The “What If” Mentality: A Key Habit for a Successful Growth Marketer
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” (Shunryu Suzuki)
Self-taught growth marketer Dan McGaw knows this well from navigating daily challenges as a founder and entrepreneur, a parent, and a pioneer in the growth industry.
Dan is founder and CEO of Effin Amazing, the former head of marketing at Kissmetrics, and a GrowthX Academy Mentor. He recently visited the Growth Marketing class at GrowthX Academy and shared his inspiring personal story and his views about growth marketing.
Dan’s early commitment to growth reminded me of the TED talk slogan: ideas worth spreading. While TED’s mission is to spread ideas, Dan has been devoted to the promotion and growth of companies, products, and ideas that help people since he was 9 years old.
“A person responsible for growth in a company is the person that doesn’t care anything but growth. Is that person that is crazy about growing a company no matter what the consequences are.”
From an early age, Dan has been active on the tech entrepreneur and on-line education scenes working with platforms that have been impacting the lives of millions people around the world. His track record on the industry has been remarkable. For instance, back in 2013, during his first 90 days at Kissmetrics he increased the company’s leads by 300% and in less than 5 months increased web traffic by 50%. Here is the top-tip that Dan shared, along with free growth tools that Dan and his team created.
Keep Wondering All of the Time
“The most successful people in growth are people those who always wonder: What if?” That’s Dan’s way of emphasizing that the best way to succeed in growth is through curiosity. One of his daily habits is to immerse himself in every single detail of his work or life projects and ask: what if this happened differently? He goes on and on, and he uncovers the possibilities that ultimately lead him to an innovative solution.
“If you can get into the “what if” mentality mindset, you will be extremely successful in this field.”
Four Free Tools for Growth
Here are four tools that Dan and his team have created to make our work way easier.
- UTM Generator. Quickly create UTMs to track your content across the web.
- A/B Test Calculator. Calculate the statistical significance & conversion rate of your A/B tests without leaving your analytics, ppc, content or whatever tool.
- Overdue Trello Cards. Tired of Trello hiding the overdue cards at the bottom of the card list? This extension forces the Overdue Cards to the top.
Finally, EffingAmazing has a great blog that is easy to read and has tons of very valuable information. One of my favorite posts is conversion rate optimization for dummies. I instantly put the learning from that post to work on a project helping a company launch an app to ignite and advance creative thinking in kids through storytelling.
Dan and his team are doing great work. Recently, they turned Bitfountain’s early success into sustainable growth by increasing their sign-ups by almost 300%, capturing 11K emails, and $30K sales only during the first month. This case study details that success.
How about you? Did it take some wondering and “what if” to become a better professional? I’d love to hear your stories and share them out in my next post, so please email me!