“How would you Growth Hack my business?”

It’s a question I smell coming miles away.

I love the expression on their face when I tell them:

“I have absolutely no clue”.

That’s like asking a stranger on the road: ‘how would you love me?’

You can’t ‘just love somebody’.

He/she doesn’t know who you are, what you do and whom your friends are.

My reply is always the same.

It’s that one question that determines how they are doing:

“How does your growth process look like right now?”

The reason why I ask this question is because the rule to growth is simple, but therefore not easy.

Process comes before Tactics.

Why?

The reason is simple, tactics change, processes don’t.

Period.

This guide will teach you how to:

1. Set up your growth process from scratch while saying goodbye to google docs and paper sheets.
2. Automate your idea flow and prioritization the ideas in order to spend the minimum amount of time in Google Sheets nobody reads. (wow that rhymed).
3. Set up your first experiment.

This guide will not teach you:

1. How to brainstorm growth ideas.
2. How to become a Growth Master and decide which experiments to run first.

This guide is for:

1. Business owners/founders who want to coördinate the growth of their teams.
2. Marketing Managers who need a more structured way to grow their business.
3. Self-proclaimed growth hackers who need a framework.
4. Growth Consultants that want to guide their clients in a processed way to growth.

Process:

1. Understand & choose your One Metric That Matters.
2. Set up a structured way to document your brainstorming ideas.
3. Create & automate a backlog for your ideas to prioritize them
4. Create, test and analyze your first experiment.
5. (Optional) Use a chatbot to capture ideas on the fly.

Tools used:

Pipefy

Zapier

Google Sheet

Estimated time to set up:

35–45 minutes. (depending on your awesome reading skills)

Growth Outline

Step 1: Find & write down your One Metric That Matters.

1.1. Why you need an OMTM

1.2. Don't let your OMTM confuse you

1.3. How to pick the One Metric That Matters

Step 2: Set up your growth process for success.

2.1. Process before Tactics: Set up your OMTM in Pipefy

2.2. Process before tactics: Set up your Brainstorm Process in Pipefy

2.3. Track those juices: Create your idea backlog in Google Sheets.

2.4. Let the adults speak: create a Zapier account to connect your Google Sheet with your Pipefy.

2.5. Don’t trust the humans: correct the human perception out of your idea score.

2.6. Be more like my buddy Edison. Set up your experiment the right way, without losing valuable data.

2.7. Let’s become Mister Edison: run your first experiment

3. The last step to real growth.

Step 1: Find & write down your One Metric That Matters.

If you have been in the Growth Marketing scene, you’ll know what an OMTM is .

For those who don’t, this is the simple explanation:

“It’s the One Metric That Matters to you and your company at this moment of time.”

Picking the OMTM lets you run more controlled growth experiments quickly and compare the results more effectively.

For example, If you would compare your company to running a Marathon, you would say that your OMTM is the amount of miles you have to run to win the race.

Always keep in mind that the OMTM will change over time as you get further down the race.

Because at one point, you’ll need to start swimming or jumping on your bike.

As there are tons of great blogs explaining what an OMTM and how to find yours, i’ll discuss them very short while mainly focussing on the process you can use to start creating your first experiments.

Here is a quick recap why you need it and how you can find it.

1.1. Why you need an OMTM

According to Kissmetrics, there are 4 reasons why you need to have an OMTM, I have added one more:

1. You need answers.

During your growth sprints, you’ll have tons of assumptions that need to be validated. Knowing which metric you need to move will help you answer your teams questions and assumptions.

2. It draws a line in the sand and have clear goals.

You could celebrate that you drank enough water during the Marathon, but if this has no impact on your end result, which is the amount of miles you are running, it’s a worthless metric. Having an OMTM allows you to have a clear way to define success for you and your team.

3. It focuses your entire company.

I think the title says it all, not?

