money on each product, many people prefer deal sites as the only channel to look for discounted products. It may be that your target market prefers the same. For this reason, add your products to the most popular deal sites.

Offer your customers a specific deal. This is surely going to let them visit your website for further product details.

FUNDAMENTALS

OF A PULL STRATEGY

Guest blogging is a form of LOPA. Guest podcasting is a form of LOPA. Even marketplaces are a form of LOPA. Here are some other ways that you can take advantage of LOPA: -

12.. LOPA (LEVERAGE OTHER PEOPLE’S AUDIENCE) Although this is built into many of the tactics already covered I still wanted to talk about L O P A explicitly. Basically, building an audience is incredibly hard. So if you can find any way to leverage someone else's audience then you will be taking advantage of a traffic shortcut.

-

-

Create giveaway for a specific blog that has your demographic as their audience. Reach out to group leaders on Meetup.com that run communities that could use your product, and ask them if they’d tell their group about you. Offer free accounts to thoughts leaders in your industry and if they have a great experience they will share it with their audiences.

CHAPTER 6 PUSH TACTICS FOR GETTING VISITORS

FUNDAMENTALS OF A

PUSH STRATEGY

Now, we will put emphasis on pushing your corporate image and product information to your visitors. Of course, this is not easy to implement, but once you have made a focus, you can do it for your startup easily. push tactic usually involves interrupting the content that is being consumed. Push tactics usually cost money. We have 4 Push tactics sand strategies to cover: Purchase ads Promo Swap “ Cross Promotions “ Affiliates Direct Sales

• • • •

PURCHASE ADS

FUNDAMENTALS OF A

PUSH STRATEGY

When it comes to selling your product to your online customers, purchasing ads can help you accomplish your goal. However, this requires you to identify the right platform of purchasing ads. Is your target audience familiar with the platform you have placed your ad in? Did your potential customers even see that ad? To answer these questions correctly, it is necessary to choose an ad platform which aligns well with your target audience. Here are some things you must keep in mind as you approach this push tactic: ❑ Understand Your Ad Platform Options ❑ Learn The Technical Details Of Your Chosen Platform ❑ Buying Ads Is A Business Model Competition ❑ Consider The Various Personas Of Your Customer

❑ Circumvent The Ad Networks When Possible ❑ If You Are Paying Per Click Then Qualify Every Click ❑ Test Variations Of Your Ad

FUNDAMENTALS

PROMO SWAP “Cross Promotions“ This is a free and easy way to drive enough traffic to your website. You can contact other companies to carry out your cross promotion activity. The company you want to conduct cross promotion with should be catering to the same target market. If your company is not considered as a threat to that company, then this can be done easily. A company allowing another company for placing one banner ad on its blog or website is an example of Cross Promotions. Here are some ideas to help you brainstorm possibilities:

▪

SWAP TWEETS

▪

SWAP FACEBOOK POSTS

•

AD SPACE SWAP

▪

DEDICATED EMAIL SWAP

•

PRE-ROLL VIDEO SWAP

▪

SPONSORED EMAIL SWAP

•

GIVEAWAY SWAP

OF A

PUSH STRATEGY

AFFILIATES One more tactic to push customers to view your website is hiring affiliates. This is when you have to pay a person for reaching a specific goal for your company, such as, activating any member or bringing a visitor to the website. Here, the main purpose is to assign a responsibility of increasing your website traffic to someone rather than worrying about it. Here are a few things to know if you are going to use this tactic: ▪

THINK CAREFULLY ABOUT THE INCENTIVES

▪

DON’T ROLL YOUR OWN AFFILIATE SOLUTION

▪

VET EVERY NEW AFFILIATE EARLY ON

FUNDAMENTALS OF A

PUSH STRATEGY

AFFILIATES • THINK CAREFULLY ABOUT THE INCENTIVES The affiliate would be rewarded for getting you low quality customers that cancel quickly because it doesn’t affect their profit either way. Create a system where the affiliate only benefits if you benefit. • DON’T ROLL YOUR OWN AFFILIATE SOLUTION There are a number of products that will allow you to easily get up and running on the technical side of creating an affiliate system. • VET EVERY NEW AFFILIATE EARLY ON When someone becomes an affiliate for you then they are representing your business to some extent. Choose your affiliate very carefully.

FUNDAMENTALS OF A

PUSH STRATEGY

DIRECT SALES I’m going to be honest, this is a hard one to categorize as a growth hacking tactic, but it is a way to get traffic at the top of the funnel so I would be re-miss to completely ignore it. Direct sales teams do not work for every kind of product, but in some cases it is a worthwhile tactic. App Stack (appstack.com), a startup that creates mobile websites in conjunction with mobile ads for local businesses, was able to grow revenues to over 50k a month in a relatively short amount of time, and their primary strategy was direct telephone sales. I use them as an example because it’s hard to imagine a startup using this method, but some of them do, and it actually can work.

CHAPTER 7 PRODUCT TACTICS FOR GETTING VISITORS

PRODUCT TACTICS FOR GETTING VISITORS What can be more exciting than to push your product to find a way? Though pulling and pushing tactics can help you increase your company’s visibility, the magic begins when you use your product to increase the number of your customers. However, this has to be carried out patiently and intelligently. Have a look below how to apply product tactics the right way:

o NETWORK INVITATIONS o SOCIAL SHARING o API INTEGRATIONS o BACKLINKS o INCENTIVES

o ORGANIC “Word-of-Mouth Marketing”

1. Network Invitations In this competitive world of networks, people are already into a number of networks depending on their interests. Some of the examples include LinkedIn, Email, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. This is where you need to show your product too. Once your product is present in a relevant network, it is time to invite your prospects to join the network.

We now live in a world where many people have already compiled their social networks in various places. We have a group of friends on Facebook. We follow people on Twitter. We are connected to business relationships on LinkedIn. We have a list of email addresses in Gmail. We have the phone numbers of friends and family in our mobile phones.

2. SOCIAL SHARING If you have a public profile on any of the social media websites, it means that you have the ability to share your posts about your product to all your potential customers. This is called social sharing. While devising your social sharing strategy, you need to analyze where your actual traffic is coming from. For instance, if a higher number of your customers use Twitter, and you have only let your Facebook customers to share something about your products on Facebook, then there can be a big mismatch. To make sure your social sharing efforts remain productive, you should identify which social network is the most useful for your business growth.

3. Backlinks Hotmail was one of the first startups that used Backlinking as its main strategy of Growth Hacking. This makes backlinking a sensible option for many startups. There are various services that enable you to insert a pop-up option on the page of your website for different reasons.

