Growth Hacking 101

You might be asking yourself, "What is Growth Hacking?" You might already have a firm understanding. You might not care at all. Well, if you don't care, don't let the door hit you on the way off our website!

Online Growth Hacking is a fairly new concept that most online marketers haven't caught onto. Why? Because it's too good for them.

One of our heroes at Rise Online Marketing is Neil Patel because of his insane knowledge of all things marketing. Below we quote some of his writing and insights, he'll quickly become your hero too.

"Growth hacking is so misunderstood that there is a desperate need for this chapter. Few concepts have been as polarizing and revolutionary, simultaneously. Is it marketing in disguise? Is it a buzz phrase used to increase salaries? Is it the future of internet products? This chapter will clearly define what growth hacking really is. The phrase “growth hacker” was coined by Sean Ellis in 2010. When I asked Sean why he felt the need to coin a new phrase he said that it stemmed from his frustration when hiring replacements for himself."

A growth hacker is not a replacement for a marketer. A growth hacker is not better than marketer. A growth hacker is just different than a marketer. To use the most succinct definition from Sean’s post, “A growth hacker is a person whose true north is growth."

Every decision that a growth hacker makes is informed by growth. Every strategy, every tactic, and every initiative, is attempted in the hopes of growing. Growth is the sun that a growth hacker revolves around. Of course, traditional marketers care about growth too, but not to the same extent. Remember, the power of a growth hacker is in their obsessive focus on a singular goal. By ignoring almost everything, they can achieve the one task that matters most early on.

This absolute focus on growth has given rise to a number of methods, tools, and best practices, that simply didn’t exist in the traditional marketing repertoire, and as time passes the chasm between the two discipline deepens.

Traditional marketers are skilled at understanding traditional products, but the internet has created a radical redefinition of the word product. For thousands of years a product has been a physical good, but now they are invisible bits and bytes in the form of software products. Products used to only be things like cars, shampoo, couches, and guns. Now Twitter is a product. Your online accounting software is a product. Things you can’t hold, per se, are products. This transition is most responsible for the new age of growth hackers. The internet has given the world a new kind of product, and it demands a new kind of thinking.

For the first time, because of this redefinition, a product can play a role in its own adoption. Sound crazy? It is. A product like Facebook allows you to share their product with other friends to make your own experience on their platform better. Shampoo can’t do that. A product like Dropbox can give you free cloud storage if you get a friend to sign up with them. Couches don’t do that. If you don’t come to grips with this new classification of products that the internet has produced, you won’t fully grasp growth hacking.

Sean Ellis, the guy that coined the term “growth hacker,” was also the first person in charge of Dropbox’s growth. He understands what is new about internet products.

Growth hackers understand the latent potential of software products to spread themselves, and it’s their responsibility to transform this potentiality into a reality.

• WHY DID WE WRITE THIS GUIDE?

  There is a revolution taking place in the world of startup growth, and we wanted to help people understand this new phenomenon. Those who understand growth hacking will have a competitive advantage that is hard to overstate, and we wanted to provide a robust framework for thinking about it.

• WHO IS THIS GUIDE FOR?

  This guide is for entrepreneurs, founders, growth leads, or anyone else who is trying to grow a startup. If acquiring new customers (and retaining existing ones) is important to your business then you should read this guide. If customers matter to you, then growth hacking should matter to you.

• HOW TO USE THIS GUIDE?

  Each chapter is a standalone mini-guide that can be read in isolation, but to get the most of the book it would make sense to read it all the way through at least once, and then return to it as a reference resource when needed

If you're in the online marketing space, aren't you sick of the same old school of thought? Aren't you sick of following the rules? Are you sick of the same marketing pitches? Well, get onboard, because we are taking Growth Hacking to a new level, and we want to bring all different perspectives to our forum.