What is Growth Hacking and How Can You Do it?

1. Growthhackingintro: All right, are you ready to learn growth hacking? This is my only free course. I hope you're excited and if you'd like it to sign up to my other courses as well. But this is all about growth hacking. So let's start with a little intro right now. Grow tacking is a term that Sean Ellis made up about 10 years ago. But before that, I called it aggressive online marketing. And it really starts with a mindset. It's all about thinking about how to grow your business with the limited resources you have. The sad truth is that right now, so many companies and advertising platforms are telling you, boom, boom, you need to spend money promote this post. You need to put budget behind this. And that's not the case. There are tons of organic ways to grow your business. In fact, I've built a 15-year career and driven three multimillion dollar bootstrap startup exits. Proving that that is, in fact not true. You do not need to spend money to grow your business, at least to a certain level. At a certain point, you will need to start doing paid advertising to hit a certain scale. But there are a bunch of different ways that you can build growth from inside of your product, from hacking existing channels where your target demographic are. And that's what growth hacking is all about. It really starts with a mindset. I want you to look at problems and look at opportunities with testing mindset, excited to explore and knowing that there's no such thing as a stupid ideas. So I'm going to get way deeper into this in this course, we're going to have workbooks for you along every chapter. We're going to talk about how to hack your own product for virality, how to hack existing channels and so much more. I hope that you'll sign up for the course. And if you've already signed up, you're in the right place. My name is Andrew startups. Follow me on Instagram or Twitter or whatever your favorite social media is. And I'll see you on the other side. 2. What is Growth Hacking?: Alright, now we're gonna talk about growth hacking in this lesson. And the first thing I want to do is give you an accurate description and definition of what growth hacking is. Because as you know, everybody throws around this term, it's a huge buzzword. And if you search on LinkedIn, you'll see just countless people adding growth hacking to their profile. So what is growth hacking, Andrew, what does it mean to me? I used to call it aggressive online marketing before it was a term to what it means is chiseling away growth and marketing prowess and market share without a budget, you know, big companies have millions of dollars and tons of money to throw at campaigns to grow their business. But most likely you don't have that in all the projects I've worked on for the last 12 years, haven't had huge budgets. So we've had to be aggressive and think outside the box and how to hack growth away from different channels, different media, different partnerships. How can we barter this? And that's just being really aggressive. So I want to give you a couple of examples of things that have happened in my career. So you can start to think like an aggressive growth hacker. My most famous example, I was working for a classifieds website in Dubai, a startup that copied Craigslist and added a profile functionality. And before it was common to do growth hacking with marketers, sit with dev teams and think about ways to hack the product. By the way, we're going to talk about that. I was sitting one evening with the developers and thinking of outside of the box ideas and shooting ideas out to them and they're telling me, no, that's stupid. No, that's stupid. I'm like, what if we made a scraper that scraped all the mobile numbers of all of our competitors sites. And they were like, Oh wait, we could actually do that. We can build a software, a really quick script that goes and rips all the other ads on all the other classified sites. That's a really great idea, Andrew, and then we can categorize it by what they're selling. So their car, their apartment, whatever. And then we can upload those bulk mobile numbers into an SMS set bulk provider. And we'll send out an SMS to those people, a text message. And we'll say, Hey, I saw your job. Hey, I saw your car online. You should try this website instead. So we ended up doing that and we set 40 thousand text messages in the next week to people. And we crushed our competition in one week because we knew we had a superior product. My phone was off the hook ringing with text messages and calls from people. Oh my God, I sold my apartment and one day I found a new car. Thank you so much. Blah-blah-blah. If you're confident in your product, then you can do anything. You remember what I said? There's no such thing as targeted spam. Those people didn't know I was going to text now, but I'm giving them value for free. We hack that system. We blew the competition away. And that's how I want you to think there's no such thing as a stupid idea. And if you have nobody's done it before, that's a potential major win for you. So in the next few lessons we're going to talk about the two main types of growth hacking. But the main thing is that you have an aggressive mindset and you want to test everything you're hungry for, find those potential massive wins for your company. So I'll see you in the next lesson where we're going to talk about the first type of growth hacking, growth hacking into your product. I'll see you there. 