Growth Hacking: Established in the most successful startups, this hot new marketing term seems to be the holy grail of growing your customer base. Sounds useful, right? So why doesn’t everybody pick up Growth Hacking – what does it take to become a Growth Hacker?
Growth Hackers are mainly four things:
- Analytical and data driven
- Keen on improving through experimentation
- Tech-savvy
- T- shaped in skills (=knows all channels but has a few dominant skills)
Now you might think: “I am not that kind of person, does that mean I’ll never become a Growth Hacker?”, to which I’d irritatedly reply: Didn’t you read the title?
– Here are 5 books (+ two additional secret books) you’ll find helpful on your journey, neatly divided into three subcategories.
3 books to get you into the right mindset
What better way to start off than to first get an overview of the companies that have successfully expanded through Growth Hacking?
LinkedIn, Uber, Snapchat, those companies did something amazing and can’t be thought away from their respective markets – but why?
Written by Sean Ellis, the godfather of Growth Hacking –Startup Growth Engines gives you a fascinating insight into the “big score” these companies pulled off to become some of the most prosperous businesses in their industries.
Traction: How any startup can achieve explosive customer growth is a must-read for the crucial first stage of founding a company and thus a definite recommendation for Growth Hackers, Growth Marketers, and entrepreneurs alike: It introduces you to 19 channels you can use to expand your customer base and helps you with choosing the channel to suit your business best.
Also, it offers precise how-to´s and interviews with some highly successful startup- founders, which is definitely a big plus.
If you are interested in Growth Hacking, chances are you have the entrepreneurial spirit to some degree. Maybe you have even thought about starting a business once or twice in your life. Well, sorry to break it to you but according to statistics taught at literally every university as well as according to the internet, 90% of all startups fail at one point or another.
The Lean Startup focuses on what sets the remaining 10% apart and will hopefully change the way you view building a business: Finding out your customers’ real desires, testing, adapting, and adjusting your business to them so you can stay competitive and become more successful.
2 books to help you with acquiring the skills
100 days of growth is practically a Growth Hacking playbook and might as well be the first book you need once you are in the stage of actually hacking that growth. It contains 100 Growth Hacking strategies the authors successfully implemented in their clients’ companies, goes into detail regarding the tools used and where to find even further information while cutting the filler and going straight to the point.
(And yes, the tips even have cool, kind of goofy names.)
Losing focus is a huge problem pretty much everybody faces often enough, but it should not happen during your business endeavors – that stuff is important.
By teaching you to constantly analyze, measure, and adjust to data, Lean analytics tries to get you to cut out topics and metrics that are momentarily superfluous, focus on the one metric that truly matters and notice when it’s time to switch focus.
Books you technically don’t need to read, but are definitely worth checking out
Don’t make business plans, ignore your competition, you don’t even need an office!
Rework undermines the typically recommended idea of making a fixed plan and thinking it over and over in favor of just getting to work and figuring it out on the get-go. With its straightforward, uncomplicated writing style this book will guide you to become more productive while also inspiring you with its out-of-the-box, at times even provocative thoughts.
A definite recommendation for Growth Hackers, entrepreneurs, and students alike!
Now that you are done with the basics, it’s time I entrust to you a well-kept secret:
Not only do start-ups make use of Growth Hacking. IBM, Microsoft, and even Walmart, some of the largest companies in the world, enjoy growing their businesses (shocking, am I right?).
Hacking Growth reminds you of the ingenious tricks yesterday’s start-ups used to become as successful as they are today, but also introduces you to a broader horizon for Growth Marketers – how to hack growth after hitting global success.
There you have it: Those are the best books to help you with becoming a Growth Hacker – Anything unclear? Contact us!
