Austen Allred - Secret Sauce: The Ultimate Growth Hacking Guide

2017 Austen Allred and Vin Clancy

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced without permission from the author. The views expressed in this book belong solely to the author and do not necessarily represent the views held by any other entity.

ISBN 13: 978-1-63587-734-2

Cover design by Marcin Talar

Edited and typeset by Eileen Leavitt

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Authors Note

Well use the words we or I throughout the book, without obvious reference to who is writing each section. We (Austen Allred and Vin Clancy) are both the authors, and wed like to keep it simple.

To Feleicia, for standing with me
no matter whats on the horizon.

Austen

For all those at the start of their journey.
Use this and free yourself.

Vin

Contents

The Perfect Landing Page:
Starting a List

Your First Drip of Traffic:
Becoming an Authority Site

How to Win at Paid
Search Marketing

How to Track
Almost Anything

Introduction

W ere going to let you in on a little secret: most marketing and growth hacking books are worthless.

Theyre full of fluff and marketing-speak and a whole lot of useless advice that, if heeded, will leave you twisting in the wind indefinitely, wondering what youre doing wrong. It wont actually be your fault; it will be your teachers.

Dont waste your time.

The truth is that marketing is pretty easy once someone tells you what you should be doing. The only problem is that no one wants do that. Theres too much money in selling books about the veneer without ever giving up the actual secret sauce.

This book is not like those books, and it will probably be very different from what youre used to. This isnt a marketing book. Its a tutorial. Its a step-by-step, systematic dismantling and dissection of every channel and practice that actually works . Almost everything youll read in this book is something anyone can do with a little bit of effort and without a significant marketing budget. When someone comes to you and says, I have a new app, but I dont know how to get users, you will not only have a dozen different strategies that could work, but youll also know exactly what it takes to implement each one of them. Thats our goal with this book: in-the-weeds, ultra-practical, and actionable steps and processes.

After you read this book you will be able to sell units of and get users signed up for just about anything.

A Word of Warning

What you will read in the coming chapters can be used for good or evil. The constant dilemma of most marketers is determining at what point something becomes spam or detracts from the user experience. This is an important conversation to have with yourself and the people you work with. Most good marketing tactics changed one degree become spammy and abusive, even when they deliver short-term results. We dont like to talk or think about that reality much, because it makes all marketing feel slimy and dirty.

Our responsibility in this book will be only to tell you what works. But we will continually recommend doing things that work long-term, because we want you to build equity in the Internet, not churn and burn the feelings of those who matter most to your company. You decide where you draw the line for your particular product, and you are responsible for being the protector of your own user experience.

Growth Hacking Wont Fix All Your Problems

With great power comes great responsibility. Growth hacking is a steroid. Used at the right time and in the right way, it can be extremely powerful. However, relying solely on growth hacking can be dangerous. You need to understand that even the best growth hacking team in the world will not save you if you have a product that people dont actually want. You might be successful in the beginning, but if the product isnt there, growth hacks will only take you so far. Otherwise, youll scale up growth as a Band-Aid to cover all of the warts on your product, only to find that the warts are now infected.

Your product is the base number, and growth hacking is the multiplier. There are times when fixing the product matters more than all the growth hacking in the world. And there are times when you need the multiplier. Carefully consider each.

But when youre ready to grow, youll find that this book includes tactics and strategies you can develop with, iterate from, and improve upon even as future technologies and social media platforms change. In the process of implementing these ideas, you will become a truly superb marketer.

It Works

What youre about to read works. Weve seen it take companies from the brink of death to success, and weve watched it take companies that are doing OK and make them explode. Weve watched twenty-something kids turn these methods into thousands of dollars per month in affiliate marketing revenue, and weve watched people who thought the world didnt care about their product find their tribe.

In this book, youll find only the methods weve seen work firsthand. Weve done it ourselves, weve watched others do it, and we have results that show it. We are driven by data and cold-hard facts, not fantasies or dreams of hypothetical growth.

It Requires Work

In our marketing experience, ninety percent of the work is figuring out what will stick. We created this guide to save you from the guesswork. But there is still a level of work required. No one can avoid that, and if you function under the delusion that good marketing is effortless, youre reading the wrong book. It takes a lot of hard, sometimes slow, and sometimes monotonous work.

But if it brings success, we use it. If it doesnt, we dont waste our (or your) time.

Pick a Channel and Nail It

This book will present and break down several different channels, going through the strategies that make them work. We recommend that you pick one channel first, and get that channel working.

The natural tendency for most people who will pick up this book is to try to do five different things at once and to do them all halfway. These methods dont work well if theyre done only part of the way. You have to be all in. You have to be thorough. There may be times when things become monotonous and boring. That generally means youre on the right path. Dont give up or try to outsource or automate too early. Even the best marketers spend an absurd amount of time doing repetitive and boring things to get what theyre doing off the ground. It just comes with the territory. Do the work, and you will see the results. Theres simply no way around it.

Before You Scale

Its the tendency of everyone who wants to growth hack to start at a very large scale. Before they do anything, they spin up two hundred accounts and forty proxies and get ready to spam everyone from their barber to Warren Buffett. Marketers are the worst culprits for diving in before they know if there are any alligators camouflaged in the deep end of the pool. They want to scale, scale, scale before they even know if what theyre scaling works.

Stop. Slow down. Do everything manually . Even if its brutally make-you-want-to-stick-meat-skewers-in-your-eyes boring. You have to watch every process intensely in the beginning to know what is working and what isnt. You need to have your ear to the ground to understand what the feedback is. Do a small experiment, make it work on a small scale, and iterate quickly. Once youve really nailed it (and only then), start to scale. And scale big .