3. Hacking Growth out of Your Product: All right. Do you feel hyped up or you've got the mindset of a growth hacker on and you're ready to start learning ways you can growth, hack your success. Well, the first thing I want to talk about is hacking your product so you might not have access to a dev team and maybe you've outsourced in there really isn't going to be a lot for you to do. It's in your product right now, but it's still really valuable for you to know about these things later on. But if you're lucky enough to be a techie person yourself, maybe you can iterate on your product and add some of these examples in. So what I want to talk about with hacking your product is all about building a viral loop, a natural Viral Loop into your product. What does that mean? That means finding an efficient way for users, clients, customers, current visitors to refer other people so that every person you acquire brings in more people. It makes your marketing more efficient and basically grows your brand exponentially. Why you just sit in sleep. So that's what growth hacking or product is all about. And I'm going to go over a couple of core key examples about how you can do that. But I want you to take a step back first and really think about the entire lifecycle and user experience of every way they interact with your brand, your product, your service, your website, your app. Where are the points where people are happiest? That's the first thing you need. Think about. Where's the Aha moment as I like to call it, where they're like, Whoa, wow, this is really great. That's where you want to hit him with a request value, okay, so you've given them value, you've made it amazing for them. And that is the perfect prime moment to be like, Hey, you should refer some friends or hey, you should review us on the App Store, or hey, you should share this on social media. All three of those are valuable for different reasons. And I'm gonna go through them because you need to figure out which one is most valuable for you. So if you want them to refer friends or, or potential users, That's probably the best thing, but also the hardest to get them to do. So you're going to have to give them some value to get them to do that. Now, AirBNB, it gives like $20 a person if you refer tons of other startups are like that. Instacart does the same thing. We'll give you credit. Money, does things right? Money makes move. So if you can give them some credit, figure out how much the user acquisition cost for you is and you're paid ads and offer them the same amount to refer people. Maybe you don't want to give away money or maybe your product doesn't allow for you to give away money or credit. The next best thing is to move them up a level, give them a premium service. So recommend three people to Spotify, get a month free stuff like that. Move that give them social currency. Maybe they get a badge on their profile. There an online community. They become a elite member with extra added benefits. That's what you want to give them. You need to give them value to get value from them. Okay, So hacking your product is all about finding that aha moment, asking them to refer other people. And then if you're really bad ass, you're allowing them to import all their contacts and then you're really going to kick it up a notch if the value that they can see, usually money is really, really heavy and then they'll screw it. I want to invite everyone I've ever met in my life. I want that money. When Airbnb first launch, I invited all my contacts at a $100 thousand and pending Credit and in good at all. But I got about 1000 or so. So brands like that know that their product is superior, the quality is there, the experience is going to be great. And so they're competent and telling people to grow the company for us become my marketer will pay you for it. So think of ways you can do that, and that is a really good way to hack your product, okay? Now with the other things, and you're pushing them to review on the app store. Obviously, if you're a new app and getting reviews on the App Store is really, really valuable for you. That's going to really help. So the reasons you want that is because you might get noticed by the App Store and highlighted if you're getting tons of really good reviews, or if you nearly want feedback, maybe you're asking them to just give you feedback on your app personally instead of reviewing it. And that way you're instantly getting tons of product feedback instead of having to pay for user testing. Now the third thing is sharing on social media. If you are a business that thinks that the social presence is really big. And obviously in this course you're going to learn all the other reasons why a social media following is big, up-selling people, keeping them top of mind for them, and also for those partnerships you know that you can make for giveaways and stuff. So if you want to push people to share on social media, again, it needs to be that aha moment. They're really happy and it needs to be really simple. That means the messages pre-written, this one-click and it's shared, boom. And then you're growing through that. You've got to have your hash tags in there, have your keywords in there. And that way you're going to get noticed by other people and that's going to bring in other customers. That's going to hack your growth. Okay, So homework for this is, I want you to look at that full lifecycle of your business and identify those opportunities to hack in that viral loop and test it, see if you can do it, talk to your developers, see how hard it is. And I'll see you on the next lesson where we're going to talk about hacking existing channels for growth. Okay, See you there. 