Your Growth Is Shrinking Geschreven door Hugo Veeger

This space started as an organized collection of quotes based on the session Your Growth Is Shrinking at Uprise 2016. Milda then joined in and added some more in-depth growth hack content and images from Growth Tribe.

Have something to add? Let me know, so I can add you as a collaborator on this Space.

The main trait of a growth hacker: a relentless passion to learn new stuff

Most people are already unwittingly optimizing a lot of processes (like putting the dishes in the dishwasher). To be a growth hacker is to constantly optimize and get better at everything combined with an extreme willingness to learn and experiment. (And measure, obviously).

You can compare it to the process of finding out the best time to go to bed, or using an activity tracker.

The founder of the company needs to drive everyone's ambition to grow and do better.

Basically, everyone should act like a growth hacker. And the founder keeps the fire burning.

The biggest killer of growth is the ego of the CEO/Founder

Big risks here are:

• Falling in love with your own product.
• Claiming something is common sense.
• Being afraid to measure things

Set a goal. If something needs work, work on it more aggressively. If it doesn't work: learn from it".

This should be your main modus operandi.

Try to model the behavior of those that already did it.

What did Zuckerberg do?™

Look at what completely different businesses do and try to emulate them.

You're a SaaS-startup? Look at what the Hotel business is doing to generate growth. How can you emulate their strategies?

Look at what the competition is not doing.

I.e. sell your holiday houses on LinkedIn.

Limit your resources and start doing stuff.

Don't put too much money in your company, it makes you slow.

Only start a/b testing when you are at 80%. Before that you should just fix stuff.

A/B test for those last 20%. The first 80% should be product / market fit (or problem / solution fit), a great experience for customers etc.

Keep testing, even when you're already BIG.

At Booking.com only about 4% of A/B tests are significant, but those are making them a lot of money).

It's better to report growth in € than in %

That way, management / skeptics / anyone will understand the effectiveness of what you're trying to do. Having a significant ROI is a great motivation.

Create a one metric purpose for the whole company.

And use sub-KPI's / metrics that contribute to that metric. Everyone should know what the company's one metric purpose is.

Look into the Pirate Metrics

The Pirate metrics:

• Acquisition: You acquire the user. For a SaaS product, this usually means a sign up.
• Activation: The user uses your product, indicating a good first visit.
• Retention: The user continues to use your product, indicating they like your product.
• Referral: The user likes your product so much he refers other new users.
• Revenue: The user pays you.

Leverage your thank you page.

For example by asking people to share.

Start building your email list. With SumoMe or something similar.

SumoMe creates these annoying but usefull popup modals.

Start putting the emails of your existing

Ingredients:

3 to 4 people (e.g. a coder, a hustler and and a hipster).
Put them together in a hight growth startup. Rampup their skills. Outcome is this beautiful 'know it all unicorn':

What is Growth:

Growth is more about the mindset than anything else. Some guy on the internet said:

Growth hacking is generally a small data - driven and technical group tasked with figuring out how to scale business.

But back to the basics, to understand the concept better let's jump into the brain of a Growth Hacker: Takeru Kobayashi, is a Japanese competetive eater, who broke the record (twice) during a hotdog eating contest.

His growth hack technique: practice and experiment at home and find loopholes, which would allow you to do things x2 faster.

Let's not forget, Growth Hacks only work for a certain time, they are not sutainable. Only building an amazing product is a sustainable way to grow.

We must learm how to eat the 'hotdog' fast because there is a lot of competition there.

Udemy

Marketplace for education. There had to be a demand (students) and supply (teachers). But during early days, no teachers were willing to supply knowledge, since there were no students to consume it.

And Udemy did something that every 'normal' company would do: they didn't hire any marketers! Udemy decided to look into where their target audience is hanging out NOW, and they found out that it was Youtube! No surprise there, since the platform provides so many video tutorials and lessons. Therefore, Udemy made a little scraper, this way hacking the supply side.

Students came into Udemy and startet building their own content.

Paypal

At first this email payment platform (bankers laughed into Paypals face) started paying people to become users (10 dollars for singing up). But the less famoust story is that Paypal noticed the irregularity data. The team noticed that not many people are using the product so they decided to tackle the eBay power sellers. Afterwards, Paypal created a BOT to go around eBay and make power sellers to sell their product through Paypal. Therefore, eBay power sellers had to create Paypal accounts.

