Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing and Advertising
£7.20£8.50 (-15%)
Your new business went online yesterday and you’ve got a marketing budget of zero. How are you supposed to create a movement around your product? How can you get to your first thousand – or million – customers? Starting from zero, it feels impossible.
Enter the growth hacker. You may not have heard of growth hacking yet, but you’ve certainly used the billion dollar brands built by it: Hotmail, AirBnB, Facebook, Dropbox, amongst many others.
Growth hackers thrive on doing what traditional businessmen would consider impossible: creating something from nothing. They ‘hack’ their company’s growth to create a narrative of sensational success, turning excited media, users and social media into a viral marketing force that will help their business grow exponentially.
Silicon Valley has realized that growth hacking – not television commercials and billboards – is the successful start-up’s secret weapon. Now growth hacker extraordinaire Ryan Holiday is ready to share his experience, teaching you how to harness the power of growth to propel you to success. Featuring insights from leading growth hackers, Growth Hacker Marketing is the essential guide to the revolutionary new approach to growing your business.
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Additional information
| Publisher | Main edition (2 Oct. 2014), Profile Books |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Paperback | 142 pages |
| ISBN-10 | 1781254362 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-1781254363 |
| Dimensions | 12.85 x 0.81 x 19.69 cm |
by Jim
Pros
– short
– good intro comments / points on the topic
– decent number of case studies
– solid business advice
Cons
– not sure author is totally qualified to be an author on this topic. (Made himself sound like a marketing veteran when he was only 25)
– author makes living from this book. Maysound odd, but i likebusiness books written by those who are already very successful at what they do. Personal preference
– sounds like he became a “growth hacker” overnight. If so is this not just a way of thinking as opposed to a skill? No idea of the process or training required to become a growth hacker. None detailed. Do you have to code? Or do you just need to hook a few tools up to your site and try to measure more things and try to be clever about. Marketing?
– lots of material similar to other books like the lean start up. “Make a product that people want, test it with a MVP etc”
by Roger Moore
Quite a short book and very easy to read. Despite this, it is still a great introduction to growth hacking. The book is written very well and keeps you interested throughout. I would recommend this book to anyone who doesn’t really know what growth hacking is and would like to get the general idea of it all. The one thing this book is great at, is instilling a growth hacking mentality. You will start to look at things differently after reading this book.
by Luca
Really brilliant book, filled with real insights and cases of use in the ‘Growth Hacker’ sphere. The book is a wonderful introduction to this market, but is by no means exhaustive or entirely explored; it serves as a great intro, but I wouldn’t recommend for someone who is already au fait with the market or a veteran marketeer themselves.
It’s got a really great glossary of terms at the back and the price is perfect for both the amount and quality of information you get. I bought the book on a recommendation of a friend after learning of my interest to expand my knowledge of the discipline and it’ll definitely be a book I revert back to time and time again.
The author, Ryan Holiday, writes very concisely and directly so it makes for a very easy read which is fantastic for both learning and absorbing all his tips and tricks – I’ll definitely be buying his other works, too.
by Robert Bassett
This is a very interesting and thought provoking little book. There are a lot of good techniques and examples of how to launch a new product without much budget. In fact, the book suggests actively avoiding large conventional advertising campaigns and budgets. It won’t take up a lot of your time or money, so definitely worth a read. As with many of these types of books it glosses over two things.
1) The danger of subscribing to a Whiggish interpretation of history, where every action is an inevitable step towards enlightenment and progress. Saying “these 20 companies used these techniques and are now worth billions” ignores the possible thousands of companies who used the same methods and failed. Remember, someone has to win; that doesn’t mean that everything they did meant they would inevitably win.
2) Describing as “industry changing” a method that is applicable for a very narrow set of problems. If you have a great new product, with little competition, in an un-established market, this is great. However, I’d suggest that your marketing isn’t super important if you have all of those things to begin with.
That’s just nitpicking though – if this was 300 pages long and cost twenty pounds you could sniff at it, but at about a quid and readable on a short commute, there’s nothing to get bothered about.
If you liked this, you’d probably enjoy
ReWork: Change the Way You Work Forever
– although I note, the price of this hasn’t gone down.
by HairyWomble
I liked this book. Yes, it’s not a detailed thesis on the theories behind Growth Hacking. The criticism some have directed towards it are unfair. This is what it says it is, it’s a primer. I got this book yesterday, read it in an evening from cover to cover and now understand what Growth Hacking is and have a good idea of the principles. This book contains lots of “Next Steps” to enhance my knowledge on the topic. It’s written in a clear familiar tone and the information provided is easily relatable. Thank you Ryan for writing a good book!
by kidderliverpool
Really good introduction to growth hacking and its use in marketing. Really good primer if you are new to this. Some criticisms of it saying there was not enough tactics, but I think the whole point of growth hacking is you learn the principles then be inventive with that concept. If you know what the concepts are, then you can run with that yourself. And make tailor made ideas for your particular product, rather than be lazy and try to rip off other ideas.
Buy if you want to get past the old ideas of advertising the hell out of everything – and hoping for the best.
by Andrew Lloyd Gordon
This is one of those (very short) books that, if you don’t know much about the subject is a good intro. But if you do, you’ll be asking, ‘”Where’s the beef?”
Ryan is a convert to Growth Hacking and explains how it challenges conventional marketing. He briefly introduces the concept and then breaks it down into its component stages.
Again, if you haven’t read any of the books in the Lean Startup movement (search for Lean Startup and dig around the tons of resources now online) you might appreciate this chatty and light read.
Unfortunately for me, I wanted a few more tricks, tips and ideas. I wanted more of a ‘How To’ guide than a ‘this is what Growth Hacking means’ ebook.
I admit, Ryan doesn’t claim that this book is an instruction guide.
Nevertheless, his examples are very obvious and known to many in the marketing/digital marketing world e.g. how Hotmail gained traction by encouraging Word of Mouth.
In conclusion, I’d give this book 3.5 stars if I could.
Buy it if you need the intro level stuff. It will get you on your way. But, even though it’s a cheap and quick read, don’t expect a huge amount of value in return.