4. Hacking Existing Channels Where Your Customers/Users Are!: All right, Now in this lesson I want to talk about the other major type of growth hacking. That's growth hacking existing channels. What does that mean though? That means I want you to hack into everywhere where your target demographic spends their time and build market share. And I want you to get your product in there. And there's different ways to do that. Some are really technical, some are not so technical. So I want to start by using a couple of famous examples that might be a little bit over your head. And then I'm going to give you some really easy low-hanging fruit ideas for your startup, okay? Or your small business or just you. So the first one and to me, the most famous example of hacking and existing channel is when Airbnb was really tiny at the nascent stage, they figured out a way to make one-click postal ads on Craigslist through the Airbnb listing page. So I'm a host, I'm creating my listing on Airbnb. It's not famous yet. And I click on the promotion tab and it shows me fill out this information and quickly post my Airbnb listing on the short-term rentals on Craigslist. Now, if you listened to the SEO section of this course, you know that.org are amazing for link juice for SEO, right? So building links back and forth to a super old.org domain like Craigslist is not only an amazing for SEO, but also they get 50 billion page views a month. There are the top five websites in the world. Seriously, huge, huge, huge site, great way to get free traffic. So much so that there's actually a term called Craigslist marketing where you can go and you can just post a bunch of ads all over the country on Craigslist for your startup, but we're not talking about that. What happened was that Airbnb did not get shut down from Craigslist for six months. And then the meantime, they went from down here, all the way up here. Okay. Their growth went through the roof because they had a superior product. The listing went on Craigslist, the pictures were better, the text was better. They beat out all the other competition on Craigslist. And so they got tons and tons of new bookings in what happens once they make a booking, you get their email address, you might get their social media contact info. All of that happens so you can upsell them and you can communicate with them over and over again. So that's a super famous example. But you might be looking at me like Andrew, I don't have software developers at hand. I need easier examples that I can do and that's fine. I've seen startups hack existing communities that are totally out of left field. Think about this one. I love this one. I saw a startup use Venmo, which is like PayPal. If you don't know it for sending money to people. They sent one penny to thousands of random strangers asking them to review and check out their new app. It was an app called jot. So check out our new app. Here's a penny for your thoughts. Boom, send up penny, boom, sent a penny. Just tons of random people that are seemingly in their target demographic, maybe just off though they look or what they're using their purchases for. You can see their history if they're public, but imagine sending a penny to someone telling them and check out your app. There's no advertising platform in the world where you can get someone to look at your product for a penny, It's impossible. And if you think about it, nobody ignores and Venmo notification because it actually if you have your sound on, it makes the touching sound when it comes to you and you get a vibration and you get a notification on the phone and on e-mail. So great way to get into the inbox right in front of someone's face for one penny. So you do it a couple of 100 times and whatever the call to action is, a bunch of people are going to convert and it costs a couple bucks. So think about opportunities where your target demographics are, where you can hack an existing channel. Most likely it's not gonna take any dev work. But I also want you to think about stuff like that from the large-scale to the smaller scale. How can we create a system for actively building market share on those existing channels? So maybe it is a really quick template that we drop different images into and we put it on Pinterest, and we use the right hashtags somewhere where your target demographic is that you can quickly with no time investment, hack into and build over and over and over again growth from okay, so your homework for this lesson is to sit back, have a crazy brainstorming session with a significant other or someone on your team and figure out all the areas where your target demographic are spending all their time and think of ways that your product can tie into them. You can build market share and those areas. Okay, I'll see you back soon and again, if you have any questions, join the forum. I love to hear your best crazy left field ideas for growth hacking. Maybe you'll help me, maybe I can help you. I'll be there to chat with you along the way. I'll see you there. 