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Introduction to Growth Hacking for Startups

VC Cafe

The term “Growth Hacking”, invented by Sean Ellis , and made popular by Andrew Chen , a Silicon valley marketer and entrepreneur, is a combination of two disciplines – marketing and coding: Growth hackers are a hybrid of marketer and coder, one who looks at the traditional question of “How do I get customers for my product?”

API 167
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Less is More, More or Less

Steve Blank

In Customer Development the goal of a minimum feature set is to pare the features of the first product release to the minimum necessary for early customers. And if you actually want to respond to shifting customer behavior by running a new marketing campaign (ads, email, etc.,) it would again take weeks or months.

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Learning is better than optimization (the local maximum problem)

Startup Lessons Learned

Instead, we try to accelerate with respect to validated learning about customers. Many optimizers are in favor of split-testing, too: direct marketers, landing page and SEO experts -- heck even the Google Website Optimizer team. How can we do split-testing when we have only a pathetically small number of customers ?