Killer Growth Hacking Tips from Qualaroo CEO Sean Ellis

Hello everyone. Welcome to this week's edition of Growth Everywhere where we interview successful entrepreneurs and bring you business and personal growth tips. Today we have the godfather of the term growth hacker, Sean Ellis, who used to work for Dropbox, Zomni, and he is now the CEO of Qualaroo. Sean, how are we doing today?

I'm good. How are you doing, Eric?

Good, good. Thanks for joining us. So yeah, why don't you tell us a little bit about your background first?

Sure, so I spent about 10 years sort of in obscurity growing companies that— 2 companies that had started out in Eastern Europe actually. And one was a company called Uproar.com, which was a game company in the late '90s and actually became the biggest game company in the world. But again, like I think a lot of times that the marketer behind some companies is sort of just heads down behind the scenes and then Same group of guys. After we sold that company to Vivendi Universal, we ended up starting LogMeIn in Budapest, Hungary again. And both companies, the headquarters eventually moved to the U.S. But so I did that, and then coming off of it, I realized that I really liked the early stage part of it, and that a lot of the long-term growth was based on stuff we figured out in the early days. So I also realized that it'd been five years since I'd done the early stage stuff. So that's the important thing, and I hadn't had a lot of practice. I should probably get into. spending a few more cycles in that area. So then I just defined my marketing roles as 6-month roles, and the first one I did was Xobni, then Dropbox. Actually, I ended up splitting, I did 2 at a time, so I did Dropbox and Eventbrite at the same time, and then Lookout and Socialcast were the next 2, and just kind of kept going down and just doing these. But basically trying to be super systematic about the process of bringing these companies to market and try to think about sort of repeatable tools and processes and just like what matters and when does it matter and what order do I do it and then how do I get really good at each of the subcomponents. And so I did that for a few years and then tried to apply that knowledge to starting my own company. And so I've been doing startups now like as a CEO for about 3 3 and a half years.

Wow, okay, yeah, obviously very extensive background. And so you mentioned repeatable processes, so what are— I mean, you've worked with all these companies before, what are some kind of repeatable processes that you— that have like held, been like evergreen, I guess?

Yeah, so I think one thing to sort of think about first of all is kind of like even before the process is the goal. And for me, the goal was not to fail.

Good goal.

Which maybe succeed should be a better goal, but I actually started each one with something my CTO now calls a pre-mortem, and essentially trying to figure out if I fail, why am I going to fail. And then I thought, if I'm really good at connecting with customers and they don't give a crap about the product because the product sucks, then it doesn't matter. So today we call it product-market fit, but I just sort of— the concept of that was something that I just realized I could be really good at marketing and it wouldn't matter if the product is something people don't need.

Mm-hmm.

And I also thought about, like, if the onboarding is awful, then it doesn't matter externally how effective you are at connecting people. If they can't kind of get their head around it and use it, then it doesn't matter. So for me, the process was first to validate product-market fit, and that was something that I don't think anybody— I think product-market fit to a large degree is luck. I mean, there's definitely some things that you can do to validate ahead of time if the problem you're solving actually exists. There's some things that you can do that can stack the odds for product-market fit, but I knew that as a marketer, there wasn't a whole lot I could do to help with product-market fit. So what I was trying to do was find pre-growth companies, but companies who had a little seed of users who were passionate about the solution. So that would be sort of the process one was Mm-hmm. And then once I had that, then the sort of formulaic way of doing it was to really tap in to understand what is the kernel of value that has been created.

Mm-hmm.

And how do I do the onboarding to get people from sort of point A of whatever context that they're in right now to point B of realizing the kernel of that value, actually coming in and having that that experience that they say, wow, this is something I can't live without. And so, a lot of times, like, if you try to go direct and you try to just promote, man, this experience is great, it's a little removed from the context that people are in. So there's a bit of an art of really understanding the context before they've had the product. So are they switching from another product, in which case a lot of your messaging is just around why it's better, or are they evergreen? Are they just switching from dealing with the problem that this is a solution to and not even realizing or caring that there's a solution out there. And sort of understanding that context and then how you build the hooks to drive interest and momentum toward your solution is— that was a big part of the process. I had sort of a bunch of different systematic ways. I'm happy to go into details on sort of how I connected those dots and And that ultimately— I also thought a lot about business models.

Mm-hmm.

