“Certain species of sharks must always keep moving to survive; if they stop swimming, they literally die. Growth teams are like those sharks”

This title comes from the business book I have recently finished reading – "Hacking Growth" written by Sean Ellis & Morgan Brown . I wanted to share some quotes and highlights I made. All of those without a doubt belong to original authors and can be found in the book.

The back cover of the book screams «The definitive playbook by the pioneers of Growth Hacking, one of the hottest business methodologies in Silicon Valley and beyond». Someone may think it is another catchy bestseller, which contains nothing but common sense phrases and obvious advices. I agree to disagree. Even though this version of the book is dated to 2017 (I was doing my Bachelor's degree and studied hard, not even thinking about product management and growth), it is still relevant and useful in 2024, and serves as a useful reminder of how you win, retain, ask for feedback and care about your end customers and your unique outstanding product, regardless the domain you are working in – be it online retailer, grocery store shopping app or software development. What makes it even more valuable is the number of real world cases from companies we all know or heard about.

Nothing can tell us more about the book than what is inside of it. Since high school I always enjoyed the feeling of finishing a good long reading, its last pages and acknowledgements. Yes, I do read the Acknowledgements. If there was readers' conversion rate for this part, this one would've probably shown the least value. For this very reason I am sharing a few last sentences, which I believe, tell us what a big deal a book we read within weeks/months can be for authors:

Sean Ellis:

Hacking Growth is based on the learning that we’ve assembled throughout our careers, so I want to thank those who have given me an opportunity to learn. First, to my family for bearing with me through long days in the start-up testing trenches. And also to the founders and CEOs who have given me the trust to experiment on their start-ups and with their precious early customers.

Morgan Brown:

There are so many people to thank at the end of a process and journey like this. This book has been in the making for the better part of three years, and of course, is the result of everything I’ve learned in my career to date. The first people who deserve thanks are my family: my wife, Erika, and children, Banks and Audrey Grace. They have given up so many evenings, dinners, and weekends in service of me writing that I’m terrified to think of all the time traded with them to make Hacking Growth happen. Books aren’t just written, they’re written and rewritten, torn down and reshaped. This isn’t the work of two people but of many, and they all deserve recognition. …Last, but certainly not least, a sincere thank you to my family. For without them there isn’t a me to write this book. To my Mom, thank you for being an unfailing champion, even in times when I probably didn’t deserve it. Your never-ending love is a true gift. To my Dad, who has always driven me to expect more of myself and do the best I could, I am grateful to have your standard to live up to. And to my brother, Graeme, my best friend, thanks for a lifetime of friendship and memories. I love you all.

“We believe that growth hacking is so much more than a business strategy, or even an ongoing process. It’s a philosophy, a way of thinking, and it’s one that can be adopted in any team or company, big or small. We wish you many wins along your way to unstoppable growth.”

QUOTES

Sharing some highlights from this book as direct quotes. While for someone like me it will be insightful and inspirational, others may find it as a good reminder of how the best companies grew back then, how they became successful, and what was accomplished with the tools they had. This is not AI generated summary. To be honest, it is not a summary at all. This is what I personally noted down directly in the book, and if you want to know more about Growth teams, activating or retaining customers, UX or product pricing, and have comprehensive overview – you should read it.

– “I found that asking people if they were satisfied with a product didn’t deliver meaningful insights; disappointment was a much better gauge of product loyalty than satisfaction.”

– “A full third of Dropbox users came from referrals of current users of the product. By early 2010, Dropbox users were sending more than 2.8 million invites per month to their friends – and the company had grown from just 100,000 users at the time of launch to more than 4,000,000. All this in just 14 months, and all achieved with no traditional marketing spend.”

– ”In late 2007, Facebook set up a formal growth team of five people, called The Growth Circle. At the time, the majority of Facebook’s 70 million users lived in North America, making it clear that drawing in international users was one of the biggest growth opportunities. But that would require translating the product into every conceivable language. The growth team engineers, led by Javier Olivine, built a translation engine that allowed Facebook’s own users to translate the site into any language via a crowdsourcing model. Growth was about engineering systems of scale and enabling our users to grow the product for us.”

