During my last startup as a founder, my primary obsession was how do i grow

the business, one of my favourite blogs for learning about startup growth was
http://www.startup-marketing.com
by Sean Ellis:the God father of Growth
hacking.
Growth hacking has become the cool thing of the day, but there has been
confusion about the difference between growth hacking and traditional
marketing.
The confusion has risen because of two reasons:
1) A lack of a better term other than Growth hacking
2) The notion that growth hacking is about hacks
To address the lack of a better term for Growth hacking, I propose replacing
Growth Hacking with Growth Marketing.
Growth marketing focuses on
the process to find facts about the complete funnel to
drive growth.

When Sean Ellis used the term Growth Hacking, he was using the term to
describe the process of finding growth as opposed to hacking together a list of
random tactics in the hope of getting something to work.
As
Sean Ellis
puts it, startups that pursue growth have to dig deep creatively,
and relentlessly test new ideas .

The Misguided View of Growth Hacking:

When people search for the term Growth Hacking, they normally see
lists
and
more
lists
of hacks which leads to a situation where people want to simply
copy the hacks without really understanding the process behind the hacks.
Most growth hacking lists fail to expose the steps before the hacks and the
process behind these successful hacks.
What is useful is finding the process behind growth hacking and lists of experiments or
hacks per customer stage and per vertical (eg distribution, activation, retention
experiments) not for you to copy blindly, but to give you an idea of what you might
want to do when applying the prior learning to your company.
What most people forget is that behind every successful growth hack there is a
process to uncover the hacks.
Josh Elman
- VC at Greylock Partners
Growth Hacking: Its about figuring our step by step how to get people to use
your products.

Lessons From Science

The goal of scientists is to find facts and understand the natural world.
As
Richard Bragg
puts it
"The important thing in science is not to obtain new facts, but
to discover new ways of thinking about them."

Scientists find facts by following an iterative scientific process which looks like
this.

By taking a cue from science, as

marketers our goal then is to find facts and
understand our product,customers, and how to reach them.

What Fast Growth Companies Do: The Process

Most high growth companies have a growth model which is based loosely on
the scientific process and other fields, such as lean.
The process behind growth marketing in most growth companies is an iterative
model that falls under these categories:
1. Exploration & Discovery
2. Testing & experimentation
3. Playbooks & Systems

Brain Balfour
VP of Growth at Hubspot,

puts it:
There is no one right or perfect
growth process. The important part is just to have one, stick to it, and improve it
over time.

Growth Marketing at Veeqo

At Veeqo, the marketing team has implemented this growth process based on
the scientific model of
1. Exploration and Discovery
2. Testing and Experimentation
3. Playbooks and Systems
Our process is not set in stone, it is constantly evolving but the fundamentals
will remain the same.
At this point it is worth pointing out that using this process presents no silver
bullets.
There will be many failed experiments along the way to finding facts and
understanding our product, our customers and how to reach them, what is
important is to stick to it until we find and understand these facts.
Before we start with the Growth Marketing process, we ask ourselves
why
we
are doing this. We then come up with a reason which becomes our goal. The
goal is then broken into sub goals per customer stage.
The Veeqo marketing team has a goal which is derived from the wider company
goal
agreed with the CEO.
To further elaborate, our goal is to grow the number of paying customers by a
specific number, this goal is broken down into various subgoals along
acquisition, activation and retention.

The Exploration and Discovery Phase:

This phase can be conducted in any number of ways. It can be done via
customer interviews, brainstorming sessions, customer observation,
researching competitors or industry best practise, reading etc
For Veeqos marketing team this stage normally starts with a brainstorming
session, looking at customer data or performing market research.
Once we have completed the exploration and discovery phase we create a
backlog of the ideas we have, the ideas go into a sheet that looks like this:
Example of Brainstorm Sheet

Funnel Stage

Acquisition

Name

PPC

Acquisition
Existing platforms

Increase paid customers

through ppc

Acquire customers via an

existing platform

1. Perform keyword research

2. Select target keywords
3. Calculate target cpc
4. Start Adverts
5. Monitor & optimize adverts

1.Find an existing platform

2.Find how customers interact
on the platform
3.Replicate process
4.Find ways to acquire
customers

Resource

Marketing: Prince

Marketing:Prince
Backend developer: Sam

Time frame:
Input & Output time.