So, like, if your business model really needs to be a function of what you think your growth engine's going to be, if you're going to grow virally, you can have a pretty low revenue per user. And if you can grow virally and have a high revenue per user, that's better. So there's no reason to, like, bring the price down, but— or the revenue per user down. But if you're going to try to arbitrage growth by buying AdWords or display ads or something, then you have to have a higher price per user. That's the other thing. Essentially, that's kind of a puzzle where you have to make sure that the pieces fit together. If the only thing that's going to support the channel that you think is going to work is a high price, but the price sensitivity for the product is They're really price sensitive, and if you raise the price, the demand drops to nothing, then start over, rethink. Like, okay, that channel is actually not viable. I have to think about how do I grow virally, or how do I grow through integrations, or whatever it might be. So business model is actually an important part of what the growth engine is as well.

Got it. Cool. Obviously, you know, there's a lot of processes that are tied to growth. So you mentioned product-market fit. I know you've talked about this in blog posts before and interviews as well. So can you tell our audience kind of how you measure product-market fit? I guess this can kind of go to Kualaroo too.

Yeah, so for me, one of the things that— you know, so for me, like a lot of the success that I had in the early companies was luck. And I think that a big part of that luck was the product-market fit piece. But what it turned out was that when you do back-to-back IPOs and 6 months later you're the first guy at Dropbox, not surprisingly there's going to be a lot of people— you're the first marketing guy at Dropbox— there's going to be a lot of people asking you to come work with their companies. And so for me, I needed an efficient way to sort of process that deal flow and pick which one I could actually— which one had the most potential.

Good problem to have.

What's that? Yeah, it's great. Exactly. I couldn't go in and study the user base and do all these things because I was super inefficient. The other thing, the other little angle with this is that when you tell an entrepreneur that you don't believe in their vision and you don't want to work with them, you really piss them off. Even if they don't maybe act angry, they're at least hurt on the inside. What I— I took it down to a single survey question that I basically had them run it. I published it on survey.io and basically just said, if you want me to work with you, go ahead and run this free survey that I set up. I worked with Kissmetrics to create the tool so they could just basically send someone there and then share the results with me. And I was looking for the percentage of people who said That they would be very disappointed if they could no longer use the product.

Mm-hmm.

So if they said they'd be somewhat disappointed, or if they said that they wouldn't be disappointed, or they said they don't use it anymore, like, I kind of took that as those people don't matter.

Mm-hmm.

But how many people actually say they'd be very disappointed if the product disappeared? If that signal was strong enough, then I knew I had a good chance of working with them. So what— kind of going Back to, you know, how would I say yes or no in working with a company? If the signal wasn't strong enough, I would say, I don't want you to waste your money on me right now. It's too early for growth, which was actually the right message for them. But that's a lot better than saying, I think you're going to fail and I don't want to work with you. Like, that would be the interpretation otherwise.

Yeah.

So, like, hey, it's a little early to work with me. Why don't you go back? keep iterating, keep those costs down, keep understanding customer needs, and try to get that product-market fit just right.

Mm-hmm.

And then, but so once I looked at enough of those numbers, and I had run that question against the Zodni user base and against the Dropbox user base and Eventbrite, and looked at kind of over time, and then there was companies I didn't work with, and I could start to see a pattern that when they were— when that user base was around 40% of active users saying that they would be very disappointed without the product, Then those companies tended to do pretty well and when they— whether I worked with them or not. And then if they were like way below that, those companies tended to flail. And so then I could basically say, as soon as you get that number to 40%, let's talk and until you get that number to 40%, let's not talk.

Yeah.

And I would basically say, I don't think I can help you get to that 40%. Like that's That's sort of an entrepreneur's risk, that's not a marketer's risk. That's why the founder gets the big bucks, because they're trying to create a solution to a problem that really matters, and if they nail that, that's the upside. You know, a marketer doesn't get very much and shouldn't expose themselves to that risk.

Got it. So the takeaway here, I think, for the audience is once you're at the 40% number, it's time for growth.

Mm-hmm.

Interesting thing, like, so when I did this, I actually ran this question when I was at Treehouse, and it was way above 40%. So the product market fit was there, but we had a pretty big— we had a churn issue which was pretty massive at the time. So how would you deal with that? I mean, would you— if you saw a company that had really good product market fit but really high churn, like, what would be your reaction to that? How would you deal with it?

