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1. 80/20 rule from Noah Kagan Appsumo’s founder, Noah Kagan, notes that one rule of thumb that they follow is to use 80% of their marketing budget for things that are working and 20% on newer marketing initiatives. One more thing: they go all in when they find marketing channels that work. You can watch one of his presentations where he shares his experiences of growing Mint, Facebook, and AppSumo here.

2. Communicate, communicate, communicate At Treehouse, we work remotely and as you might imagine. There are some that think there is no replacement to working in person while others support it. For us, we’re half and half – we have an office in Orlando and we also have a team up in Portland. The rest of us are distributed. But hey, it works because we communicate a lot. If you don’t feel like you are running enough A/B tests, speak up about it. If you feel like the team needs more developers, speak up. If you feel like an executive decision is going to cost the company money in the long run, talk. People might not always agree with you but it’s your job to communicate. You’re doing the company a disservice if you aren’t being honest. To get you started, here are some tools we use to communicate: Campfire Skype Google Chat Google Hangout GoToMeeting – we use GoToMeeting for our leadership meetings. It’s very simple to use and the video quality is pretty good.

3. Be a voracious reader Although there’s a lot of crappy content circulating the internet, there’s always going to be someone you can learn from. The key is being able to discern signal from noise. For example, if I’m looking to learn more on conversion rate optimization, there are great blogs such as Unbounce, ConversionXL, KISSmetrics, SEOmoz, and more. Just look at the detailed blog posts that they write: 10 Useful Findings About How People Use Websites – ConversionXL 5 Landing Page Conversion Killers – Unbounce The Ultimate Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization – SEOmoz If your goal is to squeeze every penny out of your website, you should be reading conversion rate optimization articles like the ones above. They cost no money to read and stand to help create original ideas that will eventually create more profit for you. This applies to any topic you’re interested in. Using the right tools can go a long way in helping you save time. If you’re on the go and don’t have time to read, you can use Pocket. To help you find relevant topics/articles via Twitter, you can grab curated lists using Listorious. Finally, I like picking off interesting topics from Inbound.org or Hacker News. Key takeaway: don’t read every single blog out there. Find the ones that actually add value and follow them.

when it comes to Web­site opti­miza­tion, the three fun­da­men­tal ques­tions pretty much never change: Who is com­ing to the site? How did they arrive? And what are their goals? What’s the next step for­ward for them both in terms of their goals and your con­ver­sion funnel? What do they need to under­stand, believe, and feel in order to con­fi­dently take those next steps

under­stand WHY web vis­i­tors do what they do. Ana­lyt­ics can tell you what vis­i­tors are doing, but you’ll never really fig­ure out WHY they’re doing it until you get a grasp on these questions.

One of the themes that came up a lot was the idea of the growth team finding a leading indicator of a user who would turn into an engaged user later on. The growth team would then focus on optimizing for that metric. 

Characteristics of leading indicator metrics The various leading indicators fit into three categories: Network density: friend or following connections made in a time frame Content added: files added to a Dropbox folder Visit frequency: D1 retention

Other points from the speakers A few other interesting things were mentioned at the conference. Josh Elman mentioned that Twitter has two degrees of an active user: a plain “active user” is someone who has visited their timeline at least once in the last 28 days a ‘retained’ or ‘core’ user is someone who has visited their timeline at least 7 times in 28 days.

Growth Hack #1: Insta-follow Upon signing up for Pinterest you are automatically following a select group of high quality users. This in turn helps alleviate the cold-start problem, where I have to go looking around the site to find boards and people to follow. Instead I get a sampling of high quality content immediately filling my feed.

Growth Hack #2: Facebook Friend Follow When you sign up for Pinterest with Facebook, your friends who are already using Pinterest auto-follow you and you follow them back. But all this auto following doesn’t seem to happen all at once but is staggered over time so that you get periodic notifications that someone has just started following you on PInterest. This brings you back to the app again and again. This also helps alleviate the cold-start problem and gives me a social incentive to maintain my presence on the site, lest I look boring in front of my friends.

But first, you need a great product Let me note that if people aren’t using your product, then you’re wasting your time spending too much time optimizing growth. You need a base of users who are happy and then your job is to scale it.

Planning and model building The planning/modeling side of things is really about understanding, “Why does growth happen?” Every product is different. You might find that people find you via SEO and then turn into users that are retained via emails You might find that people come to your site via web and then cross-pollinate to mobile, and that’s the key to your growth. You might find you need to get them to follow a certain # of people. You might realize they need to clip a certain # of links to get started.

Summary To summarize the above: Have a solid product where your users are happy Coming up with a model for how your site grows Trying out ideas and deploying them as A/B tests If the site grows, then try out more ideas. If it doesn’t, rethink the model in step 1 because it might be broken

Behind the term 'growth hacking'The concept for growth hacking grew out of the fact that most startups fail, and needing to not fail. When you think about games, the market is filled with large companies with lots of money to throw into marketing. Sean summed this need up well, with: When you're competing against Sony, you can't go dollar for dollar

2. A Must-Have Experience Sean focused on the importance of a Must-Have Experience (MHX) - you must have a hook that clearly identifies what this is.

3. Uncovering your MHXTo get a clear understanding of what your MHX is, Sean suggested reaching out to your Must Have Users (MHUs)… but what is a MHU?

Among tech entrepreneurs, there is a strong bias toward the single lifestyle for the sake of focus and an obsession pride in working 80 hours a week. But the data suggests this bias makes companies worse, not better.

The pundits proposed the mid-20s as the optimal age to start a company: At 25, entrepreneurs can give “everything to their company,” one pundit opined, suggesting that founders should not be “hamstrung” by families and non-business related commitments.

The Kauffman Foundation surveyed 550 successful entrepreneurs across multiple sectors, determined by profitability and being named a “high-valued” business by their peers. Their data suggests that most successful founders are in their mid-30s and married with children:

I prepared a short talk. I called it ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People.’ I say ‘short.’ It was short in the beginning, but it soon expanded to a lecture that consumed one hour and thirty minutes.

Here’s how the now famous book became a reality: we started with a set of rules printed on a card no larger than a postcard. The next season we printed a larger card, then a leaflet, then a series of booklets, each one expanding in size and scope. After fifteen years of experimentation and research came this book.

What I’m starting to notice more and more, is that great things almost always start small.