Growth Hacking: Marketing that Moves the Bottom Line

•  15 year startup growth veteran

•  Wrote Startup Growth Engines with Sean Ellis

•  My hobby is studying fast growing companies

3TAKEAWAYS

1.  Growth hacking complements marketing – not a replacement

2.  Use data to find leverage points and double down on those

3.  Rapid, continuous experimentation key to growth – no silver bullets

“Most startups don’t fail at building a product. They fail at acquiring customers.”

Growth is Everything

– Gabriel Weinberg

•  McKinsey & Co. studied 3,000 software companies with different growth rates

•  High-growth companies deliver 5x greater returns than medium growth companies

•  Supergrowers (CAGR > 60% at $100m mark) were 8x more likely to reach $1B

•  Increase in growth rates drive 2x the market capitalization as margin reduction in companies < $4B

•  No correlation between cost & growth rates

Growth is Everything

What is growth hacking? A cool-sounding euphemism for making the doer feel good about using the same old sleazy marketing tricks.

– David Heinemeier Hansen, 37 Signals!

What is growth hacking? A … focus on understanding your users and how they discover and adopt your products, [so] you can build features that help you acquire and retain more users, rather than just spending marketing dollars.

– Josh Elman, Greylock. Frmr. Twitter, Facebook & LinkedIn!

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Extreme Competition for Attention

Extreme Competition for Attention

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WOM Email

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James Currier

Yet some huge successes…

Little or no traditional marketing…

Use a Growth Hacking Playbook •  Experiment with all available growth levers

•  Understand what’s driving growth, test to improve it

•  Heavy focus on product and optimization

The Dropbox Growth Story •  Freemium reduced allowable CPA

•  Natural advantages to grow with collaboration and sharing

•  Catalyze sharing with double sided referral program

•  Optimize conversions on sharing loops

•  300 million users with no traditional marketing

B2C or B2B

•  Growth hacking isn’t just for consumer-focused companies.

•  B2B often requires integration with sales process.

HUBSPOT – FREE TOOLS

Finding Your Own Growth Levers •  Areas of exploration

•  Process, team and tools

SOME AREAS OF EXPLORATION

•  Platform Integrations

•  User-Get-User

•  Free Tools

SOME AREAS OF EXPLORATION •  Powered By

•  Reverse Engineer Success

Hotel Tonight’s 3G Epiphany

•  Discover the why can lead to breakthroughs in growth

•  HotelTonight found poor data connections drove conversion rates UP.

•  WHY?

Success Data: AirBnB’s Pro Photos •  Discovered that listings with

high-quality photos received 2-3x bookings

•  Invests in professional photography

•  Booking activity explodes as desire increases

Discover Your Magic Number

Twitter’s Follow 30 People

"Once a user follows 30 people, they're more or less active forever.” – Josh Elman, Greylock

Experimentation Is Key To Success

•  Generate many ideas for experiments

•  Prioritize by impact, confidence & ease

•  Balance high impact & high probability tests

Growth Team Often Needed

•  Multi-disciplinary

•  Cross functional

•  Evangelize experimentation culture

“Growth team” complements existing marketing team

HELPFUL TOOLS

•  Analytics — Identify drop-off points and under-performing pages (e.g. Google Analytics, KISSMetrics)

•  Qualitative Insights — Uncover the why behind the numbers (e.g. Qualaroo, SurveyMonkey)

•  A/B Test — Find better performing combinations to drive conversion rate (e.g. Optimizely, Unbounce)

Relentless Execution of Growth Processes

1. Ideas

2.Prioritize

3.Test4.Analyze

5.Optimize

3TAKEAWAYS

1.  Growth hacking complements marketing – not a replacement

2.  Use data to find leverage points and double down on those

3.  Rapid, continuous experimentation key to growth – no silver bullets

Morgan Brown @morganb GrowthHackers.com