It really depends on the product. I mean, so the 40% is just a proxy that you still have to think through. You know, the business still might not be viable if no one's willing to pay for that solution, or it's 40% if it's free. As soon as you put a price on it, it drops to zero, you know, like that. So, and there's certain categories, like how disappointed would you be if you could never see Forrest Gump again? You know, how disappointed would you be if you hadn't seen it? Like, I mean, certain categories are a little harder to answer there, or— How disappointed would you be if you couldn't use the dating site where you met your wife? I hope that I won't be. That kind of thing. So I mean, I think you still have to kind of look category by category, and in the case of churn, that there are certain use cases in businesses that are— that it's a project-based need and churn is going to be high, and that doesn't mean that you can't build a good business there. It's just like, one, it may not be a SaaS business. It may be something that you sell on licensing.

Good point.

I can tell you, very interestingly, churn is something that we struggled with a lot at Qualaroo. And, you know, a little bit of background on Qualaroo is that it's primarily used by people who are doing conversion rate optimization so that they They can target questions to specific groups of people on the website at specific stages to understand why or why not they're doing something and issues they're having and why they're there. And then you use that information to plug it into your A/B testing. And so we had this churn problem where we started like thinking, okay, I need to add things that are going to make people want to keep using this long-term. But it's actually been very recently that we realized our churn problem had nothing to do with the product and had a lot to do with the market that we were targeting. That there's this big vibrant market of full-time conversion rate optimization people, and they don't treat it as a project, they treat it as a process. They treat it as an ongoing process of improving their website's ability to meet business objectives. Then there's people like how I've been in the past where you're a full-stack marketer. You're doing all of these things. You don't have the time or discipline to consistently manage and do conversion rate optimization at the level where it's going to reach that optimal level. After a while, you're going to run out of ideas for questions to ask because it's sort of this side thing that you're doing. That group's going to treat it as a project. But there's this whole other group that just by changing the targeting, we can solve our churn issue overnight by just changing the targeting. So, I mean, it's kind of a long answer to that question that you asked, but hopefully it kind of gives the context, which is the case of kind of anytime you're talking about startups, it depends.

Yeah, no, totally. And I think that's a really good answer there. And so you actually bring up the concept of full-stack marketer. So let's define what a full-stack marketer is first, and then let's define what a growth hacker is, and let's kind of see what the difference is, I guess.

Okay, and to me, I actually wasn't even that familiar with the term full-stack marketer until pretty recently, but I like it. I mean, it's something that in companies that I have been in early— and then I'll go back to growth hacker in a minute— but in companies that I've been in early, You know, there's certain companies that have 2 people in them. You know, it might be a CEO and a CTO that are the 2 founders of the company.

Yeah.

And that means that they're dividing— usually the CTO in that case would be— or the CEO might be doing marketing and financing and kind of all the outreach stuff, and the CTO would be deeper in the code. But you add a 3rd person and a 4th person and a 5th person, and suddenly everybody starts to specialize a little bit more and gets a little bit You know, you're taking responsibilities off people's plates. And I've seen that in companies where, you know, I'm one of the first 10 employees, and then we have hundreds of employees, everyone's scope of responsibilities goes down. So to me, full-stack marketer is something that an early-stage company can't afford to have 5 marketers, and so you need someone who can kind of do it all, who has enough knowledge of each of the pieces that they can do That they understand SEO and SEM and content marketing, but they also understand conversion rate optimization. They also understand analytics and how to really spot opportunities in the data and issues in the data. Each of these areas, and there's a lot of people that are like that. I think startup marketers tend to be like that just out of necessity. They have to be.

Yeah.

So that's how I would kind of define a full-stack marketer, is just somebody who really has a deep understanding of kind of each of the elements of Mm-hmm. A growth hacker is something that is actually more narrowly focused than that full-stack marketer.

Okay.

The growth hacker, I mean, so a lot of things that I listed for the full-stack marketer are going to be things that would apply directly to a growth hacker, but what— if you've ever picked up a marketing textbook, you'll find that they're about this thick and there's Yep. There's a gazillion things in there, and about maybe a quarter of it or less than that you can directly tie to its impact on growth and correlate its impact on growth. Well, at the same time, you have a lot of things that wouldn't show up in there. I mean, you kind of— like marketers talk about the 4 Ps, so product is one of the 4 Ps, but But there's a lot of things that different kind of groups that are typically outside of the marketing department actually can do to impact growth. And so there's, you know, that ultimately marketing and growth are not necessarily synonymous. Marketing is broader than growth, and that growth actually bleeds into some of these other departments. So to me, a growth hacker is just someone that, again, it's that early-stage company That you, out of necessity, you have somebody who's just focused on every single activity that they can be doing has to be measured against its potential impact on growth. Everything that they look at is looked at through the lens of how can I use this to drive more growth in the business, and that to me is what a growth hacker is. So a lot of times people tie it more to Well, isn't a growth hacker somebody who's got an engineering background?