4. API INTEGRATIONS The next step, beyond social sharing, is to actually integrate your product with an existing social network at the API level. Instead of just asking them to share, you can actually bake sharing into the experience and make it happen in the background without forcing the user to give you permission each time. A great example of this is Spotify. It’s no secret that Spotify heavily used Facebook to grow their product, and they did so through an API integration. Once you login to Spotify using Facebook Connect and give Spotify the needed access, then your activity on their service is automatically published to your Facebook feed, and it’s also published inside of the Spotify app to anyone that you are connected with on Facebook.

5. INCENTIVES If you want to sell your product, you can even do better if the product is being sold along with a really great incentive. This is applicable to your business if you want to offer an intensive which costs less but can be of great value to your customers. This way, there are higher chances that your customers will prefer your product over the one being offered by your competitors.

6. Organic “ Word-of-Mouth Marketing “ Why wouldn’t you buy a product if your friend loves it and recommends the same to you? Known as Word-of-Mouth Marketing, this is one of the mostly used product tactics performed by startups as well as large corporations. Creating word-of-mouth for your product or service is what you should look forward to.

Though word-of-mouth communication cannot be measured or controlled, you can put your efforts in it and observe the results. Examples of some of the products that spread within groups of people really fast include pain-relieving products and cosmetic products.

6. Organic “ Word-of-Mouth Marketing “ You can’t make someone share your product organically with their coworkers or friends and family, but you can do certain things to make it more probable. - Simple products spread organically - Beautiful products spread organically - Pain relieving products spread organically - Products that make people look cool spread organically - Emotional products spread organically - Fun products spread organically - Unique products spread organically - Surprising products spread organically

You can’t be all these things, but you must be one of these things, or you probably don’t have a chance of spreading organically.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS ON GETTING TRAFFIC Now that we’ve talked about all three ways of getting visitors into the top of the growth hacker funnel (pull, push, product), Here are some final thoughts to keep in mind: GETTING TRAFFIC IS A RECIPE, NOT A SINGLE INGREDIENT Imagine that you start to bake a cake, but you decide that you are going to include only one ingredient and leave out all the others. It won’t taste that great. Getting traffic is similar. Most products you will have multiple ingredients that come together to create a traffic recipe.

GETTING TRAFFIC IS A RECIPE THAT IS ALWAYS CHANGING The recipe that is working for you today will probably change and morph over time. It may not be different tomorrow it will definitely be different in 6 months.

DON’T JUST COPY THE TRAFFIC RECIPES OF OTHER STARTUPS It’s so tempting to just do what everyone else is doing, but your startup is unique. It has unique personnel, unique advantages, unique disadvantages, unique customers, and it should have a unique plan.

Essentially there are 19 marketing channels that you can use to grow your business. Growth Hacking Planning Template Link: HERE

“Traction Bullseye”

CHAPTER 8 HOW TO ACTIVATE MEMBERS

ACTIVATING USERS TECHNIQUES -40

Now that you have read about the tactics to bring visitors to your website, you are going to accomplish your goal of increasing your website traffic soon. But remember that these are just visitors, and not your customers. They need to be activated and retained so that they remain the source of your revenue, but how to make this possible? Read on, and find out the answer. It`s important to recognize that the fewer goals you have, the more likely you are to achieve them. If you have 5 activation goals then it’s difficult to use the tactics to achieve any if them effectively. At minimum, for a given section of your product you should have one primary activation goal.

ACTIVATING USERS TECHNIQUES Activation goals will vary based on your product.

-40

We covered 6 activation tactics:

❖ Landing Pages

❖ Onboarding

❖ Copywriting

❖ Gamification

❖ Calls to Action

❖ Pricing Strategies

ACTIVATING USERS TECHNIQUES

I.

LANDING PAGES

For instance, if you are always tweeting about certain kinds of things from the company Twitter account then you might make your Twitter bio URL send them to a landing page that highlights those same topics. Here are some of the distinct characteristics of a landing page and why you would use one:

❖ LIMITED NAVIGATION If someone comes to a landing page from a specific campaign then this means that you can hide many of the navigational elements, since this will just distract people from completing the goal you have decided on. They have already shown interest by being on a landing page in the first place, so you can focus their attention.

❖ SINGLE CALL TO ACTION A landing page only needs one call to action for the same reason that you don't need many navigational elements. If you give them options then you will lose them, and no one can end up on a landing page unless they came through a specific campaign, which means they are ripe for activation.

ACTIVATING USERS TECHNIQUES

I.

LANDING PAGES

❖ CONGRUOUS LANGUAGE

Dd

Since you know the source of a person that ends up on a particular landing page then you can tailor the experience for them. You should use language which will appeal to them, even if it doesn’t appeal to your visitors at large. The language, and even imagery, of your landing page should be congruous with their expectations based on the source they came from.

❖ USE IT TO GET TRAFFIC, NOT JUST ACTIVATIONS Before you actually launch is one Of the best times to get traffic. You can tell people that they will be let into your product first if they share your launch page with others, or you can only let them sign up on your beta list if they tweet about you first. Get creative.

❖ THE HEADLINE AND SUBHEAD IS EVERYTHING Since you haven't launched yet you probably won't have much detail to add to the launch page. This means that the headline and subhead become very important. If those few words don't get someone's attention then they will bounce.

ACTIVATING USERS TECHNIQUES

I.LANDING PAGES ❖ EMOTIONAL IMAGERY IS A MUST Besides the headline and subhead, you also need a very emotional image. A full screen background image is the common practice. Make them feel emotion, despite your lack of content.

❖ DON'T LET THE LIST GROW COLD As you build a list of people that are interested in the launch of your product you must not let the list get cold. If you don't email them for months, then suddenly tell them about your launch, your click through rate will be very low. Stay in touch with them through the process of building your product to keep them warm, or don 't even take email addresses until you are within a month (or less) of launch.

❖ POST YOUR LAUNCH PAGE TO BETALI.ST AND ERLIBIRD.COM There is a whole ecosystem of people that are looking for new products. You can post your launch page on betali.st or erlibird.com and you can easily jumpstart your email list if you have a good launch page.