5. Real Examples of Growth Hacking From My Career & Famous Companies: So what is growth hacking app? Does everybody know what this term is? I can skip over this slide. I'll need to go into it. Cool. I'll skip over the definition. For me. It starts with the mindset. There's a really big difference from being a marketer at a traditional big company where you can clock out at five PM and you don't have to worry about work until Monday to being the chief everything officer or the first marketing hire at a company and having to grow something that is starting at square 0. And so I wanted to go over a couple of concepts. I think that will, if you can keep this in your mind when you're trying to grow your business, it's going to help you be more successful. The first thing, I don't know where it is, but it's all about creating value. If your business, if you're setting out with your business to make money, you're not going to have the passion that you need to really put in those crazy amount of hours that passion needs to be reflected in your marketing. So if you're thinking about how to acquire more users, think about how to create more value than anybody else. That's number 1, it's all about value. And once you've really feel competent in that value that you're creating, I want you to start to get really aggressive for thinking of ways that you can put that value out. You know, like we don't talk about the word spam when I worked with companies because if we're targeting the right people with enough value, there is no such thing as spam. If you get a text message from your favorite wrestlers, SMS, sorry, from your favorite restaurant with €20 and credit. You didn't ask for that message, but it's your favorite restaurants, pretty valuable message, you're going to like it. So that's really important to think when you're thinking of new ways to grow your business. You know, you don't have a ton of marketing resources. You have to be aggressive. But if you're in the back of your mind at all times, you're thinking that I'm creating more value on helping these people. I'm saving them from the other competitors that are not giving as much value, then that enables you to be really aggressive with your marketing. The second or third thing I don't know. I said is user experience and customer satisfaction are paramount to everything. I don't care if I make a bad mistake with the marketing. As long as every person that sees my stuff that starts to work with my product, my company is having a good experience and I can keep pushing and trying and testing new marketing ideas. Because in the end I'm just trying to create value. I'm not trying to take value. And when you reframe that in your mind, I think you can grow your business much more. None other thing I've noticed over the past 15 years working with early stage startups is that the best startups are reactionary, not preventative. They're not scared about accidentally pissing a user off or accidentally making a competitor map because we use there, add their name and some of our ads or something reactionary. We react because you're an early stage company, you're not going to get sued. Nothing's going to happen as long as you are not the founder getting drunk and saying racist things on social media or something, you're going to be fine. You have to be aggressive and you have to test everything and let your analytics tell you if it was a good test or not. You don't go off of your gut. You don't go off previous company's past performance is not indicative of future performance of famous stock market or stock investing quotes the same thing here. You have to let the data tell you, which brings me to my next thing. I made up this term ROT II because at early stages of startups you don't have money and you're always waiting, we're going to get this money, then we're gonna do this Andrew, we're going to raise this money. Do this, Andrew. And instead, I want you to start thinking of your time like money in the beginning, you only have so much time. We have the same amount of time in the day as Jeff Bezos or any other billionaire, startup founder or whatever. So you have to spend your time as wisely and analyze how your time investment is going on marketing, or on all aspects of the business. If you only have one hour a day to spend on marketing, you're the solo founder, you're the only person at your company. You're doing a few different things. Usually I see startup founders spending their time very frivolous lead, not really analyzing it. And you can start to scale up what's working if you're looking at getting a return on that time investment. And I'll skip over this fast because most people really know it, but you'd be surprised how many people probably even sitting in this room right now, don't know what their core KPIs, the key performance indicators of their business growth are. You need to become obsessive that if you have an office, I say put a TV screen up with the metrics on there. And literally that's the first thing you look at every day. What are the core metrics? Are you tracking them? If not, you can't do anything else. If you leave this conference with only where this talk with only one thing, it's that you have to know every day what are the status of those core metrics for your business? Because that's what's going to help you be more aggressive and know that traction is coming from where, right? So getting into the meat of the talk because I'm right on time. There's really two types of ways that you can grow your company with no money right away. You can do it from today no matter what resources you have, There's hacking your product to add more virality. That means finding