Right.

I think that the engineering piece is such a powerful piece of the toolkit for a growth hacker that people naturally assume it's a requirement for the growth hacker. So the other thing is sort of a resource-to-growth ratio, like if you can drive a ton of growth with very few resources, that's like the ultimate success for a growth hacker.

Mm-hmm.

And that ultimately an engineering-driven solution is one where your marginal cost approaches zero once you've implemented— say if you had a widget process where you— like take YouTube, like once you've kind of built that viral embeddable widget thing out there, and there's not really a big incremental cost every time someone embeds another YouTube video, and they're all linking back.

Yeah.

And so that versus if they tried to buy space on each of those ads, is it just a completely different formula for growth and one where there's very little cost? I mean, obviously there's We know that YouTube was spending a lot of money before they got acquired, like $1 million a day or something in just bandwidth costs. But that was not so much a marketing cost as it was having a whole bunch of people using the product, whether it was on those sites or locally. So that's where I think that the engineering piece comes in, is that the cycles are faster if you can prototype things. But I'm not an engineer by background, and some of the best things that I've done are solutions that required me to work closely with an engineering group.

Right.

But so I don't think it's a requirement. I think that ultimately a growth hacker is a growth hacker if they look at everything through that lens, and that they're an aspiring growth hacker if they look at everything through that lens, and they're a growth hacker if they have a track record of being able to effectively drive growth.

Yeah, I definitely agree with that because my engineering's not in— I mean, my background's not in engineering and I think there's one thing I discussed with the ex-CMO of Lynda. He's like, if you're an engineer, on the marketing side, there are some things that you don't— you just don't know what you don't know, right?

Mm-hmm.

So I think there is value in having a marketer work with an engineer because then you can kind of combine forces. But there's the resource issue too. Obviously, some engineers that are really good at marketing are probably going to be a founder sometime, not going to be an employee for very long, in my opinion.

Yes.

Yeah, I totally agree with you there. So why don't we talk about— so my friend actually told me to ask you this question, but what about white hat tactics versus black hat tactics? Are growth hackers open to testing everything or only all white hat stuff?

I mean, I think it really depends on the person, obviously, but my I tend to be really focused on sustainable growth, so I mean, to me, like, the ultimate example of an effective growth company is Dropbox.

Mm-hmm.

And being able to see— I would say Dropbox is the most white hat organization that I've ever been associated with. Like, they would not promote their paid products Without mentioning they have a free product because they just didn't think it was fair to hide that information, even though that might be one way to have a sustainable growth channel. Like, they— every touchpoint I've ever seen with companies or with their customers is the most white hat touch that you could possibly imagine.

Mm-hmm.

And yet, you know, the rumor is that their latest value is like $8 billion now. And they've essentially spent nothing on marketing along the way.

Mm-hmm.

To me, that's a huge argument for white hat. I think that the companies that are spammy— so I think like one of the fastest ways to grow would be building an invite system before someone's tried the product. And the reason that that works so well is that you have a funnel. And that every step toward actually getting into your product, you lose half the people who would be going to the next step. So if you try to drive invites at the final step in the funnel, you're driving invites against a very small number of people. But if you try to drive them at the top of the funnel, you're driving against a very big number of people. And so just naturally, that's going to probably work better. Particularly if you can accidentally have them click on send this invite to all your people in your address book.

Accidentally.

Yeah, because it's so close to the download button or whatever the thing may be, and people do that. My mom— I actually— one company that delivered a ton of utility to me It was a few years ago, so they've probably cleaned up their act, but TripIt. I use it now still. I love TripIt. I pay for TripIt.

Good product.

Yeah, but I told my mom she should use TripIt because she had this trip around South America and she was talking about, I got all these different agenda items and other stuff that's out there and it's kind of a pain. And I was like, oh, you just got to use this thing, TripIt. Next thing you know, my mom goes to install it. And spams her entire address book with, I'm out of town. I mean, in her mind, I'm out of town and my house is going to be empty from these days to these days. Please come rob me.

Wow, to her whole list.

Yeah, I mean, and like for them to sort of add this social element to travel so that they know that that's a great growth engine for them. I was a great growth engine for them. I had true utility and told people about the value that I was getting. I never did again after that. I never shared it with anyone because they did that, but I think that's kind of a classic example of, you know, that a lot of the things that might seem smart in the short term aren't smart. So when I think about growth, I think about growth shouldn't be measured in number of people, growth shouldn't be measured in number of downloads. Growth should be measured in units of utility delivered.

