How To Start Growth Hacking In 8 Steps

Derrick Hicks
Jul 23, 2017 · 11 min read

One of the biggest challenges you face building a startup is that you don’t know what you don’t know. You are constantly trying to learn as fast as possible. Burn rates & financial runways are essentially a figurative gun pointed at your head telling you to figure out how to make your company grow… or else.

You can’t plan anything too far in advance either because you have no clue if your plan is actually the best path forward. You are basically running down a really complex mountain trail with a tiny flashlight that lets you see 3 feet in front of you. The more you learn, the brighter that flashlight gets and the farther ahead you can see.

In my opinion, this is why a data-driven approach is so damn important. You can’t afford to make any dramatic mistakes. You can stumble here and there as long as you keep learning and find your path forward one data-driven point at a time.

This is what Growth Hacking is all about. It creates a framework of data-driven testing that helps you discover the best path forward for your organization. Let’s dive into how I think a Growth framework should be built from the ground up.

Oh, by the way, if you don’t know what Growth Hacking is at all read this first.

Overview — How to start Growth Hacking in 8 steps

The article below will map out the high-level process of building a Growth framework in a company built to scale and grow into a larger organization. I plan on writing follow up articles that dive much deeper into each of these topics, but I wanted to at least get a roadmap out there. Please let me know what questions you have so I can make my follow up articles even better.

Here are the 8 steps I have mapped out below:

  1. Get leadership buy-in
  2. Figure out if you have product / market fit
  3. Build your data pipeline & start filling your “data lake”
  4. Set up your core Growth team for success
  5. Pick your core Growth & North Star metrics
  6. Decide on your Growth tools
  7. Build a backlog of Growth ideas
  8. Start the Growth process

Let’s get to it!

Step 1: Get leadership buy-in

There is no way a Growth framework will thrive in an organization if you don’t have full buy-in from the leadership of the company. It’s such a fundamentally different approach to growing a company than “traditional” ways… whatever the heck “traditional” means!

Leadership buy-in is so important because a true Growth process is cross-functional by nature. This happens because it focuses on the entire customer journey vs. the typical “siloed” approach to leading teams you see in almost every organization on the planet.

Most companies have a Dev team, a Business Intelligence or Data team, a Marketing team, etc. Those teams basically march to the beat of their own drum based on the vision and direction provided by their leadership. Hopefully, the entire leadership team is doing a good job communicating with each other and then providing direction to the people that report to them so they can effectively improve the customer’s experience.

A Growth team sort of flips this on its head. It places the customer’s journey and experience at the top and everyone on the Growth team focuses on improving that experience based on empirical evidence, no matter what part of the customer journey they need to improve. This means you could essentially have a Growth team work on improving a landing page experience one month (traditionally a marketing initiative) and an in-product change (traditionally a dev task) the following month.

Now, I’m not saying a Growth team is a replacement for the traditional model of organizing groups of people in a company. I’m just pointing out the fact that it is a very different approach and you will need buy-in from the leadership within the organization.

Step 2: Figure out if you have product / market fit

One of the most commonly used phrases in the startup world these days is something along the lines of, “Do we / you / they have product market fit”? I’m sure you have heard the term before, but what is it exactly and why does it matter?

Why it matters is pretty obvious. If your product or service doesn’t meet the needs, wants, or desires of a target market your company won’t be a company for very long. Pretty simple.

What is it, though? How do you know you have finally achieved product market fit? Based on my past experience, it’s a realization that builds over time. I don’t think there is ever a clear moment you can point to and say, “Nailed it! Product market fit achieved. Let’s grow this sumbitch!”

Here are a few indications that could be a good indication that product market fit has been achieved:

  • Customers willingly giving you their hard earned money.
  • Sean Ellis’ product market fit survey.
  • Really low cancel or “churn” rates.
  • People coming back over and over to use and buy your product or service again.
  • Many really positive customer testimonials.
  • Many customers actually referring you to their friends.
  • Lots of referred people actually becoming active customers or subscribers.

Now, I personally think it’s actually pretty easy to know if you have product market fit. What is MUCH harder to know for sure is exactly WHO you have product market fit with and WHY they love what you offer. Understanding this takes time, patience, and a lot of testing.

Step 3: Build your data pipeline & start filling your “data lake”

Now that you have product market fit, it’s time to build your data foundation. This is one of the most critical steps to creating a Growth framework. There is no way I can cover everything you need to do for this step in this article. I’ll do a much deeper dive on this topic really soon. For now, I am just going to try and communicate how you need to start thinking about your data.

These are the 3 really high-level things you need to figure out:

  • Your data collection process.
  • Your data storage plan.
  • Your data analysis tools.

Fundamentally you should have the mindset that you need to track and store everything you possibly can because you can’t predict what will be useful down the road. An industry term you frequently hear for this approach is called building a “data lake”. So, figure out how to start building your own data lake by figuring out the 3 items I just listed above.

Bottom line you should be able to track just about every single customer interaction through their entire customer journey with your company. So using a SaaS company like LeanLaw as an example, you should be able to track:

  • The very first visit to your website and exactly where that traffic came from.
  • Every single page someone visits on your site.
  • How they signed up for a trial.
  • How they interacted with any feature in your product.
  • How much they paid you.
  • When and to whom they referred you to a friend or colleague.
  • Exactly what happens with that referral.
  • And when someone cancels or “churns”.

There is a lot more that needs to be tracked than just those items, but you get the point: Track. All. The. Things.

