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In my experience, the books that tend to flop upon release are those where the author goes into a cave for a year to write it, then hands it off to the publisher for release. They hope for a hit that rarely comes. On the other hand, I have clients who blog extensively before publishing. They develop their book ideas based on the themes that they naturally gravitate toward but that also get the greatest response from readers. (One client sol..
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Ryan Holiday |
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Amazon, for its part, has a couple of other easy suggestions for you if the advice "write a hypothetical press release" doesn't quite work for your situation. Their CTO, Werner Vogels, suggests trying to write an FAQ for this product you're developing. (That way you can address, in advance, potential user issues and questions.)9 Or try to define the crucial parts of the user experience by making mockups of pages, writing hypothetical case s..
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Ryan Holiday |
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Ultimately, nerve is a matter of defiance and control.
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Ryan Holiday |
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As Marc Andreessen--the entrepreneur behind Netscape, Opsware, and Ning who, in addition to running a major venture capital fund, happens to be on the board of directors for Facebook, eBay, and HP--explains it, companies need to "do whatever is required to get to product/market fit. Including changing out people, rewriting your product, moving into a different market, telling customers no when you don't want to, telling customers yes when y..
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Ryan Holiday |
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Take Evernote, a start-up that offers productivity and organization software, which made the companywide decision to delay spending even a penny on marketing for the first several years of its growth. As Evernote's founder, Phil Libin, told a group of entrepreneurs in a now-classic talk, "People [who are] thinking about things other than making the best product, never make the best product." So Evernote took "marketing" off the table and in..
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Ryan Holiday |
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84b2b74
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Evernote still came up with a bunch of clever tricks to get people to see its products while marketing was on their strategic back burner. After hearing customers complain that their bosses were suspicious of employees using their laptops in meetings, the Evernote team produced stickers that said, "I'm not being rude. I'm taking notes in Evernote." Thus, their most loyal customers were turning into billboards that went from meeting to meeti..
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Ryan Holiday |
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f5a9f7c
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The race has changed. The prize and spoils no longer go to the person who makes it to market first. They go to the person who makes it to Product Market Fit first.
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Ryan Holiday |
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You will come across obstacles in life--fair and unfair. And you will discover, time and time again, that what matters most is not what these obstacles are but how we see them, how we react to them, and whether we keep our composure. You will learn that this reaction determines how successful we will be in overcoming--or possibly thriving because of--them.
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Ryan Holiday |
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Patrick Vlaskovits, who was part of the initial conversation that the term "growth hacker" came out of, put it well: "The more innovative your product is, the more likely you will have to find new and novel ways to get at your customers."12 For example: 1. You can create the aura of exclusivity with an invite-only feature (as Mailbox did). 2. You can create hundreds of fake profiles to make your service look more popular and active than it ..
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Ryan Holiday |
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The movie marketing paradigm says throw an expensive premiere and hope that translates into ticket sales come opening weekend. A growth hacker says, "Hey, it's the twenty-first century, and we can be a lot more technical about how we acquire and capture new customers." The start-up world is full of companies taking clever hacks to drive their first set of customers into their sales funnel. The necessity of that jolt--needing to get it any w..
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Ryan Holiday |
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The company's most effective marketing tactic (besides making a great product) would never have been conceived or attempted by a pure marketing team. Instead, the engineers coded a set of tools that made it possible for every member to seamlessly cross-post his or her Airbnb listing on craigslist (because craigslist does not technically "allow" this, it was a fairly ingenious work-around). As a result, Airbnb--a tiny site--suddenly had free..
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Ryan Holiday |
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Let's be honest, a traditional marketer would not even be close to imagining the integration above--there's too many technical details needed for it to happen. As a result, it could only have come out of the mind of an engineer tasked with the problem of acquiring more users from Craigslist.13
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Ryan Holiday |
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e799d0b
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In this case, it's half strategy, half engineering. The combination is going to be different in every situation, but the point is that it's always outside-the-box, even outside-the-budget. Today, as a marketer, our task isn't necessarily to "build a brand" or even to maintain a preexisting one. We're better off building an army of immensely loyal and passionate users. Which is easier to track, define, and grow? Which of these is real, and w..