Uh-huh.

And units of utility is based on delivering a must-have experience or an experience of value, whether it's must-have or not.

Uh-huh.

And how many people do you deliver that valuable experience, and if you can drive engagement long-term and drive more value over time, that's even more growth, even though it's growth in an individual. But to me, Growth is about the delivery machine for that value. As long as you're focused on who needs that value and how do I get it into their hands, rarely are you going to gravitate toward black hat stuff.

Yeah. That's a really good point because TripAdvisor, they're giving you a good experience the whole time you're doing word of mouth marketing, right? Once they give you that bad experience, that black hat experience, bam, no more word of mouth from them. from the customers that really enjoyed the product. And that's— I mean, my background first started with SEO, and I'm obviously willing to test black hat, willing to test white hat too, but you find that the biggest, the long-term ROI solutions are the good experiences, right? That's why everything's gravitating towards content marketing now. So, big takeaway here for the audience is you can test black hat, but it's not going to be sustainable. So, let's talk a little bit—

Yeah, and to me, I think that you've seen a number of companies like BranchOut or even even like Zynga.

Yeah.

That really sort of mastered the growth stuff, but there wasn't a lot of substance underneath it. And it might be like in the case of Zynga, it might be that they maybe didn't black hat stuff, but I can tell you, like the games companies, I get invites that I know— I've been getting invites for some dragon game on Facebook that I know the guy who that's associated with has no clue that that's coming up on my Facebook every day. I finally went in there and just blocked them. That's sort of a classic gaming tactic. I think that when you see the crash of, or the substantial decline of a company like Zynga, and then branch out everywhere to nowhere, I think true utility was not being delivered in the process. They better just sell those companies quick because they're probably not going to last. To me, what's the point of doing this stuff if you're not doing a net value for the world of like—

Right.

You're applying great growth skills for something that's crap. Really? Maybe you can make some money in the short term, but is that really— Is that fulfilling? It's not for me anyway.

Yeah, it really doesn't matter how great of a marketer you are because if it's a crappy product, it's just going to fall through the funnel anyway.

Yeah.

So let's talk a little bit about GrowthHackers.com, what it is exactly and why you decided to do it.

So I did it, I think so many great ideas are out there, it's because you wanted it. I think Dropbox is a function of Drew had a need and he basically built something for his own need, and it turns out a whole bunch of other people had that need.

Mm-hmm.

For me, I started this conversation out, I spent my first 10 years as a marketer in obscurity.

Mm-hmm.

And I actually tried to connect with other marketers, like I even did like through Fast Company when I was based in Boston. I did this thing through Fast Company and tried to organize a group of marketers just so I could geek out with them about this stuff. It was me and a bunch of unemployed people sitting around and like, yeah, who haven't done anything, but somehow they're the only ones who had the time to show up. Then at the same time, I wasn't finding inspiration out there. I was only kind of self-learning with some stuff. I did find some inspiration on blogs, but it was pretty scattered about. For me, that was kind of the void that I felt like I was filling with growthhackers.com, was that just that need for community, that place to be inspired and just learn from other people. Particularly if you— I shared, just to give you an example of it, I shared recently some things that I had tried with Twitter ads.

Yeah.

And that it was kind of working for me, and then somebody said to me, you know what you should do, you should actually add images to those Twitter ads. I'm like, all right, I'll try to add images, that's a good idea. And then somebody shared a HubSpot article that talked about, don't just— when you write the tweet, don't just put the stuff before the link, put something after the link too. I did all of this, but then I did some experimenting where it worked so well that I basically was paying for clicks on retweets from my own followers on that sponsored ad. I thought, that's pretty stupid, because I had a friend of mine who had hundreds of thousands of followers retweet it, and then I'm paying for those clicks. Then I thought, all right, so all this stuff I learned, I'm going to put a low budget on it. And it turns out that based on that sort of community knowledge, I'm now driving 2-cent clicks from Twitter ads, but 2-cent clicks from some of the most valuable people in the world. These are marketers that control budgets. You know, if you take marketers, the money that marketers spend collectively are off the charts compared to probably any other group, and I'm acquiring them to the site for 2 cents apiece through this channel, but I didn't figure that all out on my own. I shared it, and in sharing it, some people shared some ideas back to me, and now I've posted the same stuff back on Growth Hackers and got other people trying it. But just this idea that if— I think that there's probably a subset of really experienced growth hackers that probably don't want to be a part of the community because they don't want to share their best stuff and they feel like they might be above it.

