Ryan Holiday
There were ad designs to approve, invoices to process, events to sponsor, proposals to review. A new product was launching, and I had a press release to write.
Buy advertisements, plan events, pitch reporters, design “creatives,” approve promotions, and throw around terms like “brand,” “CPM,” “awareness,”
The new job title of “Growth Hacker” is integrating itself into Silicon Valley’s culture, emphasizing that coding and technical chops are now an essential part of being a great marketer. Growth hackers are a hybrid of marketer and coder, one who looks at the traditional question of “How do I get customers for my product?” and answers with A/B tests, landing pages, viral factor, email deliverability, and Open Graph. . . . The entire marketing team is being disrupted. Rather than a VP of Marketing with a bunch of non-technical marketers reporting to them, instead growth hackers are engineers leading teams of engineers.
Their hacking—which occurred right on my watch—had rethought marketing from the ground up, with none of the baggage or old assumptions. And now, their shortcuts, innovations, and backdoor solutions fly in the face of everything we’ve been taught.
The old way—where product development and marketing were two distinct and separate processes—has been replaced. We all find ourselves in the same position: needing to do more with less and finding, increasingly, that the old strategies no longer generate results.
A growth hacker doesn’t see marketing as something one does but rather as something one builds into the product itself. The product is then kick-started, shared, and optimized (with these steps repeated multiple times) on its way to massive and rapid growth. The chapters of this book follow that structure.
WHAT IS GROWTH HACKING? The end goal of every growth hacker is to build a self-perpetuating marketing machine that reaches millions by itself.
First Google built a superior product. Then it built excitement by making it invite-only. And by steadily increasing the number of invites allowed to its existing user base, Gmail spread from person to person until it became the most popular, and in many ways the best, free e-mail service.
Growth Hacker Needed. Their job isn’t to “do” marketing as I had always known it; it’s to grow companies really fast—to take something from nothing and make it something enormous within an incredibly tight window.
A growth hacker is someone who has thrown out the playbook of traditional marketing and replaced it with only what is testable, trackable, and scalable. Their tools are e-mails, pay-per-click ads, blogs, and platform APIs instead of commercials, publicity, and money. While their marketing brethren chase vague notions like “branding” and “mind share,” growth hackers relentlessly pursue users and growth—and when they do it right, those users beget more users, who beget more users. They are the inventors, operators, and mechanics of their own self-sustaining and self-propagating growth machine that can take a start-up from nothing to something.
Instead of launching products with multimillion-dollar marketing budgets, the growth hackers we will follow in this book began their work at start-ups with little to no resources. Forced to innovate and motivated to try new things, growth hackers like these have built some of these companies into billion-dollar brands. They did so not only outside the enormous edifice of the Hollywood-industrial-launch-complex but also because they ignored it and rejected its tactics. Instead of bludgeoning the public with ads or dominating the front page of newspapers to drive awareness, they used a scalpel, precise and targeted to a specific audience.
Growth hackers trace their roots back to programmers—and that’s how they see themselves. They are data scientists meets design fiends meets marketers. They welcome this information, process it and utilize it differently, and see it as desperately needed clarity in a world that has been dominated by gut instincts and artistic preference for too long.
Whether that’s a Kickstarter project you’re trying to fund or a new app, the thinking is the same: how do you get, maintain, and multiply attention in a scalable and efficient way?
Growth hacking at its core means putting aside the notion that marketing is a self-contained act that begins toward the end of a company’s or a product’s development life cycle. It is, instead, a way of thinking and looking at your business.
You know what the single worst marketing decision you can make is? Starting with a product nobody wants or nobody needs.
Growth hackers believe that products—even whole businesses and business models—can and should be changed until they are primed to generate explosive reactions from the first people who see them. In other words, the best marketing decision you can make is to have a product or business that fulfills a real and compelling need for a real and defined group of people—no matter how much tweaking and refining this takes.
Some companies like Airbnb and Instragram spend a long time trying new iterations until they achieve what growth hackers call Product Market Fit (PMF);
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 publicly with what we think is our final, perfected product.
Isolating who your customers are, figuring out their needs, designing a product that will blow their minds—these are marketing decisions, not just development and design choices.
Optimizing a product to spread and be well received by customers, by the media, and by influencers is something that you, as a marketer or a growth hacker, are uniquely qualified to do. You are, in effect, the translator who helps bridge the producers and the consumers so they are in alignment.
