As Larissa Macfarquhar wrote in her New Yorker profile of him, “[Aaron] had previously believed that if you came up with a great idea people would use it. But he realized now that you couldn’t expect people to come to you; you had to pull them in.”9 The growth hacker’s job—like we marketers have always done—is to do that pulling. But how? Certainly

On the other hand, I have clients who blog extensively before publishing. They develop their book ideas based on the themes that they naturally gravitate toward but that also get the greatest response from readers (one client sold a book proposal using a screenshot of Google queries to his site). They test the ideas they’re writing about in the

So Evernote took “marketing” off the table and instead poured that budget into product development.

to see in the book. They judge topic ideas by how many comments a given post generates, by how many Facebook “shares” an article gets. They put potential title and cover ideas up online to test and receive feedback. They look to see what hot topics other influential bloggers are riding and find ways of addressing them in their book.

Product Market

minds—these are marketing decisions, not just development and design choices.

One Harvard Business Review study found that 80 percent of marketers are unhappy with their ability to measure marketing return on investment (ROI). Not because the tools aren’t good enough, but because they’re too good, and marketers are seeing for the first time that their marketing strategies are “often flawed and their spending is inefficient.”

To be successful and grow your business and revenues, you must match the way you market your products with the way your prospects learn about and shop for your products. —Brian Halligan, founder of Hubspot

customers are in perfect sync with each other. Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, explains that the best way to get to Product Market Fit is by starting with a “minimum viable product” and improving it based on feedback—as opposed to what most of us do, which is to try to launch with what we think is our final product.