Mm-hmm.

But the truth is that I'll take 100 next level down growth hackers who combine their pool of experiments and learning with mine to exchange and share that information. Our collective learning will be so much faster, so much better through that sharing. And yeah, we're going to saturate channels, but the fact is those channels are going to get saturated anyway. But we're going to be the ones to saturate it rather than— it helps us get in there first. And so to me, that's really kind of where Growth Hackers is going, is that it fills this void. But it's also owned by Qualaroo, so the other angle to it was looking at the marketing tools businesses like HubSpot, like Kissmetrics, like Marketo, are massive content marketing companies.

Yeah.

That is their primary engine of growth, and they probably put more resources into content creation than media companies do, or at least as much resources into content creation as media companies do. And I thought, that sounds like a pain in the ass. Like, I don't want to have to organize and manage all of that content creation. I want to step back and say, if I'm going to be a media company, I'm going to put the effort of a media company, I should be a media company. I should think about How would I approach this if from day one I wanted to be a media company to fill the void that I had spotted? And so that was the other thing, is like invest in the platform and think through it in terms of like why should it be a cost center, it could actually be a profit center in itself. And so ultimately long-term, if somebody else wants to pay for advertising against the user base that's there and I can do it in a way that's not too disruptive to the overall experience, and their ad is worth more to them than a Kwalaroo ad would be on there, then I'll take a third-party ad. We have to compete for access to that group just like anyone else, but ultimately there's more money coming to us. Anyway, to me, if you take the unique users of the top marketing products that are out there, that have been out there for many years, we're already at 75% of the monthly Wow. And we've only been out there for 9 weeks. So, and we've got so much stuff up our sleeves that, I mean, this week's growth, we launched a few things this week that literally put it like 100% growth over last week.

Wow.

That's not to say that that's necessarily sustainable. There's some luck pieces. There's some of this Twitter stuff that I'm doing right now, but My Twitter budget on growing that is $25 a day, so it's not like I'm spending big bucks to grow the thing.

Yeah, you bring up that Twitter hack. I actually looked at it the other day. I was like, I'm going to try this for one of my products, right? I think the key here is like, okay, it's not working out for me initially, but I know it's going to work. I just need to make adjustments. I think for the audience, just because you see a hack and it's not working initially, you need to test to see if it's going to work. There's always variables that you could be switching up to make it work for 2 cents or so.

I think it's trying to understand the media. I think entrepreneurs and growth hackers are very similar in mentality, in that it's about spotting opportunities. Looking a little bit more holistically at the product, not just my goals and my ads, or even my goals and my ads and my target users. But the property itself, I mean, the way that I think of using Twitter is not— a Twitter ad is not to buy audience, because that's expensive. I'm thinking of it as to seed great content and to get the ball rolling on great content. And then I know that if I can get that going and I can kick off that virality— and so that's why my budget is $25 a day. The Twitter ad, I got zero retweets, and I could have easily given up on it, but I've been running it now for 8 days and it's had 152 retweets now. And, you know, it just takes one retweet for someone who's got a million followers to really kick that stuff off.

Wow.

And that— so each— what I haven't posted the update on that is that each day the number of tweets or the number of clicks that I'm getting from my for my $25 has actually grown by about 200 since I did that.

Wow.

So I'm now up to— I think yesterday I did 1,680 clicks on my $25.

Wow. You know what I'm doing right after this interview. Yeah. You know, the interesting thing about growthhackers.com is when it first came out, I was like, what's the difference between inbound? There's some stuff on Hacker News, there's some other communities too. What are the key differences between those other groups?

Again, growth hackers is focused. That's the idea of what a growth hacker is. It's focused on everything that has a direct impact on growth. Inbound is more narrow than that. There's just a set of SEO stuff and content marketing, but API opportunities, viral opportunities, there's a lot of things that aren't going to fall within inbound. That's the reason why I— like inbound wasn't meeting my need.

Mm-hmm.

But there were certain things like I like inbound a lot and I go there quite a bit, but I go there for my inbound learning, not for my overall growth learning. And then Hacker News is way broader. There's a whole bunch of stuff. Like I don't have time to read all of the Growth Hacker articles right now. If I have to pick and choose the Growth Hacker articles out of that stream, it's just overwhelming. I'm trying to run a company. I'm trying to be a good dad. There's just not enough hours in the day for me to do everything. The interesting thing that's happened with growthhackers.com as well that I hadn't really anticipated as much is that it's actually become a great platform for people to build reputation within the community.