2hrs

Marketing 1 day
Backend developer 2 weeks

Impact

Medium(5)

Big(10)
Increase traffic by 10%

Expected outcome

Increase number of paid

customers by 3.

Probability it will work

High (1)

High (1)

Priority

Priority 1

Priority 1

Ideas

Steps to complete idea

Terms used in the table.

Ideas:
Description of idea
Steps to complete an Idea:
List of steps to complete a task or execute on an idea
Resources
:
Which team members will perform a task.

Timeframe
:
Input time refers to how long to complete a task.
Output time refers to how long before we see results.
Impact
:
Based on how big an impact an experiment will make.
Big assigned value of 10
Medium assigned a value of 5
Small assigned a value of 1
Unknown assigned no value.
Expected outcome:
What we expect from a test.
Probability
:
Likelihood an idea will work
1 assigned to high probability idea.
0.5 assigned to medium probability idea.

0 assigned to low probability idea.

Priority:
Priority assigned after weighing up Impact, Timeframe, probability and
expected outcome.

Testing and Experimentation:

Once we have a number of ideas on how achieve a goal.
We map out the steps needed to complete the idea or task.
After mapping the steps, we prioritize and rank those ideas based on timeframe
to complete a task, impact the idea or task will have, the resources needed,
expected outcome and probability the idea will work.
As an example we may choose an SEO idea because it has a short input and
output time, potentially has a huge impact and a high probability it will work.
The SEO idea is given a priority of say 1.
If an idea has a low impact but has a short input and output time, we may
decide to leave the idea.
There is a caveat to this approach in that there are times when we may not
know the potential impact of an idea, when we have such situations we
implement the idea as quickly as we can to ensure we get some results to
inform our decisions going forward.
Once we have ranked ideas and prioritized, the next phase is the experimenting
phase.
Experiments per stage appear in an experiments document that looks like this:

Test variables depend on what is been tested, in the experiment below we

tested for target cpc and number of paid users.
Our hypothesis was:
Increase traffic to 280 visits per week at target cpc of 1.50.
Expected Outcome:
1 paid customer per week.
280 visits per week at 1.50 cpc.

Actual PPC experiment results:

CPC

1.31

Visits

276

# Conv

% Conv

2.90%

CAC

CPL

360 45

Lead to paid
conv

38%

Paid
users

Net value

3,239

LTV

3,600

End date

Results

03/08/2015 pass

Experiment results are analysed daily for new experiments and weekly for
ongoing experiments we already have initial data for.
If an experiment does not work, we mark the experiment as failed and write
down the reasons why the experiment failed, writing down the reasons why an
experiment failed helps us go back to the experiment in the future and change a
control element in that experiment for a new experiment to begin.
Playbooks and Systems
When an experiment is successful, the experiment goes into a playbook
document.
The experiment can then be repeated several times over.

I hope you have found this useful, good luck in your pursuit of finding facts
about your product, customers and how to reach them.

Conclusion
Keep
running

I focused on a specific element (acquisition) of growth marketing in this article,

feel free to add any other elements within the funnel below.

CPC

1.31

CPC Visits

# Conv CAC

CPL

Lead to
paid

Paid
users

Net
Value LTV End date Results Conclusion

1.31

45

38%

3,32 3, 03/08/2
9
600 015

276

Visit #
s
Conv

276

%
Conv

2.90%

2.90%

Lead to
CAC CPL paid conv

4
360 5

38%

Paid Net
users value

3,239

LTV

End date

Pass

Keep
Running

Conclusi
Results on

3,60 03/08/201
0
5 pass

Keep
runnin
g