GROWTH

HACKING
EGROWTH
NGINE
By: Mohammed Hanafy

HACKING
ENGINE
B y: M ohammed Hanaf y
 AGENDA
CH1 WHAT’S GROWTH HACKING

CH2 THE PROFILE OF A GROWTH HACKER

CH3 THE GROWTH HACKING PROCESS

CH4 THE GROWTH HACKER FUNNEL VS FLYWHEEL

 AGENDA
CH5 PULL TACTICS FOR GETTING VISITORS

CH6 PUSH TACTICS FOR GETTING VISITORS

CH7 PRODUCT TACTICS FOR GETTING VISITORS

CH8 HOW TO ACTIVATE MEMBERS

 AGENDA
CH9 HOW TO RETAIN USERS

CH10 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.

mohammed.hanafy@aiesec.com
m.hanafy@Gereeb.com
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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
To define growth hacking, we should
first define the two words that compose
the term.
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 “
Growth Hacking as Business
“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.
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 low-
cost 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
One of the challenges of
this memoire is to put a
definition on the term
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.
History of 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.
Birth of the term
Growth Hacking
In this first blog post, Ellis defined a growth hacker as being “a
person whose true north is growth”4. Required skills are to have
The term Growth hacker was first introduced by Sean entrepreneurial drive, to be creative, discipline and a mind for
Ellis in 2010. Ellis helped many startups to reach high analytics, with single purpose of achieving sustainable growth.
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.
 ❑Growth Marketing Growth Hacking
is when you focus all of your vs
business efforts on growing an Growth Marketing
So… audience (or community) as fast
as possible in an environment of ❑Growth Hacking
IS IT GROWTH HACKING or extreme uncertainty, on a limited is finding an underutilized
GROWTH MARKETING ? budget. strategy for acquiring [your
core metric] at an
So growth marketing is simply unexpectedly low cost per
focusing on growing an audience acquisition.
instead of selling a product
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 And all of this is specifically metric driven. But even more
specifically, driven by the scientific method, the build-
Marketing measure-learn method, the lean startup method, whatever
Metrics 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
 So if that’s growth marketing, then why do you constantly hear the
Growth Hacking, phrase “growth hacking?” Well, because more people want to be
however… 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 Be a growth marketer - which means, you need to have turned ALL
of your business efforts towards growing an audience through a
Growth Hacker 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 GROWTH MARKETING is slow and steady, in a sense, and
vs GROWTH HACKING is fast spurts of spontaneous growth.
Growth Hacking 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

Landing page optimization Product management

SEO Analytics Onboarding

Email marketing Others UX

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

Portfolio
Presentation
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 GROWTH
next two weeks to focus on this feature. Analytics can help stack
rank your to-do list in interesting ways. 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 Get a modern

PowerPoint Presentation
that is beautifully
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 designed.
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.
GROWTH HACKERS
ARE T-SHAPED

T-SHAPE Get a modern

PowerPoint Presentation
that is beautifully
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 designed.
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.
GROWTH HACKERS
ARE T-SHAPED

V-SHAPE Get a modern

PowerPoint Presentation
that is beautifully
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 designed.
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.
 GROWTH HACKERS ARE RIGHT BRAINED

THE SQUISHY, EPHEMERAL, FLUFFY

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.
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..

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.
 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

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
GROWTH simple once you've found out the things that work for your product.
Until then you have to try hundreds of dead ends.
HACKERS ARE
OBESSIVE 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 4: Execute the experiment

Step 1: Define actionable goals
“ ANALYZING “
“ BRAINSTORMING “

Step 2: Implement analytics to Step 5: Optimize the experiment

track your goals “ PRIORITIZING “ “ Systemizing “

Step 3: Leverage your existing Step 6: Repeat and iteration

strengths “ Designing and Testing “
 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

Make Onboarding Improve Images Add “What’s

Educate Members When Someone Experience Include On New”
About Comments Content Creation Homepage To Category TO
Content Creation Content Features Show Homepage
Through Email Automatically Send
Creators And Not That Will
The Creator An
Just Highlight New
Email To
Consumers 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 1- WRITE DOWN YOUR
HACKING HYPOTHESES BEFORE YOU
PROCESS
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.
 C H A P T ER
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.

