everybody super excited to be here today my name is David our new I'm not going
to bore you with my life long story introduction you can check me on
Linkedin and today I want to introduce you to growth hacking in this 20 minute
power house session about growth hacking attempt to speak quite fast so just sort
of brace yourself so is reading this book by Malcolm Gladwell called David
versus Goliath and in this book Malcolm Gladwell talks about a political
scientist called arrogant oft
arrogant post did is that he summed up all of the war's over the past 200 years
between like very large and very small armies and he wanted to know what
percentage of the time if any the small re was able to defeat the large army and
it turns out the 28.5 percent of the time the small army sometimes ten times
smaller than the big army was able to defeat the big army to like what I did
this happen
holy moly to put his magnifying glass on these exceptions and he found that when
the small army used unconventional tactics guerrilla warfare sort of
subversive methods the small army was able to defeat the larger army 63.6% of
the time it's almost two-thirds and jimmy is a serial startup founder that
really resonated you know as a startup founder and I'm up against the big life
begins to big corporations
against the big successful startups so enough about war there's a story of
Listerine in the eighteen eighties people were bathing in a pool of
bacteria and Listerine was there go to solution though sales were good but they
weren't good enough for the CEO Gordon wheat Lambert so what is funded is he
took this Latin word mellitus which means bad breath and then he added the
cool sounding OSIS to the end of it and he created halitosis so you no longer
just had bad breath you now have a medical condition which could be fixed
with Listerine and you won't even further he developed this fictional
persona cult and edna was unpopular with their kids couldn't find a man because
she had this medical condition called halitosis the rest is kind of history he
became a huge grin that they are today in my opinion this was one of the first
forms of growth hacking subversive growth hacking
this is the baggage claim area to Houston Airport I can't remember exactly
in what year but the Houston Airport sent out a bunch of survey asking what's
the number one complaint you have with the Houston Airport and an overwhelming
majority of people said that it was the waiting waiting time at the baggage
claim area waiting a whopping nine minutes people have really short
attention span so what they did is they spend millions of dollars on
restructuring the way that the package was handled and they were able to reduce
it from nine minutes 26 minutes while huge success they sent up the survey
again what was the number one complaint by people at the baggage claim area it
was the waiting time for the day do a few sort of creative civil servants
decided to put the arrival gates little bit further from the baggage claim area
so that people actually had to walk six minutes from the baggage claim area to
the to the arrival gates the baggage claim area and complaints almost
completely dropped so this is next door is probably the most famous story of
growth hacking of all time you probably heard about it it's the story of Airbnb
so Airbnb the short term rentals I'm sure you all know them and after the
first year they were kind of struggling to get a lot of uses a lot of people to
rent their their apartments and they also had some competition what they did
is they are some of their users where did you go before he came to Airbnb for
short term rentals and a lot of a lot of their current users told him that they
would go to Craigslist and Craig said millions and millions of daily visitors
looking for apartments short term rentals with the clever team at Airbnb
did is they reversed engineered craigs list so that if I had an apartment in
Idaho for example and I put it on Airbnb and four simple steps I could actually
posted directly to Craigslist with almost no friction so almost all users
who are putting their apartment on Airbnb were also putting it on
Craigslist and some when somebody would come to Craigslist and click on the
Craigslist ad they will be redirected to Airbnb so essentially what they were
doing as they were piggybacking off at the huge audience of
of Craigslist they took things a little bit further they actually scrapes all of
craigs list because Craigslist you can contact people were department by email
and then they sent them these cool little emails from jail Jane saying I
absolutely love your apartment you can post it on Airbnb it took about a year
and a half for Craigslist find out what was happening but the rest is kind of
history and they absolutely exploded second most famous example of all time
of growth hacking is that of Dropbox Dropbox was a really cool product but it
was really hard to sell it was kind of fun sexy and once they once they had a
good product they tried to grow it through conventional marketing methods
to one of the ones that they used with Adwords for example and they had a
really good performance market here
the problem is that it was costing them between 233 238 $388 per user for $999
product that kind of sucked but they did have however was a core group of users
that really love them and they they developed a modern-day referral program
so basically if you were to send an invitation to Dropbox when your friends
you would get free space and he would get free space as well and the results
of stress
absolutely staggering so they went from a hundred thousand 24 million users from
2008 to 2010 2.8 million invites were sent in April 2010 alone and up to this
date 35% of all of their paid users registered users come from this referral
technique everybody's copying this nowadays that's the problem with these
growth factors they work ones but then everybody starts copying them and they
don't work as well so I could do some more name-dropping
really famous growth haxor growth techniques whatever you want to call
them what do all of these having common notion of OPN other people's network so
in the real estate world we talk about OPM other people's money so you not
gonna be your first house with your own money used like the bank's money your
parents money same thing in growth hacking it's extremely difficult to
build an audience your target audience is already hanging out on other people's
networks other people's platforms so why don't you start my first borrowing
somebody else's
somebody else's network platform so there is i think the last number was
