A Guide

GROWTH HACKING
Grow your business like
nobody’s business
 TABLE OF

CONTENTS
What is growth hacking? Where does a growth team
03 37 sit in a business?

Where did Growth Hacking The Future of Growth

05 come from? 39 Hacking

What are the Objectives of Why do you need Growth

10 Growth Hacking? 42 Hacking in your business?

What is the process of How to get started with

12 growth hacking? 44 Growth Hacking?

Requirements of a growth
18 hacker

What does a growth hack-

23 er use?

Growth Hacking delivers

35 business ROI
 WHAT IS GROWTH
HACKING?
GROWTH!
A
lot of people say they can’t under-
stand why growth hacking is differ-
ent from marketing, but for us the
difference is simple. The bound-
aries of marketing and development have
blurred to create growth hacking which (un-
like marketing or development teams) has
just one focus:

Growth hacking isn’t purely marketing but it’s

not purely development territory either. It’s
kind of like the love child of both. In growth
hacking, the skill sets of marketers and de-
velopers are merged to take on business
growth problems. Growth hacking couldn’t
exist without both developer and marketing
traits and skillsets.
“Compound interest is the
eighth wonder of the world. He
who understands it, earns it ...
he who doesn’t ... pays it.”
- Albert Einstein

G
rowth hacking is a way of finding growth using
a process of controlled experimentation to
drive iterative gains across the entire market-
ing, sales and product funnels. Each iterative
gain, no matter how small, stacks up to push
a business, company or product above the noise. It’s all
about compounding growth all the way across a user
journey.

To make the power of compound growth clear to you let’s

run through a quick example:

Imagine you made a 1% improvement on your website

each day for an entire year. After 365 days, your website
will have improved almost 38x from its starting level!

Conversely, a 1% decline everyday will result, after 365

days, in a website performance 0.0255x that of its starting
level.

These iterative gains could occur anywhere, in any chan-

nel or within the product. However, the goal of growth
hacking is always the same, to find growth and so it oc-
curs across websites, apps and even business functions.
Each gain is the result of a growth tactic found through
rigorous controlled experimentation, carried out with a
team grounded in agile methodology.
WHERE DID GROWTH HACKING

COME FROM?

G
rowth hacking is an amalgamation of mar-
keting and development. If you’re a growth
hacker, you will use an agile methodology
process similar to what agile software
development teams in technology com-
panies have used since 2001. This is when The Agile
Manifesto was created in Utah (http://agilemanifesto.
org/). The key values of the Agile Manifesto are:

- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

- Working software over comprehensive documenta-
tion
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan

During this time, tech companies began to emerge

with more and more frequency. These new compa-
nies structured very differently to the organisations of
yesterday. With limited money and resources but big
ideas, tech companies couldn’t afford to do things -
specifically software development - by the old book
(often referred to as “waterfall development”). https://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfall_model

Waterfall development is a sequential non-iterative

design process and consists of big scale upfront
planning and a very long cycle time (3-6 months) to
deployment. The phases of this approach are:

1. Requirements
2. Analysis
3. Design
4. Coding
5. Testing
6. Operations
W
hat was the problem with this? Well, there were
a few. As the product wasn’t tested by custom-
ers during early development, there was no way
for the company to receive essential user feed-
back across the product as to whether is was
solving a real problem or was easy to use.

This meant there were massive assumptions about user re-

quirements/wants within a product (and even the need or want
of the product itself) meaning products were often substandard.
This resulted in users not coming come back. Also, as the pro-
cess was one directional and is effectively a series of dependen-
cies, any delay resulted in large queues, project delays and lost
revenue and profit.

