Growth Hacking: Silicon Valley's Best Kept Secret Paperback – January 1, 2017

Los Angeles author Raymond Fong began his successful career with a degree in Engineering from the prestigious Harvey Mudd College and his graduate degree in computer engineering form the University of Southern California. He has worked in the aerospace industry as a systems engineer on top-secret government projects, and after five years in Engineering, he re-directed his talent and success toward marketing and consulting where he has become a recognized expert in the digital marketing arena, his knowledge and expertise is being shared as a coach and mentor, training tens of thousands of business owners around the world on the intricacies of entrepreneurship and marketing. As evidenced by this book Raymond is an expert consultant as a growth hacker for a wide spectrum of businesses. Raymond’s co-author for this book is Chad Riddersen, a former investment banker turned growth hacker and co-founder of Deviate Labs, a growth hacking consulting agency. Chad graduated from the University of Southern California, started his career at Deloitte followed by two boutique investment banking firms focusing on internet and digital media. He has worked with a broad range of clients including Boeing, Dollar Shave Club, and a half dozen companies from ABC's show the Shark Tank. High powered resource guides for this fascinating book detailing ‘growth hacking.’In their sophisticated introduction we read ‘Imagine growing your business without the typical growing pains— no additional staff, no increased work hours, and no more headaches. When you started out, you envisioned owning a business that spun off cash month after month without you having to work late nights and long weekends. The reality is, when you have the money, you have no time; and when you have the time, you have no money. This dollars-for-hours trade-off cycle is stuck on repeat, and you need a breakthrough in order to achieve your original vision. Our intention is to show you how to shatter the repeat cycle by reallocating your resources, time, and money in a way that will produce a phenomenal growth result. Intuitively, the most efficient way to produce a phenomenal result is to replicate someone phenomenal. The thing is, all of your peers are experiencing the same sales results that rise and fall with the economy. Therefore, you need to look beyond your peer group. The fastest-growing companies in the world are technology start-ups in silicon-monikered regions such as Silicon Valley, Silicon Beach, and Silicon Alley. You’ve probably heard the stories of twenty-somethings like Palmer Luckey who founded Oculus and sold the company less than two years later to Facebook for a BILLION dollars. From zero dollars to one BILLION dollars in under twenty-four months is unfathomable growth. Raymond and Chad are growth consultants, also known as “growth hackers,” and have worked with some of the fastest-growing companies in the world. They have deconstructed the Silicon Valley playbook and built a framework, the Automated Sales Process ™ (ASP ™), for any business to replicate and experience Silicon Valley-style growth.’In this new realm of information Raymond and Chad are superb teachers, making what at first seems incomprehensible quite accessible. The divide the book into sections - Growth Hacking Your Mind, Establishing an Automated Sales Process (ASP ™), Attraction. First Impression, Engage & Educate, Follow-Up, Sales Technology, and Referrals & Retention.Or to distill this summation they include such gems as ASP SUMMARY: ATTRACT thousands of interested new leads. Create a powerful FIRST IMPRESSION to set the tone for a consistent, personalized, and professional experience with your company. ENGAGE & EDUCATE your prospects so they have all the information they need to feel comfortable buying from you. Implement a seamless FOLLOW-UP process so that no business slips through the cracks and your company is always top-of-mind. Use SALES TECHNOLOGY to more efficiently close sales, upsell, and cross-sell products and services. Generate high-value REFERRALS while RETAINING existing clients.Finally someone is breaking the glass wall around the Silicon Valley mystique. This is one elegant, valuable book. Highly recommended. Grady Harp February 17

Growth Hacking has several worthwhile and beneficial tips that not only include actions but ways to think about your business differently. It is geared towards start-up businesses but could possibly be used by business owners who have reached a stagnant point in growth. Sometimes it helps to review ideas that as time has progressed, may have stopped doing. I liked that the author also discussed success stories like Dollar Shave Club that started out with very limited resources. The author's language is straight-forward and the tips provided are relatively simple to apply like referral programs and line tags. I also liked that the author uses illustrations for some of the concepts. It helped me to focus and compare the information provided. I think this book is a good beginning for whichever type of business owner you maybe beginner or refresher. Most of the concepts are not brand new and are very basic but I don't feel like that makes them any less beneficial or useful. It is important to have a base strategy that works well to be able to expand upon later on as the business gets bigger. Overall, good for anyone who is trying to market a product or service to audiences.

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.