« Fall in love with the process, and the results will come. » — Eric Thomas

Hard truth: Growth Hacking is not somehow magical. So, if you imagine that just tweaking the color of your current piggy pink call-to-action for a fantastic barbie pink call-to-action will bring your company a crazy 30% uplift conversion rate, you better think twice about it. Did you follow a strict process to research, prioritize, design, test and then analyze this experiment accurately? If not, I’m sorry to announce you that this experiment is not that likely to attract new customers magically.

Be reassured. Whether it is Airbnb, Uber, Booking or most high-growth companies, they didn’t find out their remarkable growth hack thanks to some random idea. Discovering “silver bullets” was the result of hard work and a strict process to get something worthwhile to focus on.

A “Magic Growth Hack” working for any business doesn’t exist outside of sales letter hype and over-the-top sales pitch.

Besides, if I agree that all the trendy “hacky” techniques that we heard about -scraping, black hat marketing, automation, viral loops, etc. - can be super powerful to push a company’s growth, I feel that we may have missed the most crucial point. Beyond the buzzword, Growth Hacking (GH) is a step-by-step process.

If these guys are doing so many experiments, it must be for a reason, isn’t it?

Enough small talk, in this article, I’ll dig into the Growth Hacking Methodology I’ve been trained at during the 3-month in-house program of the Growth Tribe Academy in Amsterdam. Note that I will make a particular focus on the Rapid Experimentation process that a lot of successful tech startups have used to scale their business. Hope that knowledge can help some of you!

PS1: Please note that the following paragraphs are my interpretation of the Growth Tribe learnings and my own experience as an entrepreneur.

PS2: If you are expecting a fancy version of a To-Do list, you won’t find it here.

STEP 1: Before applying the GH Methodology blindly, make sure that you reach the Product Market Fit

Image Credits: Tech Sahara

“Startups require a solid foundation of product/market fit before progressing up the pyramid and scaling the business.”

1 — A fast driven growth process is useless if you haven’t achieved the product market fit (PMF).

If your product or service doesn’t have PMF, a growth team won’t be of much help… It doesn’t make sense to try scaling a product if you’ve have not found that your users like your product and keep using it. Period. At that stage, you should obsessively focus on delivering the right product to the right market. Adopt the lean startup mindset and methodology and figure out who your (possible) customers are, understand their needs and build a fantastic product that will transform them into your first ambassadors. Yes, it can take some time and a lot of adjustments, but you probably agree that trying to scale a shitty product is even worse for your time management.

2 — But how do know you have reached this holy grail PMF ?

The Sean Ellis “Very Disappointed” Method

1. You send a questionnaire mostly to your active users

2. You ask them: “how would you feel if you could no longer use our product tomorrow?” and they can choose between “very disappointed” “somewhat disappointed” “not disappointed” or “I don’t use this anymore”

3. After segmenting your responses afterward, if at least 40% of the respondents are “very disappointed”, you reach the threshold for PMF.

Nevertheless, for some products, this could be more difficult to apply, so that’s why some Growth Hackers prefer using the Brian Balfour approach to state that you have PMF.

The Brian Balfour Trifecta Approach

1. Your product has some form of strong organic top-line growth → products with PMF usually get recommended and benefit from organic growth.

2. Your product has good retention → you retain your users, and your churn (if applicable) is low. For instance, Snapchat used to have 50% of daily active users.

3. Your users are using your product correctly → you have to be honest with yourself about what is a meaningful use of your app or product. If you have an online job board for startups and each of the startups posts one job every three months, that’s probably ok! But, for a tool like Slack, it’s perhaps sending a message twenty times per day.

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3 — Is Growth Hacking useless before PMF then?

Well, if a growth team experimenting established a fast-paced process doesn’t make sense before the PMF, we can still identify an overlap (cf. slide below) between the Problem/Solution Fit phase and the PMF phase where it makes sense to use Growth Hacking (GH). During that time, GH should be used to identify growth opportunities in pre-product market fit products by looking at data and usage patterns. The Bullseye Template developed in the book Traction can be used at that moment. Note that it will also be helpful to optimize the growth of products that already have product/market fit at a later stage.

