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[MUSIC PLAYING] DREW SANOCKI: Welcome to module 1, lesson 2, Growth as a Process. Do headlines like this make you sweat? I know they make me sweat and I try to never let them see me sweat. Most entrepreneurs read headlines like these and we get overwhelmed, we get suckered in by the promise that there's some silver bullet out there that's going to 10x our business in a year. So we try to do everything, and we do nothing well. Well, I've got some bad news for you.
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There's no single silver bullet that will 10x your business in a year. What will grow your business is pressure over time. The software as a service world figured this out long ago. The whole growth hacking movement started there led by entrepreneurs like Sean Ellis from Dropbox, Brian Balfour at HubSpot, Hetan Shah from Kissmetrics, and Andrew Chen now at Uber. Well, these smart people all know growth and they all say the same thing.
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To get growth the outcome you need growth the process. What we all read about when we read epic growth stories are the outcomes. We don't read about is the process, experimentation, and diligence and pressure that went on behind the scenes often for months and years that ultimately created that silver bullet outcome. What we all read about when read about epic growth stories are the outcomes, what we don't read about is the process and testing and experimentation and diligence and pressure that went on behind the scenes for months and years that ultimately created that silver bullet outcome.
1:25
If you don't have a process for growth I'm going to give you mine. This is the single best thing you can take away from this course. Whenever I take on a growth client, I create a new marketing backlog like this one. It's a spreadsheet. You could use trawler board or Evernote or a sticky note. Doesn't matter. In the sheet I put every marketing and growth idea we have. Everything we read on digital marketer or Shopify's blog or nerdmarketing.com-- that epic growth blog.
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Every tip, trick, or hack I add them one per line. Then I rank these ideas by two factors. Number one, expected impact and number two, effort to implement. So my top ideas will be the ones that are highest impact and easiest to implement. When I'm done, I start my growth process. I Pick one or two ideas off the top of the list and I install them, I experiment.
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I don't go all over the list, I focus only on those one or two ideas for the next week or so. This is a simple execution sprint. In software it's called a scrum. And at the end of my scrum sprint I log the results. I decide whether my tests worked enough to blow them out across the business and then choose a couple more tests for my next sprint. That's it. Wash, rinse, repeat. This growth process not any one tip or trick is what will 10x your business.
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And if you want a copy of this growth backlog I use with my clients, I've included at the end of the lesson. There's a second thing to note about growth processes. Start back to front. When ranking the ideas in my backlog for a mature business like Karmaloop I like to start with multipliers 1 and 2 before 3. In other words, I'd like to start with retention then monetization and only then acquisition. The reason is because you want to optimize your offering before you spend a dime on traffic.
3:06
Do you want more traffic or do you want more revenue? Maximize before you multiply. If we want growth in 100 days we should always focus on our existing customers, our existing merchandise, in our current platform. In that spirit, in the next lesson, which is the first lesson in module 2 I'm going to get into retention and talk about how you can hack away your customer frequency. In recap what I talked about today, growth is a process as much as it is an outcome.
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Within that process you should work back to front and prioritize multipliers 1 and 2. Thanks and I'll talk to you next module. [MUSIC PLAYING]