ACTIVATING USERS TECHNIQUES

ii.COPYWRITING

If you want your website visitors to like the image you have created about your company, then the first thing you should do is to focus on your content. Are the words powerful enough to influence their purchase decisions? They will get impressed and will purchase your product only if your words are really louder than their perception. Make this possible by following these tips: ❖ Include your company’s value proposition on the headline ❖ Make a sub heading that also communicates the same value proposition ❖ Keep in mind that short copywriting is best for less-expensive products and long copywriting works best for highly valuable products ❖ Do not imitate your competitor’s style of writing. Show some originality in your content.

are some insights around copywriting: Here THE HEADLINE SHOULD MENTION YOUR UNIQUE VALUE PROPOSITION

COPYWRITING

Why is your product unique? What do you do that competitors don’t do, or can’t do. If you don’t tell people that you’re unique then visitors will assume you're not. THE SUBHEAD SHOULD FURTHER EXPLAIN YOUR UNIQUE VALUE PROPOSITION The subhead is smaller text below your headline that further illustrates your unique value. It might give reasons why the headline is true. Use this to take away doubts or clarify the headline. LONG COPYWRITING IS GOOD FOR EXPENSIVE ITEMS If you are selling something that costs $500 then you need lengthier copywriting. This will give you a chance to inform, answer objections, and just generally convince them to become activated members. SHORT COPYWRITING IS GOOD FOR LESS EXPENSIVE ITEMS If you are selling something for $20 then long copywriting will bring up more objections than it answers. It will confuse people more than it helps people. For low cost products, short, precise, copy is better.

COPYWRITING

DIFFERENT AUDIENCES WILL RESPOND TO DIFFERENT KINDS OF WORDS audience. You should use jargon if you’re talking to doctors, but not if you’re talking to laymen. You can use slang if you’re targeting kids, but not if your audience is USE CUSTOMER DEVELOPMENT TO INFORM COPYWRITING By researching your audience online (message boards, surveys, etc.) you will start to see which words they already use. If you use their own words in your copywriting then you’ll be able to activate them much easier.

SOCIAL PROOF IS COPYWRITING It would be wise to use testimonials within your product because humans behave with a herd mentality. If everyone else is doing something then so will I. Social proof is a form of copywriting that will help you activate visitors. DON’T FORGET THE MICROCOPY Microcopy is the short tooltips, hover boxes, or other text that helps a visitor navigate the interface. Little clues, at the right place, can help people navigate your UI. Confused visitors don’t usually do what you want.

iii.CALL TO ACTION After all, it is all about directing a visitor to click on the “Buy now” or “Place an order” button of your website. This is called the Calls-to-Action technique. An ideal way to get your website visitors to perform this action is to communicate to them as effectively as you can. To do this, make the button prominent so that they do not need to take too much time finding it. Another way to do this is to let them know about the “Contact Us” section. Make your phone number visible so that they can call you directly.

ACTIVATING USERS TECHNIQUES

iv. ONBOARDING When people arrive on your site it’s like they’ve been dumped in the middle of New York City without a map and no sense of direction. Your job is to give them orientation, and lead them to the places where you want them to go. One of the best ways to guide visitors is through onboarding. Onboarding can take the form of visual directions placed on top the screen, or a series of pages that lead visitors from one place to another. Think of onboarding like a digital tour guide for your product. An explanatory video could even be a part of your onboarding strategy.

ACTIVATING USERS TECHNIQUES

v.GAMIFICATION Who doesn’t love progressing, leveling up, and completing tasks more efficiently than others, and getting awards? If everybody loves this, then your potential customers may love it too. This is considered as another Growth Hacking technique in which you are required to implement game mechanics to sell your product.

PROGRESS Bar

LEADERBOARDS

This is a profitable technique through which you can activate your website visitors, and turn them into loyal customers. If you offer them any kind of award to purchase a certain number of products, and promise to mention their name as the winner on your website, then most of them will be ready to spend money on purchasing your product. Gamification can cause someone to complete actions they normally wouldn`t. Here are some examples: PROGRESS Bar: To set progress bar to show percentage complete AWARDS: Trophies matter, even if they are meaningless. LEADERBOARDS: Just by showing someone their rank you can prompt them to compete

ACTIVATING USERS TECHNIQUES

vi.Pricing Strategies Are the visitors thinking that they cannot afford your product? They may be those website visitors who will never come back to your website again. Of course, this can go against your user growth. To control this set of website visitors, it is important to offer them products at the price they are comfortable paying. Without facing any loss, set a pricing strategy by dividing your website visitors into multiple tiers. Mention the prices of your different products on your website to give them an idea that the products they are interested in are not as expensive as they might have perceived.

PERFECT PRICE DISCRIMINATION Pricing is an important aspect of activating people to make a purchase. There is something called perfect price discrimination which is the act of creating a pricing structure that charges based on the consumer’s purchasing power.

ACTIVATING USERS TECHNIQUES

MULTIPLE TIERS Another popular strategy to activate purchases is to have three pricing tiers. Just the fact that there is a more expensive option makes you feel like you’re not wasting money, and you are getting a good deal. Options give people confidence to buy.

SUGGESTIVE TIER NAMING If you name your pricing tiers something vague like gold, silver, and bronze, then you don’t really help people discover which tier is good for them. By naming the tiers things like “Starter,” “Professional,” or “Team,” you are giving people the confidence they are in the correct tier.

ACTIVATING USERS TECHNIQUES

FREE TRIALS People are afraid to make an irreversible mistake with their money. If you give them a money back guarantee, or a free trial of some kind, then you are taking the risk away from them and placing it on yourself.

DISCOUNT CODES One of the most powerful forces, in terms of getting someone to make a purchase, is a discount code. But there is a trick that makes discount codes even more effective.

ACTIVATING USERS TECHNIQUES

BUNDLING Another way to get people to make a purchase is through bundling your product with other products. If you can overwhelm people with value then they are more willing to make a buying decision. Hacker Bundle is a good example of a service that uses this activation tactic.

CHAPTER 9 HOW TO RETAIN USERS

R E TA I N USERS if you retain them then they are literally using your product often. If you are a SaaS company then this means lowering your churn. If you are an ecommerce site then this means helping people become repeat buyers. If you are a content company then this means getting people to consume your content on a regular basis. You get the point. Many growth hackers actually consider retention the most important aspect of the funnel. There are a number of reasons for this:

❑ If your retention is low then all of the ingenious growth hacks that you apply to your product are basically meaningless. Your members will leave your product at the 11th hour (the very end of your Funnel ) ❑ By the time someone has become an activated member then they’ve shown themselves to be extremely interested in your product. They are the most qualified people you have to work with. If you don’t focus on retaining them then you neglecting the most high quality leads that you have.

