An initial winnowing can usually be done readily by considering the particular demands of your business model. For example, if you are selling a product to other businesses (i.e., business-to-business), you will often need a sales team and sales support operation to gain traction,

WHAT ARE MY BEST CUSTOMERS’ BEHAVIORS? What features do they use? What screens in the app do they visit? How often do they open the app? What items do they buy? What is their average order size? What time of day do they shop and on which days?

The first is that the group of avid shoppers have an average order of more than $50, which is just above the purchase threshold for free delivery. In addition, a large number of the regular shoppers purchase many of the same items each time, which are clearly staples for them. Finally, a large portion of the most active shoppers come to the app fro

Central to agile development is increasing the speed of development, working in short “sprints” of coding, and regularly testing and iterating on the product over time. The Lean Startup adopted the practice of rapid development and frequent testing, and added the practice of getting a minimum viable product out on the market and into the hands of a

growth teams need to recognize that sometimes establishing what the core value is, or should be, isn’t about the features of the product or service itself, but rather a matter of connecting with the right core market, which, again, as we’ll explore, might be quite different from the originally envisioned one.

If this iterative process sounds familiar, it’s likely because you’ve encountered a similar approach in agile software development or the Lean Startup methodology. What those two approaches have done for new business models and product development, respectively, growth hacking does for customer acquisition, retention, and revenue growth.

ALL FAST-GROWTH companies share one thing in common. Regardless of who their customers are, their business model, and the type of product, industry, or region of the globe they’re operating in, they all make a product that a large group of people love. They’ve built products that, in the eyes of their customers, are simply must-have.

But the hard truth is that no amount of marketing and advertising—no matter how clever—can make people love a substandard product. If you haven’t created and identified core value before you make your growth push, you’ll either end up with illusory growth at best or market rejection at worst.

growth teams must necessarily include members across a range of specialties and departments. As the BitTorrent team soon realized, often the best ideas come from this type of cross-functional collaboration, which, again, is why it’s a fundamental feature of the growth hacking process.