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Ryan Holiday |
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As Sean Ellis, one of the first growth hackers--he coined the term with Patrick Vlaskovits--puts it: "Focusing on customer acquisition over 'awareness' takes discipline. . . . At a certain scale, awareness/brand building makes sense. But for the first year or two it's a total waste of money."
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Ryan Holiday |
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The most insidious part of the traditional marketing model is that "big blowout launch" mythology. Of course, equally seductive is the "build it and they will come" assumption that too many people associate with the Web. Both are too simple and rarely effective. Remember what Aaron Swartz realized. Users have to be pulled in. A good idea is not enough. Your customers, in fact, have to be "acquired." But the way to do that isn't with a bomba..
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Ryan Holiday |
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The end goal of every growth hacker is to build a self-perpetuating marketing machine that reaches millions by itself. --AARON GINN
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Ryan Holiday |
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raw growth is great, but at the end of the day, we're running businesses here. We want to turn stats into dollars.
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Ryan Holiday |
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There's no business like show business. Yet, when it comes right down to it, that's the industry every marketing team--no matter what business they're actually in--pretends to be in when they're launching something new. Deep down, I think anyone marketing or launching fantasizes that they are premiering a blockbuster movie. And this illusion shapes and warps every marketing decision we make. It feels good, but it's so very wrong.
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Ryan Holiday |
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Our first idea is a grand opening, a big launch, a press release, or major media coverage. We default to thinking we need an advertising budget. We want red carpet and celebrities. Most dangerously we assume we need to get as many customers as possible in a very short window of time--and if it doesn't work right away, we consider the whole thing a failure (which, of course, we cannot afford). Our delusion is that we should be Transformers a..
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Ryan Holiday |
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millions--often more than the budget of the movie itself--studios regularly write off major releases as complete washes. And when they do succeed, no one has any idea why or which of the ingredients were responsible for it. As screenwriter William Goldman famously put it, nobody knows anything--even the people in charge. It's all a big gamble. Which is fine, because their system is designed to absorb these losses. The hits pay for the mista..
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Ryan Holiday |
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It was only a matter of time before someone smart came along and said, "It doesn't have to be this way. The tools of the Internet and social media have made it possible to track, test, iterate, and improve marketing to the point where these enormous gambles are not only unnecessary, but insanely counterproductive." That person was the first growth hacker."
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Ryan Holiday |
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You need the kind of objectivity that makes you forget everything you've heard, clear the table, and do a factual study like a scientist would. --STEVE WOZNIAK
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Ryan Holiday |
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Before he became the most brilliant and famous man in the ad business, David Ogilvy sold ovens door-to-door. Because of that, he never forgot that advertising is just a slightly more scalable form of creating demand than door-to-door sales.
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Ryan Holiday |
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A growth hacker is someone who has thrown out the playbook of traditional marketing and replaced it with only what is testable, trackable, and scalable. Their tools are e-mails, pay-per-click ads, blogs, and platform APIs instead of commercials, publicity, and money. While their marketing brethren chase vague notions like "branding" and "mind share," growth hackers relentlessly pursue users and growth--and when they do it right, those users..
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Ryan Holiday |
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Growth hackers resist this temptation (or, more appropriate, this delusion). They opt, deliberately, to attract only the early adopters who make or break new tech services and seek to do it as cheaply as possible. In fact, part of the reason the scrappy start-ups, services, and apps in this book might not always be well-known or topics of daily conversation is because their founders have focused their energies on product development with an..
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Ryan Holiday |
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This means that our outward-facing marketing and PR efforts are needed simply to reach out to and capture, at the beginning, a group of highly interested, loyal, and fanatical users. Then we grow with and because of them. If they are geeks, they are at TechCrunch or Hacker News or reddit or attending a handful of conferences every year. If they are fashionistas, they are regularly checking a handful of fashion blogs like Lookbook.nu or Hype..