Emerging tech companies couldn’t afford to potentially waste

time or money. Developers working together (or alone) on a
product therefore gravitated away from waterfall development.
They needed to move and shape their product and win the
attention of customers more quickly. They also needed to figure
out what was and wasn’t working, fast. This would ensure they
didn’t spend too much time on one product feature which might
not turn out to give the results predicted.
I
n short what they wanted was a new organisational model
for software development; a model that put user feedback
in the middle and facilitated teamwork, faster cycle times,
fewer development queues and better data driven decision
making. This would also ultimately decrease time to reve-
nue and profit. It was about deploying the MVP (minimal value
product) and watching the reaction of the users, taking feed-
back and modifying/fixing things that weren’t working.

Project management was the key foundation for this new di-
rection, with well defined and understood capacity and require-
ments. Things moved quickly, startups became lean with pro-
ductivity being (like it still is) key. This movement was swiftly
followed by all kinds of useful project management tools such
as Pivotal Tracker (https://www.pivotaltracker.com), Atlassian
(https://www.atlassian.com/), Agilio (https://www.agilio.eu/#/)
and many others. These products were eaten up by this new
school of development team, hungry to embrace a new culture
of business.
HOW DID TECH STARTUPS TOOK
ADVANTAGE OF THIS?

T
hese new products offered a whole new plethora
of potential activities and opportunities when it
came to marketing. Products could play a role in
their own growth, finding ways to leverage users
to share the product to non-users in return for
something. A great example of this is Dropbox, who offered
current users more free storage space every time that user
got a friend to sign up to the service.

Airbnb famously took it one step further and reverse engi-

neered Craigslist to scale their business by automatically
loading all properties from their website to Craiglist, giving
them so much more visibility via Craiglist’s huge audience.
The ROI on this tactic was literally billions! Learning to ex-
ploit and take advantage of other larger sites was becoming
the name of the game.

Traditional marketers still needed to communicate brand

values, facilitate sales and hone branding. Developers still
had to create and design a fully functioning product without
having to wonder about how to market what they’d built…
but now there was a hybrid. This is where this new form of
marketing began to break away from development and mar-
keting and become its own thing.
Growth hacking
was officially
born.
This mash of marketing and develop-
ment that came together in a burst of
ingenious glory would change market-
ing forever.

It was a way of making small bets, of

making educated guesses on what
would or wouldn’t work for a user or
product and testing it.

What worked, was then scaled.

Growth hackers listened, tested and
informed startups if they were heading
in the right direction and if not, how to
get there.
WHAT ARE THE
OBJECTIVES
OF
GROWTH
HACKING ?
T
he objectives of growth hacking are -
somewhat obviously - to grow a busi-
ness. In order to grow a business you
must identify in what areas the busi-
ness is not growing. These are bottle-
necks. You must find out where the bottlenecks
are, find out why they are there and then find out
how to break through them. Once a bottleneck is
broken through, you begin work on the next one.
You keep breaking through bottlenecks and the
business begins to grow.

As a growth hacker you must grow the entire

product funnel from top to bottom, working all
the way down the marketing and product stacks.
From top line awareness to engaging users on
your site to get to the “aha” moment, all the way to
revenue funnel testing and beyond. You’re aiming
to bring users back in for a second purchase or
subscription. You don’t just need to get users…
you need to get retained users driving monthly re-
curring revenue. The key metric that drives growth
hackers is Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV).
WHAT IS THE
PROCESS
OF
GROWTH
HACKING?
T
he process of growth hacking is kind of
cyclical, but if there’s was a beginning, you
begin with analysing the data - any data -
you already have. To help gather data, you
would implement an analytics schema so
you can visualise your marketing and product funnel
and how it’s being used, from traffic to user acquisi-
tion, to sales and revenue and back again.

Start with a basic analytics schema and build into it.

You should treat it like a product. Build out the bits
that deliver value and provide important and inform-
ative data. You will then be able to see where the bot-
tlenecks lie. Get the data to tell you enough about a
business to know a) where they need to grow and b)
if there are any bottlenecks in the way of that growth.

