- Hey there Dan Martell here,
serial entrepreneur, investor, creator of SaaS Academy.
And in this episode I'm going to teach you
how to become a world class growth hacker.
I know that that is a tall order
but trust me, I've been doing this for 20 years.
Many of my personal friends are not only
the people that created the term,
they've also scaled companies
like Twitter, Quora, Facebook, et cetera.
So we're going to dive in to that
and at the end I'm going to share with you
how to get access to my high tempo testing training.
It is the best training if you really want to figure out
how to run experiments and do that in an efficient way.
Let's get into it.
(strong beat intro music)
So my journey with the term Growth Hacker
goes back quiet a ways.
When I moved to San Francisco in 2008
I met a guy named Sean Ellis
who is the originator of the term, Growth Hacker.
So you can Google that.
But I actually, prior to that
I called it Metrics Based Marketing.
It was really just performance based marketing
when everybody else was doing more ads and PR and display.
This was more about saying, "Hey let's look at the product,"
you know now they call it product lead growth,
"and really understand the funnels,
"the flows, the messaging,
"the go-to market, product market fit,
"to improve the virality distribution of the product."
And that's how I met Sean
and shortly after I met a guy named Andrew Chen
who ran growth at Uber
and he's an incredible blogger
if you want to go deeper on this
go check out Andrew's stuff.
But it was through that journey
that I realised that there is a huge misconception between
people that are in marketing,
that think they're growth hackers
and the actual, the art and the science.
And for me it really came to be
when I met the guy named Andy Johns.
Andy was ex growth at Facebook, Twitter, Quora
and now leads I think growth and revenue at Wealthfront.
He's an incredible human being.
We we're at an event where we were all speaking
at the growth hackers conference.
And in the green room he shared with me
the concept of stacking growth channels,
almost as, the way he looked at it as,
compound interest on an investment.
And that's why you get these hockey stick curves,
if you do things right,
because every new growth channel might add an extra 5%-10%
lift month over month and they just keep compounding.
So what I want to dive into today
is the specific tactic, strategies and insights
that I have taken away,
not only scaling and growing my companies
and exiting them but also being around
some of the smartest marketers in the world.
Number one, Innovate.
The reality of it is, you can go read about Airbnb's,
you know Craigslist posting or Facebook tagging people,
buying an address book.
You can read all of these historical growth hacks,
but if you don't understand that
the core fundamental of being a world class growth hacker
is innovation,
then you're going to miss the whole boat.
What worked in the past, should not,
and will not work long term.
Even if I find a new growth channel.
For me for example with Clarity,
that was a marketplace for entrepreneurship
to get advice over the phone.
Wee grew that to 50,000 experts in about an 18 month period.
The way we did that after testing bunch of different things
was SlideShare.
Why?
Because SlideShare had proof that they were an expert,
they knew the topic because they had a slide.
Views to get us credibility
and kind of inference that this person was smart.
And also on the last slide
of every one of their presentations was their contact info,
which made the ability for us to scale the relationship,
which is part of growth hacking.
You know, scaling and building relationships.
It made us able to that in a programmatic way, right?
We did it manually at first
and then we back filled it with software.
So I say that because you need to bring
a level of creativity and innovation to your marketing,
if you want to be a great growth hacker.
Number two, tooling and API's.
This is where I feel a lot of folks
that do not have a technical understanding
or the ability to just understand
an API, an Application Programme Interface.
Essentially it's how different tools
you can interface with them.
What I've discovered over the years,
working with some of the top growth hackers,
is they're really creative
in how they connect different systems.
They might have a email component here,
data source provider here,
they put it together in some kind of like,
now we have tools like MonkeyLearn
which is essentially AI out of a box.
So you can get artificial intelligence, machine learning
by plugging these things in.
There's so much creativity that comes out of it.
But if you don't understand the tools available out there
and literally they're changing all the time,
so get on Product Hunt,
be aware of all the different marketing technologies
that are coming to the forefront in Product Hunt.
And also, how those API's or those tools
expose their feature set.
So that you can plug those together
to find a different way to scale, awareness, et cetera.
Then you're just going to be at a disadvantage.
It doesn't mean you have to learn how to write code,
although writing and learning JavaScript
or scripting technology will definitely help you.
You definitely need to be aware of the free tools
and the API's that they expose in the data.
So you can start looking for opportunities
for creative distribution.