Step 4: Set up your core Growth team

Because Growth is completely focused on the entire customer journey, it naturally requires a diverse team with many different skill sets. Every company is going to have different needs, but I think the most critical skills that need to be available to actively participate on the Growth team are the following:

  • Data & analytical capabilities
  • Design skills
  • Excellent dev skills
  • Marketing knowhow
  • Writing expertise

Operate with the skills you have available, but try to get to a place where you can fill out all of the needed skills of a Growth team. The one skill that I think is an absolute must, however, is someone needs to be able to work with data & effectively analyze tests. That skill is way too critical to the Growth process.

My current Growth team at LeanLaw as of the time of writing this includes:

  • Me — Growth lead, marketing, and analytics.
  • Contractor — Writer
  • Contractor — Front end developer
  • Contracted agency — Design & Video

Step 5: Pick your core Growth & North Star metrics

Now we are starting to get into the really good stuff! At this point, you should have ample data available to start analyzing every step in your customer’s journey. It’s time to start pulling all of the most important data points together to begin painting the picture of your customer’s entire journey.

There are quite a few tools that can help you with this now, but I have yet to find one that does this they way I need it to out of the box. Mixpannel and Amplitude’s funnel tools do a pretty damn good job and can probably get you 90% of the way there if your “data lake” isn’t too large. If it’s too large or complex, then it’s time you start making some serious investments in your analytics stack. Diving into what that looks like would be way too much to cover in this post.

So, start getting some metrics around your customer journey “funnel”. Figure out where the big drop off points are and try to figure out why. If you see a really big drop, that could be a great indicator of where your Growth efforts need to focus. For example, if you see a lot of people starting a trial but never making it through the product setup. That would be a prime place to focus your testing efforts.

We have had a lot of success modeling our “funnel” based on Dave McClure’s AARRR metrics for startups. When we first started building out our Growth process at LeanLaw, we worked with the data we had available. We didn’t have a good way to measure some of the steps, like “Referrals” for example, and skipped that one temporarily. Nothing is ever set in stone. Growth is a constant evolution as you learn and grow. Work with what you can.

Another important metric to begin working on is what Sean Ellis calls your “North Star” metric. The North Star Metric is the single metric that best captures the core value that your product delivers to customers. I think we are close to having this metric dialed in at LeanLaw, but we are still working on it. Two metrics we have thrown around recently are:

  • Invoices sent.
  • Daily Active Users.

You can make a great case that the core value of LeanLaw is driven by either (or both) of those metrics. The end result of our customer sending an invoice is a great indicator that our product did everything it needs to do leading up to that moment. Daily Active Users (DAU) indicates people are using the LeanLaw product as intended: working out of the tool all day, every day.

We are leaning more towards DAU because it’s much more immediate than the invoicing metric. Our customers generally send out a big batch of invoices one time a month. The DAU metrics are much more immediate, obviously.

Step 6: Decide on your Growth tools

This is the easy part in my opinion. I’m just going to list out the main tools we are currently using at LeanLaw and what we use them for.

The main tools you need to start building a Growth framework are simply an analytics tool, an A/B testing tool, and a project management tool. That is about it. We have a bit of tool overload at LeanLaw right now, but they all meet specific needs we have. I’m sure this list will be different in the next 6 months too.

Step 7: Build your backlog of Growth ideas.

You have your data, your tools, and your team ready to roll. Now, you need to build out your backlog of testable ideas. This is something you will be doing CONSTANTLY moving forward, by they way. Your idea backlog should fuel your testing velocity. The bigger and more exciting your backlog, the more tests you are going to get out the door.

We use and totally love the Projects tool by Growthhackers.com. It was designed specifically for Growth teams and does an amazing job. Whatever backlog tool you decide to use, the key functions it needs to have are the following:

  • A place to put a list of ideas.
  • A place to add a description and hypothesis to each of those ideas.
  • A way to score and sort your ideas by priority. Projects uses the ICE (Impact, Confidence, Ease) scoring system which works perfectly for Growth teams.
  • A list that is accessible by the entire Growth team.
  • A place to save the results of your tests.

Google sheets might be a decent alternative to Growth Hackers. You might be able to use a project management tool like Trello or Asana too. I just think it would be really tough to beat how well the Projects tool works for Growth teams.

Step 8: Start the Growth process!

It’s go time! You should have an initial kickoff meeting with your core Growth team. You may even need to break this up into two parts. I had an initial meeting where I presented a slide deck I stole from someone online that explained what Growth Hacking was and why it was important. I also used that meeting to introduce the team to our core Growth metrics as well.

We then did a follow up meeting to review and build out our idea backlog. We had a lot of discussion around how ideas were scored and if the number should be different because of the effort needed by other team members.

We made sure to walk away from this meeting with only 1 test that would be our focus for that week. The team decided we should redesign one of our most important landing pages based on what our analytics was showing us at the time. The goal was to get the test ready and launch it 4 days later.

We missed that goal and launched it early the following week if I remember correctly. That was ok, though. I wanted to make sure the team had the experience of working together and getting our first test out the door. We had a number of test ideas on our list, but we picked something that everyone on the team had to touch even though it was a little bit bigger of a project then a few other things on our list. I think that was a really good choice to start off that way.

Now, things are rolling full steam ahead. We have had many hiccups along the way, but we are frequently launching new tests just about every week and getting better at it as we go.

Wrap up

Alright, that was A LOT to cover. I hope you got a few ideas here and there and feel inspired to launch your own Growth team. Let me know what questions you have and be sure to tell me how things go for you and your team! Cheers to your future, Growth Hacking success!


If you enjoyed reading this, please take a second to recommend it by hitting the “heart” button here on Medium and sharing this post with your friends! It really helps! Thank you!

Originally published at growly.org on July 23, 2017.

Derrick Hicks

Written by

Director of Marketing @LeanLawCo | Lean #Startup #Entrepreneur | Father of 2 | Husband of 1 ;-) | #SEO #GrowthHacking #Business

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