Mm-hmm.

And so I, like I said, for the first 10 years, despite a really good track record, nobody knew who I was because I didn't care if they knew who I was. I was just focused on being good at what I was doing. But once I started sharing, like I had to blog to an empty audience for a year before I got a little bit of validation that the—

Yeah.

that the stuff I was writing was interesting for people. Then when I started doing advising and people started saying, hey, I really need someone to help us build some awareness for my product. Awareness for your product? Really? You're going to go compete out there with Budweiser and their $80 zillion budget and you're $650 and you think you're going to buy some awareness?

Typical entrepreneur.

Yeah, like this, you know, you don't need to buy awareness. What you need to buy is What you need to do is get some people using your product and get people experiencing it, and if that experience is good, they're going to tell other people. So what you need to do is focus on customer acquisition. You don't need to focus on awareness.

Right.

So that was one of my early popular blog posts, like, awareness building is a waste of time for startups. But I think part of the challenge was I didn't know I didn't know what were my unique thoughts until I engaged externally with a bunch of founders and entrepreneurs, and I could basically see like, wow, I see this very differently. It's almost a passive-aggressive thing to start blogging, but suddenly my blog posts became a lot more interesting when I saw what I firmly believed, and it was sort of different than maybe some of the common beliefs that were out there.

What is your blog, by the way, just so the audience knows?

It's an amazing blog. Thanks. It's startup-marketing.com, startup-marketing.com. I don't blog very much anymore for exactly the reason that I was saying. As soon as I became a founder, I stopped having those interactions with others that I was doing when I was an advisor, and that those interactions were a great stimulus for being able to come up with blog posts. But yeah, I kind of average I mean, I've been doing like 2 a year now since then. I started doing more blogging on external publications.

Yeah, it's working. I mean, when I look at growthhackers.com, there definitely is differentiation. I mean, the post that you guys write on Uber's growth, Snapchat's growth, it really sets you guys apart from the other communities that I look at. You're right. When I want to look for things that are growth-related, that's the place I want to go to. So thanks for explaining that.

Well, yeah, I actually left that piece out, is that the only other thing, yeah, the original content that we're writing on there was something that I've always found my best inspiration from studying how other companies are growing. So for example, we just did the Upworthy breakdown this past week, and the number of ideas that I got from doing that Upworthy breakdown, and I wasn't the primary writer on that, I just did a little editing, but the number of ideas that I got from that Upworthy breakdown for some very specific things that we can do to grow growthhackers.com.

Mm-hmm.

And I think what you have to do is that a lot of people are sort of looking for formulaic things that they can copy, and you can't do that. You have to— by understanding the growth of how other companies are growing, you learn the principles of growth and you learn some things, and then you have to think about what's unique about my situation. How can I borrow from a couple of these and combine them in some ways and Like for example, Upworthy is all about growing on the back of Facebook, but I surveyed the growthhackers.com people recently and only 3% said that they would share growth content on Facebook, where 79% said their primary place where they would share growth content was on Twitter.

Yeah.

So there's a different strategy around Twitter, but so then I could look at how is Upworthy When Upworthy does use Twitter, how is it using it and how effective is that and what can I learn from that? There's a section of the site that will come out within the next 2 or 3 weeks that I think will take it to 1 million uniques a month relatively quickly. Maybe I'm being overoptimistic, which often happens.

Hey, shoot high, right?

Yeah, exactly. You don't get there without having big expectations.

How many uniques is it doing right now per month?

We're a little over 50,000.

Okay. Well, it's only been 9 weeks. That's insane.

Yeah, on like $900 spent.

Yeah.

For one of the hardest targeted markets to acquire.

Yeah. It's really quality traffic too. So, 2 more questions from my end. So, you've probably heard this question a ton. So, let's say I'm a fresh college grad. Obviously, all the crap I learned in college for marketing, it's not really relevant, right? But how does a fresh college grad become a growth hacker?

So, I mean, it was funny, I was kind of thinking to myself today, like, are growth hackers born or are growth hackers created? So one, I do think that there is some sort of— some people don't sort of have the makeup for it, so ultimately creative problem solver is sort of at the at the essence what it takes to be a good growth hacker. So creative problem solving from how do I get Twitter ads to work for me is part of creative problem solving. How do I connect this great solution with this audience that doesn't know about it? How do I— just all these different creative problems. So that would be the starting point, is just that for each college graduate to understand what their strengths are and make sure that they're playing into those strengths. Otherwise, they can still be part of a growth team. That's part of the transition that I see things happening.

