Speaker 1: Hey there, Dan Martell here, serial entrepreneur, investor, creator of SaaS Academy. And in this episode, I'm gonna teach you how to become a world-class growth hacker. I know that that is a tall order, but trust me, I've been doing this for 20 years. Many of my personal friends are not only the people who created the term, they've also scaled companies like Twitter, Quora, Facebook, et cetera. So we're gonna dive into that. And at the end, I'm gonna share with you how to get access to my high-tempo testing training. It is the best training if you really wanna figure out how to run experiments and do that in an efficient way. Let's get into it. So my journey with the term growth hacker goes back quite a ways. When I moved to San Francisco in 2008, I met a guy named Sean Ellis, who is the originator of the term growth hacker. So you guys, you can Google that, but I actually, prior to that, I call it metrics-based marketing. It was really just performance-based marketing when everybody else was doing more ads and PR and display. This was more about saying, hey, let's look at the product, now they call it product-led growth, and really understand the funnels, the flows, the messaging, the go-to-market, the product-market fit to improve the virality distribution of the product. That's how I met Sean, and shortly after I met a guy named Andrew Chen, who ran growth at Uber, and he's an incredible blogger. If you wanna kinda go deeper on this, go check out Andrew's stuff. But it was through that journey that I realised that there is a huge misconception between people that are in marketing that think they're growth hackers and the actual, the art and the science. And for me, it really came to be when I met a guy named Andy Johns. Andy was ex-Growth at Facebook, Twitter, Quora, and now leads, I think, Growth and Revenue at Wealthfront. He's an incredible human being. We were at an event, we were both speaking at the Growth Hackers Conference, and in the green room, he shared with me the concept of stacking growth channels almost as the way it looked as compound interest on an investment. And that's why you get these hockey stick curves if you do things right, because every new growth channel might add an extra 5%, 10% lift month over month, and they just keep compounding. So what I wanna dive into today is the specific tactics, strategies, and insights that I've taken away, not only scaling and growing my companies and exiting them, but also being around some of the smartest marketers in the world. Number one, innovate. So the reality of it is you can go read about Airbnb's, you know, Craigslist posting or Facebook, you know, tagging people, buying an address, booking, you can read all of these historical growth hacks, but if you don't understand that the core fundamental of being a world-class growth hacker is innovation, then you're gonna miss the whole boat. What worked in the past should not and will not work long-term. Even if I find a new growth channel, you know, for me, for example, with Clarity, we really grew, that was a marketplace for entrepreneurs to get advice over the phone. We grew that to 50,000 experts in about an 18-month period. The way we did that after testing a bunch of different things was SlideShare. Why? Because SlideShare had proof that they were an expert. They knew the topic because they had a slide. Views to give us credibility and kind of inference that this person was smart. And then also on the last slide of every one of their presentations was their contact info, which made the ability for us to scale the relationship, which is part of growth hacking, you know, scaling and building relationships. It made us able to do that in a programmatic way, right? We did it manually at first and then we backfilled it with software. So I say that because you need to bring a level of creativity and innovation to your marketing if you want to be a great growth hacker. Number two, tooling and APIs. So this is where I feel a lot of folks that do not have a technical understanding or the ability to just understand, you know, an API, an application program interface. Essentially, it's how different tools you can interface with them. So if you, you know, what I've discovered over the years, working with some of the top growth hackers is they're really creative in how they connect different systems. They might have an email component here, a data source provider here. They put it together in some kind of like, now we have tools like MonkeyLearn, which is essentially AI out of a box, right? So you can get artificial intelligence, machine learning by plugging these things in, Trello. Like there's so much creativity that comes out of it. But if you don't understand the tools available out there and literally they're changing all the time. So get on product hunt, be aware of all the different marketing technologies that are coming to the forefront, product hunt, and also how those APIs or those tools expose their feature set so that you can plug those together to find a different way to scale awareness, et cetera. Then you're just gonna be at a disadvantage. So it doesn't mean you have to learn how to write code, although writing and learning JavaScript or scripting technology will definitely help you. You definitely need to be aware of the free tools and the APIs that they expose in the