I've read a lot and always kept the most useful pieces aside - and I still refer to it. I compiled here these resources that helped me.
All this content is available for free on the Internet. A huge shout out to all the content creators and experts within the industry who wrote these beautiful pieces!
Syllabus
The 3 first articles were written in 2012. They're the first layer.
A Recipe for Growth: Adding Layers to the Cake
Growth is Not a Hack - First Round Insiders - Medium
Growth Hacking: 10 Key Concepts You Need to Remember
Of course - the definitions evolved a lot since 2012. These 2 articles and this feed from Quora are amongst the most clear ressources on the subject.
What is "Growth Hacking" really? - Josh Elman - Medium
Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing
The growth process is a metric process. To establish clear metrics in a company, we need two things : 1/ data 2/ framework. Data can't be used properly if there's no framework to analyze it. Achieving growth means before anything else having proper metrics.
In this part, I'm highlighting ressources helping to design a growth framework. One of the most popular one is the "AARRR - Startup metrics for Pirates" framework - but depending of the characteristics of your product (B2C, B2C, Marketplace, Saas, Evergreen, Freemium, etc.), you'll need to adapt and iterate.
Here's What a Real Growth Strategy Looks Like - Road Tested by Facebook and Remind
4.1.7 Dave McClure - Startup Metrics for Pirates: AARRR! - I
10 Important Points About Growth by Brian Balfour
The Never Ending Road To Product Market Fit
The Growth Experiment Management System that Tripled Our Testing Velocity
The Startup Founder's Guide to Analytics - ThinkGrowth.org
How You Battle the "Data Wheel of Death" in Growth
How to Avoid Being Deceived By Data
What is a North Star Metric? - Growth Hackers
Don't Let Your North Star Metric Deceive You
I'm Sorry, But Those Are Vanity Metrics
What factors influence DAU/MAU? Nature versus nurture
How to create a profitable Freemium startup (spreadsheet model included!)
10 Marketing Lessons for Early-Stage Tech Startups - Both Sides of the Table
How To Create A Useful Value Proposition w/ Examples
The Growth Marketing Process: How to Shake Your Growth Hack Addiction
petithacks - small hacks, faster growth
Workflows - Growth Room - Medium
There's only a few ways to scale user growth, and here's the list
What's your viral loop? Understanding the engine of adoption
The One Growth Metric that Moves Acquisition, Monetization, and Virality
SEO: The Beginner's Guide to Search Engine Optimization from Moz
The magical science of storytelling | David JP Phillips | TEDxStockholm
Emotional Targeting 101: How to Leverage the Power of Emotion to Grow Conversions
Really Good Emails - The Best Email Designs in the Universe (that came into my inbox)
Good Copy * Email copy from great companies
Design rules the use of your product - it has to make your product both pleasant and easy to use. Simpler is better and that relates instantly to growth process.
Growth happens mainly within your product - the design of your user experience is another reflection of the design of your growth strategy. Whatever your growth focus is (Referral, SEO, etc.) - your UI should support it.
Desing Longterm UX - UX Planet
6 Customer Journey Mapping Examples: How UX Pros Do It
Douglas Atkin - Global Head of Community @ Airbnb - CMX Summit 2014
How to conduct Aha-moment (aka Magic moment) analysis without knowledge of statistics or data...
a16z Podcast: The Basics of Growth - Engagement & Retention
Why Retention Is The Silent Killer
Mailbox UX: How Mailbox Builds User Love | Notes
Bye, Google Maps. - Zachary Hamed
How design thinking transformed Airbnb from failing startup to billion-dollar business
How Medium Took Calculated Design Risks-And Won
Growth happens with a vision in a competitive environnement (or at least soon-to-be, be prepared!).
The 5 Types of Network Effects and How to Hack Them
The Broken Business of Ecommerce and Why Your Startup Won't Be The Next Casper
A Step-by-Step Guide to Conducting Competitive Analysis
In the following parts, the ressources are coming from Ben Thompson's blog, Stratechery. These are the 3 topics covered by his newsletter that I find highly related to any growth process design.
Aggregation Theory describes how platforms (i.e. aggregators) come to dominate the industries in which they compete in a systematic and predictable way. Aggregation Theory should serve as a guidebook for aspiring platform companies, a warning for industries predicated on controlling distribution, and a primer for regulators addressing the inevitable antitrust concerns
The fundamental impact of the Internet is to make distribution itself a cheap commodity — or in the case of digital content, completely free. [...]Power comes not from production, not from distribution, but from controlling consumption: all markets will be demand-driven; the extent to which they already are is a function of how digitized they have become.