there's three billion people on the internet today and it's actually
becoming more and more easy to reach out to them so the number of platforms are
growing there's a chart that I stole from James Currey and it shows the viral
effectiveness of customer acquisition channels over time and it used to be so
vital channels go through three seasons they're born they grow their big and
powerful than a sort of died off and the great thing is that the number of
channels actually growing exponentially over time so what's the next big thing
what's the next big thing to get your customers is it one of the ones listed
here is it one of the ones listed here these are all pretty famous you know
Facebook Google facebook Messenger Twitter Linkedin snapshot of the sort of
the usual suspects you actually have much more is the next big thing being
social is next big thing wearable technology is it Instagram ads that were
released about a month ago is driving cars is it virtual reality is it
augmented reality is it hello Is It / you know is it designer news is that
product you really have more and more choice to be able to tap into other
people's audiences by the way there's a few more and so there's a term growth
hacking is sort of disorienting sometimes I just wanna make something
clear the growth hacking is basically I stole this from Alistair Croll the guy
that wrote lean analytics and he says the growth hacking is 80% best practices
which people don't do it in any case but also 20% subversive penis so most big
successes most of them have at least a little bit of evil in them specially in
the early days
question is how much evil do you actually want to do so why growth
hacking why is it really buzzing why are we hearing about it why is it becoming
so important so companies and products I think we talked about it with the speed
that up just before we have limited resources in order to grow in order to
acquire users but more importantly to retain them the second reason is is that
a traditional marketing channels they tend to be expensive and saturated so I
really like to use this chart this is the average USA online spend to get one
user
up until 2012 so it's an average so it lies but it still shows you that it's
becoming
more and more expensive to grab users to acquire users so you have to be more and
more creative and more impactful on how you drive these users to product and the
third reason is probably the most important one so just show of hands
who's actually working on a product here in this in this room right so it's
probably most of this room and one of the allure of today is that people tend
to focus too much on product but actually your risk is assumption is not
building a cool product it's a lot easier to build a cool product now a
days and it was ten years ago you lean methodology you have reduced marginal
costs what's harder is actually distribution because everybody's
building cool shit basically and everybody's sort of fighting for
attention don't trust my word for it trust these guys these blank Peter teal
dave McClure they all agree that one of the most difficult parts of your
business model Candice the survival of your company is actually distribution is
actually how you can acquire new users and engage them and I lost use this stat
by the ad agencies people are bombarded with anywhere between 250 to 3,000 ads
on a daily basis
your products your value proposition your appt your icon it's just another
blip in people's lives
I mean people like bernie is the gotta get their kids out of school their
mothers are sick and then your product is just another blip how can you have
the most impact and how can you target the right customers at the right price
as cheap as possible so the third reason is and this was kind of one of the
foundational parts of growth hacking it's the ROI is much more important than
anything else it's much more important than branding so the days of madison
avenue madman
ad agencies are completely gone working on a six-month sort of campaign agency
doesn't work anymore we borrow from the lean methodology where we have a
scientific approach to marketing and customer acquisition test first if it
works keep going and finally it's exciting and it's fun and I believe it's
inevitable I worked with a lot of companies and I believe that we are
completely dissolving the gap between product and between marketing they're
becoming one this one thing that we call growth hacking so what its growth
hacking I love to use this trend diagram just kind of visual and so first of all
he's creative marketing so it's David vs Goliath using other people's networks
linking subversive Lee thinking differently than everybody else
second of all it's about experiments and data so experiments like I said we have
an experiment based approach to marketing and experiment based approach
to marketing a scientific approach to marketing and second of all these data
so we can test are good feelings we can to testing is based on data that we've
seen it and we should always test it to see if it works or not and we backed up
with data when I talk about data I don't just talk about hard data of course
there is hard data when I talk about hard data usually people pull this face
probably not at this conference which is a good thing so we like to use to turn a
lot of these experiments into customer flows for example we have a lot of
conversion funnels we used coho charged predictive analysis and a lot a lot of
a/b testing but we also talked about soft data does update is probably the
most important thing to the place where you get the most insights from new
customers and sauteed is talking to customers doing surveys doing a lot of
usability testing I often say that usability testing is like flossing
people know they should do it people don't actually do it and then when they
actually do it they start bleeding so you should do it on a daily basis and I
love this quote from Eric freeze is basically sums it all up sustainable
growth comes from understanding your best customers
finding out where to find more of them that's basically it if you retain
anything from the content from this talk it's probably this one and then finally
there's automation and engineering so I'll talk a little bit about the
relationship between engineering and growth hacking in a few seconds but
basically the notion is in order to have speed we need to use automation we need
to use coding you to use engineering and there's even if somebody doesn't know
how to code there's a lot of tools out there that can enable them to take it
off the shelf to test something without actually cutting it into his or her
