Joe: Get this: for every ninety-two dollars companies spend trying to get people to their website, they spend only one dollar trying to make that visit worthwhile. Lewis: Whoa. That is… an astonishingly bad investment. That's like spending a fortune on a Super Bowl ad for a restaurant that has no food. Joe: It's a recipe for disaster, and it’s why most marketing feels like a bonfire of cash. And that's the exact problem that Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown tackle in their book, Hacking Growth. Lewis: Sean Ellis... isn't he the guy who actually coined the term 'growth hacking' back in 2010? He was the first marketer at Dropbox, right? Joe: Exactly. He's the OG. And this book is basically the definitive playbook that came out of that whole Silicon Valley explosion, showing how companies like Facebook and Airbnb built these unstoppable growth machines. It’s been massively influential, and for good reason. Lewis: Okay, but 'growth hacking' sounds a bit... spammy, right? Like finding a loophole or tricking people. Is that what this is all about?

Joe: That's the biggest myth, and it’s the first thing the book dismantles. Everyone thinks of that legendary Airbnb hack where they reverse-engineered Craigslist to let users cross-post their listings. It was genius, but the authors make a key point, quoting Andrew Chen from Uber, who said a traditional marketer would never have even imagined it. It took an engineer, tasked with a marketing problem, to pull it off. Lewis: Okay, so it’s a tech thing, not a marketing thing. Joe: It's a fusion. That's the revolution. Growth Hacking is about creating a cross-functional team—engineers, data analysts, product managers, and marketers—all focused on one thing: growth. They break down the walls that usually exist between those departments. Lewis: I can see how that would be powerful. The marketing team usually just shouts "we need more leads!" over the wall to the product team, who are busy building features they think are cool. Joe: Precisely. The book gives this fantastic case study from BitTorrent. Their mobile app was struggling. The marketing team was doing traditional marketing—ads, press releases—but it wasn't working. The product team was just building features. They were in separate silos. Lewis: A classic corporate standoff. Joe: Totally. So they brought in a product marketing manager, Annabell Satterfield, to bridge the gap. She started by actually talking to users—a radical idea, I know. She surveyed people who hadn't upgraded to the paid Pro version and discovered most of them didn't even know it existed. Lewis: Oh, that's embarrassing. Joe: Right? So the new, blended team ran a simple experiment. They added a big, obvious "Upgrade to Pro" button on the home screen. Revenue from upgrades jumped 92 percent. Per day. Lewis: Just from a button? Joe: Just from a button. Then they noticed negative reviews were hurting app installs. So they prompted users to leave a review right after they had a successful download—a moment of peak happiness. Positive reviews shot up 900 percent. Finally, they found out power users were annoyed by battery drain. So the engineers built a battery-saver feature for the Pro version. Revenue jumped another 47 percent. Lewis: Wow. So none of those were traditional "marketing" ideas. They were all product tweaks driven by a marketing goal. Joe: Exactly. The total revenue for the mobile app grew 300 percent in a year. That’s growth hacking. It's not about finding one silver bullet; it's about this relentless, data-driven process of finding and fixing problems across the entire user experience. Lewis: That makes so much more sense. It’s like having the chefs, the waiters, and the restaurant designer all on one team, constantly tweaking the entire dining experience, not just arguing about the font on the menu. Joe: That's a perfect analogy. And that team's number one job isn't to sell. It's to get users to what the book calls the 'Aha Moment'.

Lewis: The 'Aha Moment.' That sounds a little bit like magic. What is that? Joe: It’s the moment a user truly understands the core value of your product. It’s when it ‘clicks.’ The book argues this is the absolute, non-negotiable prerequisite for growth. You can't hack growth for a product that people don't fundamentally love. Lewis: Right, you can't put lipstick on a pig, as they say. Joe: You can, but it's still a pig, and it's a very expensive pig to market. The book gives the cautionary tale of a company called BranchOut. They were supposed to be a professional network on Facebook. They found a clever hack to get around Facebook's invite limits and grew to 25 million users in three months. They raised nearly 50 million dollars. Lewis: Sounds like a massive success. Joe: It was a total flameout. They were sold for scraps. Because once users got there, the product was empty. There was no value, no 'Aha Moment.' People signed up and immediately left. It was a leaky bucket, and they were just pouring users in as fast as they were leaking out. Lewis: Okay, so how do you find that 'Aha Moment'? It can't just be a gut feeling. Joe: It's all in the data. The book explains how the early Facebook growth team dug into their user data. They weren't just looking at sign-ups. They were looking for the difference between users who stuck around and users who left. And they found it. Lewis: Let me guess, it was something to do with friends. Joe: You got it. They discovered that if a new user connected with at least seven friends in their first ten days, they were overwhelmingly likely to become a long-term, active user. That was it. That was their 'Aha Moment.' The feeling of "Oh, my friends are here! I get it now." Lewis: Seven friends in ten days. That’s incredibly specific. Joe: And that specificity is what makes it powerful. Once they knew that, they re-engineered the entire new user experience to be a friend-finding machine. Everything was about getting you to seven friends as fast as possible. Twitter did the same. They found their 'Aha Moment' was when a user followed about 30 people. Suddenly, their feed was alive with interesting content, and they were hooked. Lewis: I can see that. It’s like the first time I used Uber and the car just... appeared. That was my 'Aha Moment' for them. The magic of the core promise being delivered. Joe: Exactly. And the book provides a simple tool for this, which Sean Ellis himself developed. It's a one-question survey you send to your users: "How would you feel if you could no longer use this product?" The options are "Very disappointed," "Somewhat disappointed," or "Not disappointed." Lewis: And you're looking for the "Very disappointed" crowd. Joe: You're looking for at least 40 percent to say "Very disappointed." If you hit that number, you have a "must-have" product. You've found your 'Aha Moment.' If you don't, you have more work to do on the product itself before you even think about scaling. Lewis: That's a brilliant, simple diagnostic. Okay, so you have a great product, you know the 'Aha Moment.' How do you actually build the machine to get people there?

Joe: This is where the process becomes a science. The book uses this great analogy of the Baylor University football team. For years, they were terrible. Then a new coach came in and installed a high-tempo, no-huddle offense. They started running 20 percent more plays per game than their opponents. Lewis: So they just wore the other teams out? Joe: Partly, but the real advantage was that they were learning faster. More plays meant more data, more experience, more chances to see what worked. They went from the bottom of their conference to a national powerhouse. Growth hacking is the business equivalent of that. It's about high-tempo testing. Lewis: But doesn't that lead to sloppy work? Just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks? Joe: That's another myth. It's the opposite of sloppy. It’s a highly disciplined, four-step cycle that the growth team runs every single week. Step one is Analyze: you dive into the data and user feedback to find opportunities. Step two is Ideate: the whole team brainstorms potential experiments. Lewis: And I'm guessing not all ideas are created equal. Joe: Not at all. Which brings us to step three: Prioritize. This is where they use a simple but powerful framework called the ICE score. Every idea is rated on a scale of 1 to 10 for its potential Impact, your Confidence that it will work, and the Ease of implementing it. Lewis: Impact, Confidence, Ease. I like that. It forces you to be realistic. A world-changing idea that takes a year to build gets a low 'Ease' score, so it might not be the first thing you test. Joe: Exactly. It prevents you from chasing shiny objects. You average the three scores to get a final ICE score, and you rank your ideas. Then you move to step four: Test. You launch the top-scoring experiments for that week. At the end of the week, you're back at step one, analyzing the results, and the cycle begins again. Lewis: It's a machine. A learning machine. Joe: It's a learning machine that produces compounding wins. A 5 percent improvement one week, another 5 percent the next... it adds up to massive growth over a year. The book tells the story of GrowthHackers.com, Sean Ellis's own company. After a year of success, their traffic suddenly stalled for three months. Lewis: The experts forgot their own medicine. Joe: They did. Sean investigated and found the team had gotten complacent. They were bogged down in administrative tasks and had only run a handful of experiments in a whole quarter. They had stopped the high-tempo cycle. So he rallied the team, they committed to running three experiments a week, and within a quarter, site traffic had nearly doubled. They pulled out of the nosedive by restarting the engine.

Lewis: So when you pull it all together, it's not about a bag of tricks at all. It's a fundamental shift in thinking. Growth isn't a department or a marketing campaign; it's a scientific process that the whole company participates in, built around a product people actually love. Joe: And it's profoundly customer-centric. That's the deepest insight for me. The whole process forces you to stop asking, "How can we sell this?" and start asking, "How can we deliver more value?" The growth, the revenue, the success—it's all a byproduct of delivering that 'Aha Moment' relentlessly and efficiently. That's the real hack. Lewis: That's a much more inspiring way to think about business. So for anyone listening, what's the one thing they could do this week to start thinking like a growth hacker? Joe: Forget marketing for a second. Ask five of your most loyal customers one simple question: "What is the primary benefit you receive from our product?" Don't lead them. Just listen. The answer is the seed of your 'Aha Moment.' Lewis: I love that. And we'd love to hear what you discover. Find us on our socials and share the most surprising answer you get. It’s always fascinating to see what people truly value. Joe: This is Aibrary, signing off.