R E TA I N USERS ❑ Since all the stages of the funnel work together, sometimes retention can affect the bottom line more easily than getting new visitors. Increasing your retention by 20% us the same as increasing your overall traffic by 20%. A 20% increase in traffic might cost more in time and tangible resources than increasing retention by 20%.

❑ An increase in retention increases the lifetime value of the customer (LTV). This opens up the potential to try a number of push methods at the top of the funnel that might not have been possible before, Retention benefits the funnel as whole more than we sometimes realize.

❑ People that have been retained for long periods of time are more likely to evangelize for your product. If your product is built into their weekly routine then they are going to talk to their friends about it, take it into the workplace, and generally be an advocate for you.

RETENTION TA C T IC S - Retention, like anything, is a skill set that can be learned. Here are the tactics that we recommend trying as you focus on retention: ❑ ❑ ❑ ❑ ❑

STAGED TRAFFIC SPEED TO AHA DON’T FEAR EMAIL ALERTS AND NOTIFICATIONS EXIT INTERVIEWS

❑ ❑ ❑ ❑

THE RED CARPET INCREASE VALUE COMMUNITY BUILDING MAKE THEM HAPPY

STAGED TRAFFIC It would be smaller to try a single tactic and use only some of your resources just so that you can track the progress Of your traffic through your funnel. Then you can fix the obvious holes that were uncovered using this test traffic. Now when you spend more Of your resources on traffic your product will be better optimized to capitalize on it. In essence, you test your funnel, including retention, when the stakes are low, so that when it’s time to accelerate growth you've done the requisite work that will allow your product to handle it. Early on, stage your traffic in order to master retention.

SPEED TO AHA Even if a lot of people from your target market have purchased your product, there is no guarantee that they will return to your website for a repeat purchase. If they do, it means that you have successfully retained them! You can do this by bringing that “WOW Factor” to your product. Introduce something with your product the competitors do not currently offer them. Your customers will more likely feel that they are special for you

DON’T FEAR EMAIL Emails are perceived to be the worst thing a customer can receive from a company. However, there are a lot of positive facts about email distribution that justify that emails can do wonders in terms of retaining customers. However, when you work on this, make sure that you do not irritate your customers by repeating them. To avoid this situation, there should be something new to offer your customers through an email, such as, event-based notifications

There are number of different kinds of Emails that your product should send, and they each have their own purpose. DRIP CAMPAIGNS: A drip campaign is when you send people prewritten emails at preselected intervals. A new member might get an email on day 1, day 3, day 7, day 14, and day 21. You can use a drip campaign to introduce them to your product, share testimonials, give them case studies or other inspirational reasons to use your product, and many other things. A drip campaign burns your product into people’s minds when they are most impressionable, right after they’ve signed up. Every email sent is a chance to bring them back into your product and retain them. Fools ignore drip campaigns.

DON’T FEAR EMAIL EVENT BASED NOTIFICATIONS We are all familiar with these because of Facebook. Every time someone does anything which is remotely related to us on their social network then we get an email notifying us about it. Facebook has become very clever with their event based emails, and one of the things they do is force you to click through to their website to get the most out of their emails. They tell me that someone liked a photo I was in, but I have to click a call to action to see the photo. This is smart because once I’m back on their site then I’m sucked into the Facebook world again. What actions are people already taking in your product that could also warrant an email?

GENERAL UPDATES People love to see how other people work (it’s a weird obsession, I know), so use these emails to also give people a behind the scenes view of your company. Show them photos of your new workspace. Show them an image of your team next to the company logo. If people feel like they know you then they will be more likely to be retained by you.

ALERTS AND NOTIFICATIONS If you are building a mobile app then in addition to email you have another avenue available to get people back into your product. You can also use alerts and notifications to help retain users. Are you currently using push notifications within your mobile app? Are you currently using badges to alert people to new features, or new updates, or anything else? Remember, people can turn off alerts and notifications within their settings. Let people manage their own life, and send them relevant updates.

EXIT INTERVIEWS When people cancel your service, or go long periods of time being inactive, or generally show themselves to not be retained, then you have an opportunity to learn from them. I would recommend emailing them and asking them the worst thing about your product that made them cancel (or whatever the appropriate verbiage is for your situation). Just cut to the chase and ask them what sucks the most. Have thick skin. You can use the responses of this exit interview to inform the product roadmap, and thereby increase future retention.

THE RED CARPET It may be that a new competitor has entered the market, and your first 100 customers have started buying their brand. Will you be able to bring them back? Yes, but you should give them something extra now. This can be anything such as, sending 100 t-shirts to the first hundred customers, conducting a lucky draw for the free trip to a destination, or mentioning your loyal users in your email newsletters. Here some ways that you can give the red carpet treatment to your best users: o o o o o

Send 100 Shirts to the first 100 Users Give your best users a shout out in an email newsletter. Keep a Twitter list of your best users and retweet them often. Give your VIP users access to exclusive content. Have a drawing for a free trip to a relevant conference, but only power users can enter.

INCREASE VALUE

At the heart of any product is the value it provides. This means that keeping one eye on the value of your product is always going to help retention. Just because someone found value in your product on day 1 doesn`t mean they will necessarily find value in it on day 100. You have to always stay ahead of the value curve if you want to retain users. Here are a few generic ways to provide value: • ADD FEATURES • SUBTRACT FEATURES

❑ CUSTOMER SUPPORT: Great customer support is always the key to the best service and satisfaction to customers

COMMUNITY BUILDING

❑ DOCUMENTATION: If your product needs documentation then providing it in the best possible way is actually a service to your community

❑ SOCIAL FEATURES: One of the best ways to retain users is by providing a way for them to connect to others.

A product is good, but a movement is better. A startup is good, but a family is better. Are there things you can do to actually make people feel like they are a part of something? This is community building. People who belong to something stay longer than people who subscribe to something. Here are some ways that you can build community around your product:

MAKE THEM HAPPY All retention comes down to one thing: happiness. If people are happy they will become habitual users. If people are unhappy then you won’t retain them. Don’t overthink retention. Just make people happy with your product.

CHAPTER 10 HOW TO ACTIVATE MEMBERS WHAT YOU NEED TO DO

What you need to KNOW

What you need to DO

PRODUCT GROWTH

What you need to know

What you need to know

PRODUCT GROWTH

A Technique For Producing New Ideas Step 1: Gather Raw Materials Step 2: Digest The Materials Step 3: Unconscious Processing Step 4: The A-HA Moment Step 5: Idea Meets Reality My favorite thing about the technique is the clarity that comes from recognizing when I’m still in the mode of collecting raw materials. I now consciously spend time finding more “raw materials” earlier on in the process of developing a new idea. The results have been that the idea is more thorough and requires less frequent data gathering later in the process.