The growth hacker helps with iterations, advises, and analyzes every facet of the business. In other words, Product Market Fit is a feeling backed with data and information.
HOW DO YOU GET PMF? Because Product Market Fit can be overwhelming as a technical business concept, allow me to explain it by dropping the jargon and presenting an analogy. As it turns out, I was familiar with PMF long before I read Andrew Chen’s article.
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 book on their blog and when they speak in front of groups. They ask readers what they’d like 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.*
Their CTO, Werner Vogels, suggests trying to write an FAQ for this product you’re developing. (That way you can address, in advance, potential user issues and questions.)9 Or try to define the crucial parts of the user experience by making mockups of pages, writing hypothetical case studies so you can actually start to see what it would look like and who it would work for and how. Finally, try writing the user manual, which as Werner explains usually has three parts: concepts, how-to, and reference. (Defining these means you understand your idea in and out from the customers perspective.
companies need to “do whatever is required to get to product/market fit. Including changing out people, rewriting your product, moving into a different market, telling customers no when you don’t want to, telling customers yes when you don’t want to, raising that fourth round of highly dilutive venture capital—whatever is required.”
other than making the best product, never make the best product.” So Evernote took “marketing” off the table and instead poured that budget into product development. This undoubtedly slowed brand building at first—but it paid off.
Once we stop thinking of the products we market as static—that our job as marketers is to simply work with what we’ve got instead of working on and improving what we’ve got—the whole game changes.
The race has changed. The prize and spoils no longer go to the person who makes it to market first. They go to the person who makes it to Product Market Fit first.
But the most effective method is simply the Socratic method. We must simply and repeatedly question every assumption. Who is this product for? Why would they use it? Why do I use it? Ask your customers questions, too: What is it that brought you to this product? What is holding you back from referring other people to it? What’s missing? What’s golden? Don’t ask random people or your friends—be scientific about it. Use tools like SurveyMonkey, Wufoo, Qualaroo, or even Google Docs, which make it very easy to offer surveys to some or all of your customers.
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.
The growth hacker’s job—like we marketers have always done—is to do that pulling.
In other words, launching does not need to be an enormous campaign we’re expected (too often) to produce out of thin air so much as an initial boost or a shot in the arm. Not a blowout grand opening, but a strategic opening or a stunt that catches the attention of our core audience. So, yes, like the old model, growth hacking still requires pulling your customers in. Except you seek to do it in a cheap, effective, and usually unique and new way. Whereas all traditional marketing starts the same way—with a news story or an advertising campaign—start-ups can launch in a multitude of ways.
Take Dropbox. Today it has more than three hundred million users, but when the file-sharing service began, it was not even open to the public. New users had to sign up to a waiting list to be invited to join. In an effort to drive these sign-ups, the founders crafted a fun demo video that walked potential users through the service.
This was all Dropbox really needed. After sending a highly targeted burst of traffic to the site, the team didn’t turn around and say, “Okay, how can we get on the news for this tonight?” They didn’t need it. Within just a short amount of time, those initial seventy-five thousand users became nearly four million, which, in turn, grew to the more than three hundred million people they have today.
Would it work again for another company? Maybe; or maybe that growth hack is now played out. The point is, you’ve got to find something new and exciting and channel that energy toward exploding on the market with your product.
NOT ALL PEOPLE—THE RIGHT PEOPLE The old mindset says go out and get everyone you conceivably can.
What’s the point? Most of those people never become your customers. Growth hackers resist this temptation (or, more appropriate, this delusion). They opt, deliberately, to attract only the early adopters who make or break new tech services and seek to do it as cheaply as possible.
their founders have focused their energies on product development with an eye toward growth—they’re
This means that our outward-facing marketing and PR efforts are needed simply to reach out to and capture, at the beginning, a group of highly interested, loyal, and fanatical users. Then we grow with and because of them.
If they are geeks, they are at TechCrunch or Hacker News or reddit or attending a handful of conferences every year. If they are fashionistas, they are regularly checking a handful of fashion blogs like Lookbook.nu or Hypebeast. If they are , like you and your founders are, they are reading and doing the same things you do every day. Catch their attention and pull them in. It’s as simple as that.
This is thinking like a growth hacker—it’s how you get the most bang for your buck and how you get it from the right people.
