Book SummaryHacking Growth, by Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of Hacking Growth

In Hacking Growth, authors Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown present a non-traditional method for driving your business’s growth. Their method has helped top tech companies go from small startups to billion-dollar giants. Dubbed “growth hacking,” it entails focused and rapid experimentation to continually optimize your business for growth. By optimizing in this continuous fashion, they say you can more precisely tailor your product and presentation to deliver what people need. In turn, you’ll increase your revenue and grow your business.

Growth hacking, the authors say, is the only growth strategy that will keep your business competitive in the modern marketplace. Old approaches to marketing, like large-scale, big-budget advertising campaigns, no longer work—they’re too slow for the online world, and eyeballs are ever more scarce. And with the advent of online business, using resourceful, out-of-the-box thinking...

Hacking Growth Summary Part 1: Setting Up Your Growth Hacking Basics

In this section, we’ll explain what you need to have in place before you can start driving your company’s growth. This includes ensuring you’ve got a product customers can’t go without, building your growth team, and setting up your data analytics. With these preparatory steps taken care of, you’ll have a solid foundation on which to grow—however, keep in mind that building a great product isn’t enough to attract and keep customers. Even with a great product, you’ll still have to work hard and be creative to attract customers and grow your business.

Step 1: Ensure Customers Can’t Go Without Your Product

Before you start growth hacking, the authors recommend making sure your business offers a product or service that customers won’t want to miss out on. It should deliver so well on a target market’s needs that people would be unhappy if they lost it. Your product or service should also deliver a “click” moment—an experience where customers suddenly see how the product is indispensable to them (the authors call this an “aha” moment). For instance, a cloud-based writing platform might “click” for a remotely distributed writing team when they see how it lets them collaborate...

Hacking Growth Summary Part 2: Growth Hacking in Practice

With your product, growth team, and data prepared, it’s time to put boots on the ground. In this section, we’ll explain the core practice of growth hacking: high-tempo testing performed in a continuous cycle. We’ll explain how to find insights in your data, generate possible hacks, determine the best contenders, and start testing. We’ll then discuss how to repeat the cycle and keep moving forward.

The Growth Hacking Cycle

The authors explain that the basic process of growth hacking is to rapidly analyze your product, generate ideas for growth hacks, select the best ideas, experiment with them (in that order), and repeat. This allows you to learn about your product and your users, quickly find changes that work, and stay flexible as you develop your business. In addition, growth hacking thrives on creative solutions to tough problems—so don’t be afraid to think outside the box.

By testing rapidly, growth hacking compounds many small wins to achieve huge successes. This is much like compound interest, where a small sum of money incrementally becomes much larger.

Decide on an initial tempo of experimentation to shoot for, then ramp up over time as the process becomes...

Hacking Growth Summary Part 3: Apply Growth Hacking to Four Areas of Growth

Now that we’ve covered how to set up and implement the growth hacking methodology, we’ll discuss the authors’ recommended strategies and tactics for each phase of customer development—from your marketing to your sales funnel and user experience. Your growth team must optimize each of these at the right times to ensure maximum growth and profitability.

Customer development refers to how you take your customers from signing up to staying loyal for the long term. “Developing” a customer means crafting an experience, from top to bottom, that gets and keeps your customers excited and engaged by your product. Let’s look at the four phases—getting customers to sign up, stick around, stay loyal, and spend money.

Signing Up: Hack Your Marketing

According to the authors, the first step in hacking your company’s growth is to hack your customer acquisition. This involves two main steps:

• Step #1: Find your language and market fit: Craft appealing language in your marketing materials that gets people to try your product.
• Step #2: Find your channel and product fit: Find the best marketing channel for your product and optimize it for growth.

(Shortform note: Matt...

Shortform Exercise: Practice Thinking Like a Growth Hacker

Practice generating growth hacks using a hypothetical scenario, and then think through how to set up your own growth team.

Imagine you’re a startup founder building a service that aggregates car insurance offerings to find the best deals. Looking at your data, you notice that many potential customers bounce from your sales landing page. What additional information would you need to understand why this is happening? (Think back to the two types of data.)