As we mentioned previously, growth hackers work

on bottlenecks all the way down the marketing and
product funnel. You don’t just need to acquire visitors
but get them to take action, to buy and buy again. In
order to help with this you will need to find a way to
visualise the funnel or user journey in some way. A
great example of this is Dave McClure’s Pirate Met-
rics (AARRR):
ACQUISITION

ACTIVATION

RETENTION

REFERRAL

REVENUE
Y
ou will examine all
possible activities you can
use to break the identified
bottleneck in any given part
of the funnel and begin to
run ‘scientific like’ experiments to fix or
break through that bottleneck. To run an
experiment, you must have the following:
1
1. Hypothesis - if I try X, I
believe that Z will happen.
2
Methodology - you will want
to document your experiment
so that another tester can
re-test easily without asking
you what you did (i.e. it needs

3 Assumptions - a clear
to be easily repeatable)

understanding of what met-

rics you’re looking at within
the experiment, and what

4
success looks like (e.g. an
increase in conversion rate by
15%)
Results - a clear set of results
that are a numerical descrip-
tion of what happened. This
should certainly include statis-

5
tical significance, either
Frequentist or Bayesian.

Observations - Was the exper-

iment a success? Did it drive
growth or do you have a null
hypothesis (i.e. no correlation

6
between activity and results)

Learnings - What did you

learn? This is, in all honesty

7 the most important part.

Action Points - If you have any

action points or wish to
conduct any future testing.
The learnings should really
inform your ongoing work and
assumptions.
I
f you find experiments that deliver growth, no matter
how small, the challenge is to scale into them. You must
also learn from failed experiments, as this nullifies your
hypothesis and stops you going down the wrong path
for too long. It’s all about finding out what does and what
doesn’t work. Knowing what doesn’t work will save everyone
from concentrating on a dead end and wasting time - so it’s
important. Remember that agile development is all about
time to profit? Well growth hacking is all about time to learn-
ing that empowers growth.

Once you’re done, you move onto the next bottleneck, just
rinse and repeat to deliver iterative gains across your busi-
ness.
REQUIREMENTS OF A

GROW TH H ACKER

One growth hacker can be wild-

ly different to another - you don’t
usually get to a role like this with-
out a strong personality - but they
will always have a few things in
common.
TECHNICAL ABILITIES

N
o matter if you come from a content,
design or development background
you’ll need to have a solid working
knowledge of analytics. Analytics has
to excite you. Finding out what data
means and how you can manipulate it with action
is paramount to being a growth hacker. The more
you master analytics, the more you’ll grow to love
it because it has the power to answer your ques-
tions.

The best growth hackers are really passionate

about analytics, so if you want to follow in their
footsteps, the best place to start is a simple Google
Analytics course. Here is a basic free one to get you
going, something we ask that all interns or junior
hires at Rebel Hack to jump into straight away to
get them up to speed fast.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLI5YfMzC-
fRtZ8eV576YoY3vIYrHjyVm_e.

Growth hackers can come from anywhere within a

business. It’s not always about a particular set of
skills as any talented business user can pick up the
growth hacking process, as long as they have the
right mindset.
 PAID MARKETING CHANNEL EXPERT

I
n many ways the most desirable way to
scale a business is to use paid channels as
it’s predictable and therefore easy to model
and scale - and investors love predictability.
Paid marketing channels are also a mas-
sive part of business growth. You just need to
work out how to do it as cheaply and effective-
ly as possible, and where the opportunities for
scale are.

CONTENT MARKETER OR WRITER

Y
ou need someone with the abil-
ity to turn ideas into words that
work. Great copy feeds into almost
everything you do, from CTAs to
landing page and web page de-
sign. Content marketers understand blogging
and inbound marketing and they’re also able
to effectively communicate with the customer
through different channels. No matter how
good an idea is, if you can’t communicate it
well then you’re always losing.
DEVELOPER

I
t really helps to be able to code. A knowledge
of CSS, Javascript, HTML, Python libraries
empower growth hackers to to build widgets
and microsites or develop product features
without development support. This means
growth teams can move quickly and work inde-
pendently of development which keeps the prod-
uct development undisturbed and on track.
UI - UX

A
n understanding behind what
drives a great user experience and
the ability to test that is invaluable.
Knowing how a site should flow,
how users interact with the prod-
uct and what changes promote a better user
experience can be the difference between suc-
cess and failure. An understanding of human
psychology and decision making helps shape
products that are not just good, but truly great
in the eyes of the user.