product and i wanna talk about some growth hacking principles really to get
it into your brains so the first principle is if you build something no
one will come people don't just magically come and I think people are
really starting to come around to this that's not just by building something
awesome a lot of people are building a lot of awesome stuff that's getting
absolutely no recognition or awareness it's only in testing that will know
something's going to work or not D levels all arguments data has kept me
out of so many meetings it's absolutely incredible
we only scale successors and we kill failures so it's all about speed there's
no time for gray area if it doesn't work kill it
try maybe one more time then kill it if it works double down on it focus we have
a lack of resources and then test as much as possible and as fastest possible
speed usually went so there's been a lot of talk about what's the difference
between growth hacker and digital market here growth hackers just digital market
here same line different bottle actually it's not the case so I magnin dwell on
this too long basically a growth I was a digital market here for stock market
here for six years before naming myself growth hacker in the main difference is
the growth hackers really implanted inside the product on the whole product
funnel and the second big difference is that the growth hacker has a really
strong technical skill set which I'll go into into the next flight so this is
where growth hacker looks like let's look at this two or three seconds so
first of all you got this base layer that the growth hacker knows about this
head of growth knows about this programming psychology copywriting
analytics he understands that you can talk the lingo he can actually also
execute on some of it then you have a more even deeper foundation of this
marketing foundation with a/b testing conversion rate optimization is pretty
strong and funnel marketing and database queries and then there's this third
layer where he's really a marketing expert on all of these marketing
channels he knows how to leverage marketing channels find new ones and how
to how to use these channels and usually growth hacker is really an expert in
absolute expert on two or three channels so there's a big problem here is that
this profile is extremely rare we call these guys unicorns we call these guys
unicorns who living clouds so unicorns cuz they basically don't exist and they
live in clouds cause they're extremely hard to find and they and they tend to
hide so how do we solve this is a growth hacking agency and as a growth hacking a
firm do we solve this is we build growth hacking teams inside companies so growth
hacking team looks like this the first element is you've got your head of
growth is kind of a risk taker he's analytical he's all those things that I
just talked about the head of growths best friend is his kick ass coder best
friend is kickass coder is like a full stack odor was not scared to build stuff
that actually gonna break into buildings
stuff that is interesting really really quickly and he doesn't mind putting like
two or three days into a sprint planning to make sure that he can build the data
the data analytics framework needed to be able to track the results of what
we're actually doing so their second best friend is the UX UI designer
front-end developer and his role is to really use behavior like I psychology
and have customer empathy to be able to run these experiments and usually this
type of profile as somebody who doesn't spend six hours on the opacity of a drop
shadow for a call to action button we just sort of ships it as fast as
possible and then iterates after its been shit and then finally there's the
data analyst somebody who really understands data both large but also
small amounts of data and who's not scared of soft data and who's able to
also find insights within that data actionable insights that's the most
important part so this is the sad news is that even if you've got the team in
the mentality
there's actually no secret potion there's actually no half so it's
actually a misnomer there's a know how to make your next product into the next
big Facebook Linkedin Instagram whatever product you want but the good news is
that growth hacking is maturing and we are developing a process and the great
thing about this process it has three main points first of all it's adaptable
so it's adoptable across organizations and it's a double within the
organization across different departments and second of all it's
expandable adjust its scalable so can actually grow as the company grows and
third of all the most important because people are really lazy and it's
extremely hard to change people's behavior it's that it's extremely easy
to implement there's almost no friction this is what the process looks like so
we still a lot of the stuff from the Lean Startup in the lean methodology as
well as conversion rate optimization basically at the top you have like
company objectives so this can be OK ours or any type of different objectives
and we have data insights soft and hard data but also good feeling using your
brain and your intuition and then we start running through these loops for
the first part of the loop it's a brainstorm brainstorm ideas we use a lot
of dot voting and we still are methodologies from the Google designed
spread and second of all you have a prioritization framework we use a bunch
of different prioritization techniques third of all we design experiments with
minimal success criteria
much like people do in the scientific world then we execute execute as fast as
possible and we tend to use a Javascript and split sprint planning and then the
most important part of the analysis even if an experiment fails you can still get
learning from that experiment so it's actually not a failure when something
works we build it into the product we could get into the product and she kept
coded into the product we system eyes it inside the company and then we run these
absolute again and again and again and I have to admit nine out of 10 experiments
failed but from time to time we get these big wins and this is what we call
the growth so we put a lot of companies in this is what I usually see usually I
C def Teenz only working on a course functionalities functionalities that
respond to current customers needs with this is the way that I see companies
changing their driving developers taking them out of this core functionality
teams that spend 90% of the time on core functionalities and we're putting him on