the places in your user experience or customer experience, your, your client's experience, where they're the happiest and most excited to create a virality for you. You can create more opportunities for them to share on social media. You can push them to refer others. And you can basically start to grow your company effortlessly by injecting that organically into your product. And I'm going to talk about a couple of examples from my career and also from famous companies that you probably know about. And the other thing is hacking existing channels. Where are your core customers spending their time online, and how can you get inside of that environment? And create brand awareness without spending any money. That is what growth hacking boils down to those two things. Now, before the term came out, I call it, I've been doing this a long time, super old, if you can't tell, it's, we called it aggressive online marketing or guerrilla marketing. People throw these terms around. So growth hacking is really just the term. So some stories let me get into this so you can read on here, but I'll tell I won't say the name. This is a real screenshot from, I don't know, eight or nine years ago of a very, very famous company that figured out a way to growth, hack the largest website, pretty much the largest website and the United States to get traffic and users from for free. Basically, it's a short-term listing, property listings website. And they figured out a way with one-click to allow their users to post their listings on Craigslist. Anybody know what Craigslist is here? 50 billion page views a month. And multi-hundred million dollar company in San Francisco. Anyway, Craigslist, super old company. They weren't looking at this stuff. And after six months they got a cease and desist letter. What did I say? Be reactionary. They weren't scared about getting sued by this big company. They were like, Let's see what happens that companies Airbnb, this is how Airbnb became famous. They don't publicize this, they don't talk about it. They say that it was because they had good photos. It's because they hacked into Craigslist and they got all their listings on a.org. That was 25 years old. It has 50 billion visits a month. So that is how Airbnb became famous. They growth hack their way to fame. Not everybody has a developer who can go and see that there's a vulnerability in the code of a $1 billion company and put their content on there. Here's a couple of examples from San Francisco Bay that are real, couple years old, maybe you can see. But this is like a PayPal, like money sending website in the United States where I had a developer friend of mine receive a one penny notification. And the startup said, Hey, we'd love to get your opinion on our app a penny for your thoughts. And they sent that out to thousands and thousands of people for 2030 euros. And everybody gets a notification and an SMS and an email that they got that sent to them. So of course they're going to check it. That doesn't take any skills thinking about ways to grow your business like that. That's what growth hacking is all about. This isn't even easier, silly thing that completely worked. This is a fake parking ticket and San Francisco that a startup made. Like I said, there's no such thing as spam. If there's enough value in your message, this is $30 or €24 or something of credit for a meal service type thing in San Francisco. They put these all over their cars one day in San Francisco and everybody ran to social media like this screaming saying this company's stupid, they're never going to work. Well, I saw the founder two weeks later, 3000 per cent increase in paid users in two weeks. And because all of that social media boost all the PR that they got, there's really no such thing as bad PR. The early stage of your business. If you have enough value in your message, people are going to talk bad about that ticket and then slide that credit back in their back pocket and maybe I'll check it out later, right? So these are some examples from some other companies. So for me, these are two companies that were acquired that I was head of marketing for awhile ago. And I'll learn to tell stories that I did. Personally, I did growth hacks that lead to both of these exits. The one on the bottom in case we don't have enough time, we'll start there. This is a classified site like Craigslist in the Middle East. I know there's one guy from the Middle East here I met. I started my career in Dubai a long time ago. And this company had very little budgets. Who was to American guys there were working on it for five years and never went anywhere. And I joined and we had a very again growth hacking. The term didn't exist. So we had, I had carte Blanche, I have freedom to test crazy ideas. And I think that's what growed tacking is really about. Back then we were marketing was very separated from development and now it's much more joined together and that's really what growth hacking is about. You have to really join those two sciences. So Friday evening I'm having beers with the development team and I'm throwing out ideas and they're like, no, that's stupid Andrew. No, that's stupid Andrew. And then I was like, What if we build a scraping technology or a script that will grab all the mobile numbers of our competitors websites and categorize it by what they're listing on the site. And then maybe we can send them an SMS and tell them our site is better. Then we're like That's stupid, That's a