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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 6beb3a0 | Passion typically masks a weakness. Its breathlessness and impetuousness and franticness are poor substitutes for discipline, for mastery, for strength and purpose and perseverance. You need to be able to spot this in others and in yourself, because while the origins of passion may be earnest and good, its effects are comical and then monstruous. | Ryan Holiday | ||
| b04242c | Not me," you think." | Ryan Holiday | ||
| 2a285ad | From Rusticus . . . I learned to read carefully and not be satisfied with a rough understanding of the whole, and not to agree too quickly with those who have a lot to say about something." --MARCUS AURELIUS, MEDITATIONS, 1.7.3" | Ryan Holiday | ||
| 3d02958 | All of us waste precious life doing things we don't like, to prove ourselves to people we don't respect, and to get things we don't want. Why | Ryan Holiday | ||
| 47f81bc | The pretense of knowledge is our most dangerous vice, because it prevents us from getting any better. Studious self-assessment is the antidote. The | Ryan Holiday | ||
| b1757f8 | In The Book of Five Rings, he notes the difference between observing and perceiving. The perceiving eye is weak, he wrote; the observing eye is strong. Musashi understood that the observing eye sees simply what is there. The perceiving eye sees more than what is there. | Ryan Holiday | ||
| 251739c | The novelist Anne Lamott describes that ego story well. "If you are not careful," she warns young writers, "station KFKD (K-Fucked) will play in your head twenty-four hours a day, nonstop, in stereo." Out" | Ryan Holiday | ||
| 063ce4c | It's three interdependent, interconnected, and fluidly contingent disciplines: Perception, Action, and the Will. | Ryan Holiday | ||
| 68aac4f | While others are excited or afraid, we will remain calm and imperturbable. We will see things simply and straightforwardly, as they truly are--neither good nor bad. This will be an incredible advantage for us in the fight against obstacles. | Ryan Holiday | ||
| aa526cc | There's a saying in Latin: Vires acquirit eundo (We gather strength as we go). That's how it works. That's our motto. | Ryan Holiday | ||
| fa0803d | Growth Hacker Is the New VP [of] Marketing." What? I was a VP of marketing. I quite liked my job. I was good at it, too. Self-taught, self-made, I was, at twenty-five, helping to lead the efforts of a publicly traded company with 250 stores in twenty countries and more than $600 million in revenue. But the writer, Andrew Chen, an influential technologist and entrepreneur, didn't care about any of that. According to him, my colleagues and I .. | Ryan Holiday | ||
| 27d9b4c | of being a great marketer. 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?" and answers with A/B tests, landing pages, viral factor, email deliverability, and Open Graph. . . . The entire marketing team is being disrupted. Rather than a VP of Marketing with a bunch of non-technical marketers reporting to them, instead growth hackers are engineers leading.. | Ryan Holiday | ||
| 5941f59 | Whether you're currently a marketing executive or a college grad about to enter the field--the first growth hackers have pioneered a new way. Some of their strategies are incredibly technical and complex. The strategies also change constantly; in fact, occasionally it might work only one time. This book is short because it sticks with the timeless parts. I also won't weigh you down with heavy concepts like "cohort analysis" and "viral coeff.. | Ryan Holiday | ||
| 896699c | TechCrunch, Fast Company, Mashable, Inc., Entrepreneur, and countless other publications. LinkedIn and Hacker News abound with job postings: Growth Hacker Needed. Their job isn't to "do" marketing as I had always known it; it's to grow companies really fast--to take something from nothing and make it something enormous within an incredibly tight window. And it says something about what marketing has become that these are no longer considere.. | Ryan Holiday | ||
| bfb6886 | Heraclitus called self-deception an awful disease and eyesight a lying sense." --DIOGENES LAERTIUS, LIVES OF THE EMINENT PHILOSOPHERS," | Ryan Holiday | ||
| b3873cc | Noah Kagan, a growth hacker at Facebook, the personal finance service Mint.com (which sold to Intuit for nearly $170 million), and the daily deal site AppSumo (which has more than eight hundred thousand users), explains it simply: "Marketing has always been about the same thing--who your customers are and where they are."5 What growth hackers do is focus on the "who" and "where" more scientifically, in a more measurable way. Whereas marketi.. | Ryan Holiday | ||
| 0073c9c | how do you get, maintain, and multiply attention in a scalable and efficient way? | Ryan Holiday | ||
| 67b92dd | director of growth at StumbleUpon, put it best: growth hacking is more of a mindset than a tool kit. | Ryan Holiday | ||
| b713844 | Make something people want. --PAUL GRAHAM | Ryan Holiday | ||
| abcec0b | Yet for years, this was a scenario that marketers tolerated and accepted as part of the job. We all told ourselves that "you go to market with the product you have, not the one you want." And then we wondered why our strategies failed--and why those failures were so expensive." | Ryan Holiday | ||
| 4933446 | In other words, the best marketing decision you can make is to have a product or business that fulfills a real and compelling need for a real and defined group of people--no matter how much tweaking and refining this takes. | Ryan Holiday | ||
| 9489b3d | It was a wake-up call to me to learn that Airbnb was by no means unique: Instagram started as a location-based social network called Burbn (which had an optional photo feature). It attracted a core group of users and more than $500,000 in funding. And yet the founders realized that its users were flocking to only one part of the app--the photos and filters. They had a meeting, which one of the founders recounts like this: "We sat down and s.. | Ryan Holiday | ||
| 8cd086b | Some companies like Airbnb and Instragram spend a long time trying new iterations until they achieve what growth hackers call Product Market Fit (PMF); others find it right away. The end goal is the same, however, and it's to have the product and its customers in perfect sync with each other. Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, explains that the best way to get to Product Market Fit is by starting with a "minimum viable product" and impr.. | Ryan Holiday | ||
| 0861c39 | Product Market Fit is a feeling backed with data and information. | Ryan Holiday | ||
| 6e94433 | 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.. | Ryan Holiday | ||
| 247967b | 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.. | Ryan Holiday | ||
| 973c6a6 | Ultimately, nerve is a matter of defiance and control. | Ryan Holiday | ||
| e62d3d9 | 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.. | Ryan Holiday | ||
| 67eaebd | 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.. | Ryan Holiday | ||
| 84b2b74 | 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.. | Ryan Holiday | ||
| f5a9f7c | 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. | Ryan Holiday | ||
| 1b7c786 | 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. | Ryan Holiday | ||
| fcf9e09 | 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 .. | Ryan Holiday | ||
| 09136ca | 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.. | Ryan Holiday | ||
| 660cb54 | 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.. | Ryan Holiday | ||
| 25cc315 | 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 | Ryan Holiday | ||
| e799d0b | 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.. | Ryan Holiday | ||
| 3a5f84a | 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." | Ryan Holiday | ||
| 7f500e5 | 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.. | Ryan Holiday | ||
| f82ea0a | The end goal of every growth hacker is to build a self-perpetuating marketing machine that reaches millions by itself. --AARON GINN | Ryan Holiday | ||
| 59c30a2 | raw growth is great, but at the end of the day, we're running businesses here. We want to turn stats into dollars. | Ryan Holiday | ||
| 4d7c87c | 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. | Ryan Holiday | ||
| 03d1470 | 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.. | Ryan Holiday | ||
| 2b01ae6 | 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.. | Ryan Holiday |