GROUP A GROUP B
(TEST GROUP) (CONTROL GROUP)
CONTENT CREATION
+/- (AFTER EXPERIMENT)
-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.
 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 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 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
HACKING 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
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 GET
is that people are unpredictable and full of free-will. If you are VISITORS
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:
ACTIVATE
MEMBERS
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, RETAIN
because that would imply that they have some sort of relationship USERS
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.
DEFINING THE THREE LEVELS OF THE FUNNEL

1. Getting A Visitor Is Like Going

On A Blind Date.
GET
VISITORS
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 ACTIVATE
have to activate them and turn them into MEMBERS
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 RETAIN
account, or even making a purchase. You
could even have multiple activations that USERS
you track. Now, they are not just visitors,
but they are members. They have joined
what you are doing in some way.
DEFINING THE THREE LEVELS OF THE FUNNEL

ACTIVATING A MEMBER IS LIKE BEING

IN A RELATIONSHIP WITH SOMEONE.
GET
VISITORS
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 ACTIVATE
name implies, uses your product regularly.
This is someone that you’ve retained.
MEMBERS
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 RETAIN
best practices that growth hackers have USERS
discovered to retain users.
DEFINING THE THREE LEVELS OF THE FUNNEL

GET
VISITORS
RETAINING A USER IS
LIKE GETTING MARRIED. 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?
 WHAT ARE GOOD CONVERSION
Given all the variables that go into knowing whether you have good conversion RATES FOR THIS FUNNEL?
ratios through the funnel, here are some tips to keep in mind:

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 What We
the stages of the funnel that work together to create the largest overall
impact. Don’t miss the forest for the trees. 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 IT ALL BEGAN
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
WITH PIRATES
product more than growth. His overall point is that you shouldn`t try to find new visitors, or Click HERE
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.
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 Get
Traffic ? Users ? Profit

The Magic Is
What Happens
In Between!
 IT ALL BEGAN WITH
PIRATES PIRATES METRICS
“ AARRR “

1. ACQUISITION 2. ACTIVATION 3. RETENTION

How do users become Do drive-by Visitors Does a one-time user

aware of you ? subscribe, use, etc ? become engaged?

SEO, SEM, Widgets, Features, Design, Tone, Notification, alerts,

Emails, PR, Campaigns, Compensation, reminders, emails,
The lean Blogs, … Affirmation… updates …
Growth
Hacking 4. REVENUE 5. REFERRAL
framework Do you make money from user Do users promote your product?
activity?
Emails, Widgets, Campaigns, likes,
Transactions, clicks, RTs, affiliates …
subscriptions, DLC, analytics …
THE GROWTH
HACKER’S JOB IS
TO FIGURE OUT
HOW TO MOVE
USERS FROM ONE
STATE TO THE NEXT

??
CREATES AN VISITS AGAIN
ACCOUNT LATER
You need to measure conversions at each step

1744

10% 30% 30%

174
52 17
Acquisition Activation Retention Revenue
Dave
McClure’s
example
conversion
metrics
 AT FIRST YOUR NUMBERS WILL BE
REALLY NOT GOOD
1744

1% 18% 0%

17 3 0
Acquisition Activation Retention Revenue
 AT FIRST YOUR NUMBERS WILL BE
REALLY NOT GOOD
1744
FOCUS
HER E

1% 18% 0%

17 3 0
Acquisition 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) User signs up (or returns)

2) They activate you on the product with specific/relevant content
3) You save new content or re-pin existing content which gives Pinterest quality signals
4) Pinterest distributes the quality content to search engines
5) 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
Pull - You entice them to
Growth come to you.
Product - You use y our
product itself to bring
Hacking Push - You coerce them
them to you
to come to you.
So, you are looking for
new ways to increase the
number of your website
visitors? This is easy,
There are 12 pull tactics that we
even for a startup,
covered:
provided you follow the
right approach. From the
Growth Hacking Infographics Blogging or Guest Blogging
perspective, you can get
t h e r e q u i r e d we b s i t e Webinars Podcasting or Guest Podcasting
traffic of your visitors by
following only three Ps of Deal Sites Ebooks, Guides, and Whitepapers
Growth Hacking, i.e. Pull
Tactics, Push Tactics, and
Marketplace Conference Presentations
P r o d u c t Ta c t i c s . ?

