Growth hacking course

A Short Course in Growth Hacking
By Ken Leaver
January 2014

@Kenontek

www.kenontek.com

Disclaimer
I am a relatively novice growth hacker.

Who is learning from titans.
Therefore I did not create almost any of this content myself. Most of it was made by
established growth hackers like Sean Ellis and Andrew Chen. I have tried to label the
sources as accurately as possible (apologies in advance if there are mistakes).
So again, I did not create this stuff but rather gathered various great stuff I found on
the web and organized it.
So I don’t take credit for any of the great ideas in this deck.

-Ken Leaver

The growth hacker is the warrior that guides his
troops to avoid this tragic end.

Chapter 1: What is Growth Hacking
Chapter 2: The Growth Hacking Process
Chapter 3: The Growth Hacker Funnel
Chapter 4: Pull Tactics for Getting Visitors
Chapter 5: Push Tactics for Getting Visitors
Chapter 6: Product Tactics for Getting Visitors
Chapter 7: How to activate
Chapter 8: Retention
Chapter 9: Funnel Optimization
Chapter 10: Summary

Is growth hacking just like traditional
marketing?
NO!!
Traditional marketing has a very narrow focus and
was built around traditional products (eg.
shampoo, cars, etc.)

In first phase of a startup you don’t need a
marketing plan and team.
You need growth!

“A growth hacker is a person whose true
north is growth.” – Sean Ellis

What is the role of a growth hacker?
In the digital world products are defined differently
than in the physical one (eg. Twitter is a product)
Due to this a product can play a role in its own
adoption (eg. Facebook sharing, Dropbox)

Growth hackers understand the
potential of software products to
spread themselves and their job is to
make this happen!

So who is Growth Hacker?

Typically it is an analytical person who knows a bit
of everything and believes in testing and
measuring everything.
He is excited about learning and tries to learn
every day.
At a small startup a growth hacker typically has a
front-end and back-end developer in his team.

A Growth Hacker is T-Shaped
The flat horizontal part represents all the skills a growth hacker
needs to be familiar with: psychology, viral loops, email campaigns,
SEO, PPC, product design, etc.

The vertical line
represents the skills you
dominate in. You’re an
expert in these skills and
this is what gives your
product a chance at
scaling.

Source: Quicksprout.com

Growth hacking is not mysterious…

“Growth hacking is less like an illusionist
and more like a marathoner” – Sean Ellis
Takes a lot of work to master the skills
that pertain to growth.
You need to train for months.
More importantly you need to train in the
right way.

…Growth hacking is a lot of hard work!

Growth hackers are curious
What would happen if we made our
entire product invite-only?
What would happen if we made our users
do something every week to keep their
account from being de-activated?
What if we let customers pick their own
price?
What if we gave away a free upgrade for
our product to everyone that pays to have
Chinese food delivered to our office?

Constantly think and try new things… some of them
may even be stupid.

Growth hackers are obsessive

Are you ready to think about growth all of the
time? Even in 6 months?
Do you have the capability to focus on a narrow
goal for the foreseeable future?
Its important because often you need to try a
hundred things to find a few that work.


Step 1: Define actionable goals
Example:

Too broad = Increasing your
DAU (daily active users)
Just right = Educate members
about content creation
through email.
How to think about it?
Keep going a level deeper
until the goal is an actual task
that can be completed once
and for all.


Step 2: Track your goals with analytics

Without analytics you have
no way of knowing if you’ve
achieved your goal
Decide what you’re going to
measure
Find the best tool to measure
it (eg. Google Analytics,
Kissmetrics, Mixpanel, etc)


Step 3: Leverage existing strengths first
Every startup has inherent strengths or assets
Do the things that take the least effort and have most result first

Send email list
• Already have large mailing list
• Have strong system of email
distribution
• Takes 1 day

Do this first!!!!!

VS.

