Who should read this This material applies to companies of every size and vertical. I cover both introductory and advanced B2B and B2C tactics. Marketers of every skill level will encounter new material.

If you're brainstorming startup ideas +

It's important you learn growth hacking before deciding which idea to work on. It will save you years of going down the wrong path. You should start by assessing whether your idea is actually suited for profitable and scalable user acquisition. In this handbook, you'll learn which ad channels you can expect to succeed for your business, and how to increase customer purchase rates. When you're done reading this, if you can’t foresee these strategies working for the startup idea you're considering, you should consider scrapping your idea.

If you're a manager +

It's critical that managers know what growth entails so they can facilitate it. Don't treat growth like a black box powered by your engineering and marketing departments. It's your most important business function. This handbook helps you prioritize growth marketing projects based on their likely profitability and ease of implementation. Plus, it sheds light on a growth marketer's skill set so you can effectively assess hiring candidates. (Many companies unknowingly hire “growth experts” who are brand marketers experienced only in creating brand voice and generating buzz. Unfortunately, brand marketers often lack knowledge of user acquisition and conversion optimization. This handbook will help you avoid unintentionally hiring them.)

Growth hacking definition Growth hacking is simply data-driven revenue maximization. Growth "hacking" is a silly term. (It also goes by performance marketing and growth marketing.) I use it because it helps this handbook rank higher in Google. Practice what you preach. In reality, growth is not a series of "hacks." It's a rigorous methodology consisting of experimenting, collecting data, and leveraging human psychology. All in pursuit of directly maximizing revenue — not raising brand awareness or generating buzz.

Growth hacking versus traditional marketing +

Growth marketing (which is the term I'll be using) differs from traditional marketing in that growth primarily focuses on clearly measurable and directly profitable marketing initiatives. For example, growth rarely starts with billboards, radio ads, conferences, and other difficult-to-measure channels. (Try attributing a customer to the billboard they saw. Now try doing it when you have multiple billboards in a city. You won't know which is worth keeping.)

Growth hacking knowledge Growth marketing works through continual optimization of every step in the customer's journey. This journey includes the ads people see, the website and sales experience they then encounter, and the product they ultimately buy and use. In other words, growth marketing involves four key disciplines: Customer acquisition gets people to your site.

gets people to your site. Product development offers something people want.

offers something people want. Retention keep customers coming back.

keep customers coming back. Experimentation is how you iterate on all three. Growth marketers must be familiar with all four disciplines. Or, at minimum, your team of growth marketers must collectively address all three. They will also need to possess a few skills. Growth hacking skills A growth marketer must be: Creative when brainstorming compelling text and imagery for marketing assets.

when brainstorming compelling text and imagery for marketing assets. Reflective when assessing what has been learned from creative experiments.

when assessing what has been learned from creative experiments. Resourceful when scaling those experiments. Let’s elaborate on that last point. Resourceful entails being aggressively proactive:

Resourceful marketers never stop finding, testing, and optimizing customer acquisition channels. For example, when Pinterest releases a new ad format, they'll spend an afternoon spending $500 to uncover whether there’s new, low-hanging fruit to pick. (I cover ad channels on this page.)

Resourceful marketers never stop running A/B tests to improve signup and purchase conversion rates. (I cover A/B tests on this page.) This handbook will help hone all three skills. When to hire brand marketers Counterintuitively, "brand marketing" is typically ineffective at shaping a brand. And, as mentioned, it's typically inefficient at increasing revenue growth. So, what is it good for? A few things, including keeping your messaging measured and consistent. However, most companies don't need to exercise that restraint early on. Because long-term public perception is more the result of having a product people love than blasting them with messaging. Consumer love is what begets organic brand building via word-of-mouth, and word-of-mouth supersedes the messaging your company proactively pushes through brand marketing. So before you hire a brand marketer, hire another product manager to make your product so enjoyable that people can't stop talking about it. Later, once you've established a working growth strategy, consider hiring a brand marketer to maintain the aesthetic and voice of your brand. It'll help you stay singular and differentiated in a crowded market. But, before then, brand marketers typically slow your growth with arbitrary constraints. It's not uncommon for a brand director to dictate that all marketing materials must have red backgrounds with white text, as one example. Well, pile enough rules like that onto one another, and growth marketers won't feel empowered to experiment with different ad designs to uncover what the data says is the best aesthetic to get ad clicks that lead to purchases. Isn't that what matters? Ultimately, what’s the difference between brand marketing and growth marketing? Brand marketing increases the potential energy for revenue. It primes users to convert at a higher rate in the future. Growth marketing, on the other hand, converts that potential energy into kinetic — it gets purchases.