(A very common question: Where do I find the right people? If this isn’t immediately obvious to you, then you don’t know your own industry well enough to even consider launching a product yet. Period.) To kick off and reach your first group of users, you have many options:
You can use a service like Help a Reporter Out (www.helpareporter.com) to find reporters who are looking for people to include in stories they are already writing about your space.
Getting on one or two of these outlets is as simple as sending a quick e-mail—after all, if your product really is specially designed for these people, they want to feature it.
advisors and investors for their valuable audience and fame rather than their money
All of these types of outreach are done with a very specific mindset, with a very specific goal. We are not “spreading the word”; we’re not throwing up a billboard in Times Square and hoping in six months someone will spot our product in a grocery store and decide to pick it up. Instead, we are intensely focused on driving an initial set of new user sign-ups and customers, right now. It doesn’t matter how many people know about you or how they find out about you. It matters how many sign up. If handing out flyers on the street corner accomplishes that, then consider it growth hacking.
The start-up world is full of companies taking clever hacks to drive their first set of customers into their sales funnel.
Today, as a marketer, our task isn’t necessarily to “build a brand” or even to maintain a preexisting one. We’re better off building an army of immensely loyal and passionate users.
“Focusing on customer acquisition over ‘awareness’ takes discipline. . . . At a certain scale, awareness/brand building makes sense. But for the first year or two it’s a total waste of money.”
Remember what Aaron Swartz realized. Users have to be pulled in. A good idea is not enough. Your customers, in fact, have to be “acquired.” But the way to do that isn’t with a bombardment. It’s with a targeted offensive in the right places aimed at the right people.
Because once we bring our first customers in, our next move is to set about turning them into an army.
The growth hacker has a response: Well, why should customers do that? Have you actually made it easy for them to spread your product? Is the product even worth talking about?
Only a specific type of product or business or piece of content will go viral—it not only has to be worth spreading, it has to provoke a desire in people to spread it. Until you have accomplished that, or until your client is doing something truly remarkable, it just isn’t going to happen.
The best way to get people to do this enormous favor for you? Make it seem like it isn’t a favor. Make it the kind of thing that is worth spreading and, of course, conducive to spreading.
Instead, the product must be inherently worth sharing—and then on top of that, you must facilitate and encourage the spreading you’d like to see by adding tools and campaigns that enable virality.
One of the simplest and most straightforward examples of this is Groupon and LivingSocial, the daily deal pioneers. Each and every deal on these sites—which at the time of launch felt a lot more exciting than they do now—is accompanied by an additional offer. For Groupon, it’s “Refer a friend” and you get ten dollars when your friend makes his or her first purchase. For LivingSocial, it says, “Get this deal for free”: if you buy the deal and recommend it to three friends
To make that clear: you should not just encourage sharing but create powerful incentives to do so. If your product isn’t doing that right now, why would anyone share it? But if you do it right, people will advertise your product and feel like they are the ones getting something out of it!
I hope it’s clear how drastically different these approaches are from throwing some “Like this on Facebook” or “Post this on Twitter” buttons on the bottom of a blog post and expecting it to suddenly spread. Think about how much less Groupon, LivingSocial, and DistroKid had to spend on advertising because every offer had advertising built into it—they were not only paying their users to do it for them but also encouraging the new users to do the same thing.
Since the average Facebook user has more than 150 friends, it’s incredibly powerful if they cross-post their Twitter posts on Facebook, say, or syndicate their Instagram photos.
We can use other people’s networks to our advantage. Dropbox, for instance, offered its customers a 150-megabyte storage bonus if they linked their Dropbox account to their Facebook or Twitter account.
Think of Hotmail, whose early attempts at growth hacking we looked at earlier. They turned every e-mail its users sent into a pitch to new customers. Think of Apple and BlackBerry, which turned their devices into advertising engines by adding “Sent from my iPhone” or “Sent from my BlackBerry” to every message sent.
https://coinbase.com.”
Remember, a growth hacker doesn’t think branding is worthless, just that it’s not worth the premium that traditional marketers pay for it. A growth hacker isn’t going to try to create brand awareness by buying product placement on national television or by paying a celebrity to be associated with his or her product. Instead, a growth hacker will look for ways to get this social currency for free. They’re looking to make the use of their product inherently public and to drive that branding through thousands of small user actions.