the acquisition team were putting him on the activation team we're putting them
on the referral team repairing putting them on the retention team and then we
grow so much that we can actually hire more developers to put them back into
the back into the core functionality team and then these teams they rolled
the same process again and again and again and again
so we went through these loot and the faster we can run for these loops the
faster we get success so usually gets get asked whether it's time for growth
are not actually this for different types of growth there's top-line growth
there's activation growth there's retention growth and there's
monetization growth these two are the hardest ones to nail they're the ones
that we spend the most time on but they're the most valuable ones right now
I wanna talk about the sexy one i wanna talk about user acquisition there's a
book called traction book that shows that there's only a limited color
palette on how you can actually require users but the thing is this color
palette isn't actually so limited so if I narrowed down into content marketing
for example and see that there's also a lot of subsets of content marketing so
you've got curating a blog infographics making videos ebooks podcasts clipboards
Pinterest pins tweet LinkedIn posts Google Instagram Facebook and the list
goes on and on and on so it sort of overwhelming so you need a process for
this to end the process is kind of easy so the first rule is that you should
actually diversify your portfolio because if Google changes its algorithm
overnight your SEO strategy is completely dead and I would say find two
or three channels that actually works for you and only focus on those two
three channels we have a framework called the brass framework in order to
determine which is the best customer acquisition channels start testing its a
mix of Blink gut feeling
relevance product channel fit years how easy is it to the to set up this circus
requisition channel and finally scalability if it works can actually
scale if so then when you're driving traffic to your products your website
your landing page whatever then what do you do then comes behavioral psychology
this is James Korea from Google Labs he recommends that you should spend 50% of
all your resources on the first user experience on that first experience that
a user has with your product and I'm not even talking minutes I'm actually
talking seconds so you should be able to show the court value of your product
within the first five seconds
of a person's is it just like with the date you know that first impression
really counts and then when you're done with the first five seconds you can use
principles of persuasions to make sure that person signs up and actually gets
to the core value of your product and understands gets to that while moment
what is the value that you're showing people have the attention spans of
goldfish what are some of the best examples of user on wording ever
actually come from video games video games do this really well I don't have
anybody please like World of Warcraft or whatever the first time you play they
teach you to punch they teach you to jump they teach you to kick it remove
all of the friction that each little by little how to get to that while moment
so once you've gotten so many to that while moment how do you know if they are
actually using the product this is where we used to
we start to use hard data card data is really one of the foundations of growth
hacking hard data tells us exactly what's happening on our website and we
use things like events based analytics but also predictive analytics so hard
data is great but then you can get too caught up in hard data and not really
understand your users and get stuck in the sort of local maxima of optimization
so to get out of this local maxima we use soft data and software is basically
talking to your products and using doing usability testing there's no excuse to
not talk to at least one customer every single day so then what do we do with
these hypotheses what we do conversion rate optimization we do a lot of a/b
testing and there's so much that you can maybe test signup forms you can maybe
test landing pages you can only test product pages you can maybe test
referral pages
there's so much to choose from that you also need a framework for this and now
what
so as a growth hacking agency we gotta get a lot of a lot of requests for
actual growth hackers so this is data pulled off evangelists and you see that
the number one requested skill and marketing is actually growth hacking and
so this is Amsterdam in the startup ecosystem report of 2015 I thought this
was pretty cool Amsterdam finally made it into the top twenty one of the big
ones that they're struggling with is actually talent and we were having this
problem too I get about 40 or 60 requests per month for a good growth
hacker technical marketeer the problem is that the ratio is 721 there's only
eighteen thousand proclaims growth hackers for about $120 hundred thousand
230,000 open positions
so our solution for this was to stop with the consulting or continue with the
consulting but to also build will call the growth tribe Academy we're gonna
teach people to skill set and the point of the growth tribe Academy is to make
people ready to join teams the type of teams that are being used by these
companies Facebook Spotify LinkedIn cora Twitter and there's many many more so
the difficulty is how do we train people to do this in a three-month period how
do we train people to go through a whole curriculum and learn all of these skills
and only three months the solution for this was that we would put them in
actual growth projects and actual startups and we're only gonna teach them
what they need to know so this is you access is everything you could learn
about UX but we're only gonna be teaching you this specific . we've also
signed up with a really strong partners to build credibility but also to have
help on the public side and on the private side for example we've partnered
up with a TWiki which is one of the fastest growing startups here in the
Netherlands and we've just launched our growth tribe Academy so if anybody is
interested in this I'd really ask you to go check out our web site grows tribe
Academy dot com we're we're sort of building the future of the future of
education
bridging the gap between product development and marketing and I just
like to stop when the quotes from our from our applicants and he says that
education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world
growth hacking it's the second thank you very much