Discussions, Write-ups & Reviews of Hacking Growth — a book by Sean Ellis & Morgan Brown
Hacking Growth was released this past Tuesday and is, in my biased opinion, picking up the attention it well deserves.
With so much great content floating around the web surrounding the release, I decided to make a list of all of the reviews, write-ups, interviews, and podcasts surrounding the launch to get a full picture of the thoughts that went into writing the book and what readers think of it. Then I figured, hey — why not share this with everyone? So, here we have it.
And, for those of you that have yet to hear about Hacking Growth, I’m also adding a quick overview…
Hacking Growth Overview
In Hacking Growth, Sean Ellis, founder of GrowthHackers and Morgan Brown take you behind the scenes of the fastest growing companies in the world: Facebook, Uber, Dropbox, Pinterest, AirBnB and many more, to uncover the secrets of how these teams move fast and compound win after win to crush their competition and create extraordinary value.
Sean and Morgan provide the step-by-step growth hacking process that any company, in any vertical can use to find growth wins faster and leave their competition in the dust.
The 5 Steps to driving growth for your business outlined in the book:
BUILDING GROWTH TEAMS
At the core of today’s fastest growing companies is a new business unit called the Growth Team. This cross-functional team is made up of specialists from across the organization that come together to design and test new experiments that can lead to big growth wins.
Managed by the Growth Lead, the team meets weekly and moves quickly through a prioritized queue of ideas that have the potential to improve business results throughout the customer lifecycle; from acquisition and activation, to retention and revenue.
The team is comprised of builders and doers from software development, product management, data analytics, design and marketing to collaborate on innovative and incremental experiments that can move the metrics that matter most to the business.
MUST-HAVE PRODUCTS
Growth efforts are nothing without a product that people absolutely love. But how do you know if the product you’re working on is ‘can’t live without’ versus just ‘good enough’?
In Hacking Growth you’ll learn how the Growth Team’s first order of business is figuring out exactly where the product or service is on the ‘Must-Have’ scale. Using Sean’s ‘Must-Have’ Survey, you’ll learn just how disappointed customers would be without your product and what to do according to just how attached they are.
If your product fits the ‘Must-Have’ bill, we’ll show you how the Growth Team can get off to the races with their growth push, but if you’re not quite at that level, we’ll show you how the Growth Team can lead the way in figuring out what it will take to make your product indispensable to your customers.
FINDING YOUR GROWTH LEVERS
Each type of business has it’s own recipe for growth. A marketplace like eBay has different needs than a social network like Facebook, than does a restaurant chain or a professional services firm or an e-commerce company like Amazon.
We call these essential elements of growth your ‘growth levers’ which are the core inputs that determine your growth. For Amazon, their growth levers include things such as the number of product categories and products within each category they carry, combined with the conversion rate of their online shopping cart and the number of people who find Amazon.com in the first place.
Once you’ve identified your growth levers, you’ll have a better understanding of where to place your growth bets for best results.
TESTING AT HIGH TEMPO
The Growth Team, with the growth levers identified, will set off on a high-tempo experimentation process to discover what works (and what doesn’t) when it comes to moving the needle for your business.
Using unbridled ideation to find new and novel approaches to growth, to a formal process for vetting and ranking ideas to try, to an experimentation framework that focuses on high impact tests, the growth team will find wins both big and small while running laps around your competition in the process.
The entire process is fed by insights from data gathering and analysis the provide the rigor needed to ensure that the effort to grow is being exerted in the right place at the right time.
HACKING THE FUNNEL
Growth doesn’t just come from new customer acquisition, but so often companies spend all their time and energy there that they leave growth and money on the table by ignoring other parts of their business.
In Hacking Growth you’ll learn why the fastest growing companies focus on retention and revenue optimization first and new customer acquisition second. Plus you’ll get dozens of new ideas for finding growth in all parts of the customer lifecycle, whether it’s how to pick a new customer acquisition channel to test or when and how to change pricing or how to decide if viral marketing is right for you.
Hacking Growth helps you find wins wherever they might exist in your business and shows you how to apply the growth hacking process to finding the winners faster than your competition.
Hacking Growth Book Reviews
Write-ups
Inc.
Observer
Hitenism
Inman News
Polaris VC
Irish Tech News
Forbes
Sean Ellis — LinkedIn
ConversionXL (by Sean Ellis & Morgan Brown)
Interviews & Podcasts
Whale Q&A
AMA: Sean Ellis & Morgan Brown
Growth.ly
AMA with Founders of GrowthHackers.com
This Much I Know
Growth hacker Sean Ellis on expanding through experimentation
WhatUsersDo
Re-introducing Growth Hacking: Misunderstood Gem & Friend to UX
Startups for the Rest of Us
Hacking (Customer) Acquisition with Sean Ellis
Bowery Capital
Optimizing Your Team for Customer Acquisition
The Founder Show
Growth Hacking Without the Hype
Business901
Sean Ellis Introduces Hacking Growth
Louder Than Words
Hacking Growth with Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown
Appmasters
Hacking Growth with Sean Ellis
Call to Action
Inside “Hacking Growth,” a New Book by Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown
The Top
He Coined Term “Growth Hacking” After DropBox, EventBrite, LogMeIn Work, Now Launching Book “Hacking Growth”
Growth Marketing Toolbox
Sean Ellis Shares Growth Hacking Tools and Tactics
Powderkeg — Igniting Startups
Startup Marketing Master Class with Growth Hacking Gurus Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown
Entrepreneur On Fire
Sean Ellis: From DropBox, to Eventbrite, to Qualaroo
Warrior Forum
‘Hacking Growth’ with Sean Ellis
Artillery Marketing
The Marketing Book Podcast: “Hacking Growth” by Sean Ellis
Jill on Money
Growth Hacking
Lastly, Sean eating a burrito on launch day…
Now available on Amazon
If you find anything missing from the list or have your own opinion you’d like to share, feel free to add it in the comments!