MINIMUM VIABLE PRODUCT (MVP)

PEOPLE DON'T BUY PRODUCTS; THEY BUY BETTER VERSIONS OF THEMSELVES.

RESOURCES

If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there. Lewis Carroll, Author of Alice in Wonderland

• WHEN YOU’VE ALREADY GOT USAGE, ANALYZE IT.

The Typical Features Usage

60

What percentage of

50

your customers or

40

users have adopted

30

each feature?

20

50%

18%

Intercom on Product Management

10 0 Jan

Feb

March

April

PRODUCT What you need to know

GROWTH

Growth Is Not One-Size Fits All

Growth is a company-wide mindset.

Netflix knows that growth is cultural Culture: What gives Netflix the best chance of continuous success for many generations of technology and people!

FACEBOOK knows that growth is cultural If we don’t create the thing that kills Facebook, someone else will. “ Embracing change “ isn’t enough. It has to be so hardwired into who we are that even talking about it seems redundant. The internet is not a friendly place. Things that don’t stay relevant don’t even get the luxury of leaving ruins. They disappear.

2. The Internet must enrich the lives of individual human beings.

GROWTH HAS

TO ALIGN WITH YOUR VALUES

1. The Internet is a global public resource that must remain open and accessible. 3. Individuals 'security and privacy on the Internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional.

Growth Has to Align With Your Values 4. Individuals must have the ability to shape the Internet and their own experiences on it. 5. The effectiveness of the Internet as a public resource depends upon interoperability (protocols, data formats, content), innovation and decentralized participation worldwide. 6. Transparent community-based processes promote participation, accountability and trust

CAHPTER 11 HOW TO ACTIVATE MEMBERS WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

What you need to Do

What you need to Do

PRODUCT GROWTH

“ I ASK EXISTING USERS OF A PRODUCT HOW THEY WOULD FEEL IF THEY COULD NO LONGER USE THE PRODUCT. SEAN ELLIS

“

If you’re above 40% of the people saying they’d be very disappointed, I tend to say you’ve found Product/Market fit, and if you’re less than that, you haven’t. SEAN ELLIS

EXAMPLE: WE PROVED THAT GOOGLE ANALYTICS HAS PRODUCT/MARK ET FIT

“ You’ll Create The Best Product If You Know More About Customers Than Your Competitors And You Act On That Knowledge. HITEN SHAH

THERE ARE EVEN MORE WAYS TO ASSESS PRODUCT/MARKET FIT

QUALITATIVELY…

NET PROMOTER SCORE (NPS)

delighted.com

WHY DO PEOPLE SIGN UP?

qualaroo.com

WHAT DO THEY EXPECT FROM YOUR SOLUTION? intercom.io

WHY DID THEY BUY? qualaroo.com

WHY DID THEY VISIT CERTAIN PAGES?

qualaroo.com

WHY DID THEY DECIDE TO CHECK IT OUT? qualaroo.com

WHAT PROBLEMS ARE THEY TRYING TO SOLVE? qualaroo.com

WHAT OTHER SOLUTIONS DID THEY CONSIDER?

qualaroo.com

WHAT FRUSTRATES THEM? intercom.io

WHY ARE THEY CANCELING?

lesschurn.io

WHY ARE THEY CANCELING?

surveymonkey.com

WHY ARE THEY CANCELING?

surveymonkey.com

PRODUCT What you need to Do

GROWTH

Only 1 out of 5 tests win.

4 out of 5 tests cost you money.

$

Five ways that products can grow themselves Powered By

Integrations

Work Emails

Embeds

Invites / Referrals

1.67 out of 5 tests win (5 of our last 15 tests won)

TIPS Time

Continuing To Ship New Features Is The Worst Thing You Can Do

CHAPTER 12 TOOLS, TERMINOLOGY and FAQs

TOOLS AND TERMINOLOGY In fact, growth hacking is not just a collection of tactics either (despite the number of tactics outlined in this book). Growth hacking is the process that arrives at those kinds of tactics. Sure, use the tools, use the terminology, and use the tactics, but understand the fundamentals of growth hacking before jumping to the conclusion.

If you allow yourself to think like a growth hacker then you’ll uncover tactics that no one else is aware of, and you’ll be able to survive even when the current round of tips and tricks have run their course.

TOOLS

The most common analytics tools used by growth hackers fall into a few broad categories:

GENERAL ANALYTICS Analytics is by far the most popular analytics platform for general data. Its free and it’s very powerful. Google Analytics is best for high level overviews of your product, but it is difficult to use for granular event or people based analytics (like the kind of tracking that is becoming popular). If you want to watch geography data, device data, bounce data, and other common metrics, then this is a great tool. However, if you are trying to figure out if people churn less after they watch your demo video (a kind of event/people based analytics) then you are going to have difficulties. It simply wasn't built to provide this kind of information. Most companies have a number of analytics platforms running simultaneously, so despite the drawback* of Google Analytics you should still have it installed.

TOOLS

The most common analytics tools used by growth hackers fall into a few broad categories:

EVENT/PEOPLE BASED ANALYTICS There has been a renaissance of sorts within the tools that growth hackers use. Due in large part to the limitation of Google Analytics, a number of new software products have been introduced which allow growth hackers to track the kinds of information that they are interested in. When you install Google Analytics then you place a single piece of JavaScript in each page of your site. When you install event/people based analytics tools then you actually attach a script to each event on your site (not just the site as a whole). This simple change opens up huge possibilities. Now you can get an answer to the following kinds of questions: Do people who use feature X have a higher LTV? Do users in segment Y have higher engagement with feature Z? And almost anything else you can dream of.

TOOLS

The most common analytics tools used by growth hackers fall into a few broad categories:

NICHE ANALYTICS Another trend in analytics are the platforms which focus on certain verticals or niches. Now you can find analytics tools that are primarily for mobile apps, or primarily for lean startups, or primarily for ecommerce. There are too many of these to list, but it would be worthwhile to do a Google search for specific products geared toward the metrics that matter for your industry.