4. It sets the line to experiment

On average 9 out of 10 experiments fail, and most of the time, the ones that succeed aren’t the ones that you saw coming. Let me repeat that, on average 9 out of 10 experiments fail. As you are moving the Metric and your general ideas run out, people will start thinking outside of the box to get everything moving.

5. You can hold teams accountable.

Noticed I used the word teams and not individuals? Because you are running experiments together, there is no ‘you screwed it up’. If it goes down, and it will, everybody is responsible. Having a big fat number up there, helps you hold the team responsible without them shooting vanity metrics in your face.

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1.2. Don't let your OMTM mislead you.

When it comes to your OMTM, there is a lot of confusion around picking one metric to look at for your growth teams.

Imagine a world where you didn't need any dashboards created because all you had to look at was just one single number month over month.

I just doesn't make sense.

• OMTM are output metrics, not input metrics

As Brian Balfour puts it in his blogpost why OMTM's are deceiving, Spotify's OMTM is 'time spent listening to music.

Yet, you'll run into one issue when brainstorming for ideas to increase this metric.

You can't come up with experiments to invent more time.

This is because their (and probably your) OMTM is an output metric.

Output metrics represent results and input metrics represent actions.

Therefore, this metric will show you how great you are doing, but it doesn't show what action led to those results.

This is why brainstorming for experiments to increase your OMTM doesn't make sense.

You'll need to brainstorm for ideas to increase the actions (input metrics) that lead up to increasing your OMTM to run better defined experiments.

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Make sure to check out the other 3 reasons why OMTM's are deceiving right here.

• OMTM doesn't focus on funnel logic

If you look at a common framework growth hackers use is the AARRR framework. It's a process used to split up the customer journey to run better and well-defined experiments.

Here is a quick overview I created to showcase the framework based on the metrics of Airbnb.

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The 'issue' with just looking at your OMTM as a single metric is that the metric could be achieved through multiple ways in the buyers journey.

By looking at the example above, you could increase the OMTM, nights booked, by either focussing your experiments on the activation, retention and also the referral phase.

Yet, each of these phases require different ways of experiments and tracking.

It's therefore important to understand which part of the funnel you are opitimizing to increase your OMTM.

• OMTM doesn't focus on top of the funnel activities

Let's say you want to define your first experiment to increase the number of nights booked for AIrbnb.

For the sake of this example, let's say Airbnb isn't doing any digital marketing yet.

You come up with your brilliant experiment: 'Let's run Google Ads to people looking for hotels in Belgium to convince them to book a place with Airbnb'.

Since If you are looking for a hotel in Belgium, you might haven't considered booking the night with Airbnb.

The person searching for a hotel sees the search ad while roaming around the internet, finds a great spot, signs up with a discount code and books a night.

Your OMTM just increased and the team is cheering.

Easy if you targeting people with an INTENT to book a place already.

But the pool of people looking for a place to stay in Belgium per month is limited to the amount of people having that intent.

What happens if you move up the funnel to people who aren't considering booking a place in Belgium to book a night with Airbnb right now?

Following the OMTM logic you would automatically exclude running these type of experiments.

Why would you want to run experiments towards people that aren't moving your OMTM right now to showcase how amazing you are doing?

Or why would Hubspot create a side project to help people with their email signature, if they aren't signing up to their CRM right now to become a MAU (monthly Active User)?"

Because it doesn't mean that people creating their email signature with Hubspot and aren't becoming a Monthly Active User today, won't become one in te future.

Maybe they don't need a CRM right now, but only in a few months.

Maybe they already have a CRM and are looking to compare before signing up.

The point is, if you only look at running experiments that increase your OMTM right now, you'll be missing out a big chunk of the market that might increase your OMTM in the future.

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1.3. How to pick the One Metric That Matters

Since every growth experiment evolves around your OMTM, we've discussed above that running experiment ideas based on this metric doesn't make sense. Here is a 5 step process on defining your multiple OMTM's and the input metrics needed to move the needle forward:

Step 1: Pick a few output metrics as your OMTM

Define your main output metrics across the entire funnel that define the main value your products deliver.

