The Top 10 Growth Hackers to Follow in 2020
Introduction
The world of growth hacking is always changing and evolving. To stay on top of your game, you need to learn from the best. Here are the top 10 growth hackers that you need to follow in 2020. (Everyone was so good that it was impossible to rank them, so we made the list alphabetical).
Hana Abaza
Hana Abaza, the VP of Marketing of the enterprise e-commerce platform Shopify Plus, hacks growth on a large scale. Major retailers, such as Steve Madden Shoes, Gymshark, and MVMT, have joined the ranks of Shopify Plus’ customers.
Upmarket B2B SaaS sales requires a significantly more labor intensive process than a low-cost product. To facilitate growth in these conditions, Abaza built a revenue playbook to align the marketing and sales teams. Far beyond a normal SLA (service level agreement), this playbook drove process changes in the entire organization. The growth strategy worked, raising the Shopify Plus MRR to $12.4 million.
Notable Quote
“Marketing doesn’t start when you launch your product. Ideally you’re starting before that.”
Content To Check Out
In addition to her Twitter, be sure to check out Hana Abaza’s terrific podcast interviews and speeches on growth marketing.
Sid Bharath
Sid Bharath, growth marketing consultant boasts an impressive track record in helping SaaS companies grow, including ShareDesk, Demio, LemonStand, and ReCharge. Bharath also served as the VP of Growth at Thinkific, helping increase revenues at the online course platform from zero to a millions in ARR.
Bharath uses a five-step framework for growth hacking: creating a customer persona, sketching out the entire customer journey, prioritizing the customer’s “trigger points”, and scaling the most successful channel.
One channel that Bharath has used to great success is to leverage partnerships. While at Thinkific, Bharath partnered with thought-leaders in the online entrepreneur space, including Lewis Howes and John Lee Dumas. Using influencer webinars, Thinkific grew their revenue by 2000%.
Notable Quote
“Start by mapping out what each stage is for your business and what questions customers are asking in each stage. Then identify what needs to be done to take customers from one stage to the next and start optimizing conversion rates based on that.”
Content To Check Out
Sid Bharath writes frequently on growth marketing at Crazy Egg and Twitter.
Austin Distel
As the CMO of the wildly popular Proof, Austin Distel has experienced the power of growth hacking firsthand. After all, the Austin-based startup went from 0 to $180,000 MRR in less than a year.
Two growth hacks that made a huge impact on Proof’s success? Building virality into their product and leveraging paid traffic. Adding “Verified by Proof” to their customers’ pop-ups not only established credibility for their customers, but also acted as free advertising for their product.
On the paid traffic front, Proof relies on three main metrics: cost per acquisition (CPA), trial conversion rate, and lifetime value (LTV). By building a profitable paid acquisition funnel, Proof was not only able to gain customers-they were also able to out-brand their competition.
Notable Quote
“We solve our own problems and then package them into products.”
Content To Check Out
You can find Austin Distel’s conversion-oriented content at the Proof blog and on Linkedin.
Steli Efti
Notable quote:
“If you try to trick your customers, you’ll never earn and deserve their long-term business.”
Content to check out:
Sean Ellis
This list wouldn’t be complete without the godfather of growth hacking, Sean Ellis, particularly since he invented the term. Ellis led hyper-growth teams at multi-billion dollar unicorn startups such as LogMeIn, Dropbox and Eventbrite before founding Growth Hackers, the world’s largest community of growth professionals.
Ellis’ main advice to startups? Find product/market fit, optimize your onboarding and sales, and then test acquisition channels. Ellis doesn’t believe in a single magic-bullet hack. Rather, growth hacking is a discipline of rapid experimentation to discover the unique approach that will work for your business. Growth requires buy-in from the entire team: sales, marketing, engineering, product, and support.
Notable quote:
“Growth hacking is not anti-marketing, it is the evolution of marketing, it is pro-growth.”
Content to check out:
Ryan Hoover
As the founder of ProductHunt, Ryan Hoover has helped an incredible number of startups get traction in the marketplace. The Y Combinator-backed tech curation platform allows users to upvote their favorite tools and apps, providing huge exposure to startups with quality products.
The strategy worked. After only 3 years, Angel List acquired Product Hunt for $20 million. Hoover continues to run Product Hunt, as well as helping transform the culture of remote work.
Notable quote:
“When you look back in 6 months from today and don’t feel embarrassed by your naiveté, there’s a problem.”
Content to check out:
Hoover’s Medium blog and Twitter definitely deserve to be in your feeds.
Jim Huffman
As the CEO of GrowthHit, Jim Huffman is the go-to growth expert for startups looking to scale. After growing two startups to over $10 million in revenue, it’s obvious why that’s the case. His data-driven approach has yielded dramatic boosts in conversion rates and MRR for clients in a variety of industries.
Huffman’s team has a meticulous approach, looking at every piece of the sales funnel for optimization opportunities. By leveraging conversion rate optimization, GrowthHit was able to increase revenues 200% at Sharply.
In addition to his consultancy, Huffman mentors startup founders on growth strategy at Techstars, General Assembly, and Sephora Accelerator.
Notable quote:
“The first tactic I like to start with is asking yourself the question, ‘How can I have the biggest impact on my customer in a positive way?’”
Content to check out:
Aaron Krall
If you want to improve your trial-to-paid conversions, you need to talk to Aaron Krall. Krall is an expert on optimizing the user onboarding process. His email sequence for Thrive Email was so successful that it increased conversions by 287%.
Krall’s main takeaways for creating a killer onboarding sequence? Help your users reach their moment of first value as quickly as possible, have a clear call to action for each email, and focus on benefits instead of features.
Notable Quote
“When have customers that talk and share your product with everyone they know, it’s a good sign you’re doing something right.”
Content To Check Out
You definitely need to join Aaron Krall’s 16,000+ member Facebook group, Saas Growth Hacks. His podcast interview on having a SaaS breakthrough is excellent.
Hila Qu
As the VP of Growth of the innovative financial app Acorns, Hila Qu has built a full-funnel growth team, with sub-teams focusing on User Acquisition, Customer Marketing, and Product Growth. The accomplished growth hacker also served as a Product Manager at Growth Hackers.
Experimentation is key-Qu’s team tests new creatives daily on their acquisition funnels and have run over 100 experiments related to product development. Since Acorn is a mobile app, the team has to run these experiments on a fairly rigid schedule.
Due to the successful experimentation, focus on customer experience, and a frictionless referral program, the Acorn team has brought in over 5 million users to the app.
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Originally published at https://www.lusha.com on October 27, 2019.