Dropbox’s founders, after pulling in their first set of users with their awesome demo video and social media strategy, had a choice. They could try to continue growing with the same tactics—more videos, more social media—or they could use advertising to boost their brand, because it was the conventional marketing wisdom. They tried the latter only to find that it cost between $233 and $388 in ad spend for every paying subscriber they brought in.17 After more than fourteen months of struggling to find a growth engine, the Dropbox team had what they call their epiphany. Using an idea brought on by talks with the famous growth hacker Sean Ellis, Dropbox built one of the most effective and most viral referral programs of the start-up world. It was as simple as placing a little “Get free space” button on the front page of the service. The offer was that users would get five hundred megabytes of free space for every friend they invited and got to sign up. Almost immediately, sign-ups increased by roughly 60 percent and stayed at that level for months. With more than 2.8 million direct invites a month because of the program, it’s not hard to see why. And remember,
All of which is to say a simple truth that we try to deny too often: if you want to go viral, it must be baked into your product. There must be a reason to share it and the means to do so.
You can’t just expect your users to become evangelists of your product—you’ve got to provide the incentives and the platform for them to do so.
Keeping our growth engine going is a step unto itself. We must dive deeply into the analytics available to us and refine, refine, refine until we get maximum results.
The traditional marketer’s job, as I learned in my time in fashion and publishing, is to get the leads—to bring in potential customers. It’s someone else’s job to figure out what to do with them. But does that really make sense anymore? First off, in a small company, there is no one else. Your job is not just to bring in potential customers but to create lifelong users. And, as it turns out, dedicated and happy users are marketing tools in and of themselves. What’s the point of driving a bunch of new customers through marketing channels if they immediately leak out through a hole in the bottom? What’s the use of building up a certain perception of your product in the media and via marketing if the moment people try it they find out the hype isn’t true? Marketing doesn’t have to be this Sisyphean job of driving people through the door or to a website. Today, analytics make it clear whether new users from your marketing initiatives actually stick. It’s called “conversion rate.” Know what it is and use it!
They needed to make the prospective users they were already getting stick.
I know this doesn’t seem like marketing—it is quite literally a product/feature development decision. But if it drives better user adoption and makes users more engaged, it is. (Remember, if you’ve built in viral features, the more your users stick, the more it will spread.) These moves grew Twitter, and they grew Pinterest. Who could argue then that it wasn’t great marketing?
Now every company is going to have their own metrics and definitions of what this is. Facebook’s growth hackers saw that users who added seven friends in ten days were the most engaged and active—so that’s what they designed features and campaigns to drive. At Zynga, it was all about D1 users—that is, users who came back after the first day. At Dropbox, it was dragging at least one file into your Dropbox folder—not just creating an account.
Remember: metrics are somewhat relative depending on what you are trying to accomplish. Figure out what your most important metric for growth is and focus on that. Don’t listen to or judge yourself on other people.
Increases in park attendance are great . . . but can mask other problems. What matters is happy customers.
They were alienating their core users, who were abandoning the service—known as “churn”—even as new users joined.
Though this approach is untraditional, you can see how this checks off so many growth hacking objectives. It increases the conversion rate, increases the price a listing can charge, draws members deeper into the community, weeds out potentially risky or negative listings, teaches users how to use the product better, makes them rave about the product, and just as a bonus, it got a bunch of positive publicity about it. Now tens of thousands of Airbnb listings on nearly every continent have been verified and improved by their team of freelance photographers.
At the end of the day, we are all just trying to grow our businesses. What growth hackers have mastered is the ability to grow and expand their businesses without having to chase down new customers. At the end of the day, isn’t this a lot easier and cheaper? Why not optimize internally instead of constantly chasing lead generation? They add up to the same thing: better and more profitable customers.
Aaron Ginn explained to me that even the best growth hacker cannot “grow a broken product.”21 Just because you’ve achieved Product Market Fit doesn’t mean that your idea is flawless, that there aren’t huge areas that still need to be tweaked and improved.
The reality is that your product is probably broken in at least one way. A growth hacker uses all available information to figure out where those problems are and then does something about them as soon as possible.
The role of the growth hacker is to ruthlessly optimize incoming traffic for success. As Eric Ries explains in The Lean Startup, “The focus needs to be on improving customer retention.” Forget the conventional wisdom that says if a company lacks growth, it should invest more in sales and marketing. Instead, it should invest in refining and improving the service itself until users are so happy that they can’t stop using the service (and their friends come along with them).
