There has been some debate as to what growth hacking actually is. People have been fighting about whether the term is stupid, or whether it is a genius idea or whatever. I’m basically going to give you my take on what growth hacking is and the way we see growth hacking.
Let’s start somewhere else—so what is business? That can be seen as a painfully […]. It basically just means to earn more than you spend—then you have a business. You can have more details about that, but that’s if you go to a business school and you learn about logistics and finance and stuff. Also, if you go to business school, you don’t necessarily become a good businessman, even though the business school might help you to become one. I’m going to come back to that.
Now, what is a high-growth startup? Again, in this really obvious way, it’s about finding out how to provide huge new value to a lot of people. I’ve outlined all the important things here. Find out—nobody knows, otherwise, it wouldn’t be a startup. Huge new value—unless you really do provide a lot of value to someone, it’s not going to take off and there’s not going to be high growth. And unless you get a lot of people, again, it’s not going to have high growth. So all three things are important.
But what’s the business school of high growth? I mean, where do you learn how to do that? A lot of startups have been doing this from intuition. Of course, you can do that, but there’s a lot to it. I just listed a few of the disciplines that go into actually doing a high-growth startup. You need to attract lots of customers, so you need to think about channels and messaging and value propositions—you need to optimize that a lot. You need to be able to actually prove to them that there is value, so you need to be very good at onboarding and understanding what is the “aha!” moment for your users and so on—so that’s a discipline.
Then, there’s the discipline of actually selling something to them. You can’t just entertain them, unless you [inaudible 02:14]. If you’re selling something, you ned to know the why and the when and the how; what’s the pitch, what’s the bundle, what’s the pricing—that’s a discipline.
Then, you basically ned to retain them for a long time so that they’ll keep experiencing that value and hopefully attract others to the same value.
So, if you look at the ingredients in actually doing high growth, there are a lot of disciplines there that you need to get ready. Of course, you can do it by intuition and obviously you can, but you might also actually look into what other methods the other people use to do that. So here’s what I think growth hacking is: it’s a very, very large toolbox that addresses all those disciplines. It gives you a lot of inspiration and techniques for actually carrying out all these different things.
To some extent, growth hacking is the business school of high growth. It’s where you learn all the techniques or get the catalog, or the curriculum, for what to do when you want to do high growth. You can learn in other places; growth hacking is not the only religion, but there is a lot of information to be caught from there.
Morton Elk, CEO SimpleSite
And, just as with business, growth hacking is not the same as growth. It is not a growth strategy to say we’re growth hackers. Its’ both [inaudible 03:36] to know the value and to know your uses. Growth hacking is a very, very large, very interesting toolbox that you need to apply to some of the things that you need to do. This is our take on growth hacking. We do a lot of growth hacking in the company, but growth hacking is not what defines us—that’s the value we create and the growth we’re looking for. But growth hacking really plays an important role in doing that.
Just to finalize, because it’s not textbook yet, you need to go to the web and find those resources. What we’ve done on the Nordic Growth Hackers website is basically to collect the resources that we find are the most interesting and instructive. If you go to www.nordicgrowthhackers.com/Resources, you’ll basically see sorted into those disciplines what we think are the best resources out there for actually finding out what the toolbox is. So basically, it’s just a toolbox. It’s not more religious than that, but they’re really, really good tools. You don’t need to use all the tools; you need to find the tools that are important to your business. That’s basically it.
So now, for the rest of the evening, you’re going to hear six talks about growth in a variety of the disciplines we were talking about—in the acquisition, in retention. We’re going to hear about the growth that worked, growth that didn’t work, or growth that worked but didn’t create a business, and you’re going to have some interesting we stories from out there that will hopefully inspire you in terms of [inaudible 05:00] in your business. So, thank you and I hope that you will enjoy the evening.
