Hacking Growth: How Today’s Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success. Kindle Edition!
By Sean Ellis (Author), Morgan Brown (Author)

 

Hello!

 

My name is Maria and today we’re talking about “Hacking Growth” by Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown.

 

This book is meant to be a step-by-step guide to implementing growth strategies.

 

I have two main points that I want to go over with you, so let’s get started!

The first point has to do with conversion rates.

 

Now conversion rates are the percentage of people who take a desired action.

 

So that can depend on your business and your strategy what that specific action is.

 

One of the formulas that is shared in this book is that conversion rates = desire – friction.

 

Desire can be seen as how much a product or a service is wanted by a potential customer.

 

Friction is anything that can make a potential customer think, “is it worth it?

 

Should I follow through with this?”

 

So ideally we want to maximize the desire so that people really want the product, and minimize the amount of friction.

 

But often we focus on trying to increase desire, which is actually very hard to do.

 

Especially nowadays as the digital world is becoming more congested with ideas.

 

However friction is something we can more easily combat.

 

However, a lot of times we don’t focus on that.

 

If you look at examples such as Amazon, they have the option to do one-click purchasing.

 

That is eliminating a lot of friction.

 

Eliminating the process of having to type in your credit card information each time.

 

Eliminating the process of having to click on multiple screens and waiting for screens to load.

 

It’s a one-step process.

 

There’s very little friction and that helps us with our conversion rate.

 

The second point I want to talk about is gamification.

 

Now gamification is the offering of rewards, perks, benefits that users can earn based on their actions.

 

There are three keys that are important when implementing gamification.

 

Meaningful rewards, surprise and delight, and instant gratification.

 

These are important elements to consider when trying to implement gamification into your product or service.

 

Some gamification strategies are more overt than others.

 

For example, rewards and loyalty programs at Starbucks and other major brands have, are very clear ways of gamifying the process of using the product or the service.

 

However there are also more subtle instances of gamification.

 

For example on LinkedIn when you create your profile there’s a bar on the side that shows your progress to completing your profile.

 

So once it reaches % you’ve completed your profile.

 

The reward is having completed your profile, and that progress bar that’s tracking what you’re doing acts as a way of incentivizing and encouraging the consumer to finish their sign up process.

Now, let’s go over some of the positives, negatives and who I think should be reading this book.

 

One major positive that I love about this book is that it highlights relevant examples from today’s business world to illustrate what they’re talking about.

 

It shows how Facebook, Airbnb, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram implement growth hacking techniques into their businesses and that’s a great way of relating to the ideas that they’re trying to explain.

 

So I like how they use a variety of examples that are relevant to really illustrate the points.

 

They’re not just giving you theoretical ideas.

 

They’re showing you how these different strategies are being implemented by major corporations.

 

Why would you not want to be using some techniques that the Facebooks, YouTubes, and Twitters of the world are using themselves?

 

And now to the negatives.

 

The only negative I had with this book is that at times I found it to be too specific.

 

It gave you even examples of how to break down your meetings.

 

What you should be talking about exactly within the meetings.

 

Just going over the general ideas and specifying how ideas are implemented would have been enough in my opinion.

 

Who should be reading this book?

 

Well, startups and tech companies should definitely consider reading this book because the strategies are definitely targeted towards the kind of products and services you’ll be developing.

 

And these ideas are very relevant to startups because they can show you how with a limited budget some of these techniques can be implemented and used for extreme results.

 

That’s it, that’s my book review for “Hacking Growth” by Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown.

 

If you want to see what I talked about here in a written format, or you want more information on the authors, please head over to my blog, www.promotekdbook.com.

 

Next week I’ll be back with another book review!

 

But until then, keep reading and keep learning!

 

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Purchase Link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01IZTCF6Y