TOOLS

The most common analytics tools used by growth hackers fall into a few broad categories:

CUSTOM ANALYTICS As much as software products are used by growth hackers , many of them also use solutions that are built in-house. Sometimes ifs just easier to roll your own dashboard for specific use cases than it is to get a product to do what you need it to. This will depend on your internal engineering resources also. If you don't have the engineers then you might not be able to build a custom analytics plat- form, in which case you'll have to use off the shelf products. When possible, I recommend installing Google Analytics, some event based product, and building in-house solutions when necessary. Its always better to have too much data than not enough.

TERMINOLOGY

This is far from an exhaustive list, but following are some of the terms that you will hear often in growth hacking circles

KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATOR “ KPI “ A KPI is a number that helps you get a quick grasp of how things are going within your company. If you are selling software subscriptions then a KPI would be how many new subscriptions you have sold today. Another KPI would be how many people canceled their subscription today. A KPI is not an obscure data point that doesn’t have meaning unless it’s ran through a complicated equation. A KPI is a number that matters for obvious reasons, and by simply looking at you can get a sense of company trends and company health. Here are a few best practices around KPIs:

TERMINOLOGY

This is far from an exhaustive list, but following are some of the terms that you will hear often in growth hacking circles

VIRAL COEFFICIENT (K) The viral coefficient is a number that tells you how many new people are brought into your product because of your existing users. If every 50 visitors to your product bring in 100 new visitors to your product then your viral coefficient would be 2. Anything above 1 means that you are growing virally. things to know about virality: ❖ Here some Going viral is based on an equation. It's not just a phrase thrown around to describe something that is seemingly everywhere online. ❖ A viral coefficient over 1 is a great thing, but even if you are below 1 it's still a benefit to the company. Virality isn't always the goal (or even possible). Anything above o means that you are amplifying your product distribution to some degree. ❖ Virality is probably focused on too much. Growth hacking is a large set of skills, and it's possible to grow a product substantially, and profitably, without worrying about virality.

TERMINOLOGY

This is far from an exhaustive list, but following are some of the terms that you will hear often in growth hacking circles

COHORTS A cohort is a portion of your users based on when they signed up for your product. Everyone that signed up in January is in the January cohort. Everyone that signed up in February is in the February cohort. It’s important that you use cohorts because otherwise your data won’t be as clear as it could be. If every month your KPIs are improving for new cohorts month over month then things are going in the right direction. If you just look at a single metric, and average it across all users since the beginning of your product, then your data is being skewed by the good and bad of past cohorts, and you are not seeing how things are currently going with your product as clearly as you should.

TERMINOLOGY

This is far from an exhaustive list, but following are some of the terms that you will hear often in growth hacking circles

SEGMENTS Segments are like cohorts, but instead of basing the group on signup date, you base the group on other segmenting factors. You might categorize your users into male and females groups, in order to see how they behave differently. You could even break cohorts into segments if this gives you relevant data for your product.

CUSTOMER ACQUISITION COST (CAC) Customer acquisition cost is the amount of money it takes to get a new customer. If you spend $500 on Google Ads and this gives you 2 new customers then your customer acquisition cost for this channel is $250. It’s important that you know the CAC for each channel because it can very greatly. Also, once you know the CAC per channel then you know how much you can spend on that channel, or if you should spend anything on that channel.

TERMINOLOGY

This is far from an exhaustive list, but following are some of the terms that you will hear often in growth hacking circles

LIFETIME VALUE OF CUSTOMER (LTV) The lifetime value of the customer is the expected amount of money you’ll make on someone throughout their entire lifecycle on your product. If people pay you $300 a month for your product, and stay customers for an average of 2 years, then your LTV is $300 x 24 (months) = $7,200. Segments come in handy when calculating LTV because you might discover that certain segments of your users have a much higher LTV than other users. This will effect also the CAC

TERMINOLOGY

This is far from an exhaustive list, but following are some of the terms that you will hear often in growth hacking circles

MULTIVARIATE TESTING Multivariate testing (or A/B testing) is when you make product changes that are only seen by some of your users. This gives you some people that see the A version of your product and other people that see the B version of your product. Then you can see if version A or B gives you the results you want. A debate within multivariate testing is whether or not multi-armed bandit testing is the best kind of A/B test. Bandit testing is a continuous form of A/B testing that always send people toward the best performing options. In essence, the experiment never ends. I’m not going to get into this debate here, but I wanted you to know that there is a debate.

TERMINOLOGY

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) CRO refers to the process of making changes to a website or landing page with the goal of increasing the number of online visitors that take a specific conversion action (for example, completing a lead generation form or purchasing a product).

Split Testing The two types of split testing –A/B split testing and multivariate testing –involve conducting controlled, randomized website tests that present website visitors with different combinations of text and images in order to uncover the winning combination that improves a specific website metric. For example, a website using A/B split testing might randomly deploy two versions of a landing page with different headlines to see which contributes to more purchases.

Call-to-Action (CTA) A call-to-action is a piece of text or an image that exhorts visitors to take a specific action. A “Buy Now’ button is a CTA, as is a closing paragraph to a blog post that reads, “Take advantage of this special offer now by completing the form below.”

TERMINOLOGY

Pivot According to Steve Blank, a pivot is a fundamental change in a business’s customer segment, channel, revenue model/pricing, resources, activities, costs, partners or customer acquisition strategy. Pivots occur when untested business hypotheses are disproven, requiring a change in one or more elements underpinning these assumptions.

Product/Market Fit (PMF) Essentially, product/market fit refers to the extent to which a given product satisfies a market demand. An improved fishing pole has a good product/market fit with fisherman, while a new set of work gloves does not.

Software as a Service (SaaS) SaaS is the name given to software products that are centrally hosted by a vendor and made available to customers over the internet. Dropbox, Quickbooks, Microsoft Office 365 and Adobe Creative Cloud are all popular examples of SaaS programs.

TERMINOLOGY

Disruption Though the term has become a bit overused, a “disruptive” product is one that challenges traditions in an existing market. A product that offers a significantly different pricing model, appeals to a new set of target customers or displaces older technology can be considered disruptive.

Growth Experiment A potential growth hack, currently in the experimental stage.

Scalable Growth Hack Growth hack with a YES output from the ESS which can also be automated using tech (bots, scripts, etc).

Unicorn Growth Hacks: Exceptionally successful hacks (Not the financial unicorn). Example: Airbnb-Craigslist.

TERMINOLOGY

Lean Analytics Bare minimum tracking, reporting and analysis.

A/B Testing Comparing 2 versions to check which performs better, usually by changing one element at a time.

CRO Conversion Rate Optimization.

Deep Dive In-depth analysis of any metrics.