SEO Contests

Social Media LOPA

FUNDAMENTALS
OF A PULL
STRATEGY

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.
 Adam Breckler, of Visual.ly, provides
the following advice when creating an
infographic:
FUNDAMENTALS
✓ SELECT A GOOD TOPIC
OF A PULL ✓ FIND THE RIGHT DATA
STRATEGY ✓ ANALYZE THE DATA
✓ BUILD THE NARRATIVE
✓ COME UP WITH A DESIGN CONCEPT

4. INFOGRAPHICS ✓ POLISH AND REFINE THE DESIGN

Infographics can entice people to ✓ DISTRIBUTE THE INFOGRAPHIC

your product because they
simultaneously display expertise and
aesthetic taste. Visualizations are
powerful tools, and they are spread
using social media extremely easily.
 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.

FUNDAMENTALS
OF A PULL
STRATEGY
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.
➢ SLIDE DECK
If you’re presenting at a conference then you
probably have a slide deck.
➢ 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
➢ 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 non-
existent.
 FUNDAMENTALS
OF A PULL
STRATEGY

7. SEO
Even today, SEO is considered as the
So, when you create a lot of such content, search engines will soon
primary way to get maximum traffic to your
realize that you have high authority on the topic of your interest.
website. This is simply because thousands
Eventually, your website rankings will increase, and give another
of people search for product information by
chance to your potential customers to visit your website. However,
using popular search engines. In this case,
there are really two kinds of SEO strategies. I call them:
your efforts of writing eBooks, user guides,
and whitepapers about something related content and code.
to your business are worth it.

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.
Offer your customers a specific deal. This is surely going to
For this reason, add your products to
let them visit your website for further product details.
the most popular deal sites.

FUNDAMENTALS
OF A PULL
STRATEGY
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.
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:
- 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 •
 FUNDAMENTALS
PURCHASE ADS 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 OF A PUSH
“Cross Promotions“ STRATEGY
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
 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
FUNDAMENTALS OF A PUSH STRATEGY
going to use this tactic:

▪ THINK CAREFULLY ABOUT THE INCENTIVES

▪ DON’T ROLL YOUR OWN AFFILIATE SOLUTION
▪ VET EVERY NEW AFFILIATE EARLY ON
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
FUNDAMENTALS OF A PUSH STRATEGY
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.
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
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
-40 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.

We covered 6 activation tactics:
-40

❖ 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
Dd

❖ CONGRUOUS LANGUAGE
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.
 Here are some insights around copywriting:
THE HEADLINE SHOULD MENTION YOUR UNIQUE VALUE PROPOSITION
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

COPYWRITING
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.
 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
COPYWRITING
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
PROGRESS Bar
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. 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.

BUNDLING
Another way to get people to make a purchase is through bundling your
ACTIVATING 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
USERS TECHNIQUES 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 ❑ THE RED CARPET

❑ SPEED TO AHA ❑ INCREASE VALUE
❑ DON’T FEAR EMAIL ❑ COMMUNITY BUILDING
❑ ALERTS AND NOTIFICATIONS ❑ MAKE THEM HAPPY
❑ EXIT INTERVIEWS

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 Send 100 Shirts to the first 100 Users

o Give your best users a shout out in an email newsletter.
o Keep a Twitter list of your best users and retweet them often.
o Give your VIP users access to exclusive content.
o 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 ❑ DOCUMENTATION: If your product needs documentation

then providing it in the best possible way is actually a service to

BUILDING 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
60 Features Usage

50
What percentage of
your customers or 40 50%
users have adopted 30

each feature? 20
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
Work Emails

Embeds
Integrations

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.
 The most common analytics tools
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.
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
METRICS

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.
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)

METRICS

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.
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
METRICS

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.
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

METRICS

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.

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.
METRICS

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”
 OTHER RESOURCES and TOOLS
RESOURCES
 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!