Growth Hacking Lessons Learned

The Bimotics team spent early July learning about Growth Hacking from Aaron Ginn at Stumble Upon hosted by Refresh Miami. I honestly had to Google what it meant, but I was excited to get perspective from the Valley nonetheless.  I went in thinking that the principles sounded a lot like marketing so i figured it was just another buzzword going around the geeks to make the even more exclusive.  But I learned that the Growth Hacking was much more essential than that.  And indeed it has a place between product engineering and marketing that is focused on what matters most to investors- growth.

5 key takeaways from the event:

1. Growth Hacking relies heavily on Lean Startup Principles such as sprints and measures
2. User Accounting:  new users + reactivation - churn - deactivations = user growth
3. When performing experiments, aways solve for the down case. So if the test case didn’t work, then you have learned something.  You can learn why it failed.  True scientists are always trying to prove for the null
4. The goal is to find what are the people in your channel are thinking and how they are looking and interacting with your product
5. The data science role, assists product manager in determining areas to focus on by identifying new opportunities and communicating the long run effects of the A/B tests

For now, Growth Hacking is mainly focusing on more of the B2C business models and products that make money from ads and replay on shares and links.  This makes sense as these applications need to get as many users (millions of active users) as possible clicking through their stuff. However, the basic tenets and lessons such as creating a metrics oriented culture, running a lean organization and focusing on actionable metrics definitely apply to B2Bs as well.