Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success

In his seminal book Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely describes an experiment that revealed just how much consumers’ decisions about the price they would like to pay are affected by the set of options they have to choose from. The idea for the experiment was born when Ariely noticed that The Economist magazine was using a rather perplexing pricing

No matter how a potential customer discovers your product—whether via ads, articles and reviews, or word of mouth—the first text they see must send the right message fast; and in fact, it must do so a good deal faster today than just a few years ago.

You want to track, at a minimum, the metrics for each of the steps users must take to reach the aha moment and how often they are taking those steps. Take Uber, whose essential metric for riders is rides completed. So in addition to the number of new people downloading the app, the company would want to track in the number of rides being booked, th

The first step in collecting the data to then pan for nuggets of insight is to track the key actions of your users or customers. This is done through the process of event tracking. Most analytics platforms allow you to identify key events within your system such as when a user clicks a button, watches a video, downloads a document, fills out a form

growth experts like Justin Mares, Gabriel Weinberg, Andrew Chen, and James Currier have helpfully sorted leading channels into three basic categories: viral/word-of-mouth, organic, and paid. We’ve drawn on their categorizations to compile the following (representative, but not exhaustive) set of options.

The North Star should be the metric that most accurately captures the core value you create for your customers. To determine what that is you must ask yourself: Which of the variables in your growth equation best represents the delivery of that must-have experience you identified for your product?

When it comes to monetization, analysis starts by returning to the basic mapping of the entire customer journey, which, recall from Chapter Six the team should create when it first starts the growth hacking process. The goal at this stage is to highlight all of the opportunities in the journey—from acquisition to retention—for earning revenue from

WhatsApp’s North Star was therefore the number of messages sent, rather than, say, daily active users, because even if a user is active with the app every day, but is only sending one message, it’s unlikely that WhatsApp is their preferred choice for communicating with their network.

Website copy can be swapped out and tested relatively easily with tools like Optimizely and Visual Website Optimizer, which install a small piece of code on your website or app that randomly displays different versions of copy to your visitors and then measures and compares their responses.