Book of the Week: Growth Hacker Marketing

21 Feb 2015

This week I find out what it means to be a growth hacker with Growth Hacker Marketing. There’s not much to the book. It doesn’t tell you how to be a growth hacker in detail. Traction is better for specific things to do. This is written for old school marketing people who want to find out about this new thing called the Internet. This book is an interesting read after The 4-Hour Workweek, because Ryan worked on marketing Tim’s other book, The 4-Hour Chef. Everyone is linked together someway. Growth Hacker

The new job title of “Growth Hacker” is integrating itself into Silicon Valley’s culture, emphasizing that coding and technical chops are now an essential part of being a great marketer. Growth hackers are a hybrid of marketer and coder, one who looks at the traditional question of “How do I get customers for my product?” and answers with A/B tests, landing pages, viral factor, email deliverability, and Open Graph. - Andrew Chen, Growth Hacker is the New VP of Marketing

In the traditional marketing world, you are give a product and it is your job to spend money to get users and make money. The problem was that you could not measure how many users you got from spending money on various things. This changed with the Internet. You can track precisely where people are coming from. This lead to the rise of the growth hacker. The growth hacker starts with product-market fit. If you don’t have that, then the job becomes that much harder. The best growth hacks are engineered and integrated into the product and allow it to spread by reaching the right people. Hotmail grew virally after Tim Draper suggested that every email include a message to sign up for Hotmail at the end of the email. Each startup’s growth hack will be different, but it involves thinking how to build a product that has market fit and is inherently viral. One important part of virality that can be overlooked is retention. Your product is not viral unless you have retention. Otherwise you’re spending money to fill a bucket with holes in it.