That was when I discovered the true meaning of growth hacking – marketing techniques used by startups/small businesses/solopreneurs to grow their respective businesses in the absence of big budgets. These marketing techniques are often metric and ROI driven, rather than chasing vague notions like branding or mind share. In the past few years, top companies like Netflix, Dropbox, and Airbnb, among others have used growth hacker marketing techniques to acquire new customers and achieve sustainable growth. Ryan Holiday’s book Growth Hacker Marketing aims to be the essential growth hacking guide for growing a sustainable business. It’s a quick read – in fact, it’s like reading a long form blog post on growth hacking which was one of the issues I had with the book (more on that below). In less than 80 pages, Ryan explains the steps involved in growth hacker marketing, elaborating each step with various examples of companies which leveraged growth hacking to scale up their respective businesses. Sadly, it just doesn’t have enough content to be considered a serious growth hacking guide.
But first, here are some positives:
Ryan features several examples of companies that used growth hacking as a secret weapon to acquire new users to their platform. I really enjoyed reading about how Airbnb started as a concept and how Hotmail used a simple growth hack to gain millions of new users. I was also intrigued by how Ryan used growth hacking to boost sales of Tim Ferriss’ book The 4-Hour Chef. The concept of Product Market Fit (PMF) is explained well. Product Market Fit is achieving a state in which a product and its customers are in perfect sync. As Ryan calls it, this is the ‘holy grail for every growth hacker’ and he does a good job simplifying this technical concept. The revised and expanded edition of the book contains an additional chapter where Ryan explains how he used the four-step growth hacker marketing approach to promote his own book.
So these are the things I liked about the book. Now let’s talk about a few things that I didn’t like.
Final Verdict
Growth Hacker Marketing is an interesting read, but it falls short of expectations. If you’d like to learn more about how to leverage growth hacking to grow your business or website, join the GrowthHacker online community instead and read some of the trending articles and case studies on the forum. But if you have to purchase a copy of the book, grab the Kindle edition and save yourself some money. Just don’t expect it to be a tutorial on growth hacking. I’m sharing a few essential growth hacking resources here, if you’re interested in learning more about the concept:
How BuzzFeed Makes The World Go OMG, LOL and Win Every Day [Case Study] How We Scaled a Startup from 0 Organic Traffic to 100,000 Visitors/Month How Slack Became the Fastest Growing B2B SaaS Business (Maybe) Ever [Case Study] 20 Marketing Experts Share The Growth Marketing Trends That Will Dominate 2018 AMAs with Growth Hacking Experts