For the same reason, I love the idea of Dropbox rewarding users with 250 megabytes of extra storage if they take a tour of the basics of Dropbox. The idea is to teach members how to use the service and motivate them to get past potential hurdles. It’s also why the site offers a 125-megabyte bonus to users who send Dropbox just ninety characters of feedback about the service—now they’re involved and participating. (Personally, I’ve earned something like 625 megabytes of free space, which makes me a happier user, more likely to refer friends, and keeps me “stuck” to the service. It’s the kind of marketing that, just a year ago, I’d never have considered marketing.)
Yes, it’s more seductive to chase new marketing initiatives. Yes, it would be more fun to get some press. But it’s better for business to retain and optimize what we already have. According to Bain & Company, a 5 percent increase in customer retention can mean a 30 percent increase in profitability for the company. And according to Market Metrics, the probability of selling to an existing customer is 60 to 70 percent, while to a new prospect it’s just 5 to 20 percent.
Growth hacking is about maximizing ROI—about expending our energies and efforts where they will be most effective. You’re better off rolling out new features that get more out of your customer base, that turn potential users into active users, than going out and pounding the pavement for more potentials.
Tim took Product Market Fit to the next level—designing each chapter to stand alone on its own merits and made specifically for a defined community and group of readers. Even within the chapters, he wanted bite-size pieces of content that would immediately provide value to the reader—if you picked up the book and opened it to a random page, he wanted you to be able to get something out of it.
Tim used tools like SurveyMonkey and Wufoo to ask friends and colleagues about the sections they responded to most. We tested the back cover and subtitle repeatedly. Before a section was cut or added, multiple readers of the manuscript had to agree. The result was a book perfectly crafted for its prospective readers, one that we knew would spread and generate reactions because this had been built into the writing itself. The product and the market were in sync.
the blogs had to have more than one hundred thousand unique visitors a month. With tools like Compete, Quantcast, and Alexa, it was easy to research potential sites we wanted to appear on, cross-check their traffic, and then reach out. And as I explained earlier, when your product is actually relevant and designed for a specific audience, bloggers love to write about you. Writing articles about you means more pageviews (and advertising revenue) for them!
For Tim, blogging weekly for five years meant he had a captive audience to launch to, and this was a huge asset for us.
Instead, we can grow our businesses by iterating, by tracking success, by doing whatever we can to bring people into our sales funnel. And then we understand that it’s up to us to optimize our product around these customers and their needs. We can change on the fly. We can spend our budgets on product improvements instead of additional advertising.
At the core, marketing is lead generation. Ads drive awareness . . . to drive sales. PR and publicity drive attention . . . to drive sales. Social media drives communication . . . to drive sales. Marketing, too many people forget, is not an end unto itself. It is simply getting customers. And by the transitive property, anything that gets customers is marketing. That is what growth hackers have taught us.
Hotmail to Airbnb to Groupon to Spotify, and see the startling fact: tactics that no one would have previously described as “marketing” turned out to be the marketing steroids behind their business growth. For Hotmail, it was inserting an e-mail signature at the bottom of each message that turned every e-mail sent by one of its users into a pitch for new users. For Airbnb, it was craigslist infiltration, which allowed Airbnb hosts to use the site as a sales platform. For Groupon and LivingSocial, it was their referral offers that paid users to share deals with their friends. And for Spotify, it was the free “advertising” it got from Facebook integration.
Each followed the process I’ve outlined in this book: they merged marketing into their product development; they kicked off growth with early adopters; they added viral elements; and then they relentlessly repeated these cycles, always guided by the data, with an eye toward optimization.
Growth hacking doesn’t make our instincts any better, but it fundamentally reduces the costs of being wrong, giving us freedom to experiment and try new things.
As I interviewed and read about the dozens of growth hackers whose many insights contributed to this book, I noticed that each one had used an almost entirely different set of tactics than the others. Some had relied on viral features; others leaned more heavily on product and optimization. Some were expert e-mail marketers, while others knew how to use platforms and APIs to reach equally large amounts of people. For all the tactical differences, the strategic goal was the same: to reach people in an effective, scalable, and data-driven way.
Growth hacking really is a mindset rather than a tool kit. And if you leave this book with one thing, it should be that mindset.