Dollar Shave Club and The Disruption of Everything
My experience within the Saas B2B world showed me how Sales could rapidly become a harsh topic. Pricing change is the norm the first year and keeping a strategy for more than 6 months require force. Here are the ressources I needed to keep a mind straight.
Sequoia - Winning your First Customer
Sequoia - Focus On Your Value Proposition
The Power of Stories and Structure - Sales Hacker
Don't Sell a Product, Sell a Whole New Way of Thinking
Welcome to The Era of The Sales Stack
I analyzed 147 cold sales emails and 93.9% were shitty as hell
What's a Good Email Open Rate & Click Rate? [Benchmark Data]
The Price Is Right: And for Early-Stage SaaS Companies, It Needs to Be
How To Price and Sell Your Startup's Product
Picking a pricing strategy for your product - Inside Intercom
Sequoia - Pricing Your Product
There's something wonderful in this industry - people love to share their journeys. Here are the ones that I found the most interesting!
Why Instagram Worked - Backchannel - Medium
The 7 Ways Dropbox Hacked Growth to Become a $4 Billion Company
The Secret Behind Pinterest's Growth Was Marketing, Not Engineering, Says CEO Ben Silbermann
How we generated $712,076.64 in revenue with two people in a little over two years
Moz's Accidental Journey to $40m - The Startup - Medium
From 1 to 100K users in 48 hours 🚀 - Jean-Sébastien Wallez - Medium
Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook's Early Days: Go Hard or Go Home
Chamath Palihapitiya - how we put Facebook on the path to 1 billion users
Chasing Facebook's Next Billion Users
How I Burned 10 Million Dollars So You Don't Have To.
From 0 to 1,000,000 to ? - Adrien Roose - Medium
7 Lessons From 100+ Failed Startups - ThinkGrowth.org
How to stay up-to-date?
CXL - Conversion Optimization Blog. All Things Data-Driven Marketing.
Brian Balfour | Growth and Customer Acquisition Strategy
Essays on tech, growth, and startups
Do more with less
I'm sharing here a proven tactic that drive results to get back at least 25% of your lost checkouts, while the e-commerce average is around 8%.
Launching an ecommerce store? You have everything ready, your products, your website, your design - even your analytics? Yupee !But how about your CRM ? In this article, we'll review a simple go-to plan you can start with today to extend your CRM capabilities. Let's dive in!
This calculator will let you know which budget you'll need on Facebook - and if your ads are profitable.
This email A/B test significance test will let you know which version of your email A/B test is the most performant - and on which metrics. Plus, we'll display which recommandations you can take.
The perennial, ever-so-sticky question: How much does an e-commerce website cost? The answers will vary. Also, the answer you don’t like: It depends.
Personalizing your eCommerce site is a great way to improve conversion rates.
Learn how to create FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) for eCommerce and you’d not only do a service for your potential customers but also save time answering questions (on live chat, email, phone, or otherwise).
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is key to getting your website found and for you to take advantage of the phenomenal use of search engines as the starting point for most users’ journey on the web -- to find answers, to look for information, to compare product A with product B, to look for solutions, to find local stores or merchants, and also to buy.
As far as proven eCommerce marketing strategies go, while we use the word “try” in the title, what we really mean is that you “should”. By the end of 2022, global eCommerce will be worth a whopping $5.55 Trillion. By 2023, eCommerce is going to be worth $6.17 Trillion. If anything, eCommerce is only going to get bigger and is a viable opportunity for any eCommerce brand.
Landing pages -- unlike regular pages -- help convert better. Use them generously for all campaigns. eCommerce conversions -- along with sign ups with tracking pixels happen on landing pages. Sales happen on eCommerce product pages. All of this is tracked.
One way to challenge big brands is to leverage data. Which data? Yours
To help boost your Shopify store conversion rates, you’ll need a holistic approach.
What do customers want to see? Truth is, it really depends on what you offer and how you want to brand your business. Overall, here are the things that we highly suggest you consider when writing your newsletter.
How to increase click rate on emails? This is a very tricky question because it always depends on a lot of stuff and by a lot we mean — A LOT. So, we suggest to actually follow this checklist that we have formulated to help you get a bigger picture of what should be done.
Discover your intelligence & benchmark ecommerce platform, panoramata.co! Sart saving countless hours on benchmarks and deliver more value today.
