One of the biggest problems companies face today is stagnating growth. Hacking Growth helps businesses get game-changing results by encouraging them to try new things all the time. It focuses on four drivers of expansion: user acquisition, activation, retention, and monetization.
Marketers, product managers, and everyone else interested in growing their business or their products should read it. This book doesn’t give you a magic bullet or a secret way to market that will increase sales right away. Instead, it gives a strong way to put together multidisciplinary teams that use iterative experimentation to produce real results.
1. Build Growth Teams With Diverse Talent
Departments rarely work together at most businesses. Teams frequently operate in silos, with minimal inter-group communication and cooperation. However, expansion teams require representation from numerous disciplines and functions.
A good growth hacking strategy starts with putting together one or more groups of people from different fields. In order to oversee the process, each group has a “growth lead” assigned to them from the outset. Team members who aren’t directly involved in making the product may include product designers, data analysts, market researchers, software engineers, etc.
The establishment of a growth team is sometimes met with initial resistance. Staff reorganization is a critical component of this strategy. Many team members have preconceived beliefs of what teams are supposed to do and how they should do it in regard to the ownership of initiatives.
When growth teams are led well and everyone on the team is rewarded for the team’s success, these problems can be solved. It is also crucial to assign a senior executive to the team so that it has the authority to work across organizational silos as necessary.
2. Determine If Your Product Is a Must-Have
Before diving into high-speed growth experimentation, you need to be certain that your product is a must-have, that you understand why it is, and that you understand who needs it. To rephrase, please tell me who your target market is and why they need your product/service.
Step one of this procedure is to recognize the “aha” moment. This is the point at which the product’s true worth to its customers becomes apparent; when consumers fully understand what the product is for, why they need it, and how it will improve their lives. To put it another way, please explain why this product is a “must-have.”
Don’t try to second-guess what the enigmatic quality might be. Instead, employ scientific ways of investigating user behavior to get to the bottom of things and uncover their true value. Finding the most devoted customers is as simple as mining their data and comments for clues about what they care about.
Sending out a poll to a few hundred of your most loyal consumers is one way to find out if your product really is a must-have. To gauge their level of disappointment, you could pose the question, “How disappointed would you be if this product no longer existed tomorrow?” (a) extremely dissatisfied; (b) disappointed; (c) not dissatisfied; (d) I no longer use it.”
If 40% or more of respondents say they were “extremely disappointed,” the product has become a must-have. If only 25–40% of your target audience buys into your pitch, it’s likely that some adjustments to the product or the language used to sell it are in order. But if fewer than 25% do, it’s either because the target demographic is a poor fit or the product requires further development before it can be pushed for expansion.
Keep in mind that this survey should not be used for anything beyond preliminary research. Customers shouldn’t be led to believe that the product could soon be phased out. In addition, customer interviews are a better option than surveys if you don’t have a large enough user base to collect several hundred responses.
3. Identify The Growth Levers Of Your Business
The first step in making a growth strategy is to figure out which growth indicators are most important for your product. For this, you’ll need to identify the specific user behaviors that contribute most reliably to your product’s essential value being realized. Once you’ve nailed down the relevant indicators, you’ll have found your primary growth levers.
Your next step should be to develop a growth equation, a short formula that sums up the several forces acting in concert to propel your expansion. Each product and company has its own unique version of this equation. Condensing your development levers into a simple formula can be a huge time-saver in terms of helping you concentrate on what matters.
This KPI will be the most important way to measure how well your business is doing. It will be the “North Star” against which all other efforts will be judged. This KPI will be the most important way to measure how well your business is doing. It will be the “North Star” against which all other efforts will be judged. To find it, consider which of the variables in your growth equation best symbolizes providing the product’s “must-have experience.”
As the business develops, the north star may move. However, this specificity aids in maintaining a focused data analysis. Therefore, you can launch your high-impact tests as soon as feasible.
4. Learn & Adapt Using The Growth Hacking Cycle
Using the Growth Hacking Cycle, a growth team may become a well-oiled, highly efficient, and constantly testing machine. There are four steps to it:
- Collecting Information and Analyzing Results
- The genesis of an idea
- Prioritizing experiments
- Conduct the actual experiments.
Stage One: Analyze
Dig into the available data from an early adopter group to find out who they are. Consider questions like, “What kinds of things do my top customers do?” For what purposes do they employ these features? Exactly what traits do my most loyal clients share? From what kinds of audiences did you recruit these people? Why do customers stop using the product when certain things happen? To what extent do my most loyal clients behave differently from my most devoted ones?
Stage Two: Ideate
Growth is propelled by new ideas. A steady stream of testable hypotheses is essential for boosting fundamental KPIs. The growth hacking method relies heavily on unrestrained creativity. You need input from your team, as well as internal and external stakeholders including your company’s suppliers, partners, and customers. Put in place a project management tool to keep track of all the suggestions coming in and how they’re being handled.
Stage Three: Prioritize
Apply the ICE rating to a concept before giving it serious thought. The impact, confidence, and ease of implementation of each suggestion should be rated out of ten by the submitter. The total score for each concept is calculated by averaging the individual scores. Try not to obsess over perfecting the score. It’s merely a resource for guiding the team or growth lead in the direction of future experimentation.
Stage Four: Test
Make sure each test has a set of controls and a set of subjects so that data can be analyzed correctly. Then, establish a statistical threshold of 99 percent confidence for each test. If there is more than one acceptable version, the “win” should go to the first one. Create a test report and update the group with the findings.
Control the loop by having a weekly growth team meeting for an hour to discuss the previous week’s findings and plan out the next week’s experiments. Keep in mind that even ineffective experiments can result in substantial learning in a surprisingly short time.
5. Execute On The Growth Hacking Playbook
The book’s second section, “The Growth Hacking Playbook,” details a variety of strategies for drawing in and keeping clients. While it would be impossible to summarise all of the ideas presented here, we will provide a brief overview of some key points from each chapter.
Acquisition
That includes (1) minimizing the expense of client acquisition, (2) improving the language/market fit (i.e., how well your messaging connects with your target audience), and (3) identifying the channels and products best suited to reach your target demographic.
Activation
The first step is to create a flowchart describing the user journey to the product’s “aha!” moment. The next step is to compile a report detailing the success rates of each stage of the funnel. Gather feedback from users who made it through each stage as well as those who dropped out. By doing so, you may better envision the tests you could do to enhance activation.
Retention
There are three distinct phases of user retention: onboarding, maintenance, and churn. Growing the frequency with which customers experience the product’s “aha moment” is a common method for improving initial retention. The key to medium retention is getting people to use the product on a consistent basis. And the key to long-term retention is providing ever-increasing value to customers.
Monetization
The first step in generating money is to bring attention to all of the touch points there are with the consumer, from initial attraction to ongoing support. Problems in the payment or renewal process should be sought out. Using a cohort analysis, compare your highest and lowest-spending customers. Also, use polls to determine which product enhancements appeal to different groups.
Maintaining momentum for growth is an ongoing process. Companies that see sustained growth after an initial burst of popularity are the ones that keep pushing boundaries, learning from their successes, seizing chances, and so on. Growth hacking goes beyond simple business methods. It’s an outlook that can be used in any group or organization, no matter how big or small.
After The Hacking Growth Book Summary
The book Hacking Growth was summarized, and the key takeaways were the five ways in which development may be sped up. It is not designed to replace reading the book, though. It’s because there’s so much more to take in and understand from the original text.
This book is a must-read for any marketer, product manager, or business owner who is serious about expanding their product line or their customer base. Amazon and Apple Books both sell a copy of Hacking Growth.
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