AMHF 0140 - Book Club - Growth Hacker Marketing by Ryan Holiday

Our book club selection for June was Growth Hacker Marketing by Ryan Holiday.

We’re a little late discussing it because, well, it’s summer. And because we wanted to get the last three videos out for our Marketing Lab members who are working on their Five Stories Every Aviation Brand Must Tell.

But, we’re catching up and I’m glad we did.

This is a great book for people who studied marketing before about 2000 and need an orientation to explain what the heck happened.

So, the book explains what Holiday calls “growth hacker marketing.”

Of course, he’s not the first to use the term: Wikipedia has a fantastic entry:

Sean Ellis coined the term “growth hacker” in 2010. In the blog post, he defined a growth hacker as “a person whose true north is growth. Everything they do is scrutinized by its potential impact on scalable growth.” Andrew Chen introduced the term to a wider audience in a blog post titled, “Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing” in which he defined the term and used the short term vacation rental platform Airbnb’s integration of Craigslist as an example. He wrote that growth hackers “are a hybrid of marketer and coder, one who looks at the traditional question of ‘How do I get customers for my product?’ and answers with A/B tests, landing pages, viral factor, email deliverability, and Open Graph.” In 2012, Aaron Ginn defined a growth hacker on TechCrunch as a “mindset of data, creativity, and curiosity.” In the book “Growth Hacking”, Chad Riddersen and Raymond Fong define a Growth Hacker as “a highly resourceful and creative marketer singularly focused on high leverage growth”

The second annual (2013) “Growth Hackers Conference” was held in San Francisco set up by Gagan Biyani. It featured growth hackers from LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube among others. In 2015, Sean Ellis and Everette Taylor created GrowthHackers – the largest website community dedicated to growth hacking and now host the annual GrowthHackers Conference.