TERMINOLOGY

Heatmap Shows how users interact with a website.

Hustle Working outside your comfort zone in the growth hacking execution phase.

ICE Score Impact-Certainty-Ease Score. ICE and scored from 1 to 10 and divided by 3. Use best judgement.

Iterating The cycle of Experiment > Adjust > Experiment repeated and analyzed.

TERMINOLOGY

Sprint A set period of time when the team works to execute a specific process usually growth experiments typically last 30 days.

Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) Using pre-defined processes to save time and resources, essential for growth hackers.

T-Shape Breadth and Depth of knowledge, growth hackers leverage each other's core competency to run campaigns as a team.

TERMINOLOGY

Cohort Portion of the users based on WHEN they signed up. Example: November Cohort = Everyone who signed up in November. If you don't use cohorts you're looking at overall data which is skewed because of bad cohorts hence you won't be able to make the right decisions.

Viral Mechanics Engineering growth (virality) into the product itself.

METRICS TERMINOLOGY

One Metric That Matters (OMTM) As an alternative to a set of KPIs, some growth hackers prefer to focus on “one metric that matters.” This OMTM might be any of the metrics listed below, or it could be any other data point that provides an overall snapshot of the business’s progress.

Churn Rate Churn rate refers to the percentage of customers that stop subscribing to a service. If your business involves a free trial or a month-to-month subscription, your churn rate would be the percentage of prospects that fall out of your trial period without subscribing, or the percentage of customers that cancel their paid subscriptions during any given month.

Average Order Volume (AOV) Another metric that some startups use to measure progress is the average size of each order that goes out. If your AOV was $100 in October 2013 and $200 in October 2014, this could indicate that your business’s performance is improving.

METRICS TERMINOLOGY

Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) MRR –or, the amount of recurring revenue a business generates month over month –is a metric that’s popular with Sean Ellis, HitenShah and other well-known growth hackers. Points in this metric’s favor include its ability to take new business, churn, upgrades and downgrades into effect, as well as its compounding nature.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) A less commonly used growth metric is a business’s NPS, which is a score falling between -100 and 100 that measures customers’ willingness to recommend a company to others. This score can be helpful in detecting changes in consumer sentiment, but does not always directly tie to revenue or growth.

Daily Active Users (DAU)/Monthly Active Users (MAU) DAU and MAU measure the “stickiness” of an internet product by determining the number of users that visit during a given day or month. When DAU or MAU metrics are trending upwards, it can be assumed that the product is gaining traction among its target user base.

METRICS TERMINOLOGY

AARRR “AARRR” is a startup metrics model that incorporates five key data points: acquisition, activation, retention, referrals and revenue. Focusing on all five is more complex than tracking a single OMTM, but can give a more comprehensive look at a business’s health.

Burn rate Burn rate refers to the speed at which an entrepreneur or startup spends its money. As an example, if Startup A earns a $500,000 fundraising round and spends an average of $10,000/month on everything from paid ads to paperclips, its $10,000/month burn rate gives it approximately 50 months of capital.

Daily Active Users (DAU)/Monthly Active Users (MAU) DAU and MAU measure the “stickiness” of an internet product by determining the number of users that visit during a given day or month. When DAU or MAU metrics are trending upwards, it can be assumed that the product is gaining traction among its target user base.

METRICS TERMINOLOGY

A3R3 The Modified growth hacking funnel (Awareness – Acquisition – Activation – Retention – Revenue – Referral ) It`s a modification of the AARRR Pirate Metrics.

Triple Peak Effect Describes the lifetime of any channel potentially used for growth hacking in 3 phases - Early Adopters (Hacks), Early Majority (Organic), Late Majority (Paid).

OPN (Other People's Networks) Leveraging other people's network.

O2I Hacking Growth hacking by converting a process from Outbound to Inbound.

METRICS TERMINOLOGY

NSM (North Star Metric ) Same as OMTM. The North Star Metric (NSM) is a powerful concept that has emerged in recent years from Silicon Valley companies with breakout growth. It helps teams move beyond driving fleeting, surface-level growth to instead focus on generating long-term retained customer growth. The North Star Metric is the single metric that best captures the core value that your product delivers to customers. Optimizing your efforts to grow this metric is key to driving sustainable growth across your full customer base.

User Personas Detailed definitions of how your target audience looks.

Channel Personas Detailed definition of how your target channels look.

Growth Triangle Relationship between Patience, Budgets and Growth explaining the need for growth hacking.

RESOURCES

HOW TO GET STARTED  Buffer Social – “Idea to Paying Customers in 7 Weeks: How We Did It”  Entrepreneur – “How to Start a Business in 10 Days”  The Muse – “You Have an Idea – Now What? 3 First Steps for Your Startup”  Tomasz Tunguz – “The 3 Minute Technique for Brainstorming Your Startup’s Product Roadmap”  Healthpreneur – “How to Start An Online Business”  Perception IT – “Ultimate Ecommerce Guide for Online Entrepreneurs”  Entrepreneurship in a Box – “50 Questions to Develop Business Idea”  Chron – “7 Steps of Product Development”

 Visual.ly – “10 Rules to a Great Startup Idea”

RESOURCES

VALIDATING YOUR IDEA  Usability Hour – “How to Validate Your Ideas for Free With This Landing Page”  Hatchery – “How to Validate Your Business Idea By Testing a Hypothesis”  Growth Hackers – “7 Steps to Validate Your Startup Idea”

GETTING YOUR INITIAL CUSTOMERS  Optimizing Rocks – “If You Build It… It’s Just There”  Moz – “How to Grow: 21 Tactics to Acquire Customers”  Growth Hackers – “19 Ways Growth Hackers Acquire Customers”  Medium – “The Growth Hacker’s Cookbook”

RESOURCES

CUSTOMER RETENTION  Conversion XL – “9 Case Studies That’ll Help You Reduce SaaS Churn”  KISSMetrics – “How Mention Reduced Churn by 22% in One Month”  The Next Web – “Creating Customers for Life: 50 Resources on Loyalty, Churn and Customer Retention”  Tomasz Tunguz – “Why Everything I Thought I Knew About Churn is Wrong”

CORE METRICS FOR STARTUPS  Clarity – “Measuring the Health of Your SaaS Business: the Ultimate Metrics Guide”  Growth Hackers – “The Only Metric That Matters”

 KISSMetrics – “How to Calculate Lifetime Value – The Infographic”  Roy Povarchik – “7 Metrics Every Ecommerce Marketer Should Follow to Achieve Growth”