Who's Julian Shapiro? I spend thousands of hours deconstructing complex topics. I compile my insights into free handbooks (like the one you're reading). Over a million people read them annually. Insights that don't make it into handbooks get shared on my Twitter. I'm also the founder of Demand Curve, a company that trains startups in growth marketing and helps them find great marketing contractors and agencies. You can read more on my about page.

The growth funnel Before you dive into this handbook's tactics, let's develop an intuition for which growth tactics will likely succeed for your company. To do this, I must introduce the growth funnel. It's the journey a customer takes through your advertising and product experience: Acquisition → Conversion → Engagement → Revenue → Referral I. Acquisition An acquisition "channel" is a place you source potential customers from. For example, ads, content marketing, and sales are all acquisition channels. Channels separate into two broad categories: Paid channels — Paid channels include advertising, sponsorships, and affiliate marketing. Here, "paid" means you're paying for channel performance as it scales. For example, for every click, impression, or referred sale, you're paying.

— Paid channels include advertising, sponsorships, and affiliate marketing. Here, "paid" means you're paying for channel performance as it scales. For example, for every click, impression, or referred sale, you're paying. Unpaid channels — Unpaid channels include content marketing, offline networking, sales, virality, and PR. Here, "Unpaid" doesn't mean these channels are free, but rather you're not paying more as performance scales. For example, you'll pay for the labor to have a blog post written. But the resulting SEO traffic doesn't cost you on a per-visit basis. This is great — unpaid channels can have unbounded upside! This handbook teaches the most popular paid channel: Ads. It also teaches two unpaid channels: Content Marketing and Sales. As I explain below, many companies find that only unpaid channels will ever work for them. II. Conversion When visitors are intrigued by what you're offering (on your website or in-person), some of them "convert" into registered users or paying customers. "Conversion events" are the business-critical events along your product's funnel. For example, a website visitor may first convert into a registered user. Then, after using your app for a while, they might later convert into a paying customer. You'll learn conversion optimization through Landing Pages, A/B Testing, and Ads. III. Engagement At the point of Engagement, we've already acquired users and converted them into registered users. But now we need them to engage if they're ever going to pay us. Many businesses will handhold a user to teach them how the product works. Because educated users are more likely to become purchasers. This handbook teaches engagement through User Onboarding. IV. Revenue Your revenue per customer can be maximized through cost reduction, conversion rate optimization, pricing optimization, cross-selling other products, and retention. Unfortunately, this topic is outside the scope of this handbook. V. Referral You need to make your product so good that customers do your selling for you. It's the most cost-effective way to scale your business in the long-term. Thankfully, you don’t need to be a viral consumer app to accomplish this. Many B2B companies grow exclusively through word-of-mouth.

This handbook teaches referrals at the bottom of the User Onboarding page. Tip — See the bottom of your screen for quick navigation links.

Growth funnel loops +

The growth funnel's linearity — for example, going from Acquisition to Referral — doesn't mean the user's journey must also be linear. Their journey may consist of repeatedly looping from advertising to in-app engagement before finally reaching the point of purchase conversion. For example, if a user fails to engage with your product, you might show them new Instagram ads directed at your educational content. You can do this repeatedly until they're given the right content that finally motivates them to the next step. I call this the Retargeting Loop. (I'll talk more about retargeting later.) Here's another loop: the Ecommerce Repurchase Loop. After a user goes from Acquisition to Revenue, you then email them a steep coupon to compel them to purchase yet again. In other words, you're prompting them to repeat earlier steps in the funnel. If you can trigger the Repurchase Loop repeatedly, you may have a subscription business. The key takeaways are: Your marketing efforts should consider where in the funnel a user is, and what type of message will best compel them to the next step in the funnel.

After a user purchases, consider how you can restart their loop — or direct them toward a different, complementary growth funnel.