Hacking Growth Book Summary

Book Summary

15 min

Brief Summary

Hacking Growth provides unique insights on how to move a company from a mediocre performance level to the next level. The approach taken by Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown is simple and practical--it motivates a company to move from sluggish growth to double-digit growth rates. The authors present an easy step-by-step guide that explains how a company such as Uber grew exponentially from a scrappy startup to its current height. This book appeals to budding entrepreneurs as well as seasoned CEOs wishing to understand the methodology that produces extraordinary growth. Hacking Growth is rich in marketing and startup information and is one of the most important books for anyone starting a business.

About the Author

Sean Ellis is a keynote speaker who helps companies unlock their growth potential. Additionally, he is a renowned growth coach and author credited with coining the term “growth hacker.” Ellis was pivotal in helping firms such as Dropbox and Eventbrite experience breakout growth. Ellis is the former CEO and founder of Qualaroo and the current CEO of Growth Hackers. He is an active investor, entrepreneur, and advisor to startups. Ellis attended the University of California, Davis (1989-1994), New York University (1998) for a Strategic Management course, and Harvard University (2007) for a five-month course in Advertising and Buyer Behavior. Ellis acknowledges that his mission is to help startups enjoy “the revered unicorn status” as discussed in the contents of his book, Hacking Growth.

Morgan Brown is currently the Chief Operating Officer (COO) at Inman News as well as the co-founder of Growth Hackers with Sean Ellis. He is a renowned veteran in the field of start-up marketing with more than fifteen years helping companies in the nascent stage to breakout and experience amazing growth. Morgan has a passion to help companies use digital marketing and business methodologies to transform from little known entities to powerhouses that are forced to be reckoned with. He grew up in Connecticut and attended the University of California at Santa Barbara where he graduated with a degree in Zoology. He first worked at a startup in 1999 at SalesMountain.com. Morgan is married to Erika and has two children-Audrey Grace (9) and Banks (10).

Topics

Entrepreneurship

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Key Insights

Chapter One: Building Growth Teams

Want to increase revenue and profit? The answer is growth teams! Growth teams are the tires that will move your car forward.

How do you create a growth team? Includes members from each department so that you have the collective energy of all your departments. This means your growth team is collaborative with a focus to push growth.

Choose a visionary growth team leader who can keep the team focused and inspired and set targets for your team. Why? Every team needs inspiration and leadership--think of a football team with a strong coach!

Chapter Two: Determining if Your Product is a Must Have

How do you figure out what product or service will sell in the marketplace?

A must-have survey is a simple way to engage your customers about how they feel about your products. This survey will provide critical feedback in creating that must-have-product or service.

What next? Test! A/B testing is a good way to test how well your product or service will perform in the market. Think of your respondents in the must-have survey as coffee tasters helping you to develop a new coffee brand-for free!

Chapter Three: Identifying Your Growth Levers

Stats are important to monitor what you are trying to sell.

Stats are also useful core metrics that measure how customers interact with your product or service. Metrics such as user acquisition and web traffic will help you to identify which metrics can be used to drive growth.

This sounds rather complicated and technical? Not really-- you don’t need to be Einstein to analyze these stats. You can always work with a professional to crunch the data.

Chapter Four: Testing at High Tempo

How do you gain customer insights to generate growth-hacking ideas? This starts in the analyze stage--where data is analyzed and customer insights are shared with a growth team. Why analyze? The analysis helps to identify patterns and trends and removes the haze so you can see clearly.

What comes next after the analyze stage? The ideate stage-(don’t be scared by the big word). It simply means the stage where ideas are further developed or refined. Think of it this way-after taking a photo, the film has to be developed in a dark room which is the ideate stage.

You now come to the idea pipeline (another big word!). The idea pipeline is where proposals are presented in clear terms...