Growth Hacking: RunwayMaximize the Growth of Your Most Valuable Customers

Mark Andersen

May 4, 2015

• Start in your smallest segment possible, monopolize it & then expand ("competition is for losers": Thiel)

• How is your product unique & better?

• Do things that don't scale: build out an awesome experience before coding it

• Live user testing/customer support: quantitative & qualitative; focus on finding the big problem

Growth Strategy

• "Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market": Marc Andreessen

• "Make something people want": Paul Graham (Y Combinator)

• "Make insanely great products": Steve Jobs

• "A great brand is a promise of benefit that's persuasive and unique": David Ogilvy

How do you know if you have it?

• Would at least 40% of your customers say they'd be "very disappointed" without your product (Survey.io)

• Clearing Net Promoter Score (NPS), retention and lifetime net value hurdles

• Word of mouth is one of your biggest acquisition channels; virality (K value > 1)

Product/Market Fit

• How are you measuring your product/market fit?

• Are you clearly communicating your unique, compelling value proposition?

• Who are your most valuable customers?

• What early behavior are your most valuable customers doing that's most predictive of success?

• How quickly are you getting your users to their aha! moment?

• How can you build virality inherently into your product?

Product & Marketing Questions

Marketing: Personas & Customer Journey Maps, WOM, User Groups

• Create personas & then a customer journey map (storyboards) for every key persona showing their key experiences

• Word of mouth (WOM), PR & invite flows are excellent forms of acquisition. WOM is always the easiest & cheapest growth.

• AirBnB turns their users into their own distribution networks: through the click of a button you can post your listing to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn...

Content Marketing & Social MediaOnline petitions: CREDO Mobile's 275,000 Likes on FB

Marketing: Content Marketing & SEO

Identify your most valuable customers & create content they crave: Credo Mobile example, Salesforce, HubSpot, KISS Metrics..

•Inbound links from high authority sites, page rank

•Site architecture: title & description tags, anchor text, descriptive URLs, "Mobilegeddon"

•Link-rich, transactional keyword-focused content pages: setup persona-based keyword groups targeting your most valuable users

•Keyword research is key: (1) What do people search for that's related to your site; (2) How many people search for it; (3) How many other people are ranking for it; (4) How valuable is it for you?

Analytics

• Net Promoter Score

• Retention

• Lifetime net value

Growth Metrics (ignore total registrations)

• active users

• activity levels

• cohort retention

• revenue