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Ryan Holiday |
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Uber, a car service start-up founded by Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp, has been giving out free rides during Austin's SXSW conference for several years. During a single week, thousands of potential Uber customers--tech-obsessed, high-income young adults who cannot find a cab--are motivated to try out this service. One year Uber offered free rides. Another year, it offered BBQ delivery. Instead of spending millions on advertising or count..
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Ryan Holiday |
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At the gym that his father built on the second-floor porch, young Roosevelt proceeded to work out feverishly every day for the next five years, slowly building muscle and strengthening his upper body against his weak lungs and for the future. By his early twenties the battle against asthma was essentially over, he'd worked--almost literally--that weakness out of his body.
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Ryan Holiday |
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A function of Rockefeller's personality: resilient, adaptable, calm, brilliant. He could not be rattled--not by economic crisis, not by a glittery mirage of false opportunities, not by aggressive, bullying enemies, not even by federal prosecutors (for whom he was a notoriously difficult witness to cross-examine, never rising to take the bait or defend himself or get upset).
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Ryan Holiday |
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Use this knowledge to be gentle and gracious.
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Ryan Holiday |
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Later in the election, Politico moved the goalposts again to stay on top. Speed stopped working so well, so they turned to scandal to upend the race once more. Remember Herman Cain, the preposterous, media-created candidate who came after Pawlenty? After surging ahead as the lead contender for the Republican nomination, and becoming the subject of an exhausting number of traffic-friendly blog posts, Cain's candidacy was utterly decimated by..
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Ryan Holiday |
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Whatever is rightly done, however humble, is noble. (Quidvis recte factum quamvis humile praeclarum.) --SIR HENRY ROYCE L
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Ryan Holiday |
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through our perception of events, we are complicit in the creation--as well as the destruction--of every one of our obstacles. There
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Ryan Holiday |
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Just because other people say that something is hopeless or crazy or broken to pieces doesn't mean it is.
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Ryan Holiday |
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the brilliant strategist and historian B. H. Liddell Hart came to a stunning conclusion: In only 6 of the 280 campaigns was the decisive victory a result of a direct attack on the enemy's main army. Only six. That's 2 percent.
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Ryan Holiday |
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1. You can create the aura of exclusivity with an invite-only feature (as Mailbox did). 2. You can create hundreds of fake profiles to make your service look more popular and active than it actually is--nothing draws a crowd like a crowd (as reddit did in its early days). 3. You can target a single service or platform and cater to it exclusively--essentially piggybacking off or even stealing someone else's growth (as PayPal did with eBay). ..
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Ryan Holiday |
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9. You can try to name a Planned Parenthood clinic after your client or pay D-list celebrities to say offensive things about themselves to get all sorts of publicity that promotes your book (OK, those stunts were mine).
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Ryan Holiday |
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And what is up to us? Our emotions Our judgments Our creativity Our attitude Our perspective Our desires Our decisions Our determination.
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Ryan Holiday |
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The imperative is clear: stop sitting on your hands and start getting them dirty.
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Ryan Holiday |
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no one is truly successful because they are delusional, self-absorbed,
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Ryan Holiday |
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Nikola Tesla, who spent a frustrated year in Edison's lab during the invention of the lightbulb, once sneered that if Edison needed to find a needle in a haystack, he would "proceed at once" to simply "examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search." Well, sometimes that's exactly the right method."
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Ryan Holiday |
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Life (and our job) is difficult enough. Let's not make it harder by getting emotional about insignificant matters or digging in for battles we don't actually care about.
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Ryan Holiday |
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Hello, shitstorm of press. Hello, number one on the New York Times bestseller list. I pulled this off with no connections, no money, and no footsteps to follow.
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Ryan Holiday |
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Because of the way that blogging is structured--from the way bloggers are paid by the pageview to the way blog posts must be written to catch the reader's attention--this was all very easy to do. The system eats up the kind of material I produce. So as the manufactured storm I created played itself out in the press, real people started believing it, and it became true.
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Ryan Holiday |