The Growth Playbook — Why “Hacking Growth” is a Must-Read for Startup Founders and Employees
Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown created a detailed guide with multiple case studies of how to acquire, retain, and generate more revenue from customers.
I first heard of the term “Growth Hacking” back in 2015. It was the year I first became interested in tech startups, and I looked up to startup founders and their ability to create large, impactful companies quickly.
I wanted to figure out how to emulate them, so I read as many startup resources as I could. One of those resources was the book “Growth Hacker Marketing”.
It was written by an author I admire — Ryan Holiday — and I really liked the book back then. I even ended up writing a 5-page paper on it for my English class, and I posted it as an article on Medium.
In recent years though, a new book has been lauded as the new guide to growth hacking, and that’s Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown’s “Hacking Growth”, published in 2017.
This book was recommended to me by my colleague Jig Young, and I also heard the founder of Kumu recommend it on the Hustleshare podcast.
I finally read it over the past few weeks, and I can’t help but praise it. Now that I work as a Product Designer at First Circle, a 150-person startup, and because I work in the Acquisition team, it’s my job to help grow the number of businesses that get financing from us.
As such, it’s important I find out what the best companies do to create a culture and process for continuous testing and growth, and help shape First Circle to have that kind of culture and process. Hacking Growth taught me which things in our process and culture we should keep, and which ones we should change.
It also helped me generate and validate ideas for all sorts of growth hacks. I realized that we didn’t have to reinvent the wheel — we could use some of the same tactics of successful companies like Airbnb and Dropbox.
What’s The Book About?
Hacking Growth is a guide on what growth hacking is and how to integrate a growth-centric culture and process in your company, with multiple examples of companies successfully increasing their growth.
The book’s first part walks you through the importance of growth hacking, how and why to build a growth team in your company, and determining if you have product/market fit. It also mentions the importance of finding out which metrics you should focus on growing, and why & how to test new ideas at a fast pace.
The book’s second part is a playbook on how to grow the 4 main parts of every startup’s customer journey — acquisition, activation, retention, and monetization. It also tells you why a company shouldn’t lose its culture of experimentation even if it has achieved fast growth.
Who Should Read This Book?
I think these types of people would benefit most from this book:
- If you’re a product designer or product manager working at a tech startup, then you should definitely read this book. Product Designers and Managers have to think of how to improve a product to meet both the customer’s needs and the startup’s needs, and usually the startup has ambitious growth goals. This book helps teach you how to get insights from users and test new ideas to meet those ambitious growth goals.
- If you’re a marketer or data analyst at a tech startup, you would benefit from reading this book as well. Marketers and data analysts are important people to have in a growth team. For marketers, this book helps you get ideas on finding or growing marketing channels. For data analysts, this book can help you figure out what type of reports to create, what kind of insights to surface, and how to properly track metrics.
- If you’re a startup executive or founder, then you could read this book to pioneer a growth hacking mindset in your company. For me, the growth hacking mindset has 3 main benefits: 1) It encourages you to interview & survey customers regularly, and test new ideas with them; 2) it shows you the importance of creating cross-functional teams and having them focus on the right metrics; and 3) it teaches you the importance of testing fast and how to prioritize experiments across the funnel.
Things the Book Can Improve On:
#1: Shouldn’t a user researcher be on a growth team too?
In Chapter 1 on “Building Growth Teams”, the book outlined the roles needed in a growth team, which includes a growth lead, a product manager, software engineers, marketing specialists, data analysts, and product designers.
One role that I think is missing here is the user researcher — someone whose job is to talk to customers, surface new insights, and test new ideas with them. A Product Designer could take on this role, or even a product manager, but as a company scales, I think it’s worth adding this as an important role in growth teams as well.
In First Circle, we have two CX researchers who’ve been uncovering lots of insights for us through customer interviews, and I and others in the CX team have also done interviews ourselves. These helped us surface insights on how to improve our service, and I think it’s important that someone plays the role of user researcher in any startup or growth team.
#2: I wish the book had a list of tips or insights to recap each chapter at the end, or a summarized guide at the end of the book.
One book that I love because of its summarized guide at the end is Sprint by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky. This book taught me about Google’s Design Sprint process, and I’ve used the checklist at the back of the book to help me remember how to plan for and facilitate various parts of a design sprint.
For Hacking Growth though, it has nothing like that — no checklists or tips at the end of each chapter. And because I read the book over a few weeks, I’ve already started to forget some of the earlier content. I wish it had a summarized guide or list of insights, because it’s quite tedious to read through the book again.
Which part of the book is most important?
For me, the most important part of the book is Part 1, because this part teaches you how to form a growth team, how to figure out which metrics or customer journey points to focus on, how to run growth team meetings, and how to ideate & prioritize experiments.
I find these more important than Part 2, which contains various growth hack ideas. Part 1 is especially important if your startup doesn’t have a growth team yet, or its culture and processes don’t look like a growth team’s yet.
The growth hacks and tips mentioned in Part 2 of the book might not fit the context of your company or your role, and they’re not that relevant if your company doesn’t have a growth hacking mindset yet.
If a company and its employees truly had a growth hacking mindset, it would get customer feedback regularly, have cross-functional teams, and run experiments at a fast pace.
I’m glad that First Circle does have a growth hacking mindset, but we still have room for improvement. And I hope to use the tips from Hacking Growth to improve my output, as well as our company’s culture, processes, and results.
Overall, Hacking Growth is still an amazing book.
I hope you pick up a copy and learn as much from it as I did. Here in the Philippines, we don’t have many employees or startup founders with the mindset of a growth hacker, and I wish we had more of them.
So if you’re from the Philippines and are working for a startup, this book would help you provide value to your company. I hope you enjoy reading it!
About the Author
Brian Tan is a Product Designer at First Circle and a co-founder of Effective Altruism Philippines.
About First Circle
First Circle is a FinTech company that provides businesses in the Philippines fast, fair, and flexible financing. To read more about our company and what we do, go to firstcircle.ph, or follow our CX blog to read more articles from our CX team.
