Create your impact through Growth Hacking
If you're at a startup and struggling to know what to work on or where to make the most impact, you probably don't have robust frameworks like OKRs to work within. But what you do have is Growth Hacking! I gave this talk a few weeks back and wanted to share the slides. When in doubt on where or how to have an impact, pick an important business metric, and hack away at it relentlessly and methodologically.
At the end of the day, growth hacking is just a process, set of skills, and a mindset. It was initially invented to describe a marketing methodology to bring more users in, but with the rise of product-led growth, it can apply to any department, any team, and ideally a cross functional team.
What does it look like in practice?
In practice, your experiments must be small. The experiments are inherently not at scale. Paul Graham says flat out, ‘do things that don’t scale’. Secondly, they must be measurable. If you can’t measure it (qualitatively or quantitatively) it's not exactly growth hacking. And experiments must be easily shut down. Don't muck up all your code on an experiment!
And oh, it all should be happening very fast -?ship something this week.
Next, here’s the process in a less abstract way. These are steps to follow.
This might look familiar to those that are practicing Mart Cagan's 'Inspired' method. Inspired is a "build --> measure --> learn" loop. This is the same just, tighter and more measured.
Here's a canonical example from Dropbox, where they famously hacked there way to millions of users by offering free space for referrals. How many different iterations of this graphic, the graphic's placement, the GB amount, and the copy do you think they tried?! Not to mention all the ways they enabled users to share easily.
Read more about it here.
And finally, if you're not sure what metric to hack on, h ere are the most common metrics:
And just keep in mind these 2 quotes as you go!
Happy Growth Hacking!
Let me know what experiments you run that have an impact!
Eve