BLOGSPOT atas

Sunday, April 30, 2017

How Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown Scaled GrowthHackers to a Community of 200k Marketing Professionals

Apr 26, 2017,07:52am EDT

Matt HuncklerContributor
Reinventing America

Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown began their careers at startup companies. They quickly realized getting audience exposure was one of the biggest challenges faced by small businesses.
“You see people at startups working really hard to try to make a difference with whatever product they’re building. However great the solution is, it only makes a difference if it gets in the hands of the people who need it,” Ellis said.
Ellis’ realization that distribution is just as important as a great product led him to coin the term “growth hacking” in a 2010 blog post. He defined growth hacking as a marketing strategy that prioritizes business growth over everything else, and he urged startups to embrace growth hacking in order to get their products out to their customers as quickly as possible.
Brown had come to similar conclusions about the unique problems of startup marketing, and he discovered Ellis’ blog on the subject. They intentionally connected a few years later, and Brown took an interim role as Head of Growth at Ellis’ company, Qualaroo.
GrowthHackers began as a side project for the pair while they were working at Qualaroo. Today, GrowthHackers has a community of 200,000 members and also provides consulting, training, software, and hiring services. In my recent interview with Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown, they shared the secrets behind the company’s journey from idea to thriving global community of growth marketing leaders.
Building a Unique Community
GrowthHackers began as one part passion project and one part content marketing strategy for Qualaroo, a customer insight and conversion rate optimization tool. Ellis wanted to create an online community for growth-focused marketers for its own sake, and he also knew such a community would include many potential customers for Qualaroo.
The first step to building GrowthHackers was forming a content strategy for the new website. While researching, Ellis and Brown discovered the Internet was awash with content from marketing technology companies, so they devised a method to stand out from the crowd.
“We couldn’t compete by pumping out as much content as possible, so we decided to aggregate, filter, and rank from this ridiculous river of content. People would come to GrowthHackers to discover the best of everything that’s out there instead of having to sift through all the noise,” Brown said.
They launched the first version of GrowthHackers and leveraged Ellis’ Twitter following of about 10,000 people to begin attracting visitors to the website. Once traffic started coming in, they worked to build a sense of community by reciprocating all visitor interactions.
“The most crucial part was making sure that if somebody posted a comment or interacted in any way, we responded to make them feel like they weren’t alone in a ghost town. It was 7 days a week for 3 or 4 months until we could finally let off the gas a little bit, because the community had built enough momentum that it could keep itself engaged,” Ellis said.
Going All-In on GrowthHackers
GrowthHackers continued as a side project for several years until Ellis decided to focus all his efforts on it. He sold Qualaroo in February 2016 and started working on GrowthHackers full time, launching the Projects software platform later that year. Brown left the team to accept a position as COO of the online real estate publication Inman News, but he and Ellis remained close collaborators.
In fact, the two recently coauthored Hacking Growth, which goes behind the scenes to reveal the winning strategies of the world’s fastest-growing companies. It serves as a playbook for assembling a team, acquiring customers, and running the processes that drive rapid growth.
Meanwhile, GrowthHackers has solidified its position as a leading source of growth marketing education and solutions for a global community. The GrowthHackers forums contain nearly 62,000 posts and 400 educational videos, as well as two dozen case studies of high-growth companies. The forums also host live Q&As with growth marketing experts on a regular basis.
The growth hacking movement continues to pick up steam today, with increasingly more businesses filling “Head of Growth” roles. Growth hacking was conceived as a way to supercharge startup growth through marketing, and GrowthHackers continues to provide the knowledge and tools needed to do so.
For Ellis and Brown, the company is a realization of their mutual passion for helping startups find customers.
“I’ve always been excited about bringing great ideas to the people who could benefit from them," Brown said. "That was the impetus for running down this path.”
==