Simon Zhang: Let Data Drive Growth

Let data drive growth Simon Zhang, founder and CEO of GrowingIO “If you are not growing, then you are dying!” This familiar saying captures growth as an enduring truth of business operations. Public companies, startups, and investment institutions all place great importance on growth, a central measure of a company’s direction. In 2010, Sean Ellis introduced the term “growth hacker.” In his view, a growth hacker’s sole mission is growth. Everything they do seeks to create the possibility of sustained product growth. Silicon Valley unicorns such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Airbnb, Dropbox, and Slack began applying growth-hacking methods long ago. Through creative approaches and scientific analytics tools, they attracted millions of users quickly and at very low cost, reaching multibillion-dollar valuations. Sean recognized this more than a decade ago. He believes modern businesses must innovate continually to grow efficiently. Known in Silicon Valley as the “father of growth hacking,” Sean is not only the framework’s originator and a leading marketing and product expert who helped more than four companies grow rapidly. He was also a good friend of mine when I worked in Silicon Valley. My acquaintance with Sean began through Dropbox, a fast-growing American startup. In late 2010, I was still at LinkedIn’s Mountain View headquarters, leading its entire analytics team to drive data-driven growth and monetization. One evening, an American colleague told me Dropbox’s growth team wanted to discuss using data for monetization and growth. I had already heard much about Dropbox: over the previous few years, its user numbers and engagement had grown explosively, at nearly 500% annually, making it one of Silicon Valley’s rising stars. Growth of more than fivefold a year was extraordinary after the 2009 economic crisis. What fascinated me most was the growth-hacking framework developed by Sean Ellis, who laid the foundations of its early growth team. This way of thinking helped companies escape a short-term, quick-results marketing trap, commercially and financially, and make user experience and value the aims of growth. Technology and product then amplified growth efficiency, maximizing future commercial returns. Traditional marketing addresses only the beginning of the user lifecycle: branding, positioning, and acquisition. Its approach is relatively broad-brush. Marketing departments bundle budgets and gradually outsource plans and execution to third-party agencies. Today, this model faces growing challenges and questions. Data-driven operations now go far beyond traditional marketing and even beyond what most companies call digital marketing. Website, WeChat, search-engine, and social-media marketing, along with media advertising, are gradually becoming basic competitive capabilities. Marketing itself has quietly expanded into product, sales, service, and other functions. Crucially, digital operations now accelerate growth through core product development and user experience. Retention requires better conversion at every step and optimization across channels, using data to find improvements quickly and keep evolving and iterating. Growth hacking embodies this effective, systematic coordination and operation at a higher level. Future digital operations will therefore no longer revolve solely around marketing. They will span the customer lifecycle, with departments collaborating to provide a consistently excellent overall experience. Since 2017, marketing’s focus has shifted rapidly from advertising, search, social media, and public commentary toward customer experience. Corporate marketing strategies increasingly recognize the role of product teams—not just marketing departments—in managing experience effectively to drive growth. Growth hacking provides a theoretical foundation for this transition. After our team returned from Silicon Valley to do business in China, we observed four major China–US gaps in growth hacking: First, a deep understanding of data’s enormous value. Second, mastery of data-driven systems and methods. Third, using data to guide the operations of each business function. Fourth, making effective use of analytics tools instead of manual work. Helping Chinese companies close these gaps and prevail against foreign competition was our main reason for founding GrowingIO. As a user-behavior analytics tool, GrowingIO analyzes marketing-channel optimization, conversion, retention, and monetization around the user. This helps not only startups and projects with limited time and resources, but also large companies building enterprise-wide data-driven systems. We live in an era when big-data technology is rapidly creating commercial value. Quickly realizing that value through analytics products is a core capability every company needs. In late 2016, GrowingIO held China’s first data-driven growth conference. We were honored that Sean Ellis traveled to Beijing to deliver several excellent growth-hacking talks and training sessions. In his presentation, “Growth Hacking Success: Setting and Achieving High Impact Growth Objectives,” Sean emphasized the importance of data analysis and scientific experimentation. China is undergoing an important industrial upgrade. As its demographic dividend diminishes, internet-traffic benefits concentrate through a Matthew effect, users’ time becomes more fragmented, and capital investment grows more rational and pragmatic, companies’ future unit operating costs will rise linearly or even exponentially. As costs increase substantially, Chinese companies must move beyond broad-brush marketing and operations toward more scientific and efficient approaches in marketing, manufacturing, sales, and future customer service. Sean Ellis’s Hacking Growth offers an effective theoretical and practical framework. I hope it brings rapid growth to your business!