Linda Thompson's Key Ideas from Hacking Growth
by Sean Ellis, Morgan Brown

Creating a must-have product is the baseline requirement for rapid and sustainable growth. 

To know whether a product has made it to a must-have category, create a survey asking the following question: How disappointed would you be if the product no longer existed tomorrow? If at least 40% of the respondents answered very disappointed, then it is a must-have.

You can also measure and see if a product has reached a must-have status with the retention rate. When the retention rate is stable over time, then the company can push for more growth.

The hacking process has the following steps:

• Analyze: look out for what features customers use, what screens they use to visit the app, how often they open the app, and what other apps they use.
• Ideate: members need to submit as many ideas as possible
• Prioritize: Prioritizing means scoring ideas (and deciding on which ideas to pursue and which not to)
• Test: testing is done with the goal of identifying which ideas have practical value.

Once you’ve put together your growth team, determined your key growth levers, and done sufficient testing to establish that your product is a must-have, you’re ready to start hacking the first stage of the growth funnel: acquiring customers.

The first message a potential customer sees about your product must tell them what they hope to gain. The smallest changes in language can have the most outsize impact in bringing new customers. So start small.

There are two ways to discover which marketing channels bring the most customers: discovery and optimization.

You can rank channels based on the following six factors:

• Cost. How much do you expect to expand on a particular channel compared to others?
• Targeting. How easy is it to reach your intended audience?
• Control. How likely is it for you to change an experiment that’s running?
• Input time. How much time will it take to launch the experiment?
• Output time. How long will it take to get results from the experiment?
• Scale. How large an audience can you reach with the experiment?

The first step in hacking activation is to identify all the steps that a customer makes to realize your product is a must-have. Any of the steps might need improvement.

The next step is to calculate the conversion rates for each of the steps on the way to the aha moment. The goal of the growth team is to identify problems in the activation process and eliminate friction.

Desire – Friction = Conversion Rate

Ways of reducing friction include simplifying the sign-up process or allowing users to start enjoying a product before signing them up.

The purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer. The main strategy of retaining customers is to provide a product or a service that is of high quality and that continuously addresses a need of theirs.

Retention has 3 phases:

• The initial retention period: a new user becomes convinced that using a product or a service is beneficial to them
• The medium retention period: the interest in a product novelty fades. The mission of the growth team is to make using the product a habit
• The long-term retention. The role of growth teams is to ensure that the product keeps offering more value.

Products are created so that they can be monetized. So the goal of everything including retention and growth is to find ways to earn more money.

The ideal situation is to increase the lifetime value of a customer (LTV). Different business models have different ways of increasing LTV.

For example: Retailers are concerned with making sure that their customers buy more of what they sell. While a SaaS company might be more concerned with getting customers to renew their subscriptions.