Growth Hacking: Silicon Valley's Best Kept Secret (English Edition) Format Kindle

SUMMARY: This book walks you through how to grow a business fast despite constrained resources. It teaches you how to identify opportunities for boosting the profitability of your sales cycle, then executing on each with high efficiency, proving them, and then adding more. It's an easy read featuring a lot of condensed value, with many great examples, implementation checklists and analysis frameworks.

Chad and Raymond have done a great job of codifying many of the growth tactics used by start-ups that have achieved breakout success - albeit at a fairly high level. They've distilled this into an organising framework applicable to all businesses, not just start-ups or digitally-centric businesses commonly known for growth hacking.

The book starts with a succinct guide to the mind-set growth hackers bring to what they do, and why breakout growth starts with thinking (and living) differently and acting with more clarity.

They then step us through the ASP Framework - their way of deconstructing and analysing the parts of a sales and value delivery cycle – being mindful of the psychology of your customer and their total experience.

With ASP, they provide a means to clarify and see each sales cycle part in perspective to detect where high leverage opportunities to create growth exist. In the guise of the lean start up, they advocate a resource-efficient, data-driven approach to testing promising ideas/pathways for growing/enhancing key strata’s of the sales cycle or optimising customer experiences. By layering successive improvements, they drive the creation of “dominos of leverage”. Collectively, the ASP approach is designed to minimise cost of acquisition, maximise lifetime value and increase the volume of preferential customers who act on good experiences.

Throughout, there are many useful principles, examples, checklists and tests, including obvious and far-from-obvious tactics and how they can be combined.

While this book is an easy enough read to make sense to a total beginner, IMO, it is really more suited to someone who already has a decent understanding of business and modern marketing. For the latter, it can be thought of as a “compass” to analyse a company to get oriented for growth, despite constrained resources.

Disclosure: I'm a recent acquaintance of Chad (one of the authors) via a learning community we are both in. I’m also a Growth Hacker & Strategy Consultant who has worked in this area for over 20 years.

Growth Hacking: Silicon Valley's Best Kept Secret by Raymond Fong is an insider's guide to the best ways to grow a business quickly for a big profit. The writer has drawn upon experience and the people he knows or knows about in order to gather as much information as he can about the topic. The message that he is presenting is fairly simple: you have to be smart in order to grow a business. This does not mean that you need to have a long line of degrees or even lots of experience in the field. While those things may help, the reality is using the available resources you have in intelligent ways is far more effective than lots of the other traditional ways of doing things. If we want to progress forward, we need to be thinking in new and exciting ways. Many people are afraid to do this because it takes them out of their comfort zones. But, those who are willing to take the risks are the ones who have the potential to see the most rewards later on.
Lots of the information provided in the book is useful for anyone who is interested in starting and then growing a business. The author uses lots of examples of real people and real companies that have successfully taken a small start up and turned it into a huge profit. The business advice is sound and will open many readers' eyes to the possibilities that are out there. Some of the other advice is fairly basic, such as taking care of yourself with exercise and diet so you are the most effective person you can be. However, even the basic advice is such that it should be told to people who are looking for a way to improve. Really, this book is not just for business owners. It is for anyone who seeks improvements and ways to be more effective.

Creating or automating a replica of your best sales person sounds an admirable achievement, but is it possible?
The authors Raymond Fong and Chad Riddersen certainly think so, and in this book put forward a very strong case.
The book is faultless in its writing, extremely well edited, and most convincing in the evidence and examples it puts together.

Attracting prospects, setting a positive first impression, keeping prospects engaged and educated, following them up, and closing the sale with up-sell and cross sell opportunities, and lastly getting great referrals and retaining them as long term customers - these area all p-art of the building blocks that make up the ASP model presented by the authors. I could go into each of these in some more detail, put that would not do the book justice since Fong and Riddersen explain each of these components of Growth Hacking so well. They also explain how it differs from Guerrilla Marketing, and pose the all important question of: without spending a dollar more on marketing, how can you acquire the most customers in the least time? Well, we would all be millionaires if we knew the answer to this, yet growth hacking promises to do this leveraging the advancements of modern IT marketing and, well, it is quite a compelling argument. The ideas are presented so confidently and backed up with real case examples, leaving you in no doubt that if you are not confident or skilled enough to try growth hacking yourself, you are confident that if you imply these young and talented authors, you’ll get there.

As an IT Marketer myself, this is one of the most interesting books I have read since my bible, G. Moore’s Crossing the Chasm. For me, the hardest ingredient of all is the “creativity” needed to pull it off - but in Raymond Fong and Chad Riddersen you feel sure they can provide it for you. A super read, and one that all Marketing Directors should read if looking for new ideas to improve their marketing efforts.

The marketing for this book is a little over-the-top, but despite that, the book itself does actually offer some valuable information that could help businessmen and businesswomen. The emphasis is strongly on marketing and taking advantage of the resources that you do have to find success, even when your tools are limited. The idea is certainly appealing and some of the topics relate simply to changing your own focus and point of view. I do love the way the authors present their information and there are certainly some aspects that apply to my own situation.

The book is definitely targeted for people with their own business, particularly those who are at the stage of wanting to grow it further. That being said, some of the information is relevant to non-business owners as well and could be useful for people who want to grow personally and develop new mindsets. If nothing else, the book is worth picking up simply because it is well presented and easy to follow. That aspect alone makes it better than many of the other similar books on the market.

Growth Hacking: Silicon Valley's Best Kept Secret is a dense business oriented book focused on ASP framework. It provides lots of useful and helpful information for a new or existing business owner to grow and use business opportunities. Well, there are possibly lot of similar books in the market, but what is different or attractive here is its simplicity on how old idea has been translated into new technologies with additional tricks and suggestions from the author.
Though the book is for business owners and makes most sense for them, but as a reader if you enjoy reading books for knowledge this is one that fits that category too. It’s not complex and readable at any time of day. The marketing strategies we see on the internet that are very confusing, this book takes those distributed ideas and ties them together in one pyramid that starts to build and makes sense to the reader. A good Read!