The book “Hacking Growth” is written by Sean Ellis, founder of Growth Hackers and Morgan Brown. This book provides the readers with an overview of the fastest growing companies in the world which include: Facebook, Uber, Dropbox, Pinterest, Airbnb and many more. These successful startups were brought up as case studies to show us how they were able to move fast and gain traction in a short period. Ellis and Brown outline the step-by-step growth hacking process that startups and already established companies can use to grow rapidly and outsmart their competitors.
Here are some of the five steps that Ellis and Brown outlined in their book:
- Growth Teams – Companies need to have a specialized team called the Growth Team. This team mainly comes together, where they brainstorm, design and test new experiments that can eventually lead to significant growth wins. The team meet on a weekly basis and go through a bunch of ideas that they see fit to improve the business. It consists of software developers, product management, design and marketing, data analytics that collaborate together for innovative ideas.
- Products that you must have – This section of the book tells you how the Growth Team first and the utmost important task is to figure out what product or service are customers “dying” for – not literally of course. Sean provides you with a “Must-Have” survey where you get to determine whether your customers are happy or not with the product and service you’re offering.
- Your growth levels – Every business is different, a food delivery platform is different than an app that sells products. You have to use different strategies for your business depending on its type, and these are called ‘growth levers’ which, according to Ellis and Brown are core inputs that will definitely determine your growth. Let’s take Amazon as an example, their growth levels include the number of products in every category they carry, in addition to the conversion rate of their shopping cart as well as a number of people who find Amazon.com. Once you’ve figured out your growth levels, you’ll have a much better understanding of where you decide on improving.
- Testing – After the Growth Team identified their company’s growth levels, now they’re ready to test it at a high-tempo experimentation process to see what works best for it. The process is usually done through data gathering and analysis to see if the idea tested is working or not.
- It’s not just about customer acquisition and satisfaction – Granted these two are highly important for a business to succeed. However, the book “Hacking Growth” teaches you that fast growing companies focus on retention and revenue optimization first, while new customer acquisition is second. Customer acquisition is surely an important factor, but we all know how easy it is to churn out dozens of ideas to gain customers whether it’s through changing the pricing or working on a different marketing strategy.
In conclusion, this book is a must read for every startup that’s trying to figure out its way through. It provides you with detailed steps of growth hacking and shows you how you can apply those steps for your startup to succeed.
If you’re interested in purchasing this book, it’s available on Amazon for BD 6.5.