Step 2: Define the funnel metrics needed to get to these output metrics.

Once you know which metrics you want to improve from an output metric, it's time to define the funnel that leads up to that metric.

Step 3: Break down your funnel metrics into input metrics

Break down the output metrics you have defined in the step above into input metrics you can actually impact.

Step 4: Set up your analytics

Once you mapped out which output and input metrics you want to start improving, it's time to define which analytics gaps you have.

Step 5: Measure and analyse trade-off metrics

Now that you understand which output metrics move your business forward, which input metrics move the needle you'll have to make sure to monitor the trade-off metrics.

Because most metrics are interdependent.

For every metric you try to improve, determine where in your business you might see a trade-off in your other metrics.

Step 2: Set up your growth process for success.

I have tried Trello

I have tried Google Documents

I have tried tons of tools to execute Growth Experiments in an efficient way.

The key word is efficient here, since you don’t want people spending too much time in sheets they can’t find, tests that have gone missing or data that wasn’t captured.

The problem is that every person in Growth Marketing has his own vision on how to run Growth Experiments, therefore you need to have a system that is versatile and has an interface people want to work in.

This is the simple reason I choose Pipefy for my Growth Processes.

Clean interface, Integration with Zapier for automation to safe time, almost anything is customizable and free up to 5 users.

Today i’ll teach you exactly how to set up the interface in order for you to run experiments by the end of this guide.

Once you get the hang of it, you’ll see that you’ll adapt it more towards the needs of your own company.

2.1. Process before Tactics: Set up your OMTM in Pipefy

Let’s start with creating an account on Pipefy right here (that was pretty obvious).

While setting up your account, you’ll see they have a ready-made Growth Hacking Experiment template. This is the template we will be using as a foundation in our next step.

1. First we are going to use an empty template to set up our OMTM and name it, well, One Metric That Matters. If you did everything right, you’ll end up seeing following template:

2. Great job. Setting up and tracking your OMTM is going to be the first critical step to designing your Growth Hacking Experiments. This is the guideline where all your experiments will flow from. Now it’s time to customize it!

• Double click on the names and give them the following names respectively: ‘OMTM’, ‘Doing’, ‘Goal Reached’’ and ‘Did not reach Goal’

• Great! Now we need to set the structure we want to have when writing down our OMTM. For this, we want to track the following data:

1. What is your one Metric That Matters? Always choose a ratio/percentage over a flat number! (in my case example I'll use Spotify's OMTM, monthly people listening).

2. Baseline Metric: where does this metric currently stand?

3. Target Metric: Where do you want the number to be (make sure to add seasonality to your target metric to not confuse your team )?

4. Leading indicators: What are input metrics that are linked to your OMTM. (example: amount of people coming back to the app, time spent per sessions,..)

5. Target date: A goal without a timeline is just a dream

• Let’s start with creating this form. Head over to blue plus sign on the right bottom of your screen.

• Delete the ‘what?’ → move your mouse to the entry field → you’ll see 3 dots on the right corner → delete.
• Recreate the below image by customizing your form. Here are some tips to help you out:
  1. First 4 are created by ‘text’, last one is ‘date’.
  2. Add descriptions to make it clear to everybody walking in your form (or for you to remember). These are the light grey texts.

• Done? Great! Write down your first OMTM. Don’t worry if this isn’t the final one.
• Now as a last step, we need to make sure that when the target date is reached, we can decide if we have reached our goal or not.Therefore we need to make a small change to our pipe.
  Go to ‘Goal reached’ and click on the 3 dots → edit this phase → this phase is an end of the process → save (I always forget this)! This makes sure we can recall the data later-on.
• Awesome, you have now created your first pipe to track the progress of your OMTM.

2.2. Process before tactics: Set up your Brainstorm Process in Pipefy

It’s time to set up the template where you’ll be spending most of your time to organize structured growth sprints.

