Dan Martell - Growth Hacking - How To Become a World-Class Growth Hacker

00:00:00.080 Hey there, Dan Martell here,

00:00:01.120 serial entrepreneur, investor, creator of SaaS Academy.

00:00:03.920 And in this episode, I'm gonna teach you

00:00:05.760 how to become a world-class growth hacker.

00:00:09.120 I know that that is a tall order, but trust me,

00:00:11.840 I've been doing this for 20 years.

00:00:14.280 Many of my personal friends

00:00:15.920 are not only the people who created the term,

00:00:17.760 they've also scaled companies like Twitter, Quora,

00:00:20.840 Facebook, et cetera.

00:00:22.240 So we're gonna dive into that.

00:00:23.360 And at the end, I'm gonna share with you

00:00:24.440 how to get access to my high tempo testing training.

00:00:29.700 It is the best training if you really wanna figure out

00:00:32.660 how to run experiments and do that in an efficient way.

00:00:35.920 Let's get into it.

00:00:49.500 So my journey with the term growth hacker

00:00:52.000 goes back quite a ways.

00:00:53.660 When I moved to San Francisco in 2008,

00:00:55.880 I met a guy named Sean Ellis,

00:00:57.680 who is the originator of the term growth hacker.

00:01:01.140 So you guys, you can Google that.

00:01:02.460 But I actually, prior to that,

00:01:04.340 I call it metrics-based marketing.

00:01:05.840 It was really just performance-based marketing

00:01:07.800 when everybody else was doing more ads and PR and display.

00:01:11.860 This was more about saying, hey, let's look at the product.

00:01:14.760 You know, now they call it product-led growth

00:01:16.440 and really understand the funnels, the flows,

00:01:19.380 the messaging, the go-to-market, the product-market fit

00:01:22.740 to improve the virality distribution of the product.

00:01:25.520 And that's how I met Sean.

00:01:26.540 And shortly after I met a guy named Andrew Chen

00:01:28.600 who ran growth at Uber and he's an incredible blogger.

00:01:32.180 If you wanna kind of go deeper on this,

00:01:34.200 go check out Andrew's stuff.

00:01:35.820 But it was through that journey that I realized

00:01:37.840 that there is a huge misconception

00:01:40.640 between people that are in marketing

00:01:43.540 that think they're growth hackers

00:01:45.320 and the actual, the art and the science.

00:01:47.960 And for me, it really came to be

00:01:49.600 when I met a guy named Andy Johns.

00:01:51.660 Andy was ex-growth at Facebook, Twitter, Quora

00:01:55.940 and now leads, I think, growth and revenue at Wealthfront.

00:01:59.600 He's an incredible human being.

00:02:01.220 We were at an event, we were both speaking

00:02:02.440 at the Growth Hackers Conference,

00:02:05.060 and in the green room, he shared with me

00:02:06.860 the concept of stacking growth channels

00:02:10.180 almost as the way he looked

00:02:11.440 as like compound interest on an investment.

00:02:14.540 And that's why you get these hockey stick curves

00:02:17.260 if you do things right,

00:02:18.100 because every new growth channel might add an extra 5%,

00:02:21.520 10% lift month over month, and they just keep compounding.

00:02:24.400 So what I wanna dive into today

00:02:27.240 is the specific tactics, strategies, and insights

00:02:30.540 that I've taken away,

00:02:31.460 not only scaling and growing my companies and exiting them,

00:02:34.380 but also being around some of the smartest marketers

00:02:37.260 in the world.

00:02:38.100 Number one, innovate.

00:02:39.320 So the reality of it is you can go read about Airbnbs,

00:02:42.760 you know, Craigslist posting or Facebook,

00:02:45.880 you know, tagging people, buying an address book.

00:02:47.920 You can read all of these historical growth hacks,

00:02:52.700 but if you don't understand that the core fundamental

00:02:55.220 of being a world-class growth hacker is innovation,

00:02:58.300 then you're gonna miss the whole boat.

00:02:59.580 What worked in the past should not

00:03:02.300 and will not work long-term.

00:03:03.920 Even if I find a new growth channel,

00:03:06.740 you know, for me, for example, with Clarity,

00:03:09.260 we really grew, that was a marketplace

00:03:10.880 for entrepreneurs to get advice over the phone.

00:03:12.620 We grew that to 50,000 experts in about an 18 month period.

00:03:16.580 The way we did that after testing

00:03:19.060 a bunch of different things was SlideShare.

00:03:22.080 Why?

00:03:22.920 Because SlideShare had proof that they were an expert.

00:03:25.760 They knew the topic because they had a slide.

00:03:27.540 Views to give us credibility and kind of inference

00:03:29.860 that this person was smart.

