When thinking about how things can create massive adoption and engagement as quickly as possible, you need to optimize your project for growth. That’s where Growth Marketing and Growth Hacking come into play. If you solely think about monetizing and achieving a fast, most efficient Return on Investment (ROI), then you will probably not be sustainable. Have the discipline to not optimize for these things at first and instead think about building core product value.
Product value is something that anyone within your target audience can intrinsically wrap their heads around. So, as soon as you’ve identified your main target audience, it’s time to provide them with value and set yourself up for strategic growth.
Step 1- Core Product Value: make your product/service useful for your users
Step 2- Growth: figure out how to make it easy for your users to share it with others
Focus on creating a “real connection” with your users by directing your energy towards core product value.
There are some who call this experience of realizing core product value the WOW moment, or AHA moment. The WOW moment is that specific point in time when a person first realizes how your product can benefit them.
Chamath Palihapitiya, the former head of growth at Facebook, shared a simple yet powerful framework for achieving growth by building core product value:
It’s vital to think about the metrics that can help you identify and answer these questions above, instead of simply going with a “gut” feeling. Rapid experimentation, data, AB testing, usability tests, and benchmarks can all help you get closer to these answers.
After you’ve managed to create real value for your users, you should think about how to strategically boost growth of your project.
The PIRATE funnel, also known as the AARRR Framework, by Dave McClure is a popular Growth Marketing framework that can be used for almost any business and is a simple 6 steps schema established through the customer journey. The difference between marketing teams and growth teams is that growth teams focus on optimizing the full funnel. While marketeers often only consider the top of the funnel - awareness and acquisition - growth marketing teams think about the funnel in a holistic way. Simply put, Growth Hacking and Growth Marketing aim to measure, test, and optimize the process through which a visitor becomes a paying customer.
Dao Nguyen, analyzed what makes things go viral and presented a very interesting TED talk.
When analyzing videos with 90k viewers watching live streams of goats in an office, the questions were:
Nguyen analyzed what people were thinking and feeling and hypothesized that they were actually excited because they were participating in the shared anticipation of something that was going to happen. After testing the theory with other videos, for example, one of an exploding a watermelon (800k views), she came to interesting conclusions:
It’s not about how to make “something” go viral, but rather about what people are thinking. This leads to the concept of cultural cartography: don't just think about the subject matter; think about the job the content is doing for the viewer/reader.
This idea of thinking about the job of the content really fits together to the concept of core product value.
Focus on creating value. Full stop.
How can you help achieve value? Some attributes Nguyen identified were:
