How did you learn growth hacking?

Listen, experiment, and ask questions.

It took me four years, and I am still amazed how much there is to learn.

For the first two years, I started by understanding the fundamentals of growth. This meant understanding what factors create growth. The model that made things click for me is the AARRR framework.

After that, I began by reading about peoples growth tactics and applying them myself on side projects. The goal was not to drive growth.

I would test outreach tactics. Write one-off posts and see how much traffic I could drive to them via doing email outreach.

Quickly, I began seeing trends behind the tactics. I.e., platform tactics can be extrapolated.

What I mean by this is that tactics applied to a blogging platform such as Medium can be applied to other similar platforms. So when a new platform starts up, I can capture first mover advantage.

After, understanding the dynamics of third-party platforms I started to expand my knowledge base on the Revenue aspect of AARRR. In my opinion, this is the most critical.

To do this, I started analyzing 100’s of large companies where financials or growth metrics had been leaked or were public.

I then built out financial and growth models for those companies. This allowed me to gain an intimate understanding of business growth models and how a small shift in strategy could lead to a huge impact on revenue.

I have found this to be one of the biggest advantages I have now.

Since then, I have been focused on learning Python. As a caveat, you do not need to know how to code to be good at growth, but it does unlock a whole world of fun tactics you would not have otherwise.

What got me started?

I really wanted to scrape a website and then learned enough Python to do that. Then based on that knowledge I kept wanting to improve and do more analysis. Now I am learning how to utilize API’s to do programmatic ad buys.