The Well Known Secret in Silicon Valley and The Mindset of A Growth Hacker

White Whale:

There’s a well-known “secret” in Silicon Valley about how to actually grow a company really fast, and that’s to measure two things:

1. How many people that you’re actually selling products to are actually successful in the reason they bought the product? Does it make them more money, or does it get them to some desired outcome?

2. How many of those people that are successful are referring?

When you measure those two things versus measuring top-line, top of the funnel metrics, calls, or sales, or website hits - when you’re measuring the things at the end, that’s when you can really play with:

1. Who are my best customers?

2. Who are the ones that are actually marketing for me for free? And get the crazy growth rate that you see in Silicon Valley.

The reason that this is so important, the reason this is so different, is because while everybody else is focusing on how to get more sales - they’re focusing on tiny, tiny changes at the end of the funnel that are actually going to drive a lot of viral, referral, word of mouth traffic that you hoped for in the past, but now you can kind of “Moneyball” it. I heard a really good quote that says “we’re going from the madmen days of advertising and growth to the Moneyball days of advertising and growth” - it’s going from massive spend to stats-driven wins. That’s what you really want to go after.

It’s going from talking about marketing funnels and shifting to the very, very end of the funnel and post-purchase, what that experience is like and how that gives you a feedback loop into growth.

The Mindset of a Growth Hacker:

A lot of small and midsize businesses feel that at any time there could be a startup that comes in and disrupts their way past them. I think that in this day in age that the mentality needs to be: you either decide to disrupt yourself or you get disrupted by someone else.

The mentality you want to implement is:

1. How can you take what other people are doing

2. How can you take what other companies are doing and implement it in your own business to be the disruptor?

A really good example of what’s been working really well, as far as this “white whale” traffic goes, is DropBox. They did a really good job when they were first starting out - they had this video that went viral, so essentially it had those referral metrics already there and they doubled down on that. They created an entire referral process within their sign-up system where every time you share - you get more space, every time you get someone to sign up - you get more features, so you can actually unlock things as you go. They weren’t the first to implement this tactic, but they used it really early on and really well. They essentially incentivized the use of the product within the product itself.