Growth hacking has become the buzzword everyone associates with startup success. While there’s truth to this claim, there are also several growth hacking myths that can mislead entrepreneurs. This article sheds light on growth hacking to dispel the myths. We also explore strategies budding entrepreneurs can apply to grow their businesses.
What is Growth Hacking?
Growth hacking is developing and applying marketing strategies focused on achieving rapid growth for a startup. This process involves identifying creative and low-cost tactics to acquire and retain customers.
Some people have insinuated that a growth hacker has to be an engineer or a coder. This cannot be further from the truth. Growth hacking cuts both ways and while in most cases some of the best growth hackers are engineers or coding professionals, growth hackers like Noah Kagan made it without knowing how to write a single line of code.
How to Growth Hack Successfully
Growth hacking emphasizes and often involves a pull method where the growth hacker studies user behavior and needs, and then provides a solution for them. A good growth hacker thrives at the intersection between data, product, and marketing. They use data to determine the channels for marketing the company. They also explore the terminologies used in describing the product to consumers. Finally, they decide how to strategically market the product in a way that users can understand.
Contrary to some growth hacking myths, techniques cannot be transferred from one product to another. Each growth hacking technique is designed to push a particular product to a targeted market.
The only rule in a growth hacker’s mind is to get the users and grow the company. Growth hackers don’t have rules or specific ways of doing things as long as it’s done.
Growth Hacking Phases
1) Learning Phase
Before developing your product it is important to study your market well. What isn’t obvious is that growth hacking requires the same. Study customer trends like where they visit most online, the products they use, and what they say about the products. This helps create messaging that resonates with your users and allows them to see your core value proposition. Also, to align your customer acquisition with the customers’ cycles you need to know what funnels work well with them.
2) Strategy Development Phase
Unique products are easy to market. Airbnb, X (formerly Twitter), Dropbox, Facebook, and Zynga are some products that grew with limited marketing budgets. These companies were able to utilize growth hacking as a way of gaining traction and fueling growth.
Airbnb’s growth hacking strategies worked simply because the product was a solution to a problem experienced by many people. Facebook made communication and following up on what friends are doing much easier, while X gave a clever 280-character twist to Facebook’s social aspect.
Traditionally, people built products and then marketed them. Nowadays, gaining users isn’t as difficult as keeping them. Growth hacking, therefore, begins to make sense right there. If you have built a product that people love and focused on how they discover and adopt it, you can improve it to make the users stay. This helps you to retain existing users while acquiring new ones.
To know if your product is a market fit, have a non-biased person evaluate its market fit and validate the basic assumptions and your product’s goals. Test the product with the market or a few hundred users, Then tweak and re-tweak until it suits your customers’ needs.
3) Creating Your Growth Hack
Once your product is built and tested for the target market, find your hack opportunity by leveraging loopholes in the existing external systems. Here are some examples of successful growth hacking opportunities:
- Spotify, integrated their product with Facebook because their users were on Facebook.
- Airbnb integrated their product with Craigslist ads because people looking for places to stay during vacations were looking on Craigslist.
- Dropbox offers users who invite new users to the platform free storage space.
Borrowing from all these companies, you will see that they all studied their markets. Built a product market fit, and then went for the kill by implementing a growth hack that spurred them into millions of users.
The strategies are different for each of those companies. To find your best hack, try a lot of hacks within a short period. See which one works best then settle for it in the long term as you continue to evaluate and study others.
4) Get Your users to get you More Users
When Dropbox launched they asked their users to invite their friends and get extra storage space for free. They still use that strategy to date, which explains their success in a fierce market dominated by tech giants like Google and Microsoft.
Facebook and LinkedIn grew by imploring new users to invite their email contacts to the platforms. Hotmail on the other hand had a very welcoming message “PS I Love You. Get Free Email” at the end of their emails, grew from one million users in the first six months to 10 million in the first year.
These companies found a way to make their early adopters grow the company for them by word of mouth. Your company should also have that viral lift; something about the growth hack that allows the company to grow without much effort by enabling its users to invite more customers.
5) Optimize
There is no use in getting users daily when you cannot retain them. Optimizing your product allows you to study the customer’s interaction with your product. It also lets you understand what needs to be improved to make them stay. Optimizing products ensures you retain as many customers as possible. Deploy UX testing tools and test with your customers where you should improve your products. It involves building better features and continuing to be more innovative to improve customer experience. To achieve sustainable growth you will reach an equilibrium point where your product is top-notch.
Characteristics of a Good Growth Hacker
- Passionate: The best growth hacker breathes, sweats, and breeds growth. They are passionate about marketing and have a serious love for growth.
- Obsessive: They are obsessed with growing the customer base. They will do everything to find the missing piece that enhances growth.
- Leadership skilled: Growth hackers are and should be good leaders. Good leaders listen to their teams and are good at getting people to follow them and their beliefs in the product.
- Resourceful and Informed: The best growth hackers are well-informed about product marketing. They will ensure they are well informed about your product and the market it intends to attract. While having a lot of information is great, it goes well with being a resourceful person. Resourceful growth hackers are creative and will find unique solutions to common problems.
- Curious: Growth hackers want to understand everything they can about your company’s data, product, and marketing, they have to ask questions. Their curious nerves are always ready to act when they don’t think something is right. They are looking for specific explanations to dissect the information they are given.
- Socially capable: A growth hacker understands human behavior which is very important for the product. The growth hacker has to be socially sound to formulate the best tactics to get people to adopt your product. They should be able to understand several things about your to-be customers.
Common Growth Hacking Myths
1) Growth hacking is a secret book full of secrets for growth
The reality is that growth hacking is more about the mindset than a book of secrets. If it were a book, all startups would use it and succeed. Most growth hackers have their mindsets focused on the growth aspects that a founder or company may have set aside to focus on product tweaks and implementations.
2) Growth hacking is an entirely new phenomenon
Growth hacking isn’t new. It has existed for as long as Hi5, Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, AirBnB and Dropbox. It may be a new title but not an entirely new thing.
3) Growth hacking is marketing
Marketing and growth hacking are related but none is the other. Marketing involves advertising and usually requires massive financial budgets and large teams. Growth hacking doesn’t involve large marketing budgets or building huge growth hacking teams. However, the goals that marketing seeks to achieve are usually the same for growth hacking.
4) Growth hacking must use huge networks
We have seen Spotify use Facebook’s huge network of people to gain more customers. AirBnB uses Craigslist, an already established company, to reach millions of users and gain traction. While these tactics work well, growth hacking doesn’t have to use such huge networks to succeed. Sending emails to existing clients or calling them to give them the company’s offerings can all be utilized in growth hacking. As much as this may not bring in millions of customers, the customer retention for the tens of customers you get might be huge. This is a success in itself because these channels are more personalized.
5) Growth hacking is all about new customers
Growth hacking is leveraging data, product marketing, customer acquisition, growth, and retention. It’s not just about getting new customers. It’s also about retaining existing customers and continuing to innovate as a company to keep them.
Do you have anything to add about growth hacking? Let us know in the comments section below.
