So you want to be a growth hacker?
In future, I hope they include some growth courses in MBA but for now you don’t need to go to college for that.
You can learn growth hacking by
- Reading about case studies
- Watching others run growth hack experiments
- Actually doing it (this is by far the best way to learn)
Here are my go-to resources when it comes to growth hacking:
- The #1 Inbound Marketing community |Community of growth hackers
- GrowthHackers.com – A Community for Growth-Focused Marketers
- Neil Patel’s The Definitive Guide to Growth Hacking (eBook)
- 81+ Resources on Validation, Growth, Customer Retention, and Scaling a Startup
But the best way to learn growth hacking is by doing it.
Keep in mind that growth is a mindset. At its core, growth hacking requires you to make assumptions, design & run tests, measure and analyze your results to validate your hypothesis.
Practice Growth Hacking
It’s not that hard to run growth experiments. You don’t need to be working for a SaaS company or a tech startup. You can practice growth hacking tactics on your own blog or social media accounts. Don’t forget that you don’t become a “growth hacker” just by reading about it. You try it out and see what works for you.
Designing Simple Growth Hack Experiments
You can copy my simple growth framework to start.
I just ask myself these questions for each experiment.
Hypothesis – What is your assumption for the experiment?
Platform – Where are you going to run this experiment?
Resource – Who will actually do it?
How long – How long is this experiment?
How to measure – How would you measure success?
Pass/Fail Criteria – What does success look like? and what about failure?
Process – What is the step by step process?
Results – Document the results and lessons learned.
Do you want to see some examples?
Here are two you can read (these are very short and to the point)
- Growth Hacking Experiment: Use Quora To Get Blog Traffic
- Growth Hacking Experiment: How To 3x Twitter Traffic
What do you think?
Do you think you can practice and become a growth hacker?
Here are couple of growth hacks you can practice today,
- If you are a blogger, design and run an experiment to get more traffic from Pinterest.
- If you are an online instructor, think about a way to get more PAID students in your class using quora.
- If you are just getting started on Instagram, design and run an experiment to get more followers (I am actually working on this experiment myself and will post more details soon)
- If you are into snapchat, can you drive people from other social media channels to your snapchat?
Simple. Right?
Hopefully, the creative part of your brain has started running after reading these examples above.
Now go and run a growth hacking experiment and let me know how it goes.