– “Take the case of Airbnb. Back in 2008, the team tried all sorts of ideas to grow the user base, all of which proved unsuccessful. That is, until they finally hit upon untapped-growth gold mine with a brilliant growth hack, which has since become Silicon Valley legend. Using some sophisticated programming, and lots of experimentation to get it right, the team figured out a way to cross-publish Airbnb listings on Craigslist, free of cost, so that whenever someone searched the popular classifieds site for a vacation rental, listings for properties on Airbnb popped up.”

– “By rapidly testing promising ideas and evaluating them according to objective metrics, growth hacking facilitates much quicker discovery of which ideas are valuable and which should be dismissed.”

– “The Lean Startup adopted the practice of rapid development and frequent testing, and added the practice of getting a minimum viable product (MVP) out on the market and into the hands of actual users as soon as possible, to get real user feedback and establish a viable business.”

– “The core elements of the method (growth hacking) are: (1)the creation of a cross-functional team, or a set of teams that break down the traditional silos of marketing and product development and combine talents; (2)the use of qualitative research and quantitative data analysis to gain deep insights into user behaviour and preferences; (3)the rapid generation and testing of ideas, and (4)the use of rigorous metrics to evaluate – and then act on – those results.”

– “Every company needs to grow their base of customers in order to survive and thrive. It’s about how to engage, activate, and win them over so they keep coming back for more.”

– “Search for new opportunities for product development, by assessing customer behaviour or feedback, experimenting with ways to capitalise on new technologies such as machine learning and AI.”

– “It will soon not only become possible to continuously monitor and update products, in real time, it will be vital to do so in order to remain competitive.”

– “Most growth is due to an accumulation of small wins. The best growth teams continue to experiment with improvements even once growth takeoff has been achieved. Growth teams should work on finding ways to retain and monetise customers – that is both keeping them coming back and increasing the revenue generated from them – to sustain long-term growth. Growth teams would be involved in all stages and levers of growth.”

– “Generally, the Product Team is in charge of the process of building the product, as well as of making updates, such as improving sign-up experience or adding a new feature, and the team establishes a schedule, a roadmap, for making these improvements.”

– “Growth cannot be a side project. Without clear and forceful commitment from leadership, growth teams will find themselves battling bureaucracy, turf wars, inefficiency, and inertia.”

– “It’s vital not to outsource the core responsibility for growth, at any stage. Growth is too important to delegate.”

– “You will make mistakes, experiments will fail, webpages will break – it’s an inevitable part of the experimentation process.”

– “No overly ambitious growth scaling plans should be instituted until a company has determined whether the product it’s bringing to market is a «must-have» or a «just okay but can live without».”

– “The «a-ha» moment – the utility of the product really clicks for the users; when users really get the core value – what the product is for, why they need it, and benefit they derive from using it.”

– “Often, people have to use a product for a certain amount of time before they truly have this experience with it, they have to use a certain feature to really get the full-force aha hit.”

– “The feedback (from customers) will be worthless if you’ve spent the whole time selling. You’ve got to be listening and observing, not pitching.”

– “Twitter team asked users who had gone dormant and subsequently returned: (1)Can you tell us why you signed up in the first place?; (2)What didn’t work for you? Why’d you bail?; (3)What caused you to come back and it again?; (4)What worked this time?”

– “Twitter boosted its initial growth to get users to experience what they had determined to be the core value of the service. They implemented a feature that made suggestions of people to follow a primary part of the sign-up process, making recommendations of specific accounts based on the interests that users chose while signing up.”

– “The key mission while collecting data is to look for the behaviours that differentiate those customers who find your product must-have – those who use or buy it repeatedly – from those who don’t.”

– “YouTube started as a video dating site. Co-founder Jawed Karim said “Our users were one step ahead of us. They began using YouTube to share videos of all kinds. Why not let the users define what YouTube is all about? It worked.” Instead of finding breakout success, they would have wasted precious cash and time on trying to sell products that simply were not yet a must-have.”

– “HubSpot created paid product training a mandatory part of the new customer experience. The idea that customers should be asked to pay an additional sum for training for software they’d already purchased ran counter to what was considered the best practice at the time. The HubSpot trusted the data and enforced up-front training – resulting in rapid growth of customer base and successful IPO in 2014.”