Number three, Work Backwards.
This doesn't matter if it's growth hacking
or it's product development.
But the best way for you to grow your business,
is to work backwards from the customer.
I call it the three F's, Fun, Follow and Frequent.
If I'm trying to get myself
or my product or my message in front of a customer,
I need to ask myself,
what tools do they currently pay for every month?
My perfect fit customer.
What places do they frequent?
They vote with their time, online and in person.
And then what other people do they follow?
Experts and bloggers and authors, et cetera.
Because if I can understand that landscape
then I can ask myself,
what are the creative ways to get in front of it?
For example, one of my favourite growth hacks is Twilio,
an API for telephoning.
They essentially provide a text messaging
and phone calls via a programmatic interface.
And one of their growth hacks,
because Danielle who ran marketing there,
was to sponsor the Startup Weekends.
I used to sit on the board of Startup Weekend
and seeing how Twilio became the national sponsor.
And literally for $500 in pizza,
for an award and pizza.
They were able to get all of these developers,
they asked themselves those questions.
And maybe not as structured as my process
that I teach my coaching clients,
but Follow, Frequent and Fun.
If you work backwards from the customers.
Figure out who you're perfect fit customer is
and look at that landscape of those answers
about where they spend their time, energy and money.
That is where you're going to find some creative solutions
to put your product, your message,
in front of those groups of people.
Number four, Copywriting.
When it comes to persuasion,
when it comes to communication,
I think that having a fundamental knowledge
of great copywriting, studying the greats,
understanding Robert Cialdini's book, Pre-suasion.
And really figuring out what words move people.
And it doesn't matter if it's
landing pages, ad's, et cetera.
But even microcopy within a product,
really well placed messaging within an onboarding solution
or when you're trying to activate a new account
or encourage them to share a certain thing with a customer.
The microcopy you use
is going to have an incredible impact
in getting somebody to take action
and to me copywriting is one of those skills.
Maybe not like deprogramming knowledge,
but having access to the copywriter,
but knowing personally great copywriting principles
is going to allow you to just move faster
and run faster experiments.
Number five, Testing, okay?
So I always say
failure is our experiments that ran too long.
I don't think that there's truly failures
if you're learning.
What the best growth hackers create
is a process for iterating, learning
and implementing against some kind of metric
that moves their business forward.
So if you don't have a formal process
for running these tests,
then you're just throwing a bunch of stuff.
The worst thing, when I get a client that comes to me
and they're like, "Hey we used to grow
"and now we've kind of stalled it, we're flat lined."
and when I ask them,
"Okay, well what did you do to grow in the past?"
And they list out several things,
well we used to do this, this, this, this, this and this.
And I asked them, "Well what one of those things
"was the most impactful?
"The cheapest cost?
"Lowest time to pay back you're CAC,
"your Cost to Acquire Customer?
"And highest LTV?"
They couldn't tell me, why?
Because they did that whole stack at the same time.
When you're making changes to drive growth,
you need to be able to isolate it against a control
and run experiments, or split tests.
We can get into statistical significance
and multi-variant testing.
All of that fun stuff.
Regardless of what technique tooling you use,
I'm just saying, you need to have a testing framework
if you want to be considered, or even have a chance
to be a world class growth hacker.
So quick recap.
How to become a world class growth hacker.
Number one, understand it's about innovation.
Number two, tooling and API's.
Three, work backwards from the customer.
Four, copywriting to persuade.
And five, testing.
As I mentioned a the beginning of this episode
I want to share with you an exclusive training,
it's called the High Tempo Testing training.
It's a video from one of my growth marketing events.
Where you can see the four different phases
of high tempo testing,
including the core concept
called North Star Metric, your NSM.
Understanding what your NSM is for you,
will allow you to focus, chrysalis
and get everybody moving that metric forward.
Which will provide value to both you're customer
and to your business.
That's the key for NSM.
I go more into it in the training,
click the link below to watch that.
It's 100% free.
And it was taught to me by Sean Ellis,
he's and incredible marketing mind.
He's one of my former mentors.
So be sure to click the link, download or watch that online.
And if you like this video
be sure to smash that like button,
subscribe to my channel,
and if there's anybody you think this video could serve,
feel free to share it with them directly.
But as per usual, I want to challenge you
to live a bigger life and a bigger business
and I'll see you next Monday.
What a topic, yee-haa.
Yee-haa scdoodles.