As you can see, the potential skillsets are var-

ied. Having at least one deep skill set is impor-
tant but even more important is having the right
mindset. You need a passion for hustle, getting
out there and trying new things. You should be
good at managing a lot of diverse projects but
still be able to focus on moving one metric at a
time.

You can’t be afraid of failure, but be willing to

learn from any null hypothesis’ and use them
to inform future work. You need to be curious,
willing to learn and to question your own as-
sumptions.
What does a
growth hacker
use?
conversion
rate
optimisation
platofrms
Data &
Analytics
platforms
Email
platforms
Automation &
Social Media
Platforms
landing
page
deployment
paid
channel
management
design
scripting
and
scraping
keywords
and hashtag
search
free
image
source
T
here are a load of great products out there
you can use for various aspects of growth,
but ultimately you’ll just use the ones you
like most. Those above are just a few of
our favorites.

Trying new platforms is an important aspect of

growth, so learning to learn fast is a crucial part of
being the growth hacking game! However, one word
of warning. Don’t spend your entire time (and budget)
testing new platforms over and over as there are just
not enough hours in the day. Make a decision as to
what your toolkit looks like and get on with the work
involved to grow your business. I would review your
toolkit once a year, and make any adjustments re-
quired.
 GROWTH HACKING

ROI
DELIVERS BUSINESS
 O I
R G
rowth hacking is ideally suited to deliver high Re-
turn On Investment (ROI) as it’s low risk, low cost
and iterative nature enable micro adjustments
and small gains that compound over time.

As we mentioned earlier when talking about how growth

hacking emerged, startups don’t have unlimited resources.
They need to focus on conserving what resources they can,
therefore ROI is critical (much more so than businesses with
inflated marketed budgets). This ROI is also expected on an
individual basis too, so both teams and individuals need to
be able to hold themselves to account.

When you use growth hacking tactics and methods, you

should account for all the users who come in and out of a
product. You can see which channels work to bring users in,
who is buying and who isn’t, who’s returning and who isn’t.
We call it ‘growth accounting’. This helps to identify where
where a business is haemorrhaging customers (aka reve-
nue), so that it can be fixed.

Using statistics and insight analysis you can really under-

stand your growth rates over time and identify when patterns
emerge. Running cohort and retention analysis is important
in order to showcase ROI to those in your team, and to see
how user behaviour is changing over time. Instead of just
looking at the immediate data, you can also have a long term
overview of the progress of a business.
 Where
does a growth
WHERE DOES A GROWTH
team sit in a
TEAM SIT IN A BUSINESS?
business?
USINES
A
growth team is not part of marketing or devel-
opment and in larger organisations may emerge
headed up by a VP of Growth. A growth team
needs to be able to act autonomously and ex-
periment outside the “normal” rules of business
engagement. They should be able to act across all business
units and challenge and test into all aspects of the business.
If they can’t go where the bottleneck is, they can’t fix it.

Many companies get too bogged down with wrong assump-

tions. They build assumptions up about their business and
about what works best without really ever having tested
them. Spending hours ensuring the right font is used or
exactly the right tone of phrase (when the tone or font has
never been tested) totally misses the point of growth hack-
ing. Growth hacking experiments won’t fail due to failures
to sticking to brand guidelines, they will fail due to inflexible
businesses drowning in a dogma of assumption.