Yeah.

I met with Upworthy's head of products right after we wrote our second part of our article. He happens to be based in Southern California, and so he came and had coffee with Morgan Brown and myself. And he— it was really interesting when he described the culture at Upworthy, very similar to the culture at Dropbox. And you would think, like, one's media, one's software. Like you'd think they'd be very different, but it's basically what I see in both those companies is that nobody has primary responsibility for growth. And maybe Dropbox does now, I haven't been there for a long time, but everybody understands the role they play in growth and everybody's passionate about the role that they play in growth. And when you have an entire company that's sort of focused on how each person can drive growth and they're passionate about getting their solution in the hands of that target customer, That's super powerful, and that's to me, I think, the next phase is where it becomes this sort of— there's the growth organization rather than the growth person. And so it goes growth person, growth team, growth organization.

Yeah.

And so what's great within that growth organization, then that means that aspiring growth hacker can be really good at any of the functions where they can contribute to growth. For me, I just think you have to find out what you're passionate about and what you're good at. You need to really align yourself in a role that taps into those things. Otherwise, you'll burn out for one thing if you're not passionate about it. If you're not good at it, you're not going to be very successful.

Yeah.

Then what I would do too though is just holistically understand the science of growth. And that's where I think growthhackers.com for me, that's why I think it can be bigger than marketing publications because ultimately there's something to learn on there for just about everybody. And that growth is really this kind of physics of growth. There's a science of growth and then there's a creativity of how do you tap into that. But that's what I love about these growth articles that They're really long and they're dense with a lot of information, and some people, you know, a lot of people give up a quarter of the way in and stop reading them. But for somebody who's passionate about this stuff, when you can get in there and study each of the elements of what's driving Uber's growth in a way that— we did one on Belly where the idea is that Belly, or like any of these companies, are not going to share how they're growing. But you can't grow in secret. You can reverse engineer anybody's growth if you get enough people sort of connecting those touchpoints.

Mm-hmm.

And so we basically, we study all the information that we can find about this, piece it together, and then brainstorm based on this, how would we try to grow this company? What, you know, and what proof do we have? Are they doing this? Are they doing this? And then we write the article around That. And so we did that with BellyCard, and they're a little less known, but they're out of Chicago. They're actually doing really well. And the CEO ended up tweeting to us, I went around the office to figure out who talked to you guys without clearing it with me. There's no way you guys figured this out on your own.

Wow.

But it's not that hard to figure it out when you connect the dots that way. And then we did the same thing with Square. Square had been really secretive about how they were growing, but at the recent Growth Hackers Conference in Northern California, the guy who was responsible for growing Square for a long time actually presented all the details on how they did it. We were really excited, basically, oh man, we nailed that, we nailed that. Okay, we missed this piece. I think we missed some of the community element, but we got— We got All the top pieces by just— I mean, one of the guys on my team did try very hard to connect with the Square team and try to get some human intelligence in the process as well. But it's just really fun kind of reverse engineering and exposing and then opening to the community to discuss it even more and contribute their observations. So I think that there's a bunch of really Yeah, no, it's hugely—

I mean, there's impact for anyone. If you can just read it and there's one or two takeaways, you could take it and modify the idea to whatever your business is. It totally works out. And, you know, I've used a lot of that stuff, so, you know, keep it up. Final question for you. What's one must-read book that you recommend to people and why?

If I could only read one book, I'd probably say Cialdini, Influence. People are not always— it's not always obvious how people react to certain things. When you can understand how people react to certain things, that's a huge part of just— marketing is psychology to a large degree. Just tapping into how do you pique interest, how do you maintain engagement. How do you drive action? I think one of the big developments that you're going to see over the next few years is going to be a lot of the brain science on those things that really— you haven't seen that much published around it, but I think Cialdini is probably— any of the behavior economics kind of books is a good part of it, but I think Cialdini Nailed it more than anybody in his book Influence.

Got it. Yeah, really powerful book. I've read it like 2 or 3 times already. It's one of those evergreen books. But Sean, you know, thanks so much for doing this. Obviously, you're a very busy CEO. Everyone, this is Sean Ellis, godfather of the term Growth Hacker. Thanks, Sean.

Thanks, Eric. Appreciate it.