Growth Hacking Book Reviews
Looking for a good growth hacking book? There are quite a few growth hacking books out there, and honestly some are complete garbage. In fact, most are. It turns out it’s easier to sell a book on growth hacking than it is to actually provide some valuable, actionable information. (Actually providing actionable information is really hard.)
My frustration with the lack of growth hacking books caused me to write my own
Growth Hacking Book — Winners
Secret Sauce — A Step-By-Step Guide to Growth Hacking by Vincent Dignan
Secret Sauce is perfect for some people, and for some people it won’t work out very well.
This book is best for the type of person who is somewhat familiar and comfortable with ideas of marketing (meaning they know what SEO actually is) but isn’t really sure what exactly they should do to get users/visitors/revenue.
If you’ve never heard of marketing before you may want to start somewhere else, because this book is very much about brass tacks. It’s very applicable — it actually reads like a tutorial — a step-by-step guide that gets you to users, traffic, and revenue.
The growth hacking tactics in it are among the best in any book anywhere, and they are absolutely the most actionable. It is dense, but the stuff in the book does work, and it should work for every company.
This growth hacking book is perfect for people who actually want results and are ready to get their feet wet. It’s not recommended for someone who wants a high-level overview of what growth hacking is and why it’s different than marketing.
Growth Hacker Marketing by Ryan Holiday
Ryan Holiday’s book, on the other hand, is quite the reverse. It attempts to explain to the unindoctrinated what the world of growth hacking actually consists of.
He uses a lot of examples of startups — ones that most growth hackers have heard several times before. This book is probably the best for somebody who doesn’t know what growth hacking is and is curious, and is somewhat helpful for people who want to get started.
Viral Loop by Adam Penenburg
buy it here
This book was really good, but unless you’re working at a company with a large number of users (we’re talking 1 million plus) it may not be the most useful.
It does a great job of going in depth into the viral loop, what it means, how it works, and how you can attempt to wrap it into your product.
Growth Hacking Book Runners-Up
This is an interesting look at why things take off. Think Buzzfeed-like — why things absolutely blow up. Some of it is pretty obvious, (people really like it), and some is a little more interesting.
Lean Startup Marketing by Sean Ellis
I’m pretty sure this was an attempt to optimize on the keyword “Lean Startup Marketing.” Not a very promising effort from Sean Ellis.
Growth Hacking by Jose Casanova
This one was OK — I honestly expected worse based on the book cover. It’s a pretty noob-friendly introduction to marketing (most of it isn’t really growth hacking per say), but you could do worse than this book.
