Startup Topics: Growth Hacker Marketing, SAAS Metrics

A series of events led to this post.

First, I finished reading the book on Growth Hacker Marketing by Ryan Holiday . I decided to try a few growth hacks for our products.  The first few were to dig a bit deeper and collect more information understand concepts better and start on some small projects  related to an initial analysis of my company’s customers.

While the book is a great intro to Growth Hacking, Ryan stresses that it is not a set of tools but a ‘mindset’. My second step was to watch this video from Paul Willard on Growth Hacking . Paul talks about lots of experiments he tried, and shares many observations. He talked a lot about Lifetime Value of customers (LTV), the importance of modeling it for future value.  I had a rough idea about LTV, but wanted to learn more. You can find the slides Paul used here.

I stumbled upon Jason Cohen‘s article –  Why I don’t like LTV metric . Here I was, all convinced about Paul’s ideas about LTV, and the very next day I am reading an article that says it is a wrong metric. Jason says that if you make your marketing spend decisions based on a wrong model of LTV, you will be wasting money but explains in another article a revised calculation of LTV.

I think I have enough stuff to get started with a few experiments on my own.