Growth Hacking: Runway Maximize the Growth of Your Most Valuable Customers Mark Andersen May 4, 2015
• Start in your smallest segment possible, monopolize it & then expand ("competition is for losers": Thiel)
• How is your product unique & better?
• Do things that don't scale: build out an awesome experience before coding it
• Live user testing/customer support: quantitative & qualitative; focus on finding the big problem
Growth Strategy
• "Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market": Marc Andreessen
• "Make something people want": Paul Graham (Y Combinator)
• "Make insanely great products": Steve Jobs
• "A great brand is a promise of benefit that's persuasive and unique": David Ogilvy
How do you know if you have it?
• Would at least 40% of your customers say they'd be "very disappointed" without your product (Survey.io)
• Clearing Net Promoter Score (NPS), retention and lifetime net value hurdles
• Word of mouth is one of your biggest acquisition channels; virality (K value > 1)
Product/Market Fit
• How are you measuring your product/market fit?
• Are you clearly communicating your unique, compelling value proposition?
• Who are your most valuable customers?
• What early behavior are your most valuable customers doing that's most predictive of success?
• How quickly are you getting your users to their aha! moment?
• How can you build virality inherently into your product?
Product & Marketing Questions
Marketing: Personas & Customer Journey Maps, WOM, User Groups
• Create personas & then a customer journey map (storyboards) for every key persona showing their key experiences
• Word of mouth (WOM), PR & invite flows are excellent forms of acquisition. WOM is always the easiest & cheapest growth.
• AirBnB turns their users into their own distribution networks: through the click of a button you can post your listing to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn...
Marketing: Content Marketing & SEO
Identify your most valuable customers & create content they crave: Credo Mobile example, Salesforce, HubSpot, KISS Metrics..
•Inbound links from high authority sites, page rank
•Site architecture: title & description tags, anchor text, descriptive URLs, "Mobilegeddon"
•Link-rich, transactional keyword-focused content pages: setup persona-based keyword groups targeting your most valuable users
•Keyword research is key: (1) What do people search for that's related to your site; (2) How many people search for it; (3) How many other people are ranking for it; (4) How valuable is it for you?