If you want your business to get into growth hacking you will
need to learn to let go, and move toward becoming an agile
business letting growth hackers into every part of your busi-
ness.
 THE FUTURE OF
GROWTH HACKING
THE FUTURE OF

T
o date, growth hacking has been
adopted around the world by tech-
nology startups and has made
massive inroads into FTSE and
S&P 100 businesses too.

A
lthough it started in the tech startup
space, growth hacking is being taken
up rapidly by non technology business
such as the financial sector (now
dubbed fintech), service companies
and even manufacturing. Growth hacking as it
now stands is just one part of a larger machine
which is growth marketing, sitting inside a process
of agile marketing. Growth hacking is here to stay,
and will continue to drive business value for many
businesses.

We predict the same mindset will be adopted by

non technical businesses, government organisa-
tions, charities and everything in between. It’s a
sure fire way to find growth, without taking large
risks.

Growth hacking could be used in many other busi-

ness functions, driving growth in different ways.
Analysing software development cycles and per-
formifng iterative testing could easily reduce cycle
times and therefore increase profit. Also, testing
across processes within customer service could
(using just one example) reduce call waiting times,
thus improving a business’s Net Promoter Score
(NPS).
FUTURE
S
o watch this space, as we predict
growth hacking process will creep
into many other operational areas of
a business, driving profit in any num-
ber of ways.

We predict the same mindset will be adopted by

non technical businesses, government organ-
isations, charities and everything in between.
It’s a sure fire way to find growth, without taking
large risks.

Growth hacking could be used in many other

business functions, driving growth in different
ways. Analysing software development cycles
and performifng iterative testing could easily
reduce cycle times and therefore increase profit.
Also, testing across processes within customer
service could (using just one example) reduce
call waiting times, thus improving a business’s
Net Promoter Score (NPS).
 WHY DO YOU NEED

GROWTH HACKING
IN YOUR BUSINESS
WHY DO YOU NEED

G
rowth hacking is useful for almost any business. It
can be applied across an organisation and will help
you work through growth impediments quickly and
in a structured manner. Even if you’re just starting
out (even better if you’re just starting out) you can
test your assumption before you launch your app, website or
product. The ability to do this is invaluable for new businesses
as it might help you make adjustments to your business model
early on before you have invested a lot of time and money into
it.

For more established businesses, as well as improving ROI

it allows new insight, data and experimentation to help you
understand new and current customers better and what new
customers want. You learn how to shape your business, keep a
competitive edge, attract and retain customers.

Growth hacking also enables a business to get their develop-

ment team closer to the end user and help better prioritise
development focus to build products that are actually useful. It
gives development teams the ability to receive feedback from
the end user as soon as possible, shaping their ongoing work.
 HOW TO GET

STARTED WITH

GROWTH HACKING
GET STARTED
A
lone growth hacker will not make you millions -
you usually need a wider skillset and a change
is business mindset.

The skills required to be a growth hacker are

in high demand and you will need to ensure you have a
growth hacker alongside other skills on your team. There-
fore, if you’re not sure what you want exactly it can be
easy to spend a lot of money and get the wrong thing. We
might be biased but we think the best way to approach
this is to hire an agency to get you going, set your growth
machine up and find out what part of growth hacking is
most important to you.

This will save you a ton of money in the long term and
mean you get access to a wide range of specialist from
the start, that know how to manage themselves, are used
to working as a team and won’t need any micro manage-
ment.

A good growth agency will just start to deliver growth and

a great one will also start to help you see how to incor-
porate growth hacking into your organisation organically.
The latter is what we do. As well as giving you the prover-
bial fish, we believe (as the saying goes) you need to learn
how to catch them yourself in the long run if you want to
thrive.

Each business is different - or at least - should be, but

delivering growth always has the same principles. If you
want to find out more about the ways we can deliver
growth for your company then get in touch. We’d love to
hear more about your business and your story so just
drop us an email or comment below and we’ll get in touch,
it would be great to chat!
Written, Created and Designed by

www.rebelhack.com