1. Add a new pipe and pick the ‘Growth Hacking Experiments’
2. Before starting any experiment, you need ideas (pretty obvious). How to brainstorm ideas for your growth processes is a whole different process i’ll be writing about next. For now, I’ll help you set up the process.
3. Every idea always has the same template.

Pirate funnel: We choose which part of the Pirate Funnel (AAARR) we are trying to impact. The Pirate Funnel is a wonderful framework to help you better understand your consumers. It’ll help you measure your funnel and enable you to optimize it for the better. Read more about it here if you want to have a quick update about it.

Idea owner: We add idea owners in order to remember who launched the initial idea to explain later-on, not to give praise if it works.

Short idea name: to find them quickly later-on.

Detailed Description Idea: this is where we explain everything into details about our idea.

Probability: each idea is given a score between 1 and 5 by the PIE framework (Probability, Impact & Ease). Basically, the higher the number, the fewer the resources and the easier it would be to test. If the overall score is high, there’s a better chance it’ll get tested.

1. Now, this is the first step where every Growth Marketer will argue about. Some use different terminology & other’s user other frameworks. This one works best for me, feel free to adapt to your needs.
2. In this case, we rate the chance the experiment will succeed or not depending on your own experience or past experiments. It’s scary and vague in the beginning but don’t worry, you’ll only get better at this.
3. Impact on Metric: Just as explained above, we’ll give a score on what we feel the impact is going to be on the OMTM we picked earlier. This makes sure you always keep your eyes on the ball.
4. Ease: Give a score on how hard you think the test is going to be to implement. Some ideas are great, but sometimes too difficult or long to implement, making them less attractive.
5. As a final step, let’s tell Pipefy how we want to register our ideas.
6. Click on the plus sign on the bottom right corner
7. Click customize this form and add ‘Assignee’ with the name ‘idea owner’.
8. Add a checklist, name it ‘Probability’, pick horizontal and give it 1 to 5 numbers.
9. Repeat the step above twice and name them ‘Impact on Metric’ and ‘Ease’
10. It should look like this (don’t bother about the order):

1. Go ahead and write down your first experiment, don’t worry about it being a shitty idea. It’s important to have at least one idea in your pipe for our automation later-on.
2. You’ll see that a new card has been added to your Brainstorm pipe. Awesome!
3. Now every single time a team member has an idea to grow the business, they can now use this template to register it in the same format.

2.3. Track those juices: Create your idea backlog in Google Sheets.

You know how to document all the ideas you and your team have to grow the OMTM, great!

Now you have another problem my mother always used to say:

“Ideas are worth sh*t, it’s all about execution”.

Maybe she didn’t say it like this, but you get the point.

Once you have all those amazing ideas, how do you pick the ones you want to test first (since you can’t test all of them).

This is where the PIE framework, discussed earlier, comes into play.

Every idea has been given a score on their Probability, Impact and Ease which will add up to a general score.

The higher the score, the higher the chance the idea will be tested.

It’s that simple.

Since Pipefy can’t make calculations and we still want a nice backlog of all the ideas, we need to create a Google Sheet where all our ideas are kept.

Don’t worry, you don’t need to spend ages creating and figuring out how. You can use this pre-made template to save you some time.

Make a copy to your Google Drive and make sure to not make any changements. It’s important for our automation steps later-on. Trust me, it sucks figuring it out on your own.

Now we have all our ideas written down in Pipefy, it’s time to automate all that data towards your Google Sheet.

No monkey work for you!

