What I Learned After 2 Years In Growth Hacking For Startup.

Image from https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1460804198264-011ca89eaa43?ixlib=rb-0.3.5&q=80&fm=jpg&crop=entropy&s=88faad36f16933bb58c9e5f8ec52de14 I heard about it from the day I start working at marketing position for 2 startup companies. Things below are what I have learned and faced for 2 years when following term growth hacker. Disclaim: This is my own research and writing based on my own viewpoint and experience. That can not fit with your experience and your culture. Just something for me to remind about what I have learned for past 2 years. What is growth hacking? A buzz word in 21st, describing the new way to getting customers. Some people said that it’s a new form of marketing. Other think it just a buzzword trending and it will be fading slowly by time. So you can think whatever you want. I can give you some reason to find out this is a new form of marketing. From the era of internet, a lot of things inside our world are changing. First, the “startup”, which defines a group of people works in uncertainty situation to create something news and innovation, is given birth. These things defined our word “product” again. The 21st-century product definition is not about physical products only but it’s also about some virtual things. Thinking about Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Uber, and AirBnb, what you will call them? The cool companies with cool products. Yes! Products. So “Startup” and new “Product” are defining a new way to play for marketing. In a rapid-changing world, the old process for producing ads like TVC, Big Banner,… is slowing down startup development process. When everything is to uncertainty, a big budget for all these media is the crazy dream. You may hear about how Nike get “Just do it” ads and very successful about it. But time changes, everything changes. There isn’t any 21st century like this before. So what you are gonna do if you know that your “product” isn’t product that the market needs? How can you prove your theory before investors? Before your awesome slides can be pitched to investors, you need to keep your product stay alive. So can you do this with your own budget? What if your product fail? Can we create a hit while we are in seeking-for-seed-round time? That’s when growth hacking term coming. Getting a million and million users, making a magic and get numerous people go crazy for your product, and people will talk about your product through one night. That’s what people talk about growth hackers’ job. But the real questions that growth hacker must answer is “What prevents users from using our products and share it with the world? Can we improve it and make it easier for people?” That’s all I do around 2 years. As a number of problems you solved grow, your number will grow as well. How did they work? All job have a process. So does growth hacking. There is variable process for growth hacking. My favorite thinking process is following these questions:- Level: Which part of metrics you want to improve? Acquisition? Retention? Referral? I used AARRR metrics from The Pirate Metrics. You guys can read about it here.- Idea: What’s your customer’s problem? Can you solve it and how? Where can you do that?- Measurement: How can you measure your progress? Do you have any data for what people are doing before? How can you know that you have achieved it?- Re-test: Judging your idea based on ICE scored (Impact — Confidence — Ease), will you do this?- Learn — Measure: How’s your experiment? What have you learned from it?- Repeat: How can we make this test better? For example, one of our successful campaigns is one selfie campaign for the cosmetics company. So the process has been like these: So we want to get more users (Level: Acquisition). So our team has gathered together, we know that our customers love beauty products and always want to look beautiful everyday so they have done a lot of selfie images (Ideas: Problem). So why not we create a page for users to selfie? In this page, users can invite people to vote to get a prize (Ideas: Solution). We can promote it on Facebook fanpage, email newsletter (Ideas: Place). The tech team and marketing team are really confident about it, (Re-test: ICE > 8). So we start doing it. The result is we have 6000 users for 3 weeks with only 42$ for Facebook. That’s very cheap. After that, we see that this contest can be great for us to promote what we are selling (Learn-Measure). So we start open to users feedback page and start our next experiment.(Repeat) Who can be a growth hacker? Ideally, all your teammate should be growth hacker: engineers, designers, and marketer. Only if you can solve customers’ problem as quick as you can, you can be a growth hacker. So for me, an essential skill for growth hackers: - Understanding & Sympathy customers’ problem: Yeah you should know what they feel, what they feel before you can make a great improvement for your products. Always looks for customers problems and insights rather than new ideas from other companies. Each companies have the unique situation, and markets, so be sure that you copied with your customers’ insight.- Task management: If you do only one experiment at the time, you can forget it. But what’s happens if your team must hold more than 3 experiments per week, yeah that’s when your chaos coming. You have to priority your experiment and sometimes reject some experiments due to limited time and resources.- Data Analytics: this is the backbones of every growth hacking process. In growth hacking, you can’t tell other about this banner is not beautiful or this feature is not gonna work just because your feeling tells you so. We should do everything on data. If you don’t have data for this, please test it.- Communication: Things always go to the way you don’t want. Sometimes your experiment will be rejected. If you believe in it, you should learn how to convince the team to go with you. Before any experiments, you should have a short brainstorming session to announce to others about your plan for best support and well prepare for your team. I have experienced about how miscommunication can cause chaos and destruction from inside team. That’s not the way team go up. Always ensure that your team and you are on the same board. So, that all I have known about Growth Hacking so far. In short, Growth hackers are the guys who will try to solve customers problems and scale it as quick as possible. All things about “Growth hacking” are all about tech startup. So can you hack something in another field? That would be a great challenge for all of us!!