To learn this discipline in the past, you would have had to personally network your way to the top growth practitioners in Silicon Valley. We had to learn the hard way, by doing it ourselves. Everything from paid acquisition, landing page tests, conversion optimization, viral loops, timing new content channels, all of it. I tried so many different ideas that I can’t even remember them all anymore. Little did we know how much of an impact that one day would have on the startup world.īack when we coined the term “growth hacker”, not much was being shared about how to go from day 1 of a startup to an IPO. We had finally put a name to what people in the startup world had been doing by necessity. Someone who is disciplined enough to focus on growing the business any way possible. It was time for the entire startup marketing community to chart their own course.Īnd that’s when it came to us… growth hacker.Īt the earliest stages of a startup, you don’t need a marketer, you need a growth hacker. It was a completely different philosophy. It was the end of an era, a complete break from the past. Patrick, Sean, and I were on to something. A person with the discipline to think about any part of the business as long as it was about getting growth. Someone who was focused on the true north of the business. Someone who would look at the metrics and talk to customers on a daily basis. Startups needed a person who was living and breathing the flow of customers in and out of the product. There typically is NO budget to spend on marketing. This approach can help when you have an established company with plenty of budget to spare. They’d spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on billboards. The more expensive the channel, the better. So they’d ramp up burn with a bloated marketing team and then ask their army to run random tactics on every channel available. They had the resume, why wouldn’t we trust them? They could only think in tactics. We would hire these expensive marketing executives who came from large companies because we thought they knew how to scale. It wasn’t just us, nearly every company went through this.Īnd when we did actually accelerate the business, the wins had nothing to do with the standard marketing approach. We had been walking into board meetings after having just spent a boatload on marketing and none of our metrics had moved an inch. We had been watching companies (OUR companies) burn through capital without anything to show for it. When startups hired seasoned marketers, they got the opposite of growth. Larger companies would hire seasoned marketing executives to help grow their businesses but startups didn’t need that. The traditional approach wasn’t cutting it anymore. We had all been obsessing over the same thing: marketing in the startup world was going through a massive shift. Sean was advising a handful of high-growth tech startups including Dropbox, Eventbrite and my own company, KISSmetrics. Patrick Vlaskovits was cheerfully drinking a mint julep while Sean Ellis and I were each enjoying a cold beer.Īt the time, Patrick was working on a startup and a book. Back in 2010, on a Monday at 5 PM, I found myself at a bar called Memphis in Southern California in a heated discussion with two close friends.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |