If your business is a rocket ship, a growth hacker is an engineer who makes sure you have the right mix of fuel to breach the stratosphere and reach the stars.
A growth hacker is a tinkerer who twists all the right knobs for maximum growth potential. They don’t have opinions; they have facts and data.
And if you want to give your business the best chance of thriving, you need to learn how to think like a growth hacker.
We’ll keep it simple and to the point.
And at the end of this article, we’ll look at a case study that’s happening right now, with an extremely high-profile company.
So let’s get started!
Don’t worry if you don’t feel like reading, you can enjoy the video below or watch the video on YouTube:
What is a growth hacker, and what do they do?
A growth hacker is a dynamic strategist with an entrepreneurial mindset. They combine data analysis, experimentation, and unconventional approaches to propel a business toward rapid and exponential expansion.
In other words, their job is to grow a company as fast as possible.
And they do this by following a specific structure. So let’s break it down.
1
Identify opportunities for growth
To find these opportunities, a growth hacker looks at lots of information about the market. Even more so, they look at the people who might want to buy from your business.
They use special tools to see what customers are doing, what they like, and what they don’t like. It’s a bit like detectives investigating clues to solve a mystery.
By analyzing all this data, the growth hacker can understand the trends and figure out what’s popular or what’s missing in the market.
It’s like noticing a gap on the shelves of a store and thinking “Hey, I could create a cool product to fill this gap, and people would love it!”
As a matter of fact, this is exactly what big corporations do in order to expand and gain more market share.
They find gaps in the market. Then they either buy other smaller companies to fill out that gap or create new companies from the ground up to fill the spot.
Imagine you go to a small town and you start to look around, asking yourself: “Okay, what does this town need to succeed?”
Identifying opportunities is all about being a clever investigator, using data and insights to understand what customers want, and finding ways to deliver.
So the first step in thinking like a growth hacker is adopting an investigator mindset.
Take a step back from your company and investigate what it actually needs to succeed.
And after you do that, you need a way to keep track of the progress.
Because, as we said, growth hacking is all about data.
2
Goals and Metrics
A growth hacker decides on specific goals they want to achieve.
These goals are like targets they want to hit, such as getting more customers, increasing sales, or expanding into new markets.
Just like an archer aims at a bullseye, a growth hacker focuses on what they want to accomplish.
To know if they are making progress, a growth hacker uses something called metrics.
Metrics are like numbers that tell them how well things are going.
For example, they might look at how many new customers the business gained, how much money they earned, or how many people visited their website.
It’s all data-driven.
It’s like driving a car with a GPS. The goals are the destinations you want to reach, and the metrics are like the GPS telling you how close you are to getting there.
If you’re off course, the GPS helps you make the right turns to get back on track.
A business that doesn’t track any kind of metrics and doesn’t have a predictable growth path is doomed to fail.
It’s like walking through the woods at night while also being blindfolded and wearing earplugs.
You kind of know in which direction you’re heading, but you have no idea if it’s the right one or how much longer you have to walk before you’re in the clear.
The growth hacker also makes sure the business doesn’t implode under its own weight. Which is surprisingly common.
We personally know examples of businesses that tried to grow faster than was sustainable.
Whether that was from hiring too many people that didn’t have much work to do or going after too many clients with no way of actually serving them.
The point is, those companies eventually crumbled and got acquired at a much lower value because they bit off more than they could chew.
So what do you do after you have those goals and metrics?
3
Optimizing User Experience and Conversion
When your numbers are all in check, your next step is to focus on making your customer’s experiences with your business as smooth and enjoyable as possible.
You want them to keep coming back for more and bringing their friends too.
To optimize this, a growth hacker first tries to understand the journey a customer takes when they interact with you and your business.
Now, imagine your business is a theme park, and you want your visitors, or clients, to have a blast.
You’d look at everything from their arrival at the entrance to the rides they enjoy and the food they eat.
You want to know firsthand how they actually feel when they are interacting with your business.
And in turn, you need to set up certain things in order to understand that.
Some companies require all higher management to do at least a couple of weeks of customer support just to understand how their clients feel.
And the reason you need all this information is to optimize your conversion rate. At the end of the day, you want to turn visitors into clients. Cue in the growth hacker.
To do this, you need to develop various tactics to make the purchasing process smooth and appealing. This is how some companies trick you into spending more money.
It’s really common in the video game industry to make in-game purchases.
First, they offer something valuable at a stupid discount, making it a no-brainer deal.
Now, the reason they do this is to get the credit information of their players.
Which lowers the barrier of entry because next time they’ll have something to sell at a higher price.
Now suddenly, the players in their game don’t have to go and find their cards and add all the information. It’s already done.
Now the new purchase is just one click away. That’s how mobile games make literally millions of dollars every single day.
Once you start thinking like a growth hacker, it is easy to understand how they are pulling it off.
And finally, the last step in growth hacking is letting the world know what’s going on.
4
Optimizing User Experience and Conversion
There are two ways to do marketing as a growth hacker.
One is through a shitload of money. The second way is through something called viral loops.
Here’s an interesting story: Apparently, the marketing budget for the new Barbie movie was higher than the production budget for the movie itself.
Everyone and their dog knew Barbie was coming out.
And it paid off, with the movie making 70.5 million USD on its opening weekend. This is the brutal force approach, and you need a fat bank account to make it work.
The second way is through viral loops.
Let’s explain this with an example: imagine you have a fantastic secret recipe for a delicious treat, and you share it with your best friend.
Your friend loves it so much that they share it with their friends, who, in turn, share it with their friends, and the cycle continues.
Soon, your secret recipe will become famous, and everyone wants to taste it.
Once the viral loop starts, it takes on a life of its own, spreading the businesses’ message far and wide. Keeping with the movie theme, do you really think the memes from new movies make themselves?
It wouldn’t take that much effort for a group of millennials to sit in an office one weekend, make some memes, and let them run wild on the internet.
Soon everyone is making them, and everyone is asking from which movie the memes are. It doesn’t seem so far-fetched when you think about it, right?
Word of mouth is extremely powerful because it’s extremely cheap and it spreads like wildfire if done right.
Now let’s look at the case study we mentioned in the intro.
So Twitter rebranded to X, and a lot of people are making fun of it. Indonesia even banned the newly named app due to its links to prostitution and gambling.
So what’s the deal? What’s behind this rebranding? Well, it seems like the only way for Twitter to become a powerhouse is to become a super app.
The newly appointed Twitter CEO, Linda Yaccarino, said, “X is the future state of unlimited interactivity – centered in audio, video, messaging, payments, and banking, creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities.”
In other words, Twitter users asked themselves in which direction to grow, and the answer was “everywhere”.
Even Elon Musk calls the new app the “everything app.”
And it’s not something new, China has WeChat, a super app that does exactly what Elon tries to do.
This is a growth experiment at an unprecedented scale, and it will be extremely interesting to see how it pays out.
But this is the kind of move you make when you think like a growth hacker. We hope you enjoyed this article because we sure enjoyed writing it. See you next time!