data so you can start looking for opportunities for creative distribution. Number three, work backwards. This doesn't matter if it's growth hacking or if it's product development, but the best way for you to grow your business is to work backwards from the customer. It's the, I call it the three Fs, fun, follow and frequent. What, if I'm trying to get myself or my product or my message in front of a customer, I need to ask myself, what tools do they currently pay for every month? My perfect fit customer. What places do they frequent? They vote with their time online and in person. And then what other people do they follow? Experts and bloggers and authors, et cetera. Because if I can understand that landscape, then I can ask myself, what are the creative ways to get in front of it? For example, one of my favourite growth hacks is Twilio, an API for telephony. They essentially provided text messaging and phone calls via a programmatic interface. And one of their growth hacks, because Danielle, who ran marketing there, was to sponsor the startup weekends. I used to sit on the board of startup weekend and seeing how Twilio became the national sponsor and literally for $500 in pizza, you know, for an award in pizza, they were able to get in front of all of these developers. They asked themselves those questions and maybe not as structured as my process that I teach my coaching clients, but follow, frequent and fun. If you work backwards from the customers, figure out who your perfect fit customers is and look at that landscape of those answers of where they spend their time, energy and money, that is where you're gonna find some creative solutions to put your product, your message in front of those groups of people. Number four, copywriting. When it comes to persuasion, when it comes to communication, I think that having a fundamental knowledge of great copywriting, studying the greats, understanding, you know, Robert Cialdini's book, Persuasion, and really figuring out what words move people. And it doesn't matter if it's landing pages, ads, et cetera, but even microcopy within a product, really well-placed messaging within an onboarding solution or when you're trying to activate a new account or encourage them to share a certain thing with a customer, the microcopy you use is gonna have an incredible impact in getting somebody to take action. And to me, copywriting is one of those skills, maybe not like deep programming knowledge, but having access to a copywriter, but knowing personally like great copywriting principles is gonna allow you to just move faster and run faster experiments. Number five, testing, okay? So I always say failures are experiments that ran too long. Okay, I don't think there's truly failures if you're learning. What the best growth hackers create is a process for iterating, learning, and implementing against some kind of metric that moves their business forward. So if you don't have a formal process for running these tests, then you're just throwing a bunch of stuff. Like the worst thing, when I get a client that comes to me and they're like, hey, we used to grow and now we've kind of stalled out, we're flatlined. And when I ask them, okay, what did you do to grow in the past? And they list out several things. Well, we used to do this, this, this, this, and this. And I asked them, what one of those things was the most impactful, the cheapest cost, lowest CAC payback, or lowest, yeah, time to pay back your CAC, your cost to acquire a customer, and highest LTV. They couldn't tell me. Why? Because they did that whole stack at the same time. When you're making changes to drive growth, you need to be able to isolate it against a control and run experiments or split tests, okay? And we can get into statistical significance and multivariant testing, all that fun stuff. Regardless of what technique tooling you use, I'm just saying you need to have a testing framework if you want to be considered or even have a chance to be a world-class growth hacker. So quick recap, how to become a world-class growth hacker. Number one, understand it's about innovation. Number two, tooling and APIs. Three, work backwards from the customer. Four, copywriting to persuade. And five, testing. As I mentioned at the beginning of this episode, I wanna share with you an exclusive training. It's called the High Tempo Testing Training. It's a video from one of my growth marketing events where you can see the four different phases of high-tempo testing, including the core concept called North Star Metric, your NSM. Understanding what your NSM is for you will allow you to focus, crystallise, and get everybody moving that metric forward, which will provide value to both your customer and to your business. That's the key for an NSM. I go more into it in the training. Click the link below to watch that. It's 100% free. And it was taught to me by Sean Ellis. He's an incredible marketing mind. He's one of my formal mentors. So be sure to click the link, download, or watch that online. And if you like this video, be sure to smash that like button, subscribe to my channel. And if there's anybody you think this video could serve, feel free to share it with them directly. But as per usual, I wanna challenge you to live a bigger life and a bigger business, and I'll see you next Monday. What a topic. Yee-haw. Yee-haw, skadoodles.