good idea. So someone built this script. We came back on the next work day, three days later, and we had 60 thousand modal numbers categorized by what they were listing on the site. It's fully legal in that country to send bulk SMSs through the government. Two pennies per tax. We sent out our first two thousand, one hundred, ten hundred people signed up on the website that day. So we just kept doing that and doing that and doing that in a few months, there was no competitors. We had a much better, much safer, much more secure service for those users. We want it to protect them. It was the only tool, the only site in the region where you had to have a local mobile number to participate. So no more scamming, no more gap cat fishing getting ripped off. We're trying to help people. I'm not trying to just steal them from those competitors. I'm trying to help those people create value, right? That company was acquired first for a 150, then fully acquired for a total of $400 million. The next one. Early stage startup in San Francisco years later. And we've only raised a little tiny bit of money just to build an algorithm B2B SaaS company with a multimillion dollar product, very small amount of total customers. How do you do marketing when there's only ten total customers? Ie dreams type websites where our customers. And so what I did was I built a PR campaign around a white paper that I wrote for free myself. I researched and it was a travel personalization technology company, kind of boring. But for a small subset of people, they really care about this, right? I'm trying to create value. Who nobody's talking about the future of this little tiny thing. So I wrote the white paper myself. I'm not an expert on this, but nobody else is talking about it. I want to create value for these people. So I wrote this white paper. I did a little PR campaign around it. I pushed it out to some tiny, I mean, some media outlets in this tiny little environment or industry. And we ended up getting picked up by the media about this whitepaper. People came to our website to download the full white paper. Download automatically emailed the CEO and he's solved who's downloading it and started a conversation with your aims, I believe in your in France. And that led to an acquisition from accompany in Dubai, lead to a pilot that let me know in San Francisco, led to a pilot that was successful and boom, the company got acquired $0 are spent in marketing. And so that's really what it's all about. These are just some examples. So I've got three minutes, some time. Summarize everything, growth hacking or early stage marketing. It doesn't take a lot of money to grow your business. Most startups that I worked with as a consultant, They tell me all we're gonna do marketing will after we raise money. But if you're an investor in here, you want to see traction before you give any money. How does that work? You have to do something to show that people care about your product, that they want to refer other users to your product or your service, and that they come back multiple times. So that takes some form of marketing and then that's what I'm here to teach you about. You've got to start early and you don't need to have money. It's scares me, it makes me sad every time I see people run to Facebook and go spent 2000 euros to try and test to see if their product works. You're going to get no real data because you're not an expert at running those ads and it's a drip in the bucket to everyone else advertising on social media and cetera. So instead, start your marketing with organic channels. Figure out what people like, what they're responding to, what pages on your website or your app, what features, what price points if you're an e-commerce business that people like. And then you can start to layer over that with that small paid budget that you had and you will scale your business. It's all about leveraging what you have. If you're an early stage company, you might think we don't have any money for marketing, Andrew, we can't do anything. But maybe you have a large e-mail list. Maybe you have access to an event venue like this. Maybe you have something that you can start to partner with companies that do have access to your customers. So going back to that hacking existing channels, figure out how you can barter with the people who have access to your target demographic. What do you have that you can offer them? No sponsorship on your website, something like that. Think about what you have in leverage that the other thing like I said, is growth happens when you create more value for that right target. So always be thinking about how can we create more value? How can we make the user experience better? It's not. How can we make more money? How can we make more money? You're going to fail if that's all you're focusing on. And be really aggressive if you don't know what I mean, simulator and I'll teach you about how to be aggressive and then make decisions based off of data. I made so many times that work with this first time startup founder who's already been successful in his career or her career and other ways and then go now, the blogging won't work for us, Andrea, or this won't work. I'm like, did you test it? No, You're stupid. Test it. You've got to test everything and see if it works. If it doesn't, but you test it fast, you don't need to waste a ton of time. Do a little minimally viable tests to see an always set it twice. It focused on creating value. Ita.