How To Think Like A Growth Hacker

If your business is a rocket ship, a growth hacker is the engineer who makes sure you've got the right mix of fuel to breach the stratosphere and reach the stars. They're the tinkerers who twist all the right knobs for maximum growth potential. They don't have opinions; they've got facts and data. If you want to give your business the best chance of thriving, you need to learn how to think like a growth hacker. We'll keep it simple and to the point, and at the end of this video, you'll look at a case study that's happening right now with an extremely high-profile company. Let's dive in, shall we? Welcome to a lux.

Alright, so what exactly is a growth hacker and what do they do? A growth hacker is a dynamic strategist with an entrepreneurial mindset, combining data analysis, experimentation, and unconventional approaches to propel a business toward rapid and exponential expansion. In other words, their job is to grow a company as fast as possible, and they do this by following a specific structure. So let's break it down.

First up, they identify opportunities for growth. To find these opportunities, a growth hacker looks at a lot of information about the market and the people who might want to buy from your business. They use special tools to see what customers are doing, what they like, and what they don't like. It's a bit like a detective investigating clues to solve a mystery. By analyzing all of this data, the growth hacker can understand the trends and figure out what's popular or what's missing on the market. It's like noticing a gap on the shelves of a store and thinking, "Hey, I could create a cool product to fill this gap, and people would love it." As a matter of fact, this is exactly what big corporations do in order to expand and get more market share. They find gaps in the market and they either buy other smaller companies to fill that gap or create new companies from the ground up to fill the spot.

So imagine you go to a small town, and you start to look around and ask yourself, "Okay, so what does this town need to succeed?" Identifying opportunities is all about being a clever investigator, using data and insights to understand what customers want and finding ways to deliver it. So the first step in thinking like a growth hacker is adopting an investigator mindset. Take a step back from your company and investigate what it actually needs to succeed. After you do that, you need a way to keep track of the progress because, like we said, growth hacking is all about data.

Next up is goals and metrics. A growth hacker decides on specific goals they want to achieve. These goals are like targets they want to hit, such as getting more customers, increasing sales, or expanding into new markets. Just like an archer aims at a bullseye, a growth hacker focuses on what they want to accomplish. To know if they're making progress, a growth hacker uses something called metrics. Now, metrics are like numbers that tell them how well things are going. For example, they might look at how many new customers the business gained, how much money they earned, or how many people visited their website. It's all data-driven.

It's like driving a car with a GPS; the goals are the destinations that you want to reach, and the metrics are like the GPS telling you how close you are to getting there. If you're off course, the GPS will help you to make the right turns to get back on track. A business that doesn't track any kind of metrics and doesn't have a predictable growth path is doomed to fail. It's like walking through the woods in the night while also being blindfolded and wearing earplugs. You kind of know which direction you're heading in, but you've got no idea if it's the right one and how much longer you have to walk before you're in the clear.

The growth hacker also makes sure the business doesn't implode under its own weight, which, you know, it's surprisingly common. We personally know examples of businesses who tried to grow faster than what was sustainable, whether that was from hiring too many people that don't have much work to do or going after too many clients with no way of actually serving them. The point is, those companies eventually crumbled and got acquired at a much lower value because they bit off more than they could chew.

So what do you do after you have these goals and metrics? Well, it's about optimizing user experience and conversion. When your number births are all in check, your next step is to focus on making your customers' experience with your business as smooth and enjoyable as possible. You want them to keep coming back for more and bring their friends too. To optimize this, a growth hacker first tries to understand the journey a customer takes when they interact with you and your business. Now imagine your business is a theme park, and you want your visitors or clients to have a blast. Well, you would look at everything from their arrival at the entrance to the rides they enjoy and the food they eat. You want to know firsthand how they actually feel when they're interacting with your business, and in turn, you need to set up certain things in order to understand that.

Some companies require all hire management to do at least a couple of weeks of customer support to just understand how their clients feel. The reason you need all of this information is to optimize your conversion rate. At the end of the day, you want to turn visitors into clients, hence the name conversion. To do this, you need to develop various tactics to make the purchasing process smooth and appealing.

This is how some companies trick you into spending more money. It's actually really common in the video game industry with in-game purchases. First, they offer something valuable at a stupid discount, making it a no-brainer deal. Now, the reason they do this is to get the credit card information of their player, which lowers the barrier of entry. The next time they'll have something to sell at a higher price. Now, suddenly the players of their game don't have to go and find their card and add in all the information; it's already done. Now the new purchase is just one click away. That's how mobile games make literally millions of dollars every single day.

Once you start thinking like a growth hacker, it's easy to understand how they're pulling it all off. Finally, the last step in growth hacking is letting the world know what's going on. You've gotta spread the word, my friend. There are two ways to do marketing as a growth hacker. One is through a shitload of money; the second one is through something called viral loops.

So here's an interesting story. Apparently, the marketing budget for the new Barbie movie was higher than the production budget for the movie itself. Everyone and their dog knew that Barbie was coming out, and it paid off, okay, with the movie making 70.5 million US dollars on its opening weekend. This is the brute force approach, and you need a fat bank account to make it happen.

The second way is through viral loops. So imagine you've got a fantastic secret recipe for a delicious treat and you share it with your best friend. Your best friend loves it so much that they share it with their friends, who in turn share it with their friends, and the cycle continues. Soon your secret recipe has become famous and everyone wants to taste it. Once that viral loop starts, it takes on a life of its own, spreading the business's message far and wide.

Now, just jumping back to the movie theme, do you really think that memes from new movies make themselves? It wouldn't take that much effort for a group of Millennials to sit in an office for one weekend and make some memes and let them run wild on the internet. Soon everyone is making them, and everyone is asking from which movie the memes are from. Does seem so far-fetched when you think about it, right? Word of mouth is extremely powerful because it's extremely cheap, and it spreads like wildfire if it's done right.

Now let's take a look at this case study we mentioned in the intro. So Twitter rebranded to X, and a lot of people are making fun about it. Indonesia even banned the newly named app due to links with porn and gambling. So what's the deal here? What's behind this rebranding? Well, it seems like the only way for Twitter to become a powerhouse is to become a super app. The newly appointed Twitter CEO, Linda Yaccarino, said X is the future state of unlimited interactivity centered in audio, video, messaging, payments, and banking, creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities.

So in other words, the Twitter people asked themselves, "Which direction are we going to grow?" And the answer was everywhere. Even Elon Musk calls the app the "everything app," and it's not something new. Okay, China has WeChat, a super app that does exactly what Elon is trying to do. Now, this is a growth experiment at an unprecedented scale, and it'll be extremely interesting to see how it plays out. But this is the kind of move you make when you're thinking like a growth hacker.

We hope you found this video valuable. If you learned something here today, write "growth hacker" in the comments. And with that said, we'll see you back here tomorrow for the Sunday motivational video.