Smart and Sneaky techniques, huh? But let's leave this question for the next Chapter.

Don't forget: always look for patters!

All of the Growth Hacking startups have these 3 things in common (and learn them all, word!):

• OPN (Other peoples' network. So milk and piggy back it).

• Creative or Sneaky marketing techniques (ethics??)

• And we all must remember: growth hack is more than just marketing!

• Traditional marketing channels are expensive and saturated

Most of the projects are heavily focused on the product, but the real challenge is distribution. It's not all about building new features, it's about targeting the right audience at the right cost.

Every day a person is bombarder by ads at least 250 times a day. Quite a lot, isn't it?

High self esteem? Check out Betalist. There are numbers of newly curated beta websites that are coming up, have super good landing pages, and all of them are uber competitive. This competition is very fierce due to the fact that startup creation marginal costs are so low, there are tons of coding frameworks and developers, who know how to work with it.

But no worries! New channels are popping daily,because we are so addicted to the screens. New things will be hapening all the time.

• Viral channel effectivennes

These channels come and go, and numbers of channels are still to be made. BeamSocial, wearable technology, VR so many platforms are super upcoming so there is no excuse to not to grab some aquisition.

• Activation and retention

The most difficult part: aquisition is not the problem, to retain the users is difficult. So use it all:

Available data: all about removing the waste! Copywriting days are long gone, it doesn't work anymore (not, my words), we have already substituted it with attribution models.

It's not about the tips and tricks anymore, you must develop a process. Every startup has a different value proposition, different journey. So follow the process, find the loophole, growth hack.

Dive in the data
Find your pirate funnel. Make a flowcart ( map the whole flow of a user), OMTM (need to focus our company on two metrics: time, and whatever you prefer and start with the metrics improvement).

Must read: 'Lean Analytics' (at least the first 50 pages).

Since we stole everything from the lean startup - come up with idea backlog, prioritise framework, design thinking (experiment design), time box it all, and execute (different between failing and striving startups).

Analyse the learnings. Start again. While doing it the first time we fail miserably, but at some point after mapping tons of times voila - your longed Growth Hack (via Growth Tribe)

*Smart or sneaky? *

Marketing has to be: cutting edge, subversive, based on best parctices.

Let's play an ethics game:

• Glide - importing your contacts after sign up, they send the invite to all of the imported contacts (smart or sneaky?)

• Oracle (chose V2 since it's more reasuring then V1) (smart or sneaky?)

• Uber employees ordered 500k lift themselves and then cancelled it. Lot's of comotion. (Smart or sneaky?)

But don't concentrate on subversiveness. Marketing based on best practice and cutting endge is the best!

Coding and automation

Technical marketing is all! Todays' marketer has to have some basic tech knowledge. Don't forget, there are lot's of tools that enable you.

import.io - blockspring - Clearbit API (Rich social information, unlimited leads).

You come up with these tricks through analysing data and testing it. Experiment based approach.

Use:

Hard data, retention charts, regretion analysis, customer value analysis.

Behavioural psychology to analyse soft data (talk with the users, better hyphotesis).

Tip for new read: (Substitution for copywrite) 'Hooked'. When you mix it all you get conversion rate optimisation.

AB testing: being more clear.

Marketing

Awareness (getting people to visit the website), Acquisition (getting them to sign up).

Growth
Awareness, Acquisition and Retention (making sure users come back), Referral (getting users to invite others), Revenue (sell, upsell, cross sell).

Customer acquisition channels: mix of different channels. In order to do this you have to be the T shaped player.

How to define the best channels (via Growth Tribe):

BJ Fogg model is about the failing triggers. And there only 2 reasons for a consumer to not click on a sign up button:

• Lack of motivation
• Lack of usability

Nowadays people have an attention span of goldfish, therefore we must be better than the competition, have better usability and form a clear value proposition:

Read: Usability hub. Dont make your customers think!

Activate the user: Define the wow moment, flip point it! Show the wow moment before user signs up.

Increasing retention:

Some great tips here (via Growth Tribe)

Execution fails because people don't have the skill.

And now feast your eyes and ears on the mini lecture on Growth Hack by this awesome dude: