GrowthHacker's AMAs enable marketers from all over the globe and from every stage of growing a business to ask a question of the world's thought-leaders on business growth. Unfortunately, popularity breeds a superabundance of content. If each AMA from the past 12 months alone features fifty comments (which is low-balling it), you'd have to sift through 1,000 questions and answers. Luckily for you, we did just that. Though this presentation can't hope to encompass all the value of the awesome AMA's on the GrowthHacker's platform, it does cover the ones we felt delivered the most value from the past 12 months. Here are the Top 11 Actionable Takeaways from this Year's Growth Hacking AMA's.

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1 1actionable
QUOTES FROM
THIS YEAR'S GROWTH
HACKING AMA'S

2. AMAs
enable marketers from all over
the globe and from every stage
of growing a business to ask a
question of the world's thought
leaders on business growth.
wishpond
GrowthHacker's

3. quotes...
wishpond
takeawaysHere are 11 of the best
and

4. If you were to start the
blog over today, what would be
the route you would take to get
it to a position like it is? And
perhaps a rough
of time spent?
Buffer
timeline
wishpond
Question:

5. I would spend a lot of time thinking up a blue ocean strategy-
trying to find a topic that is unique and fairly low on competition.
I'd test a couple different methods:
1. Posting consistently1x per week on the topic, or
2. Posting intermittentlyand only when the content is really
good.
I wouldn't put any big expectations on myself for the first 6 months.
Then after 6 months, I'd feel in a good position to really chase some
ambitious targets.
- Kevan Lee, Director of Marketing at Buffer

6. has quite a following
on Instagram. How do you guys
convert your
into ?
Buffer
followers
customers
wishpond
Question:

7. We view our Instagramefforts as a way to build brand affinity,
and less so a direct follower > customer conversion channel.
We want to create a bias for Buffer in the mind of our followers so that
when they're ready to choose a social media tool, we'll have a leg up.
On a very tactical level, we'll sometimes use our Instagram captions
and bio to direct followers to landing pages. We change the link in our
bio, then write "Check the link in our bio for more info" in the
caption. Contests tend to work well, too! Our IG contests are our most
popular ones to date.
- Kevan Lee, Director of Marketing at Buffer

8. How do you create and
maintain your e-commerce
How do you know which levers
will provide the most return?
growth model?
wishpond
Question:

9. The fundamentals of growthfor an ecomm business are pretty simple:
● New users: how many users you get into the door
● Activation rate: how many of those users buy for the first time
● Return rate: how many of those users come back and buy again
● AOV: how much are those users buying for
The viability/sustainability of an ecomm business lies in being able to
drive new user acquisition with a reasonable payback window -
12 months is the standard in the industry. Meaning that your 12 months
LTV (which is a combination of the metrics outlined above) needs to be
higher than your customer acquisition cost.
- Maud Pasturaud, VP Growth at Spring

10. What are some good
questions to enable the
development of amazing
content?
customer development
wishpond
Question:

11. Here are some we've used in the past:
● How long have you been in your role?
● How many people are on your team?
● How does the team work together?
● What tools do you use/spend the most time with?
● How do you learn about marketing?
● What kind of content attracts you? Can you give an example of
one unforgettable piece of content?
● Do you look at content during the workday or at home?
● What do you need to learn more about?
● Who is your marketing hero?

12. - Hana Abaza, VP Marketing at Uberflip
We also ask our sales and success teams questions. This can
be fodder for content but also helps with many other areas:
● What is the top non-product related question you get?
● What is the top product related question you get?
● How do you answer these questions?
● What are the main objections you hear from potential customers?
● What are the main complaints you hear from customers?
One more thing: don't just send a survey. Pick up the phone.
The best insights come from real conversations where you can pick up
on the nuances of people's responses. Not from an online survey.

13. What are some of your favorite
tactics to get customers to not
only stay but become
passionate promoters of your
brand?
above-and-beyond
wishpond
Question:

14. I think lowering churn starts with developing the right promise for your
product in the first place, so that you set the right expectationsfor
what your product is truly great at.
The way I figure out the promise is to really study my “must have”
users and learn the key benefit they are getting from the product. Then I
ask them why that benefit is important to them. That allows me to
reach new prospects in the right context and convert them based on an
authentic promise.
Once you have people that love your product, then I think you need to
concentrate on every other touch point to ensure you don’t turn
that love off. Great customer support on top of a must-have product
makes people want to spread the word.

15. - Sean Ellis, Founder at Growthhackers.com
It's interesting that I often see people trying to replicate the referral
program at Dropbox, but the truth is that we had great word of mouth
before the referral program was implemented. The referral program
simply amplified it.
My one tactical tip would be to prompt more word of mouth after giving
an reward for it happening naturally. Something like "Suzy just signed
up from your invite, so here's a reward you weren't expecting.
Want to invite someone else and get more rewards?"

16. Any tips on developing
from the bottom up at an
organization? What's your
one-liner for the goal of a
growth team?
a culture of growth
wishpond
Question:

17. For a growth team, I'd pitch "we want to create a team that prioritizes
and builds features and campaigns simply in the order that we can
have the highest impact on driving growthof our active user
base."
But results of having done the right methodology first can help.
I think the best way to do this is to take any project you are working on
or asked to evaluate and do three things...

18. - Josh Elman, Ex-Growth at Twitter
1. Have a baseline understandingof the data and usage in the
area you are working.
2. Create and state a clear hypothesis of what impact you may be
able to have on what you are setting out to build.
3. After you ship and get a little data from users, create a report and
analysis of what you learned and where you were both right and
wrong on your hypothesis. Being a team that approaches
everything you build this way should help increase your respect
with execs and you will be asked to take on larger tasks. And
hopefully can shift the culture to expect everyone to build products
this way.

19. Can you talk about how do you
approach creating a
More specifically, how do you
solve the prioritization issue and
decide where to focus first?
growth model?
wishpond
Question:

20. When you are building your growth model, you want to have a
framework for:
Identifying your target users:
● Who are the users you want to get into your product
● Where do they congregate and pay attention online and in the real
world
● Who do they pay attention to
Getting in front of them:
● Pick some channels that will get in front of them. Viral, SEO,
advertising, massive word of mouth campaigns, etc.
● See which bring in the right people and understand conversion by
channel and by user group as best you can

21. Activating your users:
● What do they do in the first session to get sticky
● What can you do in the first week to bring them back to do more or
try more
● How can you improve your activation system so they get going
faster and better
That's pretty rough but hopefully directionally right.
- Josh Elman, Ex-Growth at Twitter

22. What tips or strategies do you or
would you implement during
that has helped
most with your customer
retention and lifetime value?
onboarding
wishpond
Question:

23. In general, I'd design & optimize the onboarding process in the context
of what you want users to do, what information needs to get into their
brains, what work needs to be done to set up the product and get them
up the learning curve.
I'd ask yourself first: what would happen if you completely stopped any
type of "onboarding"? What would happen if you signed up a cohort of
customers and didn't do anything? That's the baseline.
What metrics aren't acceptable in the baseline case? That is, what's the
"business case" for an onboarding process? Is it going to drive up
engagement? Referrals? Upgrades?

24. Then I'd start to think about, given your customer, product, pricepoint,
where are you on these questions? --
● Does the product price point and customer's investment level
warrant simple in-product onboarding or human-based
onboarding?
● Should we send people on-site to onboard customers?
● Should we do 1:1 calls with customers over the phone for
onboarding?
● Should we do 1:many calls with groups of customers?
And then I'd just measure the crap out of itto see whether the
process you design successfully drives up the metrics you care about.
- Jonah Lopin, Co-Founder at Crayon

25. What are the biggest
you've encountered with
growing?
challenges
wishpond
Question:

26. Speaking honestly, I'd probably say feeling like I don't know what I'm
doing most of the time :)
A more useful answer would be finding that linebetween growth
that solely benefits the company vs. growth that is mutually beneficial
for the customer and the company.
It's a delicate balance, and one of the biggest challenges any marketer
will face. You'll be faced with decisions where you can opt to benefit the
company as the expense of the user, or dial back your expectations for
growth and err on the side of building brand trust. My instincts have
always been to , and that seems to
have paid off in the long term.
- Justine Jordan, VP Marketing at Litmus
err in favor of the customer

27. What do you use on a
daily basis?
tools
wishpond

28. I nerd out pretty hard on productivity tools. :) This is what I've got in my
current "stack":
● Things- Believe pretty strongly in the GTD methodology, and
this is my favorite app that I've used from a task management
perspective. I've tried them all. Wunderlist is a decent free
alternative to this.
● Soulver- It's not free, but so worth the money. Makes doing
quick calculations easy and quick, while also accepting plain text.
● Boomerang- Returns emails back to your inbox when you
specify, great for programmatic reminders to follow-up and get
back in touch.
● Instapaper- Bookmarking tool for saving webpages, articles,
and video that you want read or watch at a later time.

29. ● Alfred- Dead simple interface for quickly finding files, folders,
and applications on your computer. Mac specifically.
● Buffer- We all know this one. :) Huge fan of these guys, and
they've got a killer integration with Bitly.
● OneTab- Condenses all of your open tabs into a single view
that you can restore, save, and re-open.
● Strict Workflow - Breaks your work into 25-minute intervals
where social media and other distracting sites you specify are
blocked.
And of course, Giphy for all of my many GIF needs, Spotify for music,
Slack for internal communication and Sublime Text 2 for any dev work.
- Andrew Dumont, VP Marketing at Bitly

30. If you are suddenly 22 again, just
graduated from Stanford, how
would you start a life/career
again for ?Guy 2.0
wishpond
Question:

31. I would have taken at least one programming class
so I would be better able to tell when programmers
are bullsh*tting me.
Although, a good rule of thumb is to take whatever a
programmer says and double the time. I figured this
out without taking any classes!
- Guy Kawasaki, Brand Evangelist at Canva

32. What were your biggest
that you learned from and were
able to rebound?
failures
wishpond
Question:

33. I learned that the best product doesn't always win.
But I learned that when people love your product, they
become your evangelists.
And I also learned that while everyone might not care
about design and elegance, enough people do to make
a company successful.
- Guy Kawasaki, Brand Evangelist at Canva

34. What's the best tool or strategy
to profile a target audience?
wishpond
Question:

35. Facebook. Nothing comes close.
- Guy Kawasaki, Brand Evangelist at Canva

36. To Read the Full Article, See it
on The Wishpond Blog at...
"Top 11 Actionable Takeaways
from This Year's Growth
Hacking AMA's"
wishpond