Key Ideas
- First, the growth hacking process is not, as it’s been misunderstood by some, about discovering one “silver bullet” solution.
- The key phases of the growth journey of a customer are - acquisition, activation, retention and monetization
- The process is a continuous cycle comprising four key steps: (1) data analysis and insight gathering; (2) idea generation; (3) experiment prioritization; and (4) running the experiments, and then circles back to the analyze step to review results and decide the next steps.
- You must not move into the high-tempo growth experimentation push until you know your product is must-have, why it’s must-have, and to whom it is a must-have: in other words, what is its core value, to which customers, and why.
- If you really want that long-term major user growth it’s got to start with a good product. You’ve got to really enhance the product and get users back every day. Don’t be an episodic utility, be a community.
- “It’s essential that you instead talk to users (on a deeper level than achieved through the aforementioned survey) to understand what the true objections and barriers are to your product’s success.”
- Remember that a core tenet of growth hacking is experimentation all through the customer experience funnel: not just customer awareness and acquisition but also activation, retention, revenue, and referral.
- The first step in collecting the data to then pan for nuggets of insight is to track the key actions of your users or customers. This is done through the process of event tracking.
- All of the experimentation and analysis should be focused on discovering the aha moment you are offering, or can offer, customers. Once the conditions that create that magical experience have been identified, the growth team should turn its attention to getting more customers to experience that moment as fast as possible.
- Creating an aha moment and driving more people to it is the starting point for hacking growth. The next step is to determine your growth strategy. You have to understand exactly how you’re going to drive growth—what your growth levers are and whether they are the right ones to achieve desired results—before you move into high-tempo testing of growth ideas.
- The way to determine your essential metrics is to identify the actions that correlate most directly to users experiencing the core value of your product, such as, for Facebook, how many people users invite to join their friend circle, how frequently they visit the site, how many posts and comments they make, and how much time they spend on the site.
- WhatsApp’s North Star was the number of messages sent - not daily active users. If the user is active within the app but only sending one message - WhatsApp is not their preferred choice for communication. Daily active users, therefore, doesn’t represent the delivery of the core value to customers. For Airbnb, the North Star was nights booked. Email subscribers or more registered users, it wasn’t increasing the number of aha moments users experienced.
- The North Star may change over time as the company grows and initial goals are achieved. As Facebook learned how to engage users more actively, MAUs gave way to DAUs. At Zillow, the Play is its North Star, and a new one is selected for each year, according to the shifting needs of the business.
- When you’re committed to an idea, pressure and emotions can all too easily bias judgment. As Facebook’s original growth team lead, Chamath Palihapitiya, wisely cautioned in one talk, “If you can’t be extremely clinical and extremely unemotionally detached from the thing that you’re building, you will make these massive mistakes and things won’t grow because you don’t understand what’s happened.
- Gather data on customer behavior and measure product performance and the results of experiments. Only then can you know if your assumptions about both map to the reality of how people are using your product.