RESOURCES

CONVERSION RATE OPTIMIZATION  Conversion XL – “Unlocking Your Company’s Growth Engine with Conversion Rate Optimization”  Conversioner – “How and Where to Start Optimizing to Increase Your Conversion”  Conversioner – “10 Psychological Triggers to Boost Revenues”  Perception IT – “Some Minor Changes Can Give Big Increment in Conversion Rates”  Userlike – “8 Sure-Fire Ways to Skyrocket Your eCommerce Conversion Rates”

RESOURCES

GROWTH HACKING EXPERIMENTS  Rob Sobers – “Growth Hacking Trello Template”  The Agency Post – “The 50/50 Experiment: A New Technique for Growth Hacking”  Growth Hackers – “How Do You Capture and Manage Your Ideas for Growth Hacking Experiments”  Referral SaaSquatch – “Building a Process for Growth Experiments”

PARTNERSHIP CONSIDERATIONS  Ramon Bez – “Driving User Growth Through High Profile Partnerships”  Entrepreneur – “How to Successfully Collaborate with a Larger Business Partner”

 Vero – “How to Growth Hack Using Partnerships: An Online Marketing Strategy”  Perception IT – “Major Things to Know About Entry-Level Business Development & Partnerships”

RESOURCES

RAISING MONEY  Marketer Graham – “Fundraising Marketing: Hacks for Raising Your Round”  Seedcamp – “Setting Appropriate Milestones in an Early-Stage Startup”  Clarity – “Then & Now: Youngest Person to Raise VC Shares His Growth Path”

 AdEspresso – “Want $1M? Here’s How We Did – Anatomy of An AngelList Fundraising”  Blonde2.0 Blog – “How We Helped Raise $75,000 for an Indiegogo Campaign – Step-by-Step”  Rocketship.fm – “Growth, Pricing and the Realities of Funding”  Squirrly – “Funding Your Startup is Now a Piece of Cake”  Enamtila – “How to Succeed in Crowdfunding & Achieve 1090% Funding Goal”  Jay Gould – “Value is What You Create – Price is What You Get”

RESOURCES

BUILDING A TEAM  Entrepreneur – “5 Steps for Building a Great Startup Team”  Step Consulting – “Wanting the A-Team is One Thing. Getting It Is Another”  Social Media Today – “How to Assemble a Content Marketing Team for Your Blog”

 Tomasz Tunguz – “Startup Best Practices #9 – Structuring One on OnesTo Maximize Your Team’sSuccess”

BUILDING A TEAM  Entrepreneur – “5 Steps for Building a Great Startup Team”  Step Consulting – “Wanting the A-Team is One Thing. Getting It Is Another”

 Social Media Today – “How to Assemble a Content Marketing Team for Your Blog”  Tomasz Tunguz – “Startup Best Practices #9 – Structuring One on OnesTo Maximize Your Team’sSuccess”

RESOURCES

OTHER RESOURCES and TOOLS  Why traction is overrated - Retention _ engagement hacking and product analytics  The Ultimate Guide to Growth Hacking 168 Resources to Help You Become a Growth Hacker  The Ultimate Growth Hacking Sourcebook - Pirates Matrex  The Idiot Proof Guide to Making Money with Growth Hacking  The Growth Manifesto - Everything about growth Hacking  The Growth Hackers Guide to The Galaxy - Study Cases  The 10 Growth Hacking Articles that Broke the Internet by Vin Clancy

 Steps to be a Growth Hacker  Mobile App Growth Hacking  100 Growth Hacking Things  140 Growth Hacks

 Growth Hacking Resources  How to get 1 million swipes - Instagram

FAQs of Growth Hacking ❑ Question: When should I choose Growth Hacking over other marketing strategies? Answer: You should choose Growth Hacking for sure if you have a startup. Since you cannot afford to spend a lot on intense advertising, Growth Hacking can turn out to be the safest option to drive sales for your business.

❑ Question: Can I conduct growth hacking techniques on my own or do I need to hire a growth hacker? Answer: If you know who your target audience is, how to carry out some of the complex internet marketing activities required in Growth Hacking, and how to work with the analytics then it is an easy game for you. However, if you are new to this form of marketing, then hiring an experienced growth hacker is a better option.

FAQs of Growth Hacking

❑ Question: If I hire a growth hacker, what are the criteria I should follow? Answer: It is tricky to choose the right person. Therefore, you may need some time to identify the right growth hacker to increase the number of users visiting your website. While searching for one, make sure that he/she should be skilled at search engine optimization, analytics, social media marketing, email marketing, and social sharing.

FAQs of Growth Hacking ❑ Question: How should I incorporate Growth Hacking into the culture of my organization? Answer: At first, it is not challenging to introduce the Growth Hacking concept to your staff members, as a startup always starts with only a few employees. This is why it is easier to communicate this new marketing technique to them. To do this, conduct a brief training session, in which you can inform them about the changes made to their job description related to the addition of Growth Hacking tasks. Furthermore, educate them how useful it will be to implement Growth Hacking strategies to the company, leading to increased sales as well as an increased level of employee benefits

FAQs of Growth Hacking

❑ Question: : What if Growth Hacking doesn’t work for my business? Answer: : If the first experiment of Growth Hacking does not turn out to be successful, don’t worry as this is something many startups experience in the beginning. Start this off all over again with a different dimension. While you do this, never ignore the analytics of your potential customers.

REFERENCES ❑ ❑ ❑ ❑ ❑ ❑ ❑ ❑ ❑

Growth Hacking or: Lean Marketing for Startups For Mattn Griffel Growth Engine 1.0 For Traffic is Currency Growth Marketers Guide To Customer Engagement Automation For KissMetrics How to Prepare for Growth For Hiten Shah Growth for Pre vs Post PMF Startups – Chandini Ammineni Growth Hacking a Startup for Luchianenco Filip The definitive guide to growth hacking UNLOCK YOUR GROWTH for Sean Ellis Entrepreneurship Magazine

Final Word Till now, you must have got a clear idea of what Growth Hacking is, and how useful it can prove to be for the growth of your startup. So, what else? If things go according to your Growth Hacking plans, your startup will soon have a position where it can compete with other established companies! However, you can use each and every part of it only if you are well aware of the tactics, techniques, and tools of Growth Hacking. To ensure that you do it in the best way possible, keep having an idea about the most useful Growth Hacking strategies by consulting this book. As you go on with this, after some time, you will realize that you have actually mastered it. Till then, best of luck!