These are some notes form the book Growth Hacker Marketing by Ryan Holiday. It’s a ‘marketing primer for the 21st century’, particularly for smaller initiatives (although the lessons can be used by established brands too). _It’s relevant to everyone - whether you’re raising money for charity, writing a blog, or have a business that you’re looking to grow.
In summary: the growth hacker mindset turns traditional advertising on its head by showing how targeted and iterative advertising beats large scale brand advertising. I won’t recommend reading the entire book - if you’re interested beyond the summary below, find a more detailed summary.
Build a great product
The first step to effective marketing is to make sure the product is good. There is no shortcut here. Marketing can only have a limited impact when the product isn’t great. Note: ‘products’ are more than traditional digital or physical products - a product could be a book you’re writing or the event you’re convincing people to go to.
Product-market fit (PMF) is the foundation of a successful growth hacking process. You have to test what works and then design a product that fits the market’s needs. The book outlines the keys to getting the PMF right as quickly as possible: build a prototype. Then test it, modify it, and test it again. This approach can take many rounds of iteration before you find the best product or service to offer.
Launch iteratively
A traditional product launch looks like this: a lot of money invested in building the perfect product, followed by huge advertising campaign (or a grand launch party).
Growth hacking rejects this type of product development (as mentioned above). It also suggests a different type of advertising in the form of smaller, iterative launches. The key with growth hacking is to target the right people, not all the people. Instead of going after ‘everyone,’ growth hackers like to target early adopters, people who are really passionate. You get feedback from these users, who help develop the product. When these kinds of customers become loyal fans, they’re likely to tell their friends, helping your brand grow organically.
Here are a few examples of product launches, taken directly from the book:
- You can create the aura of exclusivity with an invite-only feature (as Mailbox did).
- You can create hundreds of fake profiles to make your service look more popular and active than it actually is—nothing draws a crowd like a crowd (as Reddit did in its early days).
- You can target a single service or platform and cater to it exclusively—essentially piggybacking off or even stealing someone else’s growth (as PayPal did with eBay).
- You can launch for just a small group of people, own that market, and then move from host to host until your product spreads (which is what Facebook did by starting in colleges—first at Harvard—before taking on the rest of the population).
- You can host cool events and drive your first users through the system manually (as Myspace, Yelp, and Udemy all did).
- You can bring on influential advisors and investors for their valuable audience and fame rather than their money (as About.me and Trippy did—a move that many start-ups have emulated).
Going viral
Going viral is every marketer’s dream. It’s when people share the product with their networks, who do the same, causing exponential growth. It’s not all down to luck, as Ryan Holiday says:
*Only a specific type of product or business or piece of content will go viral - it not only has to be worth spreading, it has to provoke a desire in people to spread it
The two important elements:
- The product must be worth sharing - again, there is no substitute for a poor product
- Sharing must be encouraged. E.g. ‘refer a friend’ campaigns. Dropbox’s refer a friend campaign gave users additional free space. The more friends users referred, the better the product became for them
Retaining and engaging users
Once you’re reached a critical mass, there’s no point getting additional people through the door if you can’t keep them active. The growth hacker’s preference is engaging dormant users vs attracting potential users. This often means going back to the product and tweaking it to ensure that users are getting more value out of it.
*You’re better off teaching your customers how to use your product, as services like Facebook and Amazon do, to get them to supply more personal information and make them more engaged - than chasing some new person who doesn’t really care