– “Everpix was one of the most highly regarded photo apps in recent memory. The best part about Everpix may be its ‘set it and forget it’ nature. After the onetime installation and configuration, there’s nothing else you have to do. The founders chose a freemium business model – the basic version of the app was free, with the option to upgrade to a paid pro version for $49 annual subscription. The founders did so much right, but they made one fatal mistake: they failed to focus on early adopters in order to drive much faster growth. The Everpix tragedy demonstrates the importance of focusing not just on growth but on the the right levers of growth at the right time. It was important to shift attention form making the product pleasing to making it more profitable.”

– “Growth hacking is not about throwing ideas against the wall as fast as you can to see what sticks, it’s about applying rapid experimentation to find and then organise the most promising areas of opportunity.”

– “Reducing the complexity of your business operations down to a basic formula is immensely helpful in allowing the growth team to focus on the right signals in this vast sea of data noise.”

– “For eBay, one of the most metrics that matters most (2017) is not daily users or new users but the number of items listed for sale. eBay determined that number of items sold is such an important metric for its growth that it designated gross merchandise volume (GMV) as the most important one to follow, commonly called the North Star metric.”

– “WhatsApp’s North Star was the number of messages sent. For Airbnb the North Star was nights booked.”

– “The more experiments you run, the more you learn.”

– “Big successes in growth hacking come from a series of small wins, compounded over time.”

– “Trying to launch too many experiments right off the bat can lead to poor test implementation, team confusion, and discouragement as targets are missed.”

– “You want not only to engage more people in using the app but to build a large base of highly active shoppers who make substantial purchases on a regular basis.”

– “Remember that cross-functional collaboration and the sharing of information are key tenets of growth hacking, that’s why it’s critical that everyone one the growth team have access to the growing bank of ideas, and be able to add to it at any time.”

– “The first phase of work in scaling up your acquisition of customers. Two types of fit: language/market fit, which is how well the way you describe the benefits of your product resonates with your target audience, and channel/product fit, which describes how effective the marketing channels are that you’ve selected to reach your intended audience with your product. How well the language you use to describe and market your product to potential users resonates with them and motivates them to give it a try. The text accompanying the product’s every feature or screen, or page.”

– “The first text users see must send the right message fast. Research has shown that the average attention span of humans is now eight seconds (probably less in 2024). You must craft language that very concisely communicates your product’s core value.”

– Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir said “If you can get even a single distribution channel to work you have great business. If you try for several but don’t nail one, you’re finished.”

– “You’ve got to first focus on optimising the channels that are most cost effective for you. Facebook and Google conduct a research to see how much of their existing user base is on those platforms, and how many similar types of users can be reached through advertising.”

– “Virality is a balance of how good the packaging is and how good the content is.” - Sean Parker, co-founder of Napster and former president of Facebook, taught early employees that the virality of any product is controlled by three factors: payload, conversion rate and frequency, where payload is the number of people to whom each user will likely to send the promotion at a time. The best way to create an incentive is to create a double-sided incentive, the one that offers something to both the sender and the recipient.”

– “The best loops are ones in which users are motivated to help sign up more users because doing so will improve their own experience of the product.”

– “Make the invite to share an integrated part of the user’s experience, not an add-on. For example, Airbnb has created the invite that includes the name and a picture of the person who invited you, along with a personalised message about the incentive. The call to action is also prominent and simple – a large box labeled «Claim Your Credit».”

– “98% of traffic to websites does not lead to activation, and most mobile apps lose up to 80% of their users within three days.”

– “You should be tracking all essential steps of the customer journey to that moment of activation.”

– “The team could try automatically adding the visitor’s first-time discount code on the checkout page.”

– “The more information people put into the product, the more their commitment increases, through a concept called stored value.”

– “Pinterest had to introduce users to the novel concept of Pins and show users how to create them – gamifying the new UX.”

– “You don’t want to ask too many questions. Make them multiple-choice rather than open-ended, with no more than four possible answers each.”