2.4. Let the adults speak: create a Zapier account to connect your Google Sheet with your Pipefy.

The only thing I hate more than burned Belgian Fries are doing tasks that can be run more efficiently. The key idea here is that all the experiments you are documenting in Pipefy are automatically shot to your Google Sheet in order to prioritize and create a backlog of your ideas, without doing the monkey work

1. Create A free Zapier Account right here. If you haven’t worked with Zapier before, don’t worry, it’s easier than cooking Spaghetti (which says more about me I guess).
2. Create your first Zap.
3. Search for Pipefy and select it.
4. Choose ‘new card’
5. Connect your account. You’ll be asked to give your API key and email you signed in. If the links don’t work, go to ‘user settings’ in your Pipefy account and scroll down until you see API key’.
6. Choose the pipe you want to receive data from, which will probably be named ‘Growth Hacking Experiments’.
7. Test your connection, eh violà, you are half way! (If it’s not fetching data, go to your pipefy and create a new experiment and retry).
8. Now you are pulling data out of Pipefy, it’s time to send it to your Google Sheet to document everything. Go to ‘set up this step’ → ‘choose app’ → search and choose google sheets
9. Create the 3rd option, not the first. (create spreadsheet rows)
10. Connect your Google Account (use the same account you have used to save the Google Sheet Backlog template)
11. Search for the template you have saved in your Google Drive.
12. Choose the worksheet you want to send data to, if you haven’t changed anything there will only be one named ‘idea backlog + prioritization’.
13. Now comes an important step. We are going to tell Zapier in which column the data needs to be moved to. This is how it should look like at the end, but let’s start with baby steps. Start with clicking on the ‘thing’ inside the red square.

1. You’ll see a long list of options. Lucky you, because you have a guide to tell you what to pick.
2. Search for ‘Field’ in the search option. Choose the Field ‘pirate funnel Metric’ or in your case it will probably be named ‘where does it impact?’. (not the unformatted one)

The same goes for the rest of the list:

1. Owner → search ‘Field’ → Field ‘ idea owner’
2. Idea title → search ‘Field’ → Field ‘What is your idea?’
3. Idea description → search ‘Field’ → ‘describe your experiment’.
4. Probability → search ‘Field’ → ‘probability’.
5. Impact → search ‘Field’ → ‘impact on metric’.
6. Ease → search ‘Field’ → ‘ease’.
7. Score is empty (you’ll be calculating this yourself in Google Sheet, you could automate this, but i’ll save you the trouble for now)
8. Let’s put it to a test! If everything worked out fine, you’ll see a new row is created in your Google Sheet with the experiment you wrote down in Pipefy. Just like this:

1. All you have to do now click on the score in row 2 (18), you’ll see a blue square appear in the right bottom corner of the number 18. Drag that down to your experiment.
2. Warning! Don’t drag it further than the experiments that are in the sheet or it will become a mess. (I had some great time figuring that out).
3. Eh violà. You now have an automated way to shoot your experiments into a google sheet and calculate the score of your experiments in a jiffy.

2.5. Don’t trust the humans: correct the human perception out of your idea score.

Most of us think we’re awesome and more often than not, we judge ourselves as better than average in most traits. We do this in all kinds of ways.

You might believe you’re a better driver than you really are (after all, everyone else on the road sucks, right? You must be above average). Or you might think you’re a lot nicer than you are (other people are jerks). You might even see yourself as smarter than you are.

Psychologists call this illusory superiority. Illusory superiority is a cognitive bias that causes us to overestimate our positive qualities and underestimate our negative qualities.

The same goes for the ideas we have. We tend to overestimate our own ideas, because you know, it’s your idea.

The things that were supposed to only take a day’s work, end up a being a weeks work.

The referral campaign you planned to build is stopped by the legal department.

The developer comes in 2 days later telling you that it’s technically impossible within the timeframe given.

I have seen it all.

Therefore it’s advised to have these 2 people in your growth sprints:

1. Growth Master: Have an experienced person who knows about growth experiments to have a look at the experiments and reset the score to something more realistic.
2. All the creators: Have the people who are going to be building the experiment in the room and ask their opinion about the ease of implementing it. Most of the time it takes longer than what you might had in mind.

Alright, you now have the experts opinion on what is feasible and are prioritized by scores.

It’s time to start building your experiments.

Head over back to your Pipefy ‘Growth Hacking Experiments’ and move all the chosen experiments from your Google Sheet to phase 2: ‘Prioritize’.

It’s time to design your growth experiments.

2.6. Be more like my buddy Edison. Set up your experiment the right way, without losing valuable data.

Most people think that Thomas Edison invented the first light bulb.

They’re wrong.

In fact, Edison was spectacularly late to the game.

The moment he started focussing on building the light bulb, more than 20 people had already invented earlier versions of what we now call lights bulbs.

The interesting question to ask is therefore:

“How did Edison win in such a crowded field when he was so far behind?”

He and his team spent a year working day and night doing thousands of experiments.

On October 21, 1879, they succeeded, creating a light bulb for everyday use in the home.

Edison would go on to pioneer five different multibillion-dollar fields with his invention factory: electricity, motion pictures, telecommunications, batteries, and sound recording.

What was the key to Edison’s incredible success?

In two words — processed experimentation.

For Edison, building a company was synonymous with building an invention factory.

As said in my intro, growth is very simple but therefore not easy.

The more experiments you run, the faster you learn, the bigger the chance you breakthrough from your competitors.

“I always compare growth to calling somebody lucky.”

People call successful people ‘lucky’ because they only notice a screenshot of their life.

What they don’t notice is the amount of sweat, blood and tears they have put into their career.

The same goes for growth.

The more experiments you run, the bigger the chances that people will call you ‘lucky’ for growing your company.

Be more like Edison and create your own ‘luck’ by remembering these wise words after asking him why he hadn’t had any results after 9000 experiments:

‘Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results! I know several thousand things that won’t work.’

Let’s start setting up your process to document every step of your growth process.

2.7 Tactics change, processes not: Set up your process for repeated success.

A typical experiment set up looks like this.

Just a Google Docs that you’ll end up spending a bunch of time naming it, sharing it with the right people, putting it in the right map and separate the winners from the losers.

That time is all over now, we have moved on into a more digital way of doing it.

To start your experiment, you’ll need to capture the following data:

1. Your assumption. (what do you believe to be true?)
2. How you are going to verify your assumptions
3. How you are going to measure it
4. The metric that has to be achieve to know if your assumption is true.
5. Possible blockers.

We build this form to make sure that every time an idea is prioritized, it contains this information which saves us a bunch of time when analyzing the experiment.

This is where Pipefy comes in great.

It allows you make certain fields required and therefore helps you remember to fill in the blank spots when forgotten, after all, we are still human.

Let’s set the data entry and the required fields:

1. Go to your Growth Hacking Experiment pipe → click the 3 dots next to ‘Prioritize’ → edit this phase →

1. Let’s delete the field ‘prioritize’ → click on the gear → scroll down and delete

1. Create the following new fields, make sure to always checkbox the ‘field is required’ and ‘editable’:

1. Once you have created all the fields, it’s time to go back to your pipe. Click on your prioritized experiment, you’ll see a new screen pops up:

1. Every time you want to move an experiment card to the next phase, you or your team will now need to fill in all the blank fields to describe your experiment.

Congratulations! You have now brainstormed an idea, prioritized it according to the PIE framework and set up the process to write down your experiments.

Now it’s time to write down your first experiment.

2.7. Let’s become Mister Edison: run your first experiment

Pick you OMTM

Before designing any experiment or brainstorming about growth ideas it’s important that everybody in the team understands what the end goal should be.

Everybody needs to know these 5 factors:

1. What is your OMTM
2. How much is that metric right now
3. Where do you want that metric to be
4. What are your leading indicators? (metrics related to you OMTM)
5. The target date you want to achieve that goal. (A goal without a timeline is just a dream)

Once everybody on your team is clear about the goal you can move towards brainstorming ideas to grow that number.

For this exercise we will choose the following set up.

1. OMTM: growth of your monthly people listening to music
2. Metric right now: 1074
3. Goal to reach: 1500
4. Leading indicators: amount of people coming back to the app, time spent per sessions,..)
5. Target date: 1 February 2018

Now everybody knows what the goal is, where you are now and where you want to go, it’s time to brainstorm ideas to move the leading indicators not the OMTM.