Image Credits: Startitup

4 — Find the sweet spot where it makes sense to apply the Growth Process Methodology

Image Credits: Brian Balfour, former VP Growth at Hubspot

For Brian Balfour, « a startup goes through three phases of growing.”.

1. Traction

2. Transition

3. Growth

As you can see, focusing on the right strategy at the right moment could help your startup reach the next level. If you want more insights, take a look at the article here. Obviously, every business will have a slightly different moment when it makes sense to try getting to the next phase. Please note that since we’re in the “Transition Phase” with my Startup Les Sherpas, I could be a little bit biased in the rest of the article.

PS: Les Sherpas is an ed-tech startup which has joined the first batch of the Founders Program by Station F, a giant French Incubator with more than 1000 startups directly on-site. Besides, we were followed by the Station F documentary series during three months (four startups selected out of 1000). One year after the first release of our first Minimum Viable Product, our online tutoring service for high school and universities has just reached the 10 000 hours given on the platform. We now want to grow faster and reach the 30 000 hours given for next scholar year!

STEP 2: The five prerequisites to implement the growth hacking process in your organization

PS: I highly recommend this youtube video from Growth Tribe with David Arnoux where I use most of the knowledge process to write the following.

Image Credits: Growth Tribe

Once you have your product-market fit, it’s only the beginning of a long path before implementing an efficient Growth Process and achieve your goals. Indeed, it will require yourself to understand and communicate correctly within your team what are the critical components of your business. Why? You’ll need everyone involved in this growth process to make it a success.

To do so, define clearly the first five prerequisites before going in the rapid experimentation G.R.O.W.S phase → the Business Model Canvas, the Value Proposition Canvas, the Personas, the Pirate Funnels and, the OMTM.

Don’t you know what these acronyms are? Let’s break them down together!

1 — The Business Model Canvas

To begin with, let’s take the Wikipedia definition, “the Business Model Canvas is a strategic management and lean startup template for developing new or documenting existing business models. It is a visual chart with elements describing a firm’s or product’s value proposition, infrastructure, customers, and finances.”

I think you got it. It describes visually on one page what your company is doing. Pretty cool to have a global overview, onboard new people and get everyone with a basic knowledge of what the f*** you’ve been doing for the past few years (months?). It’s such a typical Business School stuff now that I think pretty much everyone knows it, so I will not bore you with all the steps to create it. But, if you still haven’t done it, take a pen and begin filling in the model below.

Image Credits: Business Model Alchemist

2 — The Value Proposition Canvas

Integrated into the Business Model Canvas, it is interesting to dig deeper into this element because this is where the heart and value of your product lie. Thanks to this canvas, you can picture who your customer is and how your value proposition is shaped to make them loved your product. If you’re one of the founders, it may be evident to you but are you sure that all the rest of your team get it? Anyway, it’s always better to make sure that everyone is on the same line.

Besides, as Phil Morle explained it here, the next step once you have filled in the document is “to figure out if this is all just a dream you have for the perfect value proposition, or whether it is anchored on how your customers behave.” (the second solution is the one you’re looking for ;))

Image Credits: Strategyzer

3 — The Personas

A persona is a fictional profile that represents a brand audience. Developing a persona helps you to bring the audience to life and target it more accurately.

Why define your personas?

The objective is to succeed in putting yourself in your customers’ shoes, try to make a mental representation of their way of thinking and behaving and finally find a solution to their problem. Once done, it will be much easier to sell your products because you’ll know what they’re looking for.

As an example, your strategy on social networks will not be the same if you talk to Alicia, freshly employed as a human resources junior in a tech startup or Philippe, the sales manager of an established company.

How to build your personas? A few rules you should follow.