This book didn’t start as a book. It started as a minimum viable product—a short, one-thousand-word article for Fast Company, in fact.
we started by publishing a digital single right away. Publishing Growth Hacker Marketing as a short eBook drastically reduced our cost and let us test the market, and more important, beat our competitors to market.
I was then able to edit, improve, and add to the original text of the eBook for the version you’re now reading.
Lesson: Cheaply test your concept, improve it based on feedback, then launch.
My last book sold for $26.95 hardcover and $12.99 as an eBook. I don’t think that did a first-time author like myself any favors in the acquiring customers department. So the digital single for this book was $2.99. That meant basically anyone could afford to give it a read. By making the cost really low and then overdelivering on content we set this book up to succeed.
Before launch I wrote approximately a dozen articles by adapting lessons and content from the book for publication on influential sites. Instead of charging for my writing as I usually do, I gave these away for free. The result was popular articles on MarketWatch, Betabeat, Fast Company, Thought Catalog, The Huffington Post, Shopify, Hacker News, SlideShare.com, reddit, Medium, and a few others. This content marketing strategy is now quite common in the start-up space
I also relied on my own ten-thousand-person mailing list, which I had built slowly over the past six years painstakingly recommending books by other authors.
Finally, I reached out to the growth hacker community, who was looking for a book that validated and championed its work.
Aside from the price, which I think made this book much easier to spread by word of mouth, I designed this book to be viral. (Again, creating a positive disparity between price expectation and the product you deliver is important. It means people say things like, “I can’t believe this is only three dollars.”) One look at the Amazon page tells me we were successful. Hundreds and hundreds of Kindle and Goodreads readers have bookmarked, tweeted, and shared passages they liked. That’s not an accident.
effect. It’s a lot easier to share a blog post—which in my case were basically advertisements for the longer book.
But most important, I built an e-mail list of my most interested readers.
You’ve got to build a list, because a list is the easiest and most effective marketing tool, period.
Launching with a short digital version first meant I could optimize and improve based on the responses from those original readers. The book you’ve just read is not only 30 percent longer, but it’s packed with new examples, better writing, and fewer (ideally, no) errors.
It didn’t feel like I was selling, because I wasn’t. I wasn’t pushing, because I didn’t need to. I’d built those aspects into the product. I’d hacked marketing and product development and sales together into a perpetual motion machine.
Growth hackers use cohort analyses to track specific users from first contact through the sales funnel to give segments of users what they are looking for.
growth hacker (n.)—A growth hacker is an employee with a simple job: growing the business by any means possible.
Growth hackers’ main task is to build great marketing ideas into the product during the development process. Growth hackers often have a programming background, but it’s not required.
Growth hackers are pros at hypothesizing, testing, and iterating different versions of their products to create hockey stick growth for their companies.
growth hacking (v.)—Growth hacking is business strategy that throws out the playbook of traditional marketing and replaces it with customer acquisition techniques that are testable, trackable, and scalable. Its tools are e-mails, pay-per-click ads, blogs, and platform APIs instead of commercials, publicity, and money. While traditional marketing chases vague notions like “branding” and “mind share,” growth hackers relentlessly pursue users and growth—and when they do it right, those users beget more users, who beget more users. They are the inventors, operators, and mechanics of their own self-sustaining and self-propagating growth machine that can take a start-up from nothing to something.
Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, explains that the best way to get to Product Market Fit is by starting with an “MVP” and improving it based on feedback—as opposed to what many traditional marketers do, which is to try to launch with what we think is our final product. Isolating who your customers are, figuring out their needs, designing a product that will blow their minds—these are marketing decisions, not just development and design choices.
sales funnel (n.)—A sales funnel is a series of steps to find leads and direct them through the sales process, with the end goal of converting as many of those leads into paying customers.
vanity metrics (n.)—Vanity metrics are the metrics that feel important but are ultimately superficial or, worse, deceptive. For instance, monitoring traffic to your website (congratulating yourself that it is increasing) while ignoring conversion rate, bounce rate, time on site, and so forth, would be falling prey to a vanity metric.
If your product does not do that—even on a small scale for a much smaller audience—you need to go back to the drawing board until it does.
Aside from studying your competition and reading the blogs and thought leaders in your space? One of my favorite tricks: Find a subreddit (a topic-driven niche on the reddit site that addresses the market or space you plan to launch in), subscribe, and watch the articles (and the comments to those articles) for a few weeks.* See what people say, what they react to, what they like and dislike, etc.