Add “What’s New” category
to product
• Requires at least 2 weeks
of planning, mockups,
programming, etc.
• Engineers very busy at the
moment

Step 4: Execute experiment

1. Write down hypotheses before experiment

• This email will have higher
click rate than previously
because of xxx
• Content creation will
increase by x% because
xxx

2. Don’t get discouraged by initial results

3. Learn from success and failure


THERE IS NO SUCH
THING AS BAD DATA!

Step 5: Optimize the experiment
1. Try to have a control group

2. Utilize A/B Testing

3. Give up on experiment only if you don’t
believe it can give better results or if it
requires huge resources
4. Repeat

Growth hacking is about eventually achieving
Product – Market Fit

What does Product-Market Fit Look Like?

Source: Andrewchen.co

The Growth Hacker Funnel is how you
achieved P-M Fit
The rest of this presentation is organized
according to the funnel!

3 Levels to the Funnel
•

•

•

You can pull them in, push
them in or use the product to
get them in

Ch. 4: Pull Tactics
Ch. 5: Push Tactics
Ch. 6: Product Tactics

This is when the user takes an
action that creates a
relationship with you (join
email list, create account, etc)

Uses your product regularly.
The Holy Grail!

Ch. 7: How to activate

Ch. 8: Retention

Ch. 9: Funnel
optimization

Pull

Give visitors a reason to come to you (incentivize them, entice
them, etc.). They key is that you are providing something of value.
Example: You find a great Slideshare presentation when Googling
for a topic
Cost of these tactics are typically measured in time or personnel,
but you don’t directly pay for a visitor

Source: quicksprout.com

Pull tactic #1: Blogging
Key to SEO: Blog posts are keyword rich
and easily indexed by Google
Typically distributed through RSS, so
there is an inbuilt mechanism to deliver
to others

Great at educating people and pushing
them through your funnel
Can position you as a thought leader
Guest blogging is a great inbound linking
strategy as blog owners are always
looking for new guest posts


Pull tactic #2: eBooks, Slideshares &
Whitepapers
Hard to ignore a detailed
document on a niche you care
about
Have high perceived value and
can ask for email in exchange
for downloading
Can spread well through social
media


Pull tactic #3: Infographics
Display both expertise and nice design

Spread very well through social media
Guidelines:
1) Pick something that is clever or
noteworthy
2) Find the right data
3) Analyze the data
4) Build the narrative
5) Put into nice design
6) Distribute via all channels


Pull tactic #4: SEO
High Level
If you are creating a lot of content Google
will recognize that you are an authority on
the topic

SEO is a very deep topic and will take time.
But you should at least understand the
basic high-level stuff.
Two main areas of SEO: Code & Content.
Many resources available to do technical
audit of your site (eg. Moz) and tell you
which coding elements to change.
Need to decide which keywords you are
targeting. This will depend on 3 factors:
Traffic, Conversion, and Competition

Pull tactic #4: SEO
The strategy in 90 seconds

Source: http://growthhackers.com/slides/slides-the-ultimate-guide-to-funnel-optimization/

Pull tactic #5: Social Media
The general playbook
Engage with people who might be using
your product.
Provide value at any chance. Answer
questions, etc.
Don’t just take… but give. Become a hub of
interesting content.
Social media takes time.
Tweets have a half-life of 1 hour, Facebook 1
day. Create a schedule accordingly.
Don’ buy followers of any kind.


A Facebook post from my startup, uGift

Niche platforms
Answer questions on Quora. Create new
questions around the topic of your product.

Post relevant posts to Reddit, Hacker
News, etc.

Find potential users on
Followerwonk.


Appeal to vanity
One of Ankur Nagpal’s biggest viral
successes on the app store was an app
that asked people to rate which of
their friend’s profile picture was the
best
After a pic was chosen this sent a
message to that friend
Of course the friend opened it.
Because we are all vain.
It spread so viral Ankur had to slow it
down

Pull tactic #6: Contests
Traditional contests
Give away prizes that are
meaningful to your audience.
Experiences make a great prize.
Give them more entries to win the
contest based on how much they
give you in exchange.
Make a big deal when you
announce the winner
Be careful not to use this too often.
The people that respond to
promotions tend to often not be
the “right” user profile


AppSumo built an email list of over
700k emails by running contests.

Pull tactic #6: Contests
Non-Traditional contests
Try some crazy ideas
Ankur Nagpal ran a promotion that
gave away a Pacman arcade game
to the winner
It created tons of buzz and free PR
People were actually buying ads to
try and win

Source: http://www.kenontek.com/2014/01/27/growth-hacker-ankur-nagpal-shares-secrets/

Pull tactic #7: App Marketplaces
B2C (iTunes, Google Play, etc.)
Reviews matter a lot so make sure you have good ones. Use tricks to ensure this (eg. on
app ask “Do you like my app?” If they answer yes, then ask them for a review.
Screen shots are very important. Make sure yours are great.
Put a lot of thought into the name. It should be easy to find.
Use other tactics besides just people finding you on the marketplace as it is too
competitive these days.
Use Multiple Points of Entry: Udemy creates
lots of apps on the various topics that their
classes cover so that they can be found
across a wide range of topics on the appstore


B2C (iTunes, Google Play, etc.)
Account for the differences between
the major appstores
Apple determines ranking mainly by
velocity of downloads (and little else)
Google Play more sophisticated. They
use reviews, quality of downloads (ie.
low uninstalls) and numerous other
factors like keyword density, which
are common to SEO.
You can growthhack your reviews
(and therefore your ranking) by first
asking “Love my app?” and then only
asking the user to review it.

B2B (Salesforce, Mailchimp, etc.)
Less crowded = easier to stand out

Ask the marketplace to promote you on their blog or email
Reviews and screenshots also matter


Pull tactic #8: LOPA (Leverage Other
People’s Audience)
Guest blogging is one example
Tweet a review or complement about a site or blogger with an audience. Try to
get them to retweet you.
GrowthHacker.tv asks the people they interview to promote the interview on
their own social channels.
Reach out to group leaders on Meetup.com and ask them to write about you
Offer free accounts to leaders in your industry
Create a YouTube video targeted to a specific writer and wait for them to Google
themselves


Pull tactic #9: PR


Pull tactic #10: Scraping

Without knowing much
coding you can scrape
valuable user data from
popular community sites
and create great email lists
from it.


Pull tactic #11: Use others’ great content
to get signups to your product
Check out this blog post if you want to know more about how this one works:
http://www.kenontek.com/2014/01/14/the-brilliance-of-tweetganic/


Push
Instead of enticing, you push people to your site, often
interrupting whatever they were doing.

Example: Someone is waiting to watch a Youtube video but not
until they see your ad
To understand whether ‘Push’ works for you, you typically need
to understand ‘LTV’ (Lifetime Value of a Customer).
If LTV is higher than your CAC (Customer Acquisition Costs) you
can scale extremely quickly.


Push tactic #1: Ad Platforms
Understand the different ad platforms
The standard ones: Google, Yandex, Facebook, Twitter
More niche ones: Linkedin, Carbonads.net, Decknetwork.net. Consider the
persona of your customer.

Retargeting: Available via Google Adwords or thru specialized networks such
as AdRoll

Source: quicksprout.comcc

Everything is a function of your business model

How much you can pay? Is a function of
your business model. If you earn more
than your competitor, you can outbid
them.
Groupon grew almost entirely due to
paid advertising. Funded by an
extremely lucrative business model.
Try to deal directly with content owners
if you will spend a lot on a single
platform


Test variations of your ads
Get good at Google Adwords. Understand how to change copy, photo,
keywords, etc.
Facebook’s ad platform allows to test and optimize different photos

Understand what impacts the cost of ads
Example of ads from my startup, uGift
Target “Exact Match” long tail
keywords on Google Adwords as
it tends to be much cheaper
click rates
Tactic: If you advertise blog
posts on Facebook and rotate
them every few days the per
click costs likely to be much
lower than advertising a static
landing page for an extended
period of time.

Improve the targeting of your ads


Push tactic #2: Promo swap


Push tactic #3 Affiliates
This is when you pay someone (ie. a
different site) for achieving a goal (eg.
sending you a visitor)

Best to use an established affiliate solution
like Commission Junction or DirectTrack
rather than trying to create your own.

Essentially the affiliate does the hard work
of thinking how to achieve the goal and
allows you to focus on the product.

One type of affiliate are those that that
charge “Cost Per Action”, which typically
means a sale or filling out a form. Its
typically quite expensive and therefore
works best when you have a relatively high
gross profit.

Affiliate sites will work best if they target a
niche that is relevant to your product.


Push tactic #4 Reach out offline


Push tactic #5: Target specific
audiences and write them direct

Source: growthhackers.com/slides/slides-the-ultimate-guide-to-funnel-optimization

Push tactic #6: Purchase email lists
A common practice here in Ukraine is
purchasing of email lists. You can
often get 500,000+ emails for peanuts.
The trick of course is then adding them
to a high-quality email platform like
Mailchimp without raising red flags
This takes a bit of art and a bit of
algorithm
But I know of a startup that was
getting 7,000 unique visits per day
after just a few months of operations
as a result of this approach.

Product
People wind up on your site because of the product itself.
Example: A social network gets everyone that uses existing users to
get more users.
If you can use a product tactic in which each visitor brings along
more than one person, than you have a K factor of 1. You’ve
created a viral loop!
But, most products DO NOT go viral. Especially B2B.


Product tactic#1: Network invitations
Email Contacts

Allow for importing of
your address book.


Social Contacts

Allow for easily sharing your
social contacts. Make it the
default option.

Product tactic#2: Social sharing

Make sharing your product (and
important updates) extremely simple and
available (ie. everywhere!)
Be smart about how you get people to
invite their friends. Use Facebook’s social
graph to ask them to invite those people
who are most likely to join!

It is much easier to increase invite acceptance rates
than it is to increase the # of invites!

Product tactic#3: API Integrations
Imbed sharing into the product experience

Imbed sharing into the product
experience (ie. it happens in the
background without having to ask the
user permission all of the time)
Spotify leveraged Facebook’s API. After
you “Facebook Connected” your activity
on Spotify was automatically published
to your FB feed and inside the app to
anyone you are connected to.
Just be careful about depending on this
too much because if Facebook changes
its API it may cease to work


Product tactic#3: API Integrations
Trigger actions by users in other products
Another great example is Nike+’s integration with Path and Facebook, so that
friends can see your activity.
Friends can even cheer you on from Facebook or Path which will sound an
applause while you run.
Asks to
share your
results on
Path


The Results
on Path!

Product tactic#4: Backlinks
Widgets of any kind are a great way to get backlinks, which result in clicks to
your site as well as improved SEO.

Widgets can serve many different purposes. Think of what you can offer
which relates to your product.


Product Tactic#5: Incentives
Dropbox uses storage like a currency. It is relatively cheap to them but
valuable to new users. So they trade it for getting new users.


Product Tactic#6: Organic
Some products spread organically via organic word of mouth.


Product Tactic#7: User becomes
content creator
Always great when you can get your user to generate the content that
will attract new users to your site (ie. via long tail SEO)

Quora = answering questions
Linkedin = creating profiles
Craigslist = listings

Slideshare = presentations


Product Tactic#7: Generate scarcity
If there isn’t yet huge demand for your product than
artificially create scarcity

When Gmail launched it was invite-only and they limited the
number of invites people could send out
Some SAAS products launched and only allowed 3 customers
to sign up per day

Limit the # of promo codes you give out to your app


First define what it means to “activate” a
customer
Get their email address
Get them to create an account
Get them to read or comment on something

Get them to share something
Get them to buy something
Get them to fill out oa form
Get them to interact with someone
Get them to send a friend request


Activation Tactic #1) Make Strong
Landing Pages
Link to other popular pages on your site
Headlines
critical

Your unique value
proposition
A few benefit
statements

A big image
or video

Call to Action that
captures emails

Social Proof


Activation Tactic #2) Copywriting
A great place to find good examples of
headlining and copywriting is offline
publications

Headline explains your value proposition
Subhead explains unique value propositions
Different audiences respond to different
kinds of writing
Social proof is important (eg. testimonials)


Activation Tactic #3) Calls to Action
(CTA)
Needs to be one clear CTA

Keep things simple

Activation Tactic #4) Onboarding
Onboarding is the process of leading users to where you want them to go on your site
You may want o use a video as part of your strategy
People are impatient and will forget about you quickly unless you push them through
the onboarding process.

Twitter does this great.
Clearly guiding people from
creating to using an account


Activation Tactic #5) Gamification
People love progressing, getting awards, finishing tasks, etc. It is
hardwired into our brains. Use this fact.
Progress

Leaderboard
s
Awards


Activation Tactic #6) Pricing Strategies
Pricing options, Free Trials and Discount Codes
Offer different pricing options with various functionalities

Free Trials & Money Back Guarantees
Discount Codes – Udemy sends out emails on a regular basis with discount codes that are
only valid for a limited time. They drive huge sales.


Bundling
Opportunity bundle your product with other noncompetitive, complementary products?
If so, try services like Hacker Bundle


When in doubt, increase prices

A common piece of advice the Founder of WP
Engine, Jason Cohen, gives to entrepreneurs
starting out is “Raise your prices!”
Why? When it is difficult to discern the value of
your product people will often attribute pricing to
value
Cialdini’s book, “Influence” has a great example of
earrings that were not selling at all suddenly selling
out because the store manager accidentally
doubled their prices when she intended to halve it.

Activation Tactic #7: Try exit services
Services like Exit Monitor can detect when a visitor is about to bounce from your
website
They do this by tracking the mouse movements
You have an opportunity to make them a special offer right before they bounce

Retention #1) Test & Measure
Use staged traffic
Wrong = Focus on getting a lot of traffic before product-market fit.
Right = Put effort into getting enough traffic to test your hypothesis. Do not
exhaust your supply of beta users!


Retention #1) Test & Measure
Use cohort analysis
MixPanel


Retention #2) Your “Aha” Moment
Identifying your “Aha” Moment
Do you know what your “Aha” Moment is? If it takes 2 days currently, can you make it 2
hours?
If its necessary to create an account to see your product in action is it possible to show
them a sandboxed version of your product that will give them an “Aha” before they sign
up?
Don’t promote features which do not lead to the “Aha”. It is just clutter.

Twitter’s “Aha” occurs after you
have followed a certain number
of people. So they lead people
thru the process to make sure
that it happens.

Retention #2) Your “Aha” Moment
Validate it with analytics
It’s important to note that what you think may be your “Aha” moment may be a false
alarm.
Use analytics to decide.
Everyone thought Infinite Scroll would be great for Etsy…

But it turned out people were buying less…

Retention #3) Use email a lot
Kinds of emails
Drip campaign = when you send pre-written emails at
preselected intervals (eg. day 1, 3, 7, 14, ..) Use this to introduce
people to your product, share testimonials, inspirational reasons
to use your product, etc.
Event-based notifications = someone retweeted your post. A new
friend request on Facebook. A new response to your blog post
on Disqus. “You’ve been outbid” on eBay.
General Updates = new features, behind the scenes look of your
company, etc.
Force people to click by not giving
them all of the info in the email


Ex. Facebook sends an email that
tells you that someone liked a photo
was in, but I need to click in order to
see the photo.

Retention #3) Use email a lot
Optimizing emails
A/B test every email – focus on subject lines

Segment your audience and see if they perform differently
Use Customer.io to follow up with people that bail out of the
sign-up process
Focus your energy on the
time period when they
are most likely to convert


Retention #4) Alerts and notifications
Alerts that you send
Especially relevant to mobile apps
People can turn them off so you need to be careful not to abuse

Very effective to send notifications from friends that try to get user active again
Also very effective to send
special offers


Retention #4) Alerts and notifications
Alerts that you encourage your users to send


Retention #5: Use surveys


Retention #6) Exit Interviews

Learn from customers that leave you
Ask them the what made them cancel. Be funny
about it.
Offer them a discount to come back…
oftentimes they cancelled not because they
don’t like your product but because they didn’t
see that they were getting enough value to
justify paying the full price


Retention #7) Roll out the red carpet
Send 100 free gifts to the first 100 customers
Provide backlinks to your best customers or mention them in
your email
Keep a list of your best users and retweet them often
VIP access to exclusive content

I’m a paid monthly subscriber of
GrowthHacker.tv and like the fact
that they often retweet my
Tweets


Retention #8) Continue to add value
Ensure your product continues to add value.
Some products have a network effect and do this naturally. In
cases like this you can increase price to reflect the increased
value.
If value is decreasing then look to add important features. But
beware of “feature creep”
Subtract features. Sometimes the best way to increase value is
to get rid of distracting features and focus on the things
customers care most about.


Retention #9) Community Building
Customer support as a tool

People who feel they are part of a
community stay longer. So work on
building a community.

Customer support – provide great
customer support. Eg. Zappos
empowers their support to make sure
customers are delighted.


Retention #9) Community Building
Documentation & Social Features as tools
Documentation / FAQ – make sure support topics are easy to find and understand.
Social features – how can you let your users to interact with each other. Eg. One of the
most valuable features of Growthhacker.tv is the ability to interact with the
community.


Retention #10: Follow up with a personal
touch

Source: Ken Leaver’s email

Funnel optimization = improving each
step of the conversion funnel


Let’s try a real example of optimizing
conversion
A Blogging Product (version 1)


Optimizing Conversion Example

Next, measure…
Measure conversion between steps using Google Analytics or KissMetrics

Your baseline conversion is 5.6%. This is your starting point.
Examining the above chart, you can see exactly where people drop off!



Now its time to optimize
Think about what you can do to improve on the 5.6%
How you can shorten the funnel?
Try to rearrange the flow so the receiver receives a lot of value
upfront. (nobody likes to start by giving their email address)
Think about how to improve conversion on each step of the funnel
Try different types of landing pages (A/B testing using Unbounce
and Optimizely)
Try different types of logins (eg. Facebook, Twitter, email, etc)

Remember… no matter what, get users to
sign up so you can target them later.


Let’s see what this looks like in an example
A Blogging Product (version 2)

Essentially you have:
- combined the first 2 pages into one
- removed the ‘Choose Template’ page


Finally forecast and test
Now forecast what the result might look like…

Why bother forecasting?
Because it helps you think systematically about your decisions!
After forecasting, build it and see if your forecasts were correct
If they were not, figure out why. Then optimize and repeat.



Now let’s try using the funnel approach
to decide how to monetize our product
Let’s imagine we have a SAAS startup (like KissMetrics or
Mailchimp) that is determining how to price our product.

You are not sure whether you will make more money by charging
right from the beginning or whether it is better to offer a free trial
Optimal Monetization Example

Convert Now



Convert Now

Assuming CPC of $0.60 the cost of a customer (CAC) would be $200


Now let’s see what it would could look
like if they offered a free trial
Free Trial

First hypothesize what the funnel will likely look like using a Free
Trial conversion funnel

Assuming CPC of $0.60 the cost of a customer (CAC) would be $44
(much less than $200)
Now let’s test our hypothesis


Free Trial

Did you achieve the 1.35% conversion rate?


If not, optimize and test until you do. Or until you figure its
not possible. Decide… better to stay with Free Trial or return
to “Convert Now”.

So to conclude, if you wanna
be a growth hacker…
1

Keep experimenting and learning. Every day.

2

There are rarely huge breakthrough moments. Often you find lots of
pockets of growth that eventually result in a big whole.

3

Be obsessed about growth. Live it, breathe it, dream it.

Growth hacking course

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