– “Online shoe retailer Zappos was trying to create a new level of higher-frequency shoppers; they tried to gamify the shopping experience by offering badges for doing things like favouring a shoe model, but the badges offered no value – no higher discounts or benefits – and left customers confused. The most effective rewards in a gamified setting come in the form of status, access, power, and stuff (financial incentives or physical gifts).”

– “One of the biggest mistakes is asking visitors to opt in to receiving triggers such as notifications and emails too soon, often as a necessary first step to setting up or accessing the product.”

– “Top user incentives – for heavy users of the product, let them know they’re special and encourage greater affinity and use”

– “Once people take an action of whatever kind, they are more inclined to take that action again. Obama presidential campaign team broke down the donation request form on its website into a series of smaller steps. Having taken the first small step, users were more inclined to take the rest, which led to 5% increase in the rate at which people responded with donations, and millions of additional dollars in the campaign fund.”

– “Booking.com shows all browsers the number of people actively looking at hotel rooms in the same search area, and the number left on the site. Amazon shows browsers how many items are left when inventory is low, trying to spur them to go ahead and purchase.”

– “The longer you retain customers, the more you can learn about them and their needs and desires, which of course allows you to earn more from them. At Amazon Prime, 73% of free trial subscribers convert to paying subscribers, and 91% of first-year subscribers renew for a second year. Retention continues to increase the longer customers have been subscribers. The longer people use Evernote, the more likely they are to continue using it.”

– “Cohorts and Segments: break your retention data down more finely, determining the specific rate for carious subgroups of users through cohort analysis.”

– “Whenever a customer wants to buy a product or use a service of the type you sell, they turn to you rather than a competitor. They are loyal to you.”

– “Improving the perceived value of the rewards leads to greater retention.”

– “Communicating to customers that some new features or product offerings are just around the corner, telling them how they’ll benefit can be a powerful inducement for them to stick with you.”

– “There’s the potential to irritate customers if you seem to be baiting them by promising a fabulous new thing but making them wait too long for it.”

– “Optimise the current set of product features, notifications, subsequent rewards from repeated use. Introduce a steady stream of new features over a long period of time.”

– “Do not make a mistake of introducing too many new features too rapidly (feature bloat). People become attached to how products look and work, and rolling out changes too quickly or abruptly can result in backlash.”

– “Winning back users who’ve abandoned a product is called resurrection.”

– “One of the first steps for growth teams to better monetise customers’ base is to identify the general groupings of customers who share similar characteristics. You want to look for correlations to revenue being made from each of customers’ cohorts, which will provide ideas for experiments.”

– “The power of «charm prices» – those that purposefully end with a 9, 99, 95, 98 instead of the full round. They boost sales by an average of 24% (studies from 1987 to 2004).”

– “As you create options for customers, you want to be sure that your pricing is in proportion to the value customers are getting from the use of your product.”

– “Pricing relativity – the principle that people’s perceptions of prices are influenced by the prices of other options they are offered.”

– “Sometimes, by charging more, we make the product more appealing to large customers who were looking for best-in-class product, not necessarily the lowest-cost option.”

– “The Penny Gap – the large difference consumers perceive between a product being free and paying even a small amount for it.”

– “When we feel like we’re going to miss out, we’re more likely to take action. The travel deals site shows deals that you’ve already missed, letting visitors know that these deals won’t be around forever.”

– “You snooze, you lose. If you stall, you will fail. Today, no company can afford to leave any potential customers up for grabs by competitors. Stalls are often caused by companies becoming overconfident of having secured a premium position in the marketplace. Stalls can occur because companies lose focus in their core products or services, becoming distracted by the launch of shiny new products, extensions, making an entry into new markets.”

– “Growth teams are both active and proactive; they are detectors of early warning signs, they are entirely dedicated to acquiring, activating, retaining, and monetising the maximum number of customers and even driving the innovation of new opportunities for growth.”

– “Yet before a team moves on to a new initiative, they should push themselves to find new ways to make the most out of the channels and tactics that have already proven successful. Teams can leave lots of growth on the table by not doubling down on successes.”

– "Teams that aren’t constantly innovating, that aren’t continuously diving into customer data and surveying and that aren’t rapidly experimenting and producing results are not long for the world.”

For what it's worth, I hope you found this article useful and inspirational!

Sincerely,

Andrey Lapikov