Leaky bucket does not need more water, it needs fixing.

Growth hacking is a buzz term for the act of improving the user ecosystem of a product. It is a lot of small changes, not a few big ones, so these notes are a collection to other related topics like product-market fit, web analytics. and marketing.

To grow, you must understand why people use your product. For example, Facebook noticed people with more friends were less likely to leave, so Facebook focused finding and almost forcing you to add friends.

You must have product-market fit before growth. The product must solve a fundamental problem for someone.

Great things are simple. If you can't remember the plan you had, you can't follow it. To create a brief plan how to grow.

There are 6 components in a growth pipeline:

1. Acquisition, getting users.
2. Activation, turning acquired users into active customers
3. Retention, keeping the users.
4. Monetization, gaining revenue from your product
5. Optimization, how to improve the pipeline.
6. Measurement, how to measure your pipeline.

Understand concept of exponential growth. Increase of growth's growth is a lot more important than the growth itself.

Company 1 got 100 users this week, no increase in growth's growth.
Company 2 got 60 users this week, but it was 40 last week.
Company 2 has 20 growth of the growth while Company 1 has none.
If this continues, we know that Company 2 will bypass Company 1.

Expand your target audience.

• Horizontal Development: Offer same tool for a different target audience.
• Vertical Development: Offer different tool for the same target audience.

Sources

• Startup = Growth
• The Lean Startup
• Ultimate Guide to Funnel Optimization
• 21 Actionable Growth Hacking Tactics
• How We Acquired 100K Early Bird Signups with Zero Marketing Budget
• Guide to Growth Hacking
• There’s only a few ways to scale user growth, and here’s the list