Growth Hacking becoming more both yes (WoW! we want) and no (Its Bullshit) buzz word in the startup ecosystem. More and the most of the people are talking about this even if they don’t know what is Growth Hacking in fact. Being unknown is not an issue, but the issue is when people misunderstand (founder excepting overnight magic) and misuse (Any marketer becomes Growth hacker for salary), both leads to friction in the actual growth of the startup.
What is Modern Growth Hacking?
In my personal opinion and also according to practical approaches, growth Hacking is theory less process involved marketing and product development simultaneously. You can’t copy paste growth hacking of one product into other, here is not any or some best practices, all come from product-market fit and data that depends on the product itself.
So, in fact, is growth Hacking is playing with data and overall product development in the initial stage to get traction and more numbers. Unlike traditional marketing, it’s totally a focused on the growth of the product and experiments on distribution channels to drive users faster. Here marketer (true growth hacker) resonantly work with product nd development team for the all-around development of the startup.
So Finally Growth Hacking is:
When you Google, you would get hundreds of articles on Growth hacking, more and more people are writing about this of course including me :D. Almost everyone is saying the same story, it was coined by Sean Ellis, Hotmail story, Airbnb, Facebook growth and blah blah. If you observe closely, all including me are saying:
“Growth Hacking is modern startup term came from the intersection of market, product, marketing channels and data etc. to get a product built faster along with its user base.”
Now the point is how and from where should you start to get the result faster than your competitors. The one and only one answer are to build really an awesome product that people want to use. Even world’s top growth hacker can’t grow a bad product.
How to Kickstart Growth Hacking:
Before thinking about growth hacking, focus on building the useful product first. A product that is requirement and need of a mass not few people in your city. A product that will replace the old school method of solving problems of mass not few people in your city.
Before we will go ahead, I want to share my personal experience with Growth Hacking.
Experience #1:
In last two years, I worked for more than 5 startups as a marketer, the first assignment that co-founders gave me was: Ashraf, forget Marketing everyone is doing this, let’s start with Growth Hacking. Few of them shamelessly demanded where is fire even their product was completely bullshit even for testing.
Only one of the product was actually solving the problem and it was really awesome. I started with simple marketing but after few months, more and more people started loving their product. Then I figured out there was a channel that was very easy and cheaper to approach people. We started focusing on that particular channel that was bringing 1000% more customers. Then we push it, again it started giving another 1000% more customers. That company is wiwigo and it is doing great using two channels: SEO and partnership with enterprises travel agencies.
Experience #2
After few months, I joined another company but this time product idea seems to million dollar market. Even people were saying yes in the first approach. But the biggest problem was, the company was taking 15 days in onboarding process and they were selling one one feature for last one year.
This time idea and market opportunity were great but the product (provided by the company) was totally bullshit. Most of the client were not going ahead after one month of the painful integration process. So, how Growth Hacking could be possible.
This is the condition of 90% startups, either their product is just another product or they have a great idea and market but the product they are making is actually not able to use properly.
But if your product is solving the problem and people will use it, the only gap between people and your product is, they don’t know. In that case, growth hacking will help you get traction even day first.
So, if you ask any real growth hacker how to do growth hacking, he/she will say build a great product that people want to use. The only great product is eligible for growth hacking.
So the conclusion of “How to do Growth Hacking is?”
Build a great product that a mass of people want to use and that will replace the old school way to solving a problem. Then one or few of your current marketing channel will drive traction, in turn, a flood user base. That is Growth Hacking honestly!
What do you think about growth hacking? I would love to discuss.
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