00:03:30.840 And then also on the last slide

00:03:32.000 of every one of their presentations was their contact info,

00:03:34.400 which made the ability for us to scale the relationship,

00:03:37.560 which is part of growth hacking.

00:03:39.900 You know, scaling and building relationships.

00:03:42.560 It made us able to do that in a programmatic way, right?

00:03:45.780 We did it manually at first

00:03:46.760 and then we backfilled it with software.

00:03:48.940 So I say that because you need to bring a level

00:03:50.680 of creativity and innovation to your marketing

00:03:53.780 if you want to be a great growth hacker.

00:03:56.240 Number two, tooling and APIs.

00:03:59.080 So this is where I feel a lot of folks

00:04:02.740 that do not have a technical understanding

00:04:04.760 or the ability to just understand an API,

00:04:07.760 an application program interface.

00:04:09.620 Essentially, it's how different tools

00:04:11.560 you can interface with them.

00:04:12.740 So if you, what I've discovered over the years

00:04:15.880 working with some of the top growth hackers

00:04:17.760 is they're really creative

00:04:19.240 and how they connect different systems.

00:04:20.780 They might have an email component here,

00:04:22.480 a data source provider here.

00:04:24.180 They put it together in some kind of like,

00:04:26.240 now we have tools like Monkey Learn,

00:04:27.740 which is essentially AI out of a box, right?

00:04:30.260 So you get artificial intelligence, machine learning

00:04:32.580 by plugging these things in, Trello.

00:04:34.720 Like there's so much creativity that comes out of it,

00:04:37.120 but if you don't understand the tools available out there

00:04:40.320 and literally they're changing all the time.

00:04:41.780 So get on product hunt,

00:04:43.600 be aware of all the different marketing technologies

00:04:46.080 that are coming to the forefront, product hunt,

00:04:48.000 and also how those APIs or those tools

00:04:50.360 expose their feature set

00:04:52.320 so that you can plug those together

00:04:54.020 to find a different way to scale awareness, et cetera,

00:04:57.740 then you're just gonna be at a disadvantage.

00:04:59.560 So it doesn't mean you have to learn how to write code,

00:05:01.420 although writing and learning JavaScript

00:05:03.240 or scripting technology will definitely help you.

00:05:05.560 You definitely need to be aware of the free tools

00:05:08.760 and the APIs that they expose in the data

00:05:11.220 so you can start looking for opportunities

00:05:13.620 for creative distribution.

00:05:15.400 Number three, work backwards.

00:05:18.520 This doesn't matter if it's growth hacking

00:05:20.120 or if it's product development,

00:05:21.300 but the best way for you to grow your business

00:05:23.100 is to work backwards from the customer.

00:05:25.020 It's, I call it the three Fs, fun, follow, and frequent.

00:05:28.460 What, if I'm trying to get myself or my product

00:05:31.900 or my message in front of a customer,

00:05:33.520 I need to ask myself,

00:05:34.680 what tools do they currently pay for every month?

00:05:36.680 My perfect fit customer.

00:05:38.120 What places do they frequent?

00:05:40.380 They vote with their time online and in person.

00:05:43.020 And then what other people do they follow?

00:05:46.580 Experts and bloggers and authors, et cetera.

00:05:48.800 Because if I can understand that landscape,

00:05:51.420 then I can ask myself,

00:05:52.660 what are the creative ways to get in front of it?

00:05:54.140 For example, one of my favorite growth hacks is Twilio,

00:05:57.000 an API for telephony.

00:05:59.480 They essentially provided text messaging

00:06:01.500 and phone calls via a programmatic interface.

00:06:04.780 And one of their growth hacks,

00:06:06.560 because Danielle who ran marketing there, 1.00

00:06:08.560 was to sponsor the Startup Weekends.

00:06:11.100 They used to sit on the board of Startup Weekend

00:06:12.840 and seeing how Twilio became the national sponsor

00:06:17.320 and literally for $500 in pizza,

00:06:20.380 you know, for an award in pizza,

00:06:22.060 they were able to get in front of all of these developers.

00:06:25.000 They asked themselves those questions

00:06:26.540 and maybe not as structured as my process

00:06:29.380 that I teach my coaching clients,

00:06:30.840 but follow, frequent, and fund.

00:06:33.420 If you work backwards from the customers,

00:06:35.880 figure out who your perfect fit customers is

00:06:37.560 and look at that landscape of those answers

00:06:39.600 of where they spend their time, energy, and money,

00:06:41.880 that is where you're gonna find some creative solutions

00:06:44.380 to put your product, your message

00:06:45.920 in front of those groups of people.

00:06:47.860 Number four, copywriting.

