Lesson: Product Growth with Gustaf Alströmer

Step #1 Growth: Companies grow through replicable tactics and strategies

Growth hacking is, first of all, it’s a marketing term to describe what we all do. I don’t love the term. I think growth or product growth is something that has generally been ignored, and when products moved online and traditional marketing wasn’t really applicable anymore, then we had to invent something new.

A lot of ways that companies grow, I think, are tactics and strategies that were replicable and there wasn’t really a community around these things that weren’t working. I think you can also say that growth hacking is about taking advantage of growth platforms. You can grow through different channels. Historically there’s been many of them. SEO and Google, something that’s been big for a very, very long time out. In the old days of SEO, it was more Wild West, there was more people, I guess, taking advantage of how that platform worked. But every year, every now and then there’s a new platform and you have to learn how that platform works and take advantage of that.

I think, fundamentally, growth hacking is kind of a very metric-driven product marketing. You try to understand the motivation, psychology behind why people use your product and you build your flows and you build kind of your product, how you enter the product and how you share it and tell your friends about the product around that psychology, what is their real motivations for why people use things.

If you don’t have a good product and if you don’t understand why people are using your product, it’s really hard to be good at growth, I think. I’ve seen a lot of companies that think that they need help with growth when they actually need help with product; they haven’t really figured out something people want yet.