The Brainstorm

There are tons of ways to brainstorm ideas to move your Metric, so I won’t go any deeper into this.

Let’s say you have brainstormed 15 different ideas to move your input metrics.

You gave it a PIE score, revised it with your Growth Manager and the people involved building the experiment.

Now it's time to design the experiment.

The experiment

Before you can move the experiment to your 3rd row, you’ll need to create an experiment card.

The card will ask you for:

1. What your assumption is (we believe that):

This is where you describe what you believe will happen when you run the experiment to improve your leading indicator (input metric)

2. What you will do to verify your assumption:

This one is easy, all you have to do is copy-paste the detailed description you wrote down on the left.

3. What you will measure:

Figure out what you will measure in order to test your assumptions. Make sure to break down your leading indicator into smaller input metrics for optimal reporting.

4. What needs to happen if you are right:

Describe what you expect to get from the experiment, in other words, the target goal you want to achieve.

5. Possible blockers:

Think about what could block the experiment upfront so you can solve the problems before starting your experiment.

Filled in every blank space?

Great.

Let’s save the card and move it to the ‘Set Up Experiment’ pipe.

It’s time to put it to a test.

Don’t think, just test it.

I think this would work, I think that might to the trick.

Whatever.

Just put it to a test and let the numbers speak.

Once your experiments are described and everybody knows what to do, it’s time to move it the next phase: Testing.

Click on the experiment card and set a start and end date.

Be a doctor, analyze your results.

What if you would go to your doctor, freak out about having your blood taken (yikesss) and never get your results analyzed?

Everybody would freak out if this happened.

Yet, most people forget the most important step.

Analyzing your results to understand why something worked or didn’t work (especially the last one).

As mentioned before.

Growth is simple but therefore not easy.

You experiment, test and analyze and scale what works for your company.

But without the proper analyze, you are doomed to fail from day 1.

Move your card the last phase ‘Analyze’ and click on your expriment.

It’s time to analyze your findings.

To have a basic analyze of your findings, you’ll need to be able to answer the following questions:

1. What’s your improvement rate?

How many new subscribers did you get in the period of time.

2. Did you reach your intended goal?

This one is pretty obvious.

3. Why did you achieve or not achieve the goals?

Before moving to your next experiment and categorizing it, you need to know why something did or did not work out well.

4. What is the learnings you have learned for your further experiments?

These learnings aren’t just important for you and your team right now, but for future experiments. Your team might evolve throughout the years. Having a set of learnings ready for new people to come in is gold.

Once you have everything written down, it’s time to move to your last and final step.

Drag your experiment, depending if it’s a winner, loser or inconclusive (you’ll have to still change the name of the column from ‘archived’ to ‘inconclusive’), to the right column. :)

You can now give yourself a big high-five and treat yourself a coffee, you are now ready to kickstart your first experiments and grow your company in a processed way.

3. The last step to real growth.

Do you know what the last step to finish a AA (alcoholic anonymous) course is?

Probably not.

The last step to finish an alcohol course is to help another person get out of his addiction.

Why?

For the simple reason that helping another person will lower the chances of you falling back to your old habits.

Now I am not saying you are an Alcoholic.

But what will happen in the near future (and probably already in the past) is this:

You will see top posts on different sites that go like this:

• 15 Twitter Hacks That Will Turn You Into a Twitter Ninja
• 10 Brilliant Marketing Stunts That Put Startups On The Map Read
• The 3 hacks that got SpringSled 138,790 users in less than 40 days

It’s tricky to fall back into only implementing tactics, without thinking about the processed way.

Therefore, I ask you just this one favor:

Share this guide with just 1 person (or more) to spread the word about:

Process goes before tactics.

Once you know the process, here is an overview of tools you can use for implementation:

• 17 Growth Hacking Tools Used By The Best Digital Marketing Startups

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