Growth hacking

Growth hacking is a method that uses rapid data-driven experiments across several areas of a business in order to identify the most efficient ways to grow that business.
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Why should you use this?

The real challenge is not to build a product, it’s pretty easy to build a cool product. The most risk lies in the distribution of that product. Most products fail because they lack distribution, customers and thus a profitable business.

Growth hacking is a means to answer the question “How do I get customers/users?”. Its focus is on distribution: growing the audience for your product, throughout the customer funnel. Growth hacking uses experiments driven by hypothesis and answered by real data to quickly validate possible ways of growing. It’s akin to lean startup methods.

Use growth hacking if you have a product with good product-market fit, but are unsure of how to proceed in building your customer base.
Don’t use growth hacking if you’re unsure of the product-market fit. No amount of hacking is going to fix that gap. You’re better of using the value proposition canvas & business model canvas.\

Output

List of Experiment ideas & hypothesis
Ranking of experiments
Experiment design & execution
Data & validation of hypothesis
Business growth

See the google sheet with frameworks, worksheets & examples →\

What do you need?

What

* Product-market fit * Growth hacking mindset * Failure is the only option. 9 out of 10 experiments is going to fail. You, and more importantly your client, need to be prepared for that and willing to see the benefit of learning form failure * Any data, measurements and insights currently in place * Inventory method for experiments, scoring and results

Who

At least:

Growth hacker (interaction designer / strategist / marketeer)
Product owner @ client side

At best:

Developer
Marketer
Data analyst

How it works

Growth hacking principles:

If you build it, they probably won’t come
Data levels all arguments
Scale success, kill failures
Speed always wins

Process:

Growth hacking is an iterative process that revolves around designing experiments and validating assumptions:

Core concepts:

0 - The Pirate funnel and One Metric That Matters(OMTM)

Process:

1 - Ideate
2 - Rank
3 - Design test
4 - Execute!
5 - Analyze

0 - The Pirate funnel and One Metric That Matters

Pirate funnel

Growth Tribe’s Pirate funnel

The Pirate funnel is the lifetime journey your customer experiences when interacting with your company. It's actually just a cute name for the customer acquisition pipeline.The ideas and experiments you’re going to design can be in any one of these sections, and you can use this funnel as inspiration to make sure you’ve thought about all phases of the funnel.\

Phase: Awareness
&#xNAN;Experiment: Write one LinkedIn article per month on hot topics like Growth hacking to drive traffic to hike.one

Phase: Retention
&#xNAN;Experiment: Send out a periodic newsletter with hooks to recent blogposts

One Metric That Matters(OMTM)

The One Metric That Matters (OMTM) is the number one problem you’re solving now. It provides focus and a framework for your experiments.
If you’re lucky, the client already has a OMTM in place, ready to share with you. If not, you need to define together what you’ll be working on. Probably, the OMTM is the one thing that’s ‘broken’ in the funnel, the roadblock that needs fixing. I.e. your product already has quite a lot of users, but 90% of them fail to come back after the first use.
The OMTM can change over time. Let’s say you’re focussing on acquisition, getting foot traffic into your coffeeshop. Once you have enough traffic, you need to get people to buy coffee instead of stealing your Wi-Fi. Periodically revisit your OMTM to see if it is still the OMTM!
Make sure you quantify this metric, otherwise it’ll be meaningless. Depending on your experience with strategy & data, you might want to consult a strategist for this portion.\

1. Ideate

Now that you have your OMTM, it’s time to go wild! Brainstorm alone or in teams about what you can do to grow. Play it smart and draw inspiration from other peoples tactics →
Here’s a basic outline to organise ideas for testing:

Idea Name: What is the gist of the idea that others can understand from a glance?
Idea Description: What is the idea? How do you see it contributing to the objective? What qualitative feedback from customers or quantitative data do you have to back up this idea? What examples from other companies have worked well? Is there a minimal viable product(MVP)version of this idea that could be tested first?
Growth Lever: Is the idea focused on Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, or Revenue?
Objective: What is this idea contributing to improve?
Hypothesis: What is the expected result you predict from this idea?
Brass/pies Score: More on this below.

It’s beneficial to start your inventory of the ideas and scoring, for keeping track of the experiments and later on, the results at this point.

2. Rank

Your ideas need to be ranked in order to get those that require the least effort and have the highest impact to the top.

Ideas are ranked based on the criteriabelow, on a scale from 1 (low) to 5 (high)

The individual scores are multiplied(1x 5 x 4 x 2 x 3) and the accumulated score defines the order of execution for your experiments.

Use the google sheet to rank your ideas →

3. Design the test

In this step you add the hypothesis, quantitative and qualitative measurements and next steps to your idea, to make it a full fledged experiment.
This sheet can be used to design the experiment →

4. Execute!

Based on the previous step you should have a promising experiment, a method for validating the experiment, and a decent idea of what is needed to do this.
Depending on your team set-up, you can either include the execution of the experiment in the next sprint cycle, or use a dedicated team to make it come alive.
All completed tests should be stored in a central knowledge base that everyone on the growth team can access at any time. It’s important to keep a record of these tests so that new people can get up to speed on what’s been tested to date, andso that anyone on the team can easily search results and consider variations to what’s already been tested.
Here’s an example of an validated experiments sheet →

5. Analyze

By now you should have google analytics & hotjar (or similar) in place to gather ‘hard’ data. In addition, you might have a lot of‘soft’data from interviews, earlier research etc.
Now’s the time to gather all your data and see if you’ve impacted the OMTM at all. If you designed the experiment correctly, the hard data will tell you what has happened, and the soft data will tell you why this happened.

Even when the experiment fails, you can still learn a great deal from it. Always record your key learnings, and use them to iterate on your experiment until you get it right!

Here’s an example of the experiments sheet including key learnings and critical next step →

And now: Back to the top, rinse & repeat!