80/20 of Growth

The Gist

It’s all about testing educated guesses to increase or decrease these variables:

Best Resources

• Race Car Framework (overview of building a growth/sales engine)
• Growth Channels (overview of all growth channels)
• Demand Curve (in-depth explainers on any topic)
• Marketing Examples (specific examples)
• Growth Vault (specific examples)
• $100M offers and $100M leads (Hormozi is legit)
• Tiny Details Win (make every customer touchpoint delightful)

General

• Map out the customer journey / funnel from awareness to purchase.
• Maniacally reduce friction at each touchpoint. Don’t let people think when they buy your stuff. Emotional problem → realize you’re the solution → super easy to buy (ex: “click a button”).
• Run experiments to increase the size of the funnel that current customers already come through (ex: if WoM, test different referall programs).
• Scientific method: set measurable goals, hypothesize growth strategy, test, listen, avoid stuff that doesn’t work, double down on stuff that works, repeat.
• Be wise about what metrics you’re testing! Make sure they tie back to company goals and align with business model.
• Power laws apply to growth. Usually, just 1 acquisition channel will account for 90% of customers.
• Message + position your company as the solution to someone’s emotional problem (ex: I’m hungry → DoorDash)

Specific

• Most growth unlocks will come from improving the product, not the marketing.
• A person with quick first draft speed and rapid iteration will inevitably win.
• Don’t attach your identity to your ideas. They’re experiments!
• Start with a basic tracking system. Once it breaks, then change. Until you know that a thing works, you shouldn’t prepare for it to be used to acquire thousands of customers.
• Don’t copy playbooks of what other companies have done. Steal specific ideas. But your company is different in many ways to everyone else.
• Growth is sexy, but retention and upselling makes you rich.
• Sell the benefit of the benefit.
• Ex: Trampoline → fun for multiple kids → parents get some time off
• Sell to the decision maker (not necessarily the end user)

Tools

• Outreach: Apollo / Crunchbase / LinkedIn for sourcing, YAMM / Instantly for cold email campaigns
• SEO: ahrefs for mostly everything
• Ads: google or meta
• Managing Pipeline: google sheets / airtable / notion to start. HubSpot at bigger scale. Not sure about the rest.
• Automations: Zapier + ChatGPT
• Haven’t used too many others. Again, I recommend simple systems until things break. It’s all about testing assumptions.

Questions

• Is this the best way to do this?
• What’s the one thing that, if I did it well, would solve all other things?
• Where do our most valuable customers hangout (online & in-person)?
• How can we show that we the solution to this person’s emotion problem?
• How can we test this assumption in 1 year? 1 month? 1 week? 1 day? 1 hour?