REVIEW : Ryan Holiday's Growth Hacker Marketing

Hi, Y'all long time no write ! Guess my mission to write one article per week has been nothing but expectations. Oh well, it's better to write something than nothing right?. The thing is, I just finished reading one awesome book that kinda change my mindset about The marketing strategy that I always Implement back in my days as a marketer (well, junior marketer). It's Growth Hacker Marketing by Ryan Holiday.

Growth hacker, some of you might already familiar with that terms especially those who are working in a startup company or currently building one. According to Ryan, a growth hacker is an employee with a simple job : growing the business by any means possible. What interesting about this book is that he said, a growth hacker is the future of marketing that will be replacing the old school VP of marketing who is still playing with conventional marketing strategies such as billboards, national television, and huge celebrity endorsement. Big brands such as consumer goods or high-end fashion brands always can do both : Growth hacking their customer but still has a lot of marketing budget to a very expensive placement. But what about tech startup such as Airbnb? or Dropbox? or Iphone or Blackberry? (back in the days where they are not as successful as they are now) how they collect they initial user? they don't even have budgets to place their product on national television.

The strategy is simple, they use their limited money to Improve their product to give a better quality of service to their customer. When you have to choose between spending your money on product improvement or advertising, always chose product improvement. In this book, the example is Groupon, they have invested so much in subsidizing daily deals promo to acquire new member and number of sales but they forgot to maintain the quality of their listed merchants. So what happened is, unsatisfied costumers.

So when a growth hacker taking part? where all a startup need is a product improvement (which mostly just involves engineers). The answer is, a growth hacker is a person who kinda has to tap-in to almost all the business process including the engineering part. The main task of a growth hacker is to increase conversion with a very limited resource (including money, and people). This including how many user can he get with what price per user in what certain period? yes, it has to be that precise. Every dollar that a growth hacker spent on a campaign is measurable. The task of a growth hacker is as simple as putting "Sent from my iPhone" as a way to advertise iPhone through they own user. As simple as Dropbox who gives free spaces for each user who inviting their friends to use Dropbox. when you have a cool product and users, let them do the advertising for you, your job is to give them enough reasons of why they should use your product and why they should share it with their friends. Well, it sounds easy, but sure you have an engineering homework you have to do to make a cool product and a brilliant yet creative referral ideas.

I won't reveal the entire book for you, but I'm sure it will kinda change the way you look into the marketing strategy. There's a lot of theory and new terminology that you can use in your future marketing proposals where every time you use those terms you can look as badass as those Silicon Valley hipsters. It's a 100 pages book, you can finish it in no time, and go back to important chapter easily.

and what I know now, a growth hacker is a very appealing occupation to have in the future. Kinda look unique also to put in your business card as a title.