00:06:49.800 When it comes to persuasion,

00:06:51.720 when it comes to communication,

00:06:54.600 I think that having a fundamental knowledge

00:06:58.080 of great copywriting, studying the greats,

00:07:01.060 understanding Robert Cialdini's book, Persuasion,

00:07:04.180 and really figuring out what words move people.

00:07:07.760 And it doesn't matter if it's landing pages

00:07:09.560 ads, et cetera, but even microcopy within a product,

00:07:14.200 really well-placed messaging within an onboarding solution

00:07:18.120 or when you're trying to activate a new account

00:07:20.120 or encourage them to share a certain thing with a customer,

00:07:23.180 the microcopy you use is gonna have an incredible impact

00:07:26.980 in getting somebody to take action.

00:07:28.960 And to me, copywriting is one of those skills,

00:07:31.580 maybe not like deep programming knowledge,

00:07:34.420 but having access to a copywriter,

00:07:36.380 but knowing personally like great copywriting principles

00:07:40.040 is gonna allow you to just move faster

00:07:41.500 and run faster experiments.

00:07:43.300 Number five, testing, okay?

00:07:45.500 So I always say failures are experiments that ran too long.

00:07:48.560 Okay, I don't think that there's truly failures

00:07:51.080 if you're learning.

00:07:52.080 What the best growth hackers create

00:07:54.920 is a process for iterating, learning,

00:07:58.020 and implementing against some kind of metric

00:08:01.420 that moves their business forward.

00:08:02.820 So if you don't have a formal process

00:08:05.520 for running these tests,

00:08:07.180 then you're just throwing a bunch of stuff.

00:08:08.960 Like the worst thing, when I get a client that comes to me

00:08:11.240 and they're like, hey, we used to grow

00:08:12.980 and now we've kind of stalled out, we're flatlined.

00:08:15.700 And when I asked them, okay,

00:08:16.620 well, what did you do to grow in the past?

00:08:18.040 And they list out several things.

00:08:19.880 Well, we used to do this, this, this, this, and this.

00:08:22.340 And I asked them, what one of those things

00:08:24.300 was the most impactful, the cheapest cost,

00:08:26.600 lowest CAC payback, or lowest, yeah,

00:08:28.320 time to pay back your CAC, your cost to acquire customer,

00:08:30.620 and highest LTV.

00:08:32.180 They couldn't tell me why,

00:08:33.800 because they did that whole stack at the same time.

00:08:36.520 When you're making changes to drive growth,

00:08:39.320 you need to be able to isolate it against a control

00:08:42.180 and run experiments or split tests, okay?

00:08:44.700 And we can get into statistical significance

00:08:47.980 and multivariant testing, all that fun stuff.

00:08:50.580 Regardless of what technique tooling you use,

00:08:53.600 I'm just saying you need to have a testing framework

00:08:56.460 if you wanna be considered or even have a chance

00:08:59.140 to be a world-class growth hacker.

00:09:00.960 So quick recap, how to become a world-class growth hacker.

00:09:03.920 Number one, understand it's about innovation.

00:09:06.140 Number two, tooling and APIs.

00:09:09.020 Three, work backwards from the customer.

00:09:11.200 Four, copywriting to persuade.

00:09:14.000 And five, testing.

00:09:16.140 As I mentioned at the beginning of this episode,

00:09:17.600 I wanna share with you an exclusive training.

00:09:19.280 It's called the High Tempo Testing Training.

00:09:21.940 It's a video from one of my growth marketing events

00:09:26.020 where you can see the four different phases

00:09:29.140 of high-tempo testing, including the core concept

00:09:32.760 called North Star Metric, your NSM.

00:09:35.500 Understanding what your NSM is for you

00:09:38.480 will allow you to focus, crystallize,

00:09:40.460 and get everybody moving that metric forward,

00:09:44.220 which will provide value to both your customer

00:09:46.380 and to your business.

00:09:47.220 That's the key for an NSM.

00:09:48.740 I go more into it in the training.

00:09:50.260 Click the link below to watch that.

00:09:52.260 It's 100% free, and it was taught to me by Sean Ellis.

00:09:56.220 He's an incredible marketing mind.

00:09:58.400 He's one of my formal mentors.

00:10:00.840 So be sure to click the link, download,

00:10:02.560 or watch that online.

00:10:04.460 And if you liked this video,

00:10:05.360 be sure to smash that like button, subscribe to my channel.

00:10:08.100 And if there's anybody you think this video could serve,

00:10:09.980 feel free to share it with them directly.

00:10:11.900 But as per usual, I wanna challenge you

00:10:13.640 to live a bigger life and a bigger business,

00:10:15.800 and I'll see you next Monday.

00:10:17.060 What a topic, yee-haw, yee-haw skadoodles. 0.82

Dan Martell - July 13, 2